FORD: Am I staying close enough to the dial tone?

By Carl Ford

When Divestiture occurred, my father and I had a long talk about which company to request. Back then, an unshackled AT&T was going to deliver on all those promises Tom Selleck was giving on the commercials. Free to innovate, AT&T had all the tools: good switching, great R&D, and a client base. 

Sitting down with Dad and knowing my seniority was nonexistent, I figured I was not going to be able to get into AT&T. However, what I did not expect was that my father's advice was "stay close to the dial tone."

Now a score of years later I am asking myself the question, "Where is the dial tone of the future?"

I was advocating an end-to-end IP service using enum while at lunch with a friend in the business. My friend's view was that Facebook was the new dial tone, and I should get on the presence bandwagon.

Since I ran the first presence conference, I felt somewhat dismayed by this analysis.

At breakfast a day earlier, another friend with a very cool communications application told me he had given up on the carriers as business partners.

So there is a major disconnect between application and dialtone. And yet dialtone is where the money is, so how do we get applications connected to the dialtone?

I went to an event where new companies were introduced that represent additions to Sir Terry Matthews' portfolio of companies.  As Simon Gwatkin said to me, the goal of these companies is to add value to dial tone for businesses. 

Magor (http://www.magorcorp.com) was designed to expand the ability to deliver video conferencing into more of the day-to-day workflow. The idea here was to make video conferencing more about the collaboration needed for the business. They call this Telecollaboration rather than Unified Communication or Telepresence. Unlike other systems that are expensive enough to force a central system, the company can deploy 10 of the Magor systems where the workflow can be best impacted and with the ability to add shared information. They support integration with the PBX, so HD video connects to the dial tone.

While this company can be seen as a horizontal platform, the lessons from Mitel (http://www.mitel.com) have given insight into some vertical opportunities as well. One of them is in partnership with Motorola. Telidio (http://www.teldio.com) is a two-way radio to PBX integration that provides DTMF signaling and PBX feature displays to the two radio systems. This service expands dial tone to government services people.

On the expansion of dial tone for one-to-many communication came the services from Benbria, which is an expandable paging utility. Anyone who ever has sold PBX systems knows that paging is a big part of most business systems. The ability to support "reverse 911" emergency broadcasting was a major reason VoIP was adopted at federal installations. Benbria provides multimedia paging (that has an IM protocol embedded in the system) to effectively communicate. 

So my father's advice seems to me to still apply and I think these companies are good examples as to what to look for in the future.