Announcing the 2006

After deep thought, long and careful deliberations, numerous trips to the coffee pot, three bottles of Visine and an absolute minimum of coin-flipping, I am delighted to present the 2006 Fierce 15.

This list, as any such list must be, is subjective and as such can reasonably be debated more or less endlessly. At the end of the process, I was surprised to find that there is only one repeat from the 2005 list, which itself held very few repeats from the year previous. That speaks to the vigor of the VoIP business. It's not that the earlier winners have vanished. It's that they've either grown and gone public or have been supplanted by a neater newer idea or a fiercer company. Heat, however, is a cheap commodity in the blogosphere. We tried to look past the sizzle to find the meat.

In some cases, that was kind of hard. It is kind of astonishing (and depressing, come to think of it) that so many marketers are utterly unable to describe their company's products without resorting to a wall of jargon. Fierce as a concept may be, explaining it clearly is half the battle--and it's a battle that too many companies are failing at.

Subjective as the list is, it is anything but baseless. I took some care to include leaders in the infrastructure, carrier and application worlds. I have a particular belief that the companies that will succeed most brilliantly are the ones that succeed in building an ecosystem around themselves, and that brilliant applications are at the forefront of today's VoIP industry.

Some of these companies you've heard of. Some, I bet, you haven't. But you should. These are the best of breed for 2006.

And so, in no particular order other than the tyranny of the alphabet: The 2006 Fierce 15.

- Dan Rosenbaum

First Winner