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By Doug Mohney, on November 10th, 2009
Ditech Networks has announced that its PhoneTag voice-to-text service has been chosen as an “integrated option” on Microsoft Exchange Unified Exchange 2010. PhoneTag converts voice mail into text and then sends the transcript directly to a user’s inbox as an email attachment, so you can read your voicemail through your email client.
Users will get a look at PhoneTag through Microsoft’s Voice Mail Preview Partnership. PhoneTag is described as a “cloud” service that uses a proprietary system to deliver what the company describes “highly accurate” transcribed voicemail messages; the service has racked up numerous awards from the industry press.
This is Ditech’s latest move to leverage its portfolio of voice processing technology and turn it into deliverable hosted services. Carriers can still buy the parts and pieces to implement and run their own value-added services, but hosted provides an easier turn-up and ramp without all that icky CapX and ongoing in-house maintenance.
By Doug Mohney, on November 9th, 2009
According to TechCrunch, Google has shelled out around $30 million in cash to scoop up Gizmo5. Of course, the rumor mill last month had Gizmo5 being bought by Skype as a SIP backup plan if they couldn’t get JoltID and various other proprietary technologies secured.
The timing of this rumor/impending announcement is, shall we say, interesting at best because it comes on the Monday after Skype had indeed kissed and made up with its former owners and had secured all the code/intellectual property it needed to continue without a cloud of lawsuits.
Let’s think this through a little bit: Either A) For some reason, Gizmo5 and Skype weren’t really getting together, or the deal was contingent upon some bizarre clause that said “If we make up with Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, all bets are off”, B) Gizmo5 and Skype had a deal, but one or the other party got scared off by the evil lawsuits of Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, and/or C) Gizmo5 has shopped itself around to both Skype and Google, with the winner being the first guy that provides a check that clears.
If Google has purchased Gizmo5, it’ll likely take about a year or more for the company to figure out what to do with it, so there’s no need to start frothing at the mouth about this being a “Skype killer” by any sense of the imagination.
By Doug Mohney, on November 6th, 2009
The New York Times is reporting that Ebay has formally settled the litigation around selling Skype. Terms of the blackmail, er deal include that the founders of Skype will drop their lawsuits against eBay and the investment consortium who planned to buy 65 percent of Skype in exchange for 14 percent in the “new” company, plus two seats on the board.
When the smoke clears, eBay will hold 30 percent of Skype and the consortium owns 56 percent of the company. In likely the best news for all involved, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis will also transfer the intellectual property owned by Joltid that just happened to be at the operating heart of the Skype software over to the Skype.
Index Ventures, who had bailed out of the purchasing consortium earlier this week and faced the brunt of litigation due to partner Michael Volpi’s alleged efforts to move Skype to SIP and revealing “secret sauce” trade secrets of how Skype worked, is no longer in the picture.
SOo, the legal clouds against Skype have cleared, but if anyone is walking around with a good taste in their mouths other than Zennstrom and Friis, let me know.
By Doug Mohney, on November 5th, 2009
Bulking up, Dash Carrier Services and VIXXI Solutions have merged, making Dash a big kid on the block when it comes to E911 and wholesale carrier services.
Earlier this year — March, to be precise — Dash and VIXXI announced a “strategic relationship” where Dash would use VIXXI’s E911 database services. It would appear the relationship worked out very well for both parties since it now makes Dash a one-stop shop for wholesale carrier and emergency services. The Dash CEO becomes President of VIXXI while VIXXI’s former president/CEO now joins the Dash board of directors.
There’s probably a very interesting “behind the scenes” story on how the relationship evolved from a strategic partnership to an acquisition, but it’s no big secret that “strategic partnerships” sometimes become trial marriages.
By Doug Mohney, on November 4th, 2009
A quick review of Metaswitch’s latest news over the past six weeks reveals that the company is racking up a lot of wins among the larger Tier 2/Tier 3 CLECs and MSOs. And, oh by the way, has been increasing revenue at a steady pace.
Regional CLEC Cavalier (www.cavtel.com), split-personality SureWest Communications (Northern California and Kansas City), and mid-Atlantic MSO/fiber carrier RCN Communications are among the bigger names who have made recent MetaSwitch/MetaSphere announcements. Both SureWest and RCN are big IP/fiber shops, offering a combination of business and consumer services, including voice, video, and data.
Announcing its annual results last month for its fiscal year closing on August 31, MetaSwitch announced that its overall revenue grew 4.2 percent to $113.7 million, with operating margins “sustained” above 20 percent.
Hello! MetaSwitch recorded revenue growth in a year from hell, hello!
Business came from Tier one incumbent operators and major regional providers as smaller guys slowed down between concerns over market conditions and when they’d get their hands on federal broadband stimulus pork, er funds. MetaSwitch says 8 of the Top 10 incumbent operators in North America rely on its products for carrier VoIP infrastructure while independent analysts report the cmpany moved into the lead positon of the Class 5 segment of the global carrier VoIP market.
With Nortel in continued bankruptcy chaos, MetaSwitch is likely to see further gains over the next year. Sure, Nortel is announcing new products, but new customer growth? Mmm…
By Doug Mohney, on November 3rd, 2009
Verizon Business has significantly expanded their Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS), making it the Layer 2 Ethernet service available throughout its POPs in Europe, Asia-Pacific and North America. Enterprise IT/LAN managers can now go control-freak crazy, provisioning offices around the globe with the same IP/Ethernet service, including implementing their own IP addresses and all sorts of other nifty things.
VPLS is a MPLS-based layer 2 VPN on top of the company’s Ethernet platform and is protocol independent, so customers retain complete control of their own routing. In a world of professional paranoia and fewer available IPv4 addresses, being able to run your own Ethernet and IP addressing is a Good Thing for simplified management and security purposes.
Since VPLS is MPLS-based, you get CoS — classes of services. An organization can customize priorities for different apps, so VoIP and video can get priority over email and other less latency-sensitive traffic. VPLS also allows customers to provision their network traffic from 1 Mbps to 1 GBps and beyond — a few customers have already made noises about 10 Gbps for linking data centers.
One point not emphasized in the press release but underlined in a media briefing is Verizon Business has carefully certified Ethernet providers in over 120 countries, so while the office in Argentina or Cape Town might not be next to a Verizon POP, the carrier has a “known good” business partner to provide Ethernet into its network for VPLS service; to repeat the cliche’ of the week – Verizon Business VPLS becomes the one “throat to choke” (a.k.a. single point of contact) for network connectivity.
By Doug Mohney, on November 2nd, 2009
Mobile UC solution provider DiVitas Networks continues to make steady progress. Today, the company announced it is rolling out “Enterprise Social Networking” (Hmm, I wonder if they’ve seen Avaya’s FacePhone demo) for all major commercially-available smartphones, including web client support for Android, Blackberry, and the iPhone. In addition, they added a desktop — which could just as easily go on a netbook or laptop — client as well.
Previously, DiVitas had announced support for Nokia Eseries and Nseries, along with various Windows Mobile smartphones.
And what is Enterprise Social Networking? DiVitas does a redirect of an existing desk phone number to provide business voice/PBX services to the smart phone. In addition, DiVitas has integrated business voice with IM and social networking applications to include a person’s availability, location and network. Contacts are accessed directly from an organization’s LDAP director for one-click access to any member within the secure corporate community and individuals within the secure community can check on availability of others via Mobile Presence and Status to figure out the best way to contact a person based upon a listed preference and location.
Net-net: If a corporate colleague is in a meeting and they don’t want a phone call, the client will indicate that, so you send an IM, enabling you to communicate faster than playing phone tag.
IT and service providers of DiVitas have the ability to maintain version control with the web client, allowing the most current version of the software to be provided; the DiVitas server can provide both the new web client and the native client simultaneously.
By Doug Mohney, on October 29th, 2009
VC firms — those not cleaned out by the dot.bomb crash of 2000-2001 and the Great Recession — will be looking to invest in security companies in forthcoming funds. What with all the data breeches, stolen credit cards, and cyberwar battles across Eastern Europe over the past three years, better tools and systems are needed for such initiatives such as online health care and banking.
However, there won’t be massive hordes of firms looking to hand out money to anyone with a PowerPoint and a good idea. There will be fewer funds (see: Great Recession of 20xx) and the (mostly old-money) survivors are back to fundamentals of business plans, profitability, and investment horizons of 5 to 7 years.
By Doug Mohney, on October 28th, 2009
If you weren’t worried enough about getting your H1N1 shot, now the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has sounded the alarm about The Internet blowing a fuse from a sudden influx of daytime telecommuting workers bogging down broadband links, causing bottlenecks and slowdowns. It could get so bad as to slow down Securities industry trading during a pandemic — and that would be a bad thing?
GAO’s last tech-panic report had the GPS dramatically going away in a few years despite U.S. Air Force and DoD efforts to keep things rolling, so it’s hard to take them too seriously. There’s also a sense of “Huh” here since the GAO seems to be doing this on behalf of worries by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), along with a side-slam that Department of Homeland Security wasn’t doing enough to plan for such an eventuality.
According to the GAO: “Increased demand during a severe pandemic could exceed the capacities of Internet providers’ access networks for residential users and interfere with teleworkers in the securities market and other sectors, according to a DHS study and providers” (My emphasis on could in italics.)
If there’s a major pandemic, let me repeat: Should stock market trading go on as business as usual? *sigh*
But wait, there’s more!
“Private Internet providers have limited ability to prioritize traffic or take other actions that could assist critical teleworkers.”
OK, they can’t under current regulations. And who decides who a “critical” teleworker is? We’re already into slippery-slope territory here.
“Some actions, such as reducing customers’ transmission speeds or blocking popular Web sites, could negatively impact e-commerce and require government authorization. However, DHS has not developed a strategy to address potential Internet congestion or worked with federal partners to ensure that sufficient authorities to act exist. It also has not assessed the feasibility of conducting a campaign to obtain public cooperation to reduce nonessential Internet use to relieve congestion. DHS also has not begun coordinating with other federal and private sector entities to assess other actions that could be taken.”
I guess GAO missed the big stink about telecommunications firms “cooperating” with the U.S. government after 9/11 — not to mention the retroactive immunity passed in Congress. I also suspect GAO missed the whole “Net Neutrality” debate, with the Federal Communications Commission explicitly proposing rules that carriers NOT be able to prioritize traffic.
There are so many policy and network variables here that it makes my head spin to think about them. However, the GAO also finds that securities companies typically operate their own closed network that bypass public bottlenecks on the Internet
Oh yes, and the GAO believes DHS should “do more to address potential Internet congestion.” Uh huh.
I’m going to go take a couple of aspirin now…
By Doug Mohney, on October 28th, 2009
My major face-to-face project these days is the HD Voice Summit at 2010 CES on Wednesday, January 6, 2010 in Las Vegas. More specifically–
HD Voice Summit at the 2010 CES: Communicating the Future
Leap with us into the future of high-definition voice communications! Carriers around the world are starting to offer phone calls with FM-quality sound through both broadband and mobile services. France Telecom already has over half-million HD Voice users! Where’s the industry at the moment? What challenges — and promise — does the future hold as we move from 1930s-era sound to 21st century quality?
You’ll find more info and how to register at http://www.cesweb.org/sessions/search/results.asp?categoryID=1882
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