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By Doug Mohney, on February 5th, 2010
Is SUPERCOMM dead again?
I just got a “Deep Throat” style phone call that said just that. It is not clear if SUPERCOMM will be re-organized/re-named into Yet Another Event, if USTA and TIA have (yet again) split over philosophical differences, or if someone just wants to re-brand the event because they are bored.
If the assertion is true, this would be the latest ugly saga between the big phone companies and telecom equipment manufacturers dating back nearly a decade.
After all, once upon a time, there was a successful show called SUPERCOMM held every June in Chicago. By most accounts, the USTA would supply the keynote speakers and TIA would pay the majority of the bills through its exhibiting members.
Unfortunately, USTA and TIA couldn’t agree on how to run the show, so there was a big messy divorce and SUPERCOMM split into two shows by the different organizations. The show run by TIA became GLOBALCOMM while the USTA tried to run its own show in Vegas in the spring, but nobody showed up.
After no shows at USTA’s show and GLOBALCOMM seeing declined attendance and exhibits — when you have to invite the ditch diggers to fill space, it is obvious – the two, like Heidi Fleiss and Tom Sizemore on “Celebrity Rehab,” appeared to reach an amicable agreement to get back together for SUPERCOMM.
Until, according to more word on the street, USTA unilaterally decided in April 2009 to uproot the SUPERCOMM 2009 from a June date to October — thereby pissing off numerous vendors who had already made commitments for travel, hospitality, and other arrangements.
Needless to say, if USTA and TIA have split once again, it shouldn’t be a great surprise to anyone and now leads to an interesting situation where there may or may not be a need for a telecom trade show with USTA and TIA both involved… but you’d have to be crazy to do so, given the drama history.
By Doug Mohney, on February 4th, 2010
Among the news I’m catching up on from IT EXPO East 2010 is the team up between Dialogic and Ingate to build Ingate’s SIP Trunking software module into a new enterprise border element designed to connect “virtually any” (well, it is virtual…) SIP trunk with virtually any PBX.
Goodness is expected in seamless SIP trunk deployments in legacy TDM and hybrid PBX environments, as well as new SIP-based PBX systems. Ingate’s SIP trunking software module provides enterprise session border control (SBC) along with advanced routing capabilities for connecting SIP trunks to enterprise networks and branch offices by using Ingate’s proxy-based traversal and security technology. The software is also designed to resolve interop issues between service provider SIP services and the SIP-based systems being deployed inside corporate data networks.
Dialogic’s contribution is media gateway technologies to provide the protocols and interfaces necessary to connect to a wide variety of legacy phone and network equipment, both TDM and IP. The new enterprise border element from Dialogic will combine the functions normally found in a media gateway and an enterprise session border controller into a single product.
Dialogic plans to make a first set of enterprise border elements available later this year, with configurations offering SIP trunking, legacy PBX connectivity through the usual suspects (PRI/E1/T1 and ISDN BRI).
By Doug Mohney, on February 4th, 2010
Cable provider Optimum Lightpath is now offering 40 Gigabit optical transport to its customers and offers hints that it will up speeds further in the “foreseeable future.”
No big surprise that financial traders were highlighted in the press release among the users in Optimum’s footprint needing high-bandwidth and “extremely low latency.” Customers are expected to tap into 40 gigabit optical to consolidate multiple 10 gigabit links for improved network operations, get more bandwidth and speed, and have a path to move from 40G to 100G “when the need arises.”
The platform – not named in the press release – is based on WDM and “positioned” to support 40 Gig Ethernet when it is standardized.
By Doug Mohney, on February 4th, 2010
Metaswitch has shuffled around its leadership, moving board member/”successful industry executive” Kevin DeNuccio into the CEO role, while promoting John Lazar upward as Chairman.
The move is being touted as creating the best possible leadership team for the “next phase of the company’s evolution” – which would indicate to me that Metaswitch is looking to do more than simple organic growth moving forward.
DeNuccio’s street creds being pumped include stints at Redback Networks (bought by Ericcson), Cisco Systems, and the company formerly known as Bell Atlantic – Verizon to you Millennial kids out there. At Redback’s CEO, he grew the company and got it bought by Ericsson for $2.1 billion. Over at Cisco, he grew the worldwide service provider division from a $500 million, 500 person organization to $4 billion and 4,000 employees in a span of four years.
Maybe Mr. DeNuccio wants to add an IPO to his resume?
DeNuccio has been on the company’s board as an independent director since December 2008, so he’s had a ringside seat to both Metaswitch’s assets and the industry’s relative stagnation. Can’t hurt that Nortel took a nose dive, either.
Metaswitch founder and former Chairman Ian Ferguson is “extremely enthusiastic” about the changes and will stay on the board in his capacity of the company’s Employee Benefit Trust.
By Doug Mohney, on January 29th, 2010
Yes Virginia, there was more than the Digium AsteriskExchange store announcement at IT EXPO last week. Digium also announced Switchvox SMB 4.5.
Switchvox SMB 4.5 adds on Phone Feature Packs for Polycom handsets, enabling users to directly access things such as call recording, visual voicemail, a searchable company directory and call parking lots directly on a Polycom handset, something that has made Polycom very happy.
New features beyond the Phone Feature Packs include support for distinctive ringtones for different types of calls, extension failover to a backup Switchvox SMB server, support for multiple extensions on a single hand set. Also included in Switchbox SMB 4.5 are support for user profiles to provide caller information such as photo, extension, title and location; flexible language support in English, UK English, Italian, Castilian Spanish and LatAm Spanish, including sound packs including audio prompts.
Network junkies will appreciate Digium adding SNMP for monitoring into Switchvox 4.5.
Current Switchvox owners with a software subscription get SMB 4.5 free of charge while Phone Feature Packs are available for $30 per phone.
By Doug Mohney, on January 29th, 2010
Down in Miami last week, all the buzz was around FREETALK Connect, an PBX solution built to leverage Skype.
FREETALK Connect is schedule to roll out in March and will allow SBs (two to 49 users) to enable Skype calls from supported office phones, including the “free” Skype-to-Skype calls, mange Skype contact lists, and get inbound voice calls from Skype users. In addition, they can also participate in the Skype for SIP open beta to make low-cost global calls around the world from a desktop phone.
The box is a partnership between FREETALK and Jazinga, with the latter company providing the software platform for doing thing like callback/dial-around/ access to Skype buddy lists, auto attendant/IVR, paging, cal parking, remote extensions, music on hold, and conferencing. The FREETALK Connect box also includes managed routes to users, phone services, and apps, SIP/Skype service management, and router management.
Supported phones on the network are auto-detected and configured by FREETALK Connect and there’s an on-screen wizard for configuring everything that needs to be configured.
If that’s not enough, FREETALK announced the FREETALK Connect Alliance, an ecosystem of 13 supporting companies for the product to provide apps, products, and services for the box. Alliance members range around the globe from Italy to Taiwan and include Cloudvox, IfByPhone, Iotum, Jazinga, Skype, Tatung, Thomas Howe’s Light and Electric, Voxeo, and Voxbone.
By Doug Mohney, on January 29th, 2010
Shoveling out from under the backlog of CES, I saw two very different pieces of technology that will likely be tied together by next January. And they involve your car and your TV.
GM’s Chevy Volt (www.gm.com), the electric car that will save America (OK, maybe not, but you get it), has some onboard smarts that allow it to “talk” to you, so you can deal with it like a smart appliance.
Using a smartphone client (Android, iPhone, one of the Blackberry family) and remote connectivity through OnStar (and how well it will work the garage is an interesting question) will allow Volt owners to display charge status, the ability to schedule charge timing – including a manual “grid friendly” charge mode for when electricity is cheapest – and get email for charge reminders, interruptions, and full charge, among other things. There’s also a remote-start feature to warm/cool the car and you can review the MPG and odometer remotely if you need to.
So this rolls into part two, where Yahoo! Connected TV (http://connectedtv.yahoo.com) has expanded its footprint and released its TV Widget Developer Kit (WDK) to the public. You’ll be able to get YahooWidgets on VIZIO and Hisense TVs, plus ViewSonic is going to provide a backfit MediaPlayer. Deeper into the stack, MIPS and Sigma Designs are going to support the Yahoo Widget Engine, so Yahoo’s software will start proliferating onto more consumer devices.
(Hello, Google, Hello! I guess the TV isn’t cool enough for you to play with…Skype and Yahoo have already got their fingers on it.)
The WDK has a bunch of APIs to enable developers to write widgets using JavaScript and XML to deliver “dynamic content” to millions of TV sets and other consumer devices in the pipeline, so if you take the OnStar piece and put it with the WDK piece, your car will soon be providing you status updates on your TV!
Needless to say, the concept of car-as-network-device has my professionally paranoid friends more than a little squirmy. Someone hacks your car and it will be a Really Bad Day!
*ahem*
But let’s think about this whole Yahoo! open TV business for a moment. The cool kids on the block, like those using Digium Asterisk, could use Yahoo’s WDK to plug in presence and other features like visual voice mail over your TV.
Sure, you can currently get some TV-esque services from some of your friendly neighborhood cable franchises, but the Yahoo! toolkit means that A) Those cable franchises might get some of those bells and whistles cheaper via open code hacks and/or B) Enterprise and third-parties could go straight to their PBX infrastructure if they wanted.
Is this any better than just having a message coming straight to your cell phone? I don’t know, but it’s another option to think about.
By Doug Mohney, on January 22nd, 2010
Miami – Digium has officially launched AsteriskExchange, an online market for products integrated with the Asterisk IP communications platform (Or “open source communications engine,” if you prefer Digium’s buzz phrase.)
For outside observers of Digium, this is another one of those “Dull but good” announcements as the company continues to build a sustainable and growing ecosystem around its flagship product. On-line marketplaces are in vogue – likely to be a checklist item for VC tomorrow – and work well when there are plenty of developers and platforms/devices. Digium’s Asterisk has a community of 65,000 members (check) and millions of deployments worldwide (check), so this seems to be a no-brainer winner.
AsteriskExchange will offer everything from IP phones and gateways to call center solutions and vertical market applications; categories also exist for speech and text engines, voice prompts, and call center solutions, with new categories being created upon sufficient demand.
Asterisk developers and ecosystem partners (i.e. the phone and software guy) seem to be stoked for the prospects of the marketplace. Free listings are available for those who offer downloadable products at no cost, while pricing and promo packages are available for companies desiring a more commercial solution to be featured on AsteriskExchange.
By Doug Mohney, on January 20th, 2010
Billed as a move that “Changes Face of Cloud Telephony, Ifbyphone has purchased privately-held Cloudvox.
Terms of the deal were (as is typical with these privately held companies) not announced, but Ifbyphone has had a phenomenal growth rate over the past year.
Cloudvox is based in Seattle and enables developers to automate phone calls The company is a big Asterisk shop (hello Mark Spencer) and provides compatibility with existing Asterisk app and software libraries. It is also a scalable hosted service – duh, cloud – and allows developers to place, receive, and control phone calls from their own software, including the usual laundry list of Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, C# and simple HTTP/JSON.
From a services perspective, this moves Irv and Ifbyphone into an expanded portfolio of services ranging from turnkey (Ifbyphone’s various offerings) to customization (Cloudvox) of telephony apps. The Phone 2.0 wonks should be going crazy with the possibilities.
By Doug Mohney, on January 20th, 2010
Aculab has announced that it is incorporating a dual redundant SIP service (DRSS) in a core product line. The actual application is expected to be available later this quarter.
Adding DRSS improves IP network reliability “similar to” TDM-based SS7 networks (i.e. like the old PSTN), so Aculab says communication service providers running it in apps like hosted voice, conferencing, chat, and contact centers will be able to provide closer “always on” performance for SIP-based services.
Be interesting to see how this (long overdue in some circles) feature takes off in the months to come.
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