By David Sims
david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is one of the great rock songs ever, Ike and Tina Turner’s “Proud Mary” from their Greatest Hits. People forget how good she was before she went pop – “Sweet Rhode Island Red,” “Nutbush City Limits,” “Sexy Ida,” great rock’n’roll. Now, well, can her Tin Pan Alley tribute album be far off?

ECI Telecom is announcing that SDN Communications, South Dakota’s largest communications network, has selected ECI’s ST200 multi-service edge routers to deliver enhanced IP services.

ECI acquired the ST200 product line when the picked up Pittsburgh-based Laurel Networks this June. SDN is hoping for a smooth migration to an advanced IP/MPLS network.

Already operational, the new network lets SDN offer Virtual Private Networks and other services to its customers. “Equipment installation was completed in early June and we’re already seeing incremental revenue opportunities,” said Mark Shlanta, Chief Executive Officer of SDN Communications.

SDN Communications, a regional telecommunications provider, consists of 27 independent telephone companies covering 75 percent of South Dakota’s geography, transmitting voice, video, and data over 5,000 miles of fiber.
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In a story that TMC would gain great advantage sending First Coffee^SM to cover personally, LogiSense Corporation, an IP Billing/OSS and network software vendor to service providers and enterprises, along with Gemtek Systems are announcing that their integrated product has been selected by Caribbean Systems Inc. to deliver Wi-Fi services to hotels, timeshare/apartment blocks, Internet cafés, restaurants, colleges, and libraries on St. Martin.
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Ran across an interesting bit of news from Croatia this morning, it catches one’s attention when a news advisory starts “Ever since the first voice conferences were introduced many years ago, if participants were unfamiliar with each other’s voices or the line conditions were poor, there was the same question hanging in the air: ‘Who’s talking right now?’”

Evidently the company, Uniqall from Zagreb thinks “getting voice activity data at times from multiple active talkers, in a continuous manner, and the presentation of this data to the conference participants, were typical problems that always induced headaches for developers of conferencing and collaboration software.”

That’s right, we’re not dealing with a slick, native-English speaking press release writer here, which is fine by First Coffee^SM.

Uniqall is releasing today, “for free evaluation and download,” the first beta of its upcoming Gridborg HMP Server 1.1 software, which it promises “will be the building block that is going to make life easier for developers of advanced voice conferencing, collaboration and contact center applications.”

In the Gridborg HMP “world,” Uniqall says, “there are no physical analog ports on voice cards or their digital TDM equivalents that are restricted by the processing capabilities of a particular DSP behind them. There are just virtual VoIP front-end resources.”

Uniqall added to those virtual front-ends continuous sound energy detection. “If requested,” they explain, “virtual front-ends will keep sending to the application that created them, asynchronous events on every significant change of sound energy detected. It is then up to developers to choose the best way to present it to the conference participants.”

Such presentations may be a color-intensity coded sign next to participant’s icon, a photo, or a video stream, indicating who’s talking.

 Uniqall thinks it’ll help contact centers too, since the caller, Text To Speech part of IVR, ASR part of IVR, the agent, the agent’s coach and the recorder resource can be governed by its own distinct set of rules: “Take a piece of paper and draw a matrix of who hears what, with the recorder resource being able to hear everything. Mark differently, audio streams that should be normalized, and those that should not,” Uniqall says.

“Moving a conferencing bridge from the TDM to the VoIP side of the telephone network and from voice cards to an advanced HMP… provides several areas of instant gratification,” says Boris Pavacic, CTO of Uniqall, Inc.:

“No more thinking about a constrained number of conferences and conference participants. No more caring about the processing power of individual DSPs in an attempt to avoid ugly media processing or functionality tradeoffs. Or even worse, counting timeslots available between some main-board and its daughter-cards.”

Support for additional operating systems and processor architectures will follow in subsequent minor releases, Uniqall promises.

Incorporated in the United States with headquarters and development in Zagreb, Croatia, Uniqall claims to be “the world’s first Host Media Processing vendor with no legacy telephony board hardware business.”
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Bob Brewin is reporting that the United States Navy plans a “revolutionary upgrade of shipboard communications systems to handle voice-over-IP phone calls and converged voice, video and data traffic.”

Robert Wolborsky, program manager for network information assurance and enterprise services at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (Spawar) tells Brewin, writing for Federal Computer Week that the IP convergence project will provide a “significant increase in shipboard throughput, which will enhance warfighting capabilities for afloat forces,” in Brewin’s words.

“Spawar expects to complete the VoIP phase of the project by 2006, and will start work on a program to dynamically manage shipboard bandwidth next year. Spawar plans to provide shipboard VOIP capability through an evolutionary upgrade of the existing Automated Digital Network System (ADNS) developed by Science Applications International Corp., which uses data routers from Cisco Systems.”

The shift to IP is seen as a way not only to help better manage ships’ limited network resources, but “eliminate separate shipboard switches and wiring to handle voice calls distinct from data networks, for savings in weight and space.”

Craig Mathias, an analyst with the Farpoint Group, told Brewin that VoIP is established enough where it “makes sense [to use it] just about anywhere.”
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Late Friday afternoon Stacey Cowley, one of the better CRM writers around, wrote a nice summary of the latest updates from the midmarket CRM vendors. She rapid-fires NetSuite’s 10.6, the latest from SugarCRM, Salesnet, RightNow and salesforce.com. Worth a read.
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When First Coffee^SM lived on the North Shore of Boston in the early ‘90s he and his Turkish friend discovered the newly-opened Caffe Kilim in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, a couple hours up the road. The owner, Yalcin Yazgan is from Istanbul – his mother attended the same mosque as First Coffee’s friend’s mother, they found out.

It’s since become one of the more popular coffee shops in Portsmouth, and First Coffee^SM learns this morning that they’ll purchase their location, after being threatened with having it sold out from underneath them.

Now that First Coffee^SM lives in Turkey he rather misses the American-style coffee shop menus, and really misses Caffe Kilim, which was such a nice combination of an American coffee menu and Turkish-style hospitality. Drop by if you’re in town.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.