Some fellow TMCers were emailing back-and-forth about the Mitel lawsuit against Shoretel just before Shoretel launched their IPO. A few moments later, Jon Arnold emailed me, a bunch of TMCers, Om, VoIPCentral, Ken Camp, Russell Shaw, and a few other bloggers & journalists about this bit of news and what it meant. Go check out Jon's post here where he makes an analogy to the Verizon lawsuit against Vonage, another VoIP player around the time of their IPO.As a result of the lawsuit, the ShoreTel IPO is up in the air.
My email response to everyone in the thread was "Interesting indeed.. -that is, for mid-tier IP-PBX vendors fighting over the scraps that tier-1 IP-PBXs such as Cisco are leaving behind."
And then you have up-and-coming whipper snappers like Asterisk and Asterisk-based solutions such as Fonality, trixbox, etc. that have continued to take more market share in the IP-PBX space.
Andy wrote back "This is interesting and Tom's comment makes me think that we are at a point where innovation is slowing down."
What say you all? Is innovation in VoIP slowing down? Are we entering an era where VoIP players squabbling for the scraps from Longshank's (Cisco's & Asterisk's?) table? (Braveheart reference)
