By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music
is Frank Sinatra’s The Platinum
Collection:
Philippine VoIP providers will be required to post a performance-guarantee
bond, according to the Filipino news service ABS-CBN.
“Besides a minimum paid-up capital, firms interested in
offering voice calls over the Internet, or VoIP have to post a performance bond
to guarantee the delivery of services to the public,” the National
Telecommunications Commission said.
The Philippine journal Business
World called the move an effort “to block fly-by-night providers, but at
the risk of preventing some bona fide applicants.”
The NTC will require VoIP service-providers, defined as “a
person or entity providing the service directly to the public or through
resellers for compensation,” to post a P5-million performance bond on top of
raising at least P10 million ($180,000) in paid-up capital.
In addition to the bond, anyone register as a VOIP service
reseller, defined as “persons or entities that intend to derive or source VoIP
service from a duly registered VoIP provider under an agreement to resell the
service directly to retail end-user customers,” is required to show proof that
the entity is at least 60 percent owned by Filipinos.
According to ABS-CBN, the Philippine National Economic and
Development Authority estimates that VoIP can reduce the cost of current
international calls “as much as 75 percent, from the present $0.40 to only
about $0.10 a minute, or even lower, as is the case in other Asian countries.”
Business World
reports that the Philippines has seen “long-drawn debates over telecommunication
firms’ rights as service providers and the right of typically small value-added
service companies like internet service providers to offer this service at
rates that could be much cheaper than those of big telcos.”
Telcos argue that VoIP is a voice service, the journal says, “noting that,
under Republic Act No. 7925, only telcos that have Congressional franchise can
roll out voice services.” VAS providers contend that “hefty financial
requirements” should not be “slapped on a service that, theoretically, does not
require that much capital to offer and that this is one business that evens the
playing field.”
…
Happy birthday, Joe DiMaggio,
one of the most graceful and classy athletes in history.
…
Integrated Research, developers of
Prognosis performance monitoring products, has announced a partnership with T-Systems,
a division of Deutsche Telekom, for a
major VoIP deployment in Germany.
The company also announced the opening of a new office in
the center of Frankfurt to support its customer base and to target new IP
telephony opportunities in the region.
Prognosis is an established provider in Germany with clients
such as DB Systems (Deutsche Bahn) and Deutsche Bank. “We had committed to open
the new European office in Frankfurt and this new partnership with T-Systems
has reinforced our decision,” said Keith Andrews, CEO of Integrated Research.
Over the past 17 years Integrated Research has concentrated
on building up its Central European business for their HP NonStop server
performance management products, relying on the support of local distributors. Andrews
says the firm is now “investing in a more direct presence to address the
rapidly emerging German market for VoIP and IP telephony performance
management.”
The Gartner Group predicts compound annual growth of
business VoIP in Western Europe at 37 per cent annually, which represents 11.7
million new IP telephones deployed by 2009.
Wolfgang Sattel, Service Delivery Manager from T-Systems,
said corporations are now “starting to roll out large IP telephony deployments.”
…
Happy birthday Andrew
Carnegie. He emigrated to America from Scotland as a penniless
youth, and became one of the wealthiest Americans of his time in the steel
industry, retiring on a guaranteed pension of one million dollars a month for
life. He spent the last years of his life giving away his vast fortune,
endowing 2,811 libraries and buying 7,689 organs for churches to “lessen the
pain of the sermons.”
…
“After years of false starts,” says a new study, “Mobile CRM: Re-energizing the CRM,” published by
industry research company visiongain, “the market for mobile CRM
finally started to gain traction in 2004 and this has continued through 2005.”
Although still a “nascent market,” the report says, “mobile
CRM should be reasonably robust on a global scale by 2007.”
The study found that, to this point, mobile CRM has
accounted for less than 10% of total CRM revenues, but believes it will
continue to show steady growth. In fact, it predicts, “mobile CRM will exceed
traditional CRM growth rates to account for 20% of total CRM revenues by 2010
as the market matures.”
“In 2001, extending enterprise applications to a wireless
environment was touted as the ‘next big thing’ and nothing happened,” says
report author Marcia Kaplan, citing “security, usability problems with handheld
devices, and costs” as major impediments. But after what Kaplan describes as investing
in the necessary technology and outfitting their field personnel with mobile
devices, “businesses are looking to maximize their investment and mobile CRM is
the next rational step.”
A traditional CRM deployment usually involves only the Independent
Software Vendor and the end-user. With a mobile deployment the number of
participants is more extensive. Typically a mobile CRM implementation involves
the ISV, Kaplan says, a middleware vendor, possibly a systems integrator, a
device manufacturer, and a wireless operator.
…
Just amazing, what CRM can teach a company. England’s Essex
Medical & Forensic Services has been using Microsoft’s CRM 3.0
since April. The service, which organizes medical cover for the police across
Essex, Suffolk, Cambridge and Bedfordshire, has found that while Friday and
Saturday nights are busy nights – which they expected – activity also increases at the full moon. Which they did not
expect. CRM at work, folks, diapers and beer.
According to industry observer Colin
Barker, Steve Roberts, commercial director with EMFS says that the ability
to plan for the full moon is “a big plus” in the CRM system.
EMFS has been in existence for just a year, set up as part
of the British government’s sensible plans to privatize “non-core services”
such as medical care for people in police custody. It supplies doctors, nurses
and other medical personnel when required.
The doctors and nurses working for EMFS all have other
medical jobs, Barker says, “usually in the NHS, and only do occasional shifts.”
Roberts didn’t want a dedicated medical system to coordinate the staff, saying
they were all too expensive and complicated, and found that a CRM system worked better.
…
According to India
Business Insight, research firm Gartner, Inc. has said that India is the
fastest-growing information and communication technology industry in the world.
Focusing on “the export market instead of capitalizing on the opportunities in
the buoyant domestic market,” the ICT market in India is likely to grow at a
compounded annual growth rate of 19 percent to cross $54.8 billion by 2008, up
from $29.5 billion in 2004, Gartner says, adding that ICT exports from India will
hit $16.5 billion for 2005.
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