IP communications

Dutch telco KPN gets 1M VoIP customers

Pete Wylie — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 10:16:09 -0500

Though total Dutch adoption of VoIP slowed to only a 4 percent year-over-year increase, telco KPN took the lion's share of the growth, and now reaches more than 1 million VoIP customers in the Netherlands.

During the third quarter, KPN raised its market share nearly 5 percent to 34 percent of the total Dutch market. Its leading competitor, Ziggo, added fewer than half as many new customers as KPN did, with 18,500 adds for Ziggo compared with 47,000 wins for KPN. KPN has taken a different approach than most North America telcos and has aggressively expanded into IP communications, adding VoIP services with its 2007 acquisition of iBasis and signing up lots of customers to its IPTV service as well.

The total Dutch market now stands at 3.5 million users, according to telecompaper.com. The market is evenly split between DSL and cable providers of VoIP, with 1.521 million DSL VoIP connections compared with 1.408 million cable VoIP subscribers.

For more:
- see the telecompaper.com article here

FierceVoIP Leaders: Roberta Mackintosh, Executive Director of Advanced Voice and UC, Verizon Business

Pete Wylie — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 09:32:34 -0500

FierceVoIP sat down with Roberta Mackintosh, Executive Director of Advanced Voice and UC&C for Verizon Business, to discuss the VoIP industry and Verizon Business's plans for unified communications.

Fierce VoIP: What are some key trends you see emerging in the VoIP space right now?

Mackintosh: If we take a macro view, you have to recognize the explosion of unified communications and advanced voice products. It's gone from 18 months ago, when we were just having conversations with some large, lead clients about unified communications, to now when it's at the forefront of their communications strategy. We're seeing a lot of interest in people wanting to make decisions in voice telephony that will help them evolve to the UC solution that fits their company the best.

FierceVoIP: What are some of the ways you tailor solutions to individual companies?

Mackintosh: We want to give our clients a clear understanding of our approach to unified communications solutions and the capabilities of our systems, so that we can match them to their expectations for their products. We need to understand what they're trying achieve with unified communications to assist them in meeting their objectives.

Since Verizon Business is an IP communications specialist and has capabilities across the board, we can provide VoIP-based inbound and outbound calling, automated calling, unified communications or a hybrid solution depending on the customer and its situation. We work with several different vendors and have significant inventory to find the best match of products and services for the individual client.

FierceVoIP: What do you think will be the driver(s) for growth in the space as we enter 2009?

Mackintosh: I think people are seeing two key benefits in IP communications, and especially unified communications. The first one is the personnel benefit. Efficiency increases with unified communications because there is more control gained over work flow and time management. The second benefit is business applications, and this is not fully recognized yet. As the applications begin to really demonstrate good ROI, I think they are going to really drive growth.

FierceVoIP: Can you think of specific verticals that stand to gain from integrating business applications and unified communications deployments?

Mackintosh: Shipping companies, for instance, can identify problems more easily and stop shipments before they go out with something that's just going to have to be recalled. Keeping one shipment back so that the problem can be identified and remedied would have significant benefit logistically and financially for that company. It's also a mystery to see how much benefit could come from UC deployments to the government sector, especially at the state and local level. The higher education space is also one to watch closely. The challenges we have in both markets is really finding and testing the applications that will make a difference for their employees.

FierceVoIP: What are some roadblocks you have seen to unified communications adoption?

Mackintosh: If the CIO's of the organizations are not intimately aware of the business processes of the rest of the employees, that can cause them not to implement the business applications to full potential. We also want to shift the functionality from a manual process to an automatic one, so that the solution is as easy to use as possible. That really helps bring UC into a business. I think it will be awhile before you see really widespread UC adoption, because it has some stepping stones to get over, such as making all applications IP-based and platform agnostic.

FierceVoIP: Who do you see as Verizon Business's biggest competitor in the space?

Mackintosh: Most of our traditional competitors have an offering they are pitching as a unified communications solution, but when you look at the services, it's really not a full UC product. AT&T, for instance, bought a conferencing company and basically renamed that division as unified communications. BT operates more on a big deal basis, and doesn't integrate as well because Verizon Business has a unique perspective and gives honest advice about which product will work best for the individual customer, since we're not tied to a specific vendor. We are seeing some aggressive expansions by Microsoft, Cisco and Nortel that we're watching closely.

MetaSwitch reports hot FY08 results

Doug Mohney — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 23:18:03 -0400

Data Connection Ltd (DCL) reported record revenues of $118 million for its fiscal year ending August 31, 2008, but the real story was that the MetaSwitch division brought in more than three-fourths of the haul.

"We're very, very pleased with the results over the past year," said MetaSwitch President John Lazar. "We try very hard to be very clear about what we're trying to achieve in terms of plan."

The MetaSwitch division of DCL brought in 78 percent of total revenue for a total of $92 million. Growth was up 22 percent over the same period last year and was attributed to both later Tier 1 carrier deployments and continued expansion of the customer base. MetaSwitch now counts over 400 service providers on its books, and the year's final quarter was the company's strongest ever.

Lazar noted that the headline numbers are strong and more importantly, the company is "very profitable." He said the company feels it has a big opportunity in today's economic climate and is in a good position relative to its competition. MetaSwitch is still on track for growth in the forthcoming fiscal year and anticipates continuing to hire "across the board" in sales, engineering, and marketing as revenues increase.

Other highlights from the FY08 report include taking a "significant" venture capital investment in January 2008, a deal with Embarq to provide MetaSwitch's softswitch, media gateway and MetaSphere applications suite to provide the core of its new Embarq Smart IP Enterprise solution. MetaSwitch now serves more than 125 CLECs with its technology.

Moving forward, next generation wireless opportunities look good. "The iPhone has changed the rules," said Lazar. "The Google phone looks very interesting." New enterprise applications taking advantage of SIP phones with XML capabilities are also something that could appear in the future, particularly in the higher education space.

For more:
- MetaSwitch announces FY08 numbers. Release

Nortel's UC hospitality play

Pete Wylie — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 17:15:40 -0400

Nortel continued its aggressive expansion of UC offerings in the hospitality space Tuesday with the announcement of five hot customers that have created new revenue and improved guest experiences with Nortel solutions. Hotels and resorts with diverse customer needs and preferences have seen benefits in guest loyalty and staff productivity by turning up Nortel, according to the set of releases.

At the Venetian Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, guests can now order tickets to shows and other events through a Nortel-powered contact center that also gives them personalized message capabilities. At the Shangri-La Hotel in Vancouver, Canada, where customers seek a very natural, "tech-free" experience, Nortel's solution runs behind the scenes, optimizing the staff's time to guarantee as much face time as possible with the guest.

Wes Durow, vice president of global marketing, said the hospitality industry is migrating to IP for a variety of reasons.

"We're seeing increased UC adoption in the hospitality space because it lets hotels and resorts give a new guest experience that is more personalized," Durow said. "We're also seeing demand because of increased productivity by staff because of IP communications and the new revenue streams that they are able to generate from the level of personalization the systems allow."

Sandra Thomson, hospitality marketing manager for Nortel, said the hotel's main goal of making a guest a repeat customer is at the heart of the migration to UC.

"You want the guest to come back, and little things like being able to greet them by name, or remembering the temperature they like their room can make that difference," Thomson said. "Also, when you have something unfortunate happen, like an overflowing toilet or something similar, the UC solution helps the hotel manager find the closest maintenance person who can help."

Durow said Nortel is able to better serve its hospitality partners than other companies offering UC because the company understands "that the relationship between a hotel and a guest is not purely transactional, it's personal." He also noted the reduced energy footprint of Nortel's solution as a plus mentioned by customers.

For more:
- see the releases at Nortel's website

Microsoft steps to UC interoperability

Doug Mohney — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 15:41:48 -0400

Friday, Microsoft announced it signed up with the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) Working Group, an organization focusing on the development on an open industry standard for ubiquitous messaging. In other words, a standard so apps can talk to each other.

Microsoft says it is signing up at the behest of existing AMQP members, including several of its customers in the financial services industry; figure Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs and/or J.P. Morgan "requested" that Microsoft sign up. Cisco, Novell and Red Hat also are among the AMQP members.

Since AMPQ is a spec for platform-neutral, open standards-based business messaging, this would presumably mean that, down the road, Microsoft unified communications apps would be able to communicate with Cisco, Red Hat and Novell UC apps. Customers would be able to mix and match applications to improve business process communication both within an enterprise and outside the corporate infrastructure.

AMQP may provide greater interoperability for a number of vertical "scenarios," in addition to obvious ones for financial services, insurance and health care.

For more:
- Microsoft's press release on joining the AMQP working group.

PSAPs migrating to IP

Pete Wylie — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 10:07:33 -0400

Public safety access points (PSAPs) are increasingly shifting to IP-based systems, according to PlantCML, which provides communications solutions to more than 4,000 public safety entities in the U.S. and Canada. The firm announced two adoptions of its Sentinel Patriot IP-based emergency call answering system recently, one in Jasper, Ala., and the other in Campbell Co., Wyo.

Sentinel Patriot helps dispatchers answer and process emergency calls more efficiently by creating redundancies and enabling easier data sharing among local PSAPs. IP-based PSAP systems allow multiple communication types, wireline, cellular, VoIP, etc., to be accessed and processed over the same interface.

PlantCML officials reported that some emergency service providers, reluctant to change to IP-based networks in the past are migrating now that security has increased and the underlying technology is more reliable.

"We're starting to see PSAPs more in tune with the idea that IP is coming whether they want it or not," said Jeremy Smith, technical solutions engineer with PlantCML, in an urgentcomm.com story. "They realize they need to start putting the pieces in place to prepare for that migration. ... Budget cycles are enabling PSAPs to buy solutions and packages to prepare."

Some PSAPs are still worried about hackers and security concerns. But when secure firewalls are implemented as part of the PSAP IP-based communications strategy, first responders can feel safe that they're providing more efficient and accurate service, without damaging security threats.

For more:
- see the urgentcomm.com story here

XO nets 15,000th enterprise VoIP customer

Pete Wylie — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 10:03:34 -0400

XO Communications announced Monday it has deployed its XO IP Flex business VoIP bundle to 15,000 enterprise customers. Launched launched in April 2005, XO says it now supports more than 475,000 customer employees.

XO IP Flex is a managed service set that conveniently can be delivered over existing equipment and is priced as a single service rather than on a per phone line basis; customers purchase port speeds anywhere between 1.5 and 45 Mbps, instead of paying additional fees for each added voice line. So, XO sells an IP connection, adds on hosted services on top with simplified pricing and everyone is happy.

XO Communications has continually added new features to IP Flex including integration with XO's MPLS IP-VPN service and adding unified communications/mobile UC capabilities with XO Anywhere.

For more:
- see the XO release here

Related articles
XO Hosting Mobile UC
XO expands wholesale IP play

IDC: UC hype affecting phone, service purchases

Doug Mohney — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 16:31:15 -0400

Publishing two survey reports today, IDC says increasing "attention and buzz" around unified communications is getting to decision-makers in how they select phone systems and services.

The first study, "Key Trends in Enterprise VoIP 2008: Customer Perspectives on Unified Communications," shows that end users have become more sophisticated in understanding UC and have higher expectations about what solution providers should be able to offer.

Survey respondents ranked Microsoft, Cisco, Avaya and IBM as the top 4 key vendors in their company's UC plans; last year, respondents ranked Cisco, Avaya, Microsoft and Nortel as their top 4 UC choices. More than 41 percent of respondents believe that advanced applications integrating business communications with business applications should come directly from Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Notes or Domino environments.

What's more, 79 percent of respondents believe that UC is a desktop or mobile-based solution or platform that combines a common inbox for email/fax/voicemail, advanced IP telephony calling and management, Web/audio/videoconferencing, instant messaging, and presence management, which can be integrated with business-critical applications.

"Key Trends in Enterprise VoIP 2008: North American Enterprises' Buying Behavior," IDC's second study, focused on how U.S. enterprises are buying phone systems and services. The intro of desktop-based IP telephony solutions by Microsoft and IBM has led to a shift in focus on the source of key advanced communications functionality and call control. Long distance savings, ability to integrate with existing business applications, and cost savings over legacy equipment are the three most popular reasons why businesses are currently using or planning to use IP telephony within the next 12 months. Finally, unified messaging, remote/teleworkers solutions, and videoconferencing are the top 3 IP communications applications expected to drive future investment in data and telephony network budgets.

For more:
- IDC says UC hype affecting telephony purchasing decisions.

SPOTLIGHT: VON, Pulver move in separate directions

Doug Mohney — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 22:15:57 -0400

As Virgo Publishing attempts to bring back the VON brand in a magazine and shows, original creator of the franchise Jeff Pulver has moved on to embrace social media.

A whois.net search for von.com and voneurope.com indicates Virgo Publishing picked up the domain names around September 19. Within the telecommunications space, Virgo currently puts out Phone+ and xchange magazines. One source said Virgo intends to resurrect the VON trade show and publish a magazine of the same name.

Meanwhile, Jeff Pulver has moved to the Next Big Thing. Pulver is actively cultivating Israeli high-tech start-ups these days and building a new franchise around social media; in his blog he indicates he will be producing a social media seminar series around the United States and also has plans for a "special UnConference event" in the works.

At its height, Pulvermedia put on large VON shows in the spring (San Jose) and fall (Boston) in the U.S. and a yearly European event. In April, the operating company abruptly closed its doors and left a vocal community of attendees and enthusiasts wondering what happened.

IT Expo vs. the ghost of VON (and everybody else)

Doug Mohney — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 09:45:27 -0400

This week, the Internet Telephony Conference and Expo finds itself in the unique position of being the "only" fall show dedicated to IP telephony with the demise of VON - sort of.

Since pulvermedia had its big car crash, many of its faithful followers - mainly attendees who loved Boston in the fall and seeing Jeff in his trademark purple shirts, rather than vendors who were stiffed out of cash on events in Europe and left hanging out to dry on deposits they made for 2008 and 2009 - have been looking for a new place to call home in the fall tradeshow season.

A number of organizations considered a "VON replacement" show in Boston in October, but IP communications vendors had a lack of enthusiasm for supporting Yet Another Trade Show on their calendar. Some vendors confessed happiness - fewer shows means simpler decisions and more flexibility in deploying marketing dollars.

Not having VON to kick around any more, IT Expo now finds itself also jockeying for enterprise mindshare, an uphill sell when the franchise has more traditionally attracted resellers and system integrators. VoiceCon, with its successful spring event in Orlando, has established itself as "The" enterprise event.

In Spring 2009, IT Expo will find more numerous challenges, including the suddenly-hot eComm show, VoiceCon, and lots of larger niches (CES, CTIA, Mobile Wireless Congress) that tend to suck all the air, er, marketing dollars out of the room.

For more:
- Read Jon Arnold's blog on boring conferences

Related article
VoiceCon vs. VONx

Busy September

Doug Mohney — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 10:53:29 -0400

Can we say "traffic jam?"

We've just gone through the editorial calendar for September and it's jam-packed with events and news. Not to mention some changes in the contributor category. And have you checked out our new "FierceVoIP Leaders" series?

With IT Expo and InterOp falling on the same week (September 15), participants in those events are working to secure briefings for their announcements. A number of them want to make announcements the week before - September 8. This means most of them want to brief the week before - September 2-5, since Monday is a holiday.

Fortunately, Pete Wylie - our (relatively) new Associate Editor -- is here to help out. Unfortunately for Pete, I'm out on vacation September 2-5 so he's going to take the bulk of the briefings before September 8 and the first wave of IP communications announcements.

If that wasn't exciting enough, Streaming Media West and AstriCon take place the week of September 22. I'll be flying out to San Francisco and, from there, to Phoenix. So, while we get a raft of releases on September 15 from IT Expo and InterOp, we'll also have briefing requests for Streaming Media West and AstriCon and press releases to beat the rush at AstriCon.

I'd be really surprised if there weren't at least two or three significant announcements around AstriCon.

In addition to forthcoming news flood, our Contact Center contributor Joe Outlaw has been invited to join Frost & Sullivan as their principal Contact Center guy; good for him and Frost, not so good for us, as Frost doesn't want him doing any extraneous blogging or columns. Joe's been a class act in stepping up to the plate for us, and I wish him well over at Frost.

On the other side of the contributor ledger, we're talking to Marc Robins, President of SIP Forum, about the potential of his community to share its knowledge and opinions in a relevant fashion. We would potentially have Carl Ford, Thomas Howe and the SIP Forum as ongoing contributors to FierceVoIP.

Last, but not least, we've started interviewing C-level people in our "FierceVoIP Leaders" series. We hope to feature a different IP communications executive every Monday. So far, we've talked to Peter Vicars of NewStep and Andy Ory of Acme Packet and have a couple more in the works.

- Doug

A Glass Half Full

Doug Mohney — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 15:12:41 -0400

Trying to figure out how the price of oil, rising prices, and a code orange financial sector will affect the IP communications industry is a crap shoot. Some analysts are looking towards the Aug. 7 release of Acme Packet's (downward) revised financials as being the bellwether for the rest of the industry, but I'm not so sure if I buy into that idea. If Acme, Cisco and Nortel are down, then maybe we should consider some further thought.

In (quite arguable) theory, there's some good news this week to ponder.

The good news: Intel announced a 25 percent increase in profits this week and sees continued strength going into the third quarter as its chips go into more mobile devices, with laptops now outselling desktops. Mobility desires broadband connectivity, so the wireless companies should be OK, especially with people falling all over themselves buying 3G iPhones. Going into the data center, Sun is predicting a good fourth quarter so people are still upgrading and/or adding servers at a healthy clip.

Analysts argue that consumer electronics, are relatively insulated from the ups and downs of everything going on because everyone "needs" their tech fix and prices continue to drop.

And (in theory), the higher price of oil should lead to more telecommuting as people try to cut down on their gasoline bills and avoid traveling the increasingly expensive skies. Go price plane tickets for September travel and tell me it's not a wakeup call.

So, what do you think? Time to buy some gold? Or just chill a little?

- Doug

Spain Cable Goes IP NGN

Doug Mohney — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 23:25:32 -0400

PTV Telecom, a triple-play provider in Spain, is replacing its existing infrastructure with a PacketCable-compliant network using Sonus Networks technology to offer enhanced services in five major cities across the country.

PVT Telecom is one of the few cable operators in Spain with a wholly owned network. It's moving to IP out of its existing infrastructure and is expected to facilitate future subscriber base growth, deliver "multi-play" (i.e. voice, video, and data) services to consumers and also give it a lever into the enterprise market with IP trunks and data services.

Sonus is migrating PTV Telecom's entire legacy network across Madrid, Cordoba, Valencia, Seville and Malaga. Sonus is racking up multiple wins both in the cable MSO base--not exactly traditional territory for the IP Next Generation Network "story"--and across Europe.

For more:
- Sonus Networks PVT Telecom win release

Related articles:
Sonus Networks Reports 1Q Financials, Lots of Cash
Tata Goes With Sonus for Global IP Network

Tata Goes With Sonus for Global IP Network

Doug Mohney — Tue, 13 May 2008 21:17:09 -0400

Tata Communications will work with Sonus Networks to deliver IP communications solutions to customers worldwide, tapping into Sonus' services team and deploying Sonus Network Border Switches to interconnect disparate voice networks and deliver seamless IP services across geographies. Sonus' complete fixed line trunking solution will provide IP-voice services in nine cities across three continents.

Tata's customer base includes over 1,500 global carriers, 600 mobile operators, 10,000 enterprises, over 500,000 broadband and Internet subscribers and around (yawn) 300 public WiFi hotspots. The new IP network will be made up of Sonus' GSX9000 Open Services, PSX Call Routing Server, SGX Signaling Gateway, Sonus management system software, as well as those Network Border Switches. Tata will also implement Sonus' IMX Multimedia platform for the development of enhanced business applications; specifically for the creation of new enterprise services that blend mobile content, location-based services, and other multimedia functionality.

Tata's initial deployment cities include Newark, N.J.; Montreal; Toronto; Los Angeles; London; Madrid; Frankfurt; and Singapore.

Sonus is no stranger to big IT builds; BT selected the company in November 2007 to provide hardware to its big 21CN IP network build.

For more:
- Tata Sonus IP Upgrade Release
- iLocus blog on Sonus selected by BT for 21cn buildout.

Hyping VoIP encryption

Mon, 05 May 2008 06:59:56 -0400

Three year old Cellcrypt is getting coverage as it tries to raise several million dollars and close deals with the British government and multinational companies. According to The Guardian, Cellcrypt has supposedly been in "stealth mode" as it has been perfecting its technology and getting security clearances from U.K. and U.S. authorities--but the company has been speaking at events and posting press releases since 2006.

Still, making mobile voice calls private isn't a bad idea, especially since one of the founders of the company was demonstrating a straightforward brute force technique of cracking the current method of GSM encryption at the March 2008 Black Hat Federal Security event in Washington D.C.

Cellcrypt sells an end-to-end solution for encrypting voice calls using a VoIP application on the mobile phone and a PBX gateway, plus a switch to manage call routing to the appropriate IP addresses, but it's not a unique solution. Phil Zimmermann of PGP fame has been developing his Zfone encryption solution for several years and has licensed the underlying technology to a number of companies; there's also a set of patches to put Z-cryption onto Asterisk.

For more:
- The Guardian piece on VoIP encryption company Cellcrypt trying to raise money
- Forbes.com's ringside seat to GSM encryption being cracked at Black Hat Fed

Related articles:
List of VoIP risks keeps growing
Circle the wagons, enterprise VoIP is under attack

ADTRAN intros new IP PBX all-in-one, IP PBX phones

Thu, 01 May 2008 06:59:54 -0400

ADTRAN has rolled out the NetVanta 7060 Modular IP PBX and a couple of its own IP phones as complements.

The NetVanta 7060 bundles in IP PBX features such as voice mail and auto attendant along with a 24-port Power over Ethernet (PoE) switch in a single compact box; building in the PoE switch eliminates an additional box. The new box includes GUI wizards for setup and management, graphics-based Voice Quality Monitoring (VQM), support for SIP trunking, SIP proxy, a system scheduler, and the ability to function as a wireless controller.

Complementing the IP PBX, the ADTRAN IP 700 series of SIP-based business phones includes the IP 706 six button phone and the IP 712 (what else?) 12 button phone. All phones in the series support functions like Key System Mode, PBX Mode, Busy Lamp Field, Shared Line Appearance and Hands Free Auto Answer. Each model offers dual switched Ethernet ports to enable simultaneous voice and data, a full-duplex speaker phone and headset support. List price for the 706 is $249 while the 712 is $299.

For more:
- Adtran Announcements on IP Phones and NetVanta IP PBX

Related article:
ADTRAN Unveils Innovative Voice Quality Monitoring Technology in NetVanta and Total Access VoIP Platforms

BroadSoft and JoeDeveloper.NET mashup Facebook

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 06:59:57 -0400

BroadSoft and JoeDeveloper.NET have launched the first Facebook mashup to include carrier-grade VoIP features. J.NET's Click2Message Facebook application talks to Broadsoft's BroadWorks VoIP application platform, so Facebook users can enable their friends and colleagues to call them through their Facebook profiles with a single click.

The Click2Message application enables click-to-dial using any device and Facebook users can add the application to their profile pages, allowing their network of friends and business connections to call them without revealing their own phone numbers to the caller. (If they are your friends, why would you need to hide your number? Hmm.) The basic Click2Message application is now available free of change to any U.S.-based Facebook user; sign-up information for the free beta is available at http://marketplace.broadsoft.com. A for-pay version with advanced bells and whistles such as low-cost outbound calling, call forwarding, do not disturb, and voicemail-to-text transcription, will be released shortly

Click2Message is the latest high-visibility application announced out of BroadSoft's Xtended Developers Program, following announcements combining BroadWorks functionality with Salesforce.com, ACT! by Sage, simulScribe, and Polycom. Developers get access to APIs to integrated advanced voice features with their applications.

For more:
- BroadSoft Facebook Mashup release

Related articles:
BroadSoft powering XO Hosting Mobile UC
TMC piece on Broadsoft ACT! Mashup

MetaSwitch makes mashups

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 06:59:56 -0400

MetaSwitch has announced it is demonstrating mashups using its CommPortal subscriber interface with iGoogle and Salesforce.com, providing click-to-dial experiences with both websites. The solutions will enable service providers to integrate CommPortal directly into both websites, allowing users to access click-to-dial, contact integration, visual voicemail and other features.

Demonstrations are taking place this week during MetaSwitch's annual user forum event and put the company into a crowd of softswitch-based vendors that have announced mashup solutions, including BroadSoft and Sylantro. Other companies with mashup capabilities include Digium's SwitchVox SMB IP PBX and NewStep's CSN converged communications platform. Typical objectives around mashups are to enable service providers to quickly develop new applications at reduced cost while adding more revenue-producing services.

The iGoogle/CommPortal mashup includes an iGoogle gadget to enable click-to-dial and a remote click-to-dial option that allows subscribers to utilize the function on their mobile phones. Users can also integrate their Gmail contracts with the CommPortal interface for some contact management functionality. Salesforce.com gets a click-to-dial function with CommPortal and users get access to a contact-based view of their call history along with access to a visual voicemail application; frankly everyone is doing a Salesforce.com mashup.

For more:
- MetaSwitch Mashup release

Related articles:
BroadSoft and JoeDeveloper.NET Mashup Facebook
Converging out of CTIA

Dialogic: TDM Lives! SBCs doomed! Shopping! UC domination!

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 06:59:58 -0400

Dialogic says there's a whole bunch of TDM hardware supporting businesses and enterprises and it'll be around for the next "five to 10 years," said CEO Nick Jensen. Speaking before an audience of analysts and media at a company-sponsored briefing in New York, Jensen cited AT&T numbers where the carrier reported 85 percent of traffic for the enterprise was still carried on TDM.

"[IP network conversion] is not going anywhere near the speed of light most of the research analysts wrote about six, seven years ago." While more people are buying IP, there's still a lot of installed TDM equipment in carriers. There's a similar situation in the enterprise, but Jensen expects the IP voice business to continue to grow while TDM revenues slowly decline.

While not a public company, Dialogic has engaged in a general discussion on its finances and where it expects to be in the future. Last year, the company brought in $193 million in revenues with $28 million on the EBIDA line. In 2008, the company expects to have revenues of around $250 million "without acquisitions" and to be "north of $40 million" in profits.

Turning to the future of the session border controller (SBC), Jensen doesn't see much of a future for the pure-play SBC. "There are some great companies out there … but they're going to have to add a media play or do something else. Over the next five you're not going to have a stand alone SBC," he said. "From a tech point of view it makes a lot of sense as well. You have everything on a single box."

From an acquisitions standpoint, it's a buyer's market, with valuations on companies down and venture money tight. Dialogic anticipates making "a couple" of acquisitions this year, shopping for companies in the deep packet inspection (DPI) and security space, potentially in the media gateway arena. "Any company below $100 million [in value] is at risk," stated Jensen. Carriers want to deal with stable companies and purportedly have forced smaller companies to merge. "There are a number of good and interesting companies out there," with technology but without a customer base. Dialogic hasn't been shy, first purchasing Intel's media business when it was Eicon, then acquiring Cantata and OpenMediaLabs.

Turning to unified communications, Microsoft and Cisco continue to drive the market. Major corporations look at Microsoft to provide a solution for the desktop or Cisco to provide a solution for a network, so "there's a drive to both angles." Some customers don't want to be completely owned by one company, so they choose to go with the other for diversity purposes. "The two are the dominant players over the next five to 10 years," he said. Jensen expects a host of new applications being created by third-party developers once a UC infrastructure takes root in the enterprise space.

For more:
- Dialogic acquisition of Cantata in perspective by iLocus
- Dialogic acquires OpenMediaLabs press release

Converging out of CTIA

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 06:59:59 -0400

Is converged communications the new catch phrase these days? Feels like it.

More and more, companies are starting to abandon such choice acronyms as VoIP, FMC, and UC for the all-encompassing "converged" word, and with good reason. If you embrace the concept of "Voice is [just] another application," then converged communication means you can freely mix and match voice and presence and IM into everything you do. Fixed-mobile convergence and unified communications become subsets--rather than separate and distinct categories--of the converged world.

I spent last week walking the floor at CTIA and saw a lot of familiar faces from the wide world of IP communications, people I've talked to for years and years at events in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Las Vegas and San Jose. Nearly all of the companies I talked to started out in the wireline world and now have healthy and growing businesses in the fast-paced wireless arena. Doesn't matter if you are managing sessions coming over copper or via an air interface, it's still being able to transcode and manage security and conduct billing on the fly. Adding WiMAX and LTE and femtocells only means there are additional challenges in moving calls onto and through the network, not a re-invention of the wheel.

If you're an applications server company, supporting FMC simply becomes a matter of adding features to your core product, according to Sylantro CEO Marco Limena. Add some software and voila! One number reachability, call logging, four digit dialing, and all the other fun features one expects out of a corporate desktop handset delivered to a mobile phone. Outgoing calls appear with the caller ID of the hosted service.

NewStep Networks started out as an FMC company, but now they've embraced "service convergence"--being able to deliver any content to any device and any place, regardless of the type. At CTIA, the company announced it now supports social networking capabilities within the CSN platform; it has a Facebook application for click-to-call and widgets for Yahoo!oneConnect and iGoogle to leverage presence, location, and behavior characteristics. Same underlying functionality used to bounce calls between mobile and wireline networks, different application.

At the edge, voice mashups are only going to accelerate the use of converged in regular conversation and the further dilution of what FMC is on any given day of the week. I think unified communications/UC will have some staying power for a bit because Microsoft is spending a bunch of money to promote the concept within the enterprise community and once the juggernaut starts rolling, it is hard to stop.

What do you think? You can reach me at doug@fiercemarkets.com.

- Doug Mohney