I thought the most noteworthy thing Jorge Blanco said to me in our podcast interview was that we'd "crossed the chasm" from TDM to IP telephony. We had our interview before I received Allan Sulkin's annual Market Review article, and I was a little skeptical of Jorge. But Allan's article pretty much convinced me that this wasn't just a case of a vendor blowing smoke.
We just posted my most recent podcast interview, this one with Jorge Blanco of Avaya. Jorge and I discussed Avaya's priorities and projections for 2008, what private ownership is likely to mean for the company, and what the competitive landscape looks like. I'll be posting some text excerpts and reactions over the next day or so.
Fresh fromthe recent announcement of 4,000 layoffs and a high-level management shake-up that resulted in the hasty departure of a number of C-level executives, Sprint’s new CEO Dan Hesse is now taking his first swing at WiMAX. In a surprise move, Sprint announced they are in talks to revive their recently abandoned plans to merge their pending Xohm service with Clearwire Communications, the other WiMAX acolyte. This is seen as one part of a multi-dimensional plan to attract additional investments to help fund their planned nationwideWiMAX deployment.
Zeus posted below on the major switching announcements out of Cisco and Juniper this week. These moves don't directly relate to voice or multimedia or Unified Communications, but they obviously are part of the big picture.
This article was written by Justin G. Castillo, partner at Levine, Blaszak, Block & Boothby law firm
Suppose your next invoice from your telecom carrier contains a surprise: back billing for over two years’ worth of previously-unbilled charges. You dispute the back-billed charges, but the carrier insists that its back-billing is lawful.
What are your rights? How much of the back-billed charges (if any) must you pay?
In this corner, weighing in at 800 pounds and sporting a brand new chassis and operating system, the champion of the networking industry, Cisco! In the other corner, the challenger, wearing a lean, mean operating system, a newcomer to the enterprise switch market, Juniper Networks!
I've posted Allan Sulkin's annual Enterprise Communications market review in the right-hand column here, and as always, it's worth a read. Beyond the stuff we've been talking about for a few months now--the rise of Cisco, the impending rise of Microsoft, the challenges faced by the incumbent PBX vendors--Allan also notes some key trends within the marketplace.
Over the years there have been many technologies come and go that promised to converge voice and data. Protocols such as ATM and ISDN would be the magical thing that would bring our voice and data networks together – and the technology allowed for it, but these were dismal failures. There was even talk about running voice through an IBM mainframe. ISDN wound up being used for frame-relay backup until lower cost DSL became available, ATM was used where frame-relay speeds topped out, and the mainframe idea was just silly (although it did work). So what’s the difference this time with using IP instead of traditional voice networking?
Check this out: In an article on Cisco's collaboration strategy, our sister site, Information Week, describes how Margaret Hooshmand, executive assistant to Cisco Emerging Technologies Group leader Marthin DeBeer, works. She's "bi-located."
I can say I know how the guy feels (Take this Job & Shove It) or anyone else that has worked in telecom. His theory is for those without vast capital resources or the stomach to take on the man with institutional financing isn’t worthwhile. There’s also an old saying- “that love is blinding.”
In my posts I have been working through a QoS implementation for voice or video conferencing. Last week I talked about Classification, where we assign a priority to traffic streams and mark them so that the network routers know how to handle the traffic. When working with an enterprise, the next step I take in this process is to determine the Bandwidth Demand.
You rarely hear of academic education for VoIP and IP Telephony. Here is one source if you are in the Chicago area: the VoIP laboratory that is part of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) Center for Professional development. The VoIP Lab is located at the Daniel F. and Ada L. Rice Campus, which is a satellite (in Wheaton, Illinois) of Illinois Institute of Technology's Main Campus in Chicago. The Rice Campus caters to working professional graduate and upper-level undergraduate students with course offerings in information technology and management. The programs offered include a Bachelor of Information Technology & Management, Master of Information Technology & Management and a Computer and Network Security Technologies Graduate Certificate. The VoIP Lab is used in the information technology programs.
At Lotusphere 2008 in Orlando this week, the two key topics were Unified Communications and Social Software, also called Social Media. Since I always write about UC, I thought I would change gears and write about social software, which I believe will have a tremendous impact on organizations and the way in which we get our work done. Of course there was plenty of news in the unified communications area as well, and to listen to my podcasts with Bruce Morse, VP Unified Communications Software, Lotus Software, and Marisa Viveros of IBM Global Technology Services, go to the UC Strategies website.
Take the poll:
As SIP continues to seep into the mainstream, more attention is being paid to security issues, especially in public IP networks/the Internet. At VoiceCon Orlando in March, we're bringing back Cullen Jennings and Eric Rescorla to once again give their "SIP Security" tutorial, which offers enterprises a jump on many of the key issues. And, via VOIPSA, I've discovered a trove of SIP-related and other Internet security presentations from the most recent ETSI Security Workshop (click on the Agenda link for the topics of each presentation).
With all the talk about the iPhone--AT&T's enterprise pricing plan, and IBM's announcement of Lotus Notes for the iPhone, it seems increasingly clear that you're going to be supporting more iPhone users, not fewer. That may not be an ideal situation, and the iPhone may be lacking in terms of enterprise features/functions, but, to paraphrase Woody Allen, the heart of the mobile phone user wants what it wants, so you'll be supporting a cadre of iPhone users no matter what.
Voice quality over IP networks is never constantly acceptable. As the network and traffic change, so do the conditions that VoIP calls will encounter on the IP network. There will not only be good and bad days, there will be good and bad minutes. Listeners describe the voice quality problems using words like garbled, choppy, robotic, muffled, clipped, echoes, hissing and static. Speaker recognition may not be possible.
Sorry to get all Hardy Boys with you on the blog title - I just couldn’t resist. Here’s the story: I was recently perusing the Inter-Tel product page and noticed that, curiously, the Inter-Tel 7000 is no longer listed. And though there’s some info on the system on at least one of the company’s European websites, the UK press was recently told this about the now combined entity’s IP PBX systems lineup:
Andrew Odlyzko, who's one of the foremost authorities on public networking, bandwidth and net neutrality, has a new paper, "Network neutrality, search neutrality, and the never-ending conflict between efficiency and fairness in markets" that makes some critical points debunking the telcos' arguments against Net Neutrality.
Here's an interesting tidbit on how queuing models are used in designing Manhattan supermarkets, and what we might learn for the contact center. A couple of features here and here have some in-depth analysis of contact center issues.
Entrepreneur Magazine published its Top-Performing Entrepreneurial IPOs and I couldn’t help but notice the list of the top 15 performers.
One on the list is an IP-PBX manufacturer and that was Shortel. So, Shoretel, congratulations, now get busy, break those molds and make some money.
By Fred Knight
Lotusphere continues through Thursday, but I’m getting ready to return home. So, what follows are some thoughts/observations about IBM’s efforts in Unified Communications, after a day and a half of sitting in sessions and press conferences, walking the show floor, wandering the halls and chatting with attendees.
Classification is the first of four steps in implementing QoS in your network. Classification is the job of determing which streams get high pirority, and which do not. All application users would like their applications to be running with high priority, but of course there is no priority if we all have high priority. QoS is by definition a zero sum game, so we have to decide who gets the nod and who waits.
Avaya today announced an upgrade to its core Communications Manager software package, to release 5.0. The company's headline for the release is "End to End SIP," and indeed they appear to be incorporating more SIP functionality into CM. But they haven't eliminated the need for the SIP Enablement Server (SES)as a separate entity, and according to Anne Coulombe, who briefed me on the announcement, that's reflective of where the market is relative to SIP.
By Fred Knight
Late this afternoon, Mike Rhodin, GM of all things Lotus – and who’ll be a keynoter at VoiceCon Orlando -- met with bloggers attending Lotusphere for a Q&A session. Below is a rough transcription of this session, rough because I’m a lover not a typist, and also because the vast quantities of Maker’s Mark and wine I consumed during the past weekend in New Orleans are still working their way through my system.
By Fred Knight
After the morning keynote, I took a quick minute to catch some sun – OK, it was more like 10……yeah, you’re right, actually 15, but that was it, really – and then hit the show floor. The exhibit area is expansive, but no big booths; instead, there are pods clustered all over the place. Avaya and Siemens were located next to each other, so I started with them.
By Fred Knight
Good morning from Lotusphere 2008. A crowd that I’m guessing approached 7,000 jammed into a cavernous ballroom at the Dolphin Hotel in Orlando to hear Mike Rhodin, GM responsible for the Lotus/Domino constellation of products, and his team make a wide range of announcements on everything from clients and servers, to UC to social networking and portals. Over the next day or two, I’ll be sending more details along.
Last week, Nortel announced it was extending its UC 1-2-3 program to include four new application-based Starter Kits. My initial reaction was one of mild interest. Nortel started with an IPT 1-2-3 program in 2006 which morphed into UC 1-2-3 in 2007. Both of these programs include a Converged Office Starter Kit, 25 free seats of Nortel’s UC plus Microsoft OCS integration (just the Nortel part is free).
We've posted a new feature over in the right-hand column, by Brent Kelly of Wainhouse Research. In mid-2007, Brent and Wainhouse did a pretty thorough survey of end user attitudes about Unified Communications, and the results were pretty revealing. Among other things, it supports the notion that Siemens--and almost everyone who's not Microsoft or (to a lesser degree) IBM--is going to lose the desktop battle. Yet it also makes me wonder if Cisco isn't an exception to this rule.
Telephony has had past fights for turf and it won’t be any different now and in the future with battles for market share. What I do think will be different and notably so is the marketing of the contenders.
The healthcare industry is about to be bombarded by Baby Boomers. We're accustomed to using technology to facilitate communications. The system that exists has been supporting Depression-era technophobes.
As a Baby Boomer, I find myself increasingly engaged with the healthcare system. Nothing in particular is wrong but like an aging automobile there are more things to check and service as the miles add up. As a communications industry professional, I find myself increasingly frustrated by the IT infrastructure of healthcare in this country. It sometimes seems the only technology that the industry has embraced is the IVR.
Sipera, a VOIP security company, has come out with its Top 5 VOIP Threat Predictions for 2008. Their top concern is denial-of-service attacks through SIP trunks and mobile infrastructures. This makes sense both in its own right, and because DoS attacks are a legitimate concern based on their effect on the underlying data network.
Dan York presents a conundrum: Once VOIP has reached critical mass in the enterprise, how will you filter out SPIT (spam over IP telephony) while allowing legitimate traffic such as notifications to go through?
The IT skills needed for VoIP and IP Telephony crossed many boundaries. The skills needed for UC cross even more boundaries. When implementing Unified Communications (UC), IT must modify its structure. IT should not patch together pieces of their present organization for UC. The requirements for implementing Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) are close to the requirements for implementing UC.
By Hank Levine and Jim Blaszak
We believe that average enterprise customers did not do as well in telecom procurements in 2007 as in previous years. Our assessment is based on our observation of carrier conduct in procurements and regulatory decisions. And 2008 only promises to further separate smart, tough customers from ‘the pack’.
John Bartlett's post below reminded me that I'd received this announcement from New Edge Networks, that New Edge, which provides enterprise broadband, is now offering Class of Service over DSL (they claim to be the first to do this).
I work with a lot of enterprises who are just implementing QoS for the first time. At first blush, implementing QoS looks like it means just turning on the QoS mechanisms that are already available in their routers and switches. But of course real life is more complicated than that! I always tell them there are four parts to implementing QoS, and you have to do all four to get it right.
In my interview with Mark Straton (podcast), Mark made what I thought was a very significant prediction:
Cellular telephone service remains an anomaly in modern enterprise communications, as it represents a separate, stand-alone communications network that is not integrated with anything else in the network infrastructure. Couple that with the fact that cellular is typically the fastest growing and most poorly managed element in our service mix, and you begin to understand why the topic of fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) or the idea of integrating cellular and wireless LAN technologies is getting so much attention.
Which is more appalling: The telcos' hypocrisy or the fact that the FBI is a deadbeat?
Key quote: "To put it bluntly, it sounds as though the telecoms believe it when the FBI says the warrant is in the mail but not when they say the check is in the mail."
The first-ever No Jitter podcast is now available (direct download here).
Future podcasts will feature representatives from other vendor companies, as well as industry analysts and others. This is the home page for the podcasts.
The Avaya announcement I blogged about earlier today raises a question about the role that "openness" will really play in Unified Communications.
Today Avaya announced a new product that’s a pretty good illustration of how Unified Communications can actually work as vertical industry-focused, communications-enabled software. It’s a joint announcement with Motorola of a new application that lets retail workers scan a bar code on a product and “find the expert.” The application is called "Avaya Specialist Connect for Retailers," announced at the National Retail Federation's annual show in New York this week.
At first recall, reading BCR for the first time was like getting introduced to the telecom gurus. That ole’ motto “Best signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) in the industry” meant something.
In the Feature column, Rob Smithers and Mike Hommer of Miercom report on the results of their test of Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007. Perhaps surprisingly, they found OCS quite scalable, at least when doing basic call setup and teardown. They also enountered a few hiccups when it comes to latency. And their conclusion about OCS has less to do with how it does than with what it does.
What do you think?
Some pretty big news out of Redmond this week: Jeff Raikes is passing the baton to Stephen Elop to lead the massive $16.4 billion Microsoft Business Division. Reaching outside the company for a top dog to replace the estimable Mr. Raikes has set tongues a-wagging.
As 2007 drew to a close, several issues of our UC eWeekly newsletter focused on what the year had produced in terms of UC. Looking ahead, here are some predictions of what 2008 is likely to bring.
I’ve been receiving lots of comments and feedback on my previous blogs on VoIPLoop and UCStrategies.com about Communication Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) and Unified Communications () - some in agreement, some not so much in agreement. I’d like to clarify my position (and hopefully I can put this topic to rest for a while). I view CEBP as a continuation of UC, and not as a separate entity.
Stephen Elop, who will succeed Jeff Raikes as head of Microsoft's Business Division, comes to the company from Juniper, where he'd been COO. Elop is former CEO of Macromedia, and he spent a year at Adobe after that company acquired Macromedia, before moving to Juniper in January 2007.
Interestingly, Elop comes out of the IT world; from 1994 to 1997, he was CIO of Boston Chicken.
UPDATE: Here's a pretty detailed profile from around the time of the Macromedia-Adobe merger.
Wow, another departure in the top leadership of a major UC contender: Microsoft announces the retirement of Business Division president Jeff Raikes.Raikes led the launch of Office Communications Server 2007.
UPDATE: Raikes tells the hometown paper, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, that he's probably going to pursue interests outside the software business. The transition plan calls for Raikes to leave in September 2008, giving time for the division to make a smooth transition to Raikes's successor, Stephen Elop.
Gary's post below makes some great points, especially in light of reports that AT&T and other ISPs may begin filtering Internet traffic for pirated content. The issue Gary highlights is Acceptable Use Policies, and even if standard business-service contracts deal with the bandwidth issues more appropriately than individual-service agreements apparently do, this is an issue for the enterprise
The big event this week has been the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and to be honest, I haven't seen much out of the coverage of CES (TechWeb, among others, has the blowout coverage) that seemed very compelling for the enterprise.
It’s finally happening. The FCC is looking into restrictive practices by ISPs. The Associated Press reports in a New York Times article dated January 9, 2008, that the FCC will investigate customer complaints that Comcast interferes with the Internet traffic carried on their network. The AP first reported last October 19 that BitTorrent file sharing traffic was hindered.
It is about time that the meaning of “net neutrality” gets some teeth. This is the first time the FCC is going to really look at what “net neutrality” really means and if and when some “net neutrality” enforcement is warranted. Comcast is not the only ISP that should be investigated. I wrote a blog, “Have Read Your ISP Terms of Service Lately?, posted at VOIPLoop on October 10, 2007. I want the ATT Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) investigated as well.
Take the poll:
Irwin's post below is a really great analysis of where enterprises are in confronting the issues around Unified Communications. I think he's spot-on when he writes that, "The biggest roadblock we’ve seen to UC isn’t technical, it’s organizational."
I think most visitors to this site would agree that from a communications and networking perspective, 2007 was the “Year of Unified Communications”. But what is the outlook for 2008 (and beyond)?
The title should conjure images of blood, as in the case of blood sucking in the cloak of darkness. For many remembering- that pretty much describes those toiling away at the monumental task of bullet-proofing the telephone system.
The question is, which telephone system?
GigaOm has an interesting article about an investment Cisco just made in a company called SoonR, which makes technology for backup-and-restore. Sounds mundane, but the GigaOm writer makes a good point about the role of the cloud.
My recent post on Digium resulted in a conversation with the company about its multifaceted role as the manager of an open source PBX community, developer of PBX systems, and provider of enabling communications software to rival PBX developers. Here are a few of the interesting tidbits I picked up:
The feature we're highlighting today, by Bob Bellman, deals with contact center metrics, and how the network and applications help you reach meaningful goals in customer contact. Bob's article is a quick tutorial on the leading edge in contact center technologies, such as knowledge management systems and real-time speech analytics.
Before we put the final nail on the coffin of 2007, I’d like to re-visit Cisco’s C-Scape analyst conference held in mid-December. One of the main tent sessions was titled “Software, Software, Software.” I remember thinking at the time, “What a great title for a blog entry.”
It’s that wonderful time of the year when people around the world make their New Year’s resolutions – things they’ll do differently, bad habits they’ll quit, good habits they’ll start, and so on. Here are some New Year’s resolutions related to unified communications that I would like to see in the coming year.
There's a truly weird story circulating on the Internet about Voxeo, the VoiceXML company out of Orlando. Basically, it's been erroneously reported that they're owned by an Israeli defense contractor, Elron Electronics, and that they built the systems that tally the Iowa caucus votes.
In his Voxeo blog, Dan York sets the record straight.
Now, first of all, I must point out that there's nothing wrong with a company being owned by an Israeli defense contractor. But, for the sake of accuracy, it's important to note that, as Dan York explains, Voxeo isn't owned by any outside company at all; it's privately held--owned by its employees. As for whether Voxeo's products are used in conjunction with the Iowa caucuses, Dan describes in general terms how Voxeo's products are used by its customers and points out that, like most vendors, they don't talk about who's a customer and who's not.
By John Bartlett
I consult from my home office, and so my wife often overhears my phone conversations. She can repeat my lines about packet loss and jitter and how they affect your real-time traffic, even though her background is in biology and art. She asked me the other day why people still don’t know this story, since she knows it so well. Great question. And the answer is that voice and video streams are really different from those data transaction streams we have managed for years, and they really do need special treatment.
The Consumer Electronics show will be in Las Vegas next week, and one of the surprise announcements is that an industry consortium will be displaying a short-range, wireless HDTV interface. Called WirelessHD, the consortium includes Sony, NEC, Toshiba, LG, and Intel, and will be using a new brand of wireless technology.
AP reports that network congestion delayed or dropped cellular text messages on New Year's Eve. The article quickly moves to the question of what would have happened if this had been an emergency situation, rather than just New Year's Eve (which, admittedly, is often a disaster of a different sort).
Over at our sister site, Information Week/Tech Web, David Strom identifies what he considers to be the 5 major tech trends for 2008. What caught my eye was how he frames the issue of communications.
My previous post didn't really address the substance of the piece that's currently featured to the right, by Marty Parker. Marty's in the middle of writing a series of articles that attempt to help specific verticals understand how they stand to benefit from Unified Communications. This series will expand on some ideas that Marty introduced in a BCR article from last year, "Top UC Applications Are Now Apparent."
If you're a return visitor, you'll notice that we've got some new content in the right-hand column, in the box marked "Feature Story." We originally had some links to BCR articles there, and over the long term we'll be continuing to post BCR features, but we're also going to use this right-hand column to run newly-written pieces that are longer than the typical blog post. For example, Allan Sulkin is busy putting the final touches on his annual PBX market review, which used to run in the January or February issue of BCR. When that article's completed, it'll run in this right-hand feature column. So maybe think of that "Feature Story" bar as BCR at No Jitter.
The Apple iPhone is still much debated and regardless of who thinks or says what about the product and/or Apple as a company, one thing is certain- they are selling and users as a whole like them. Yet they've been deemed by some as not a phone fit for business.
Does Avaya know something?
Vanguard Communications has a really interesting case study on its blog. The author, Jason Alley, describes what he and the client did when a management personnel change threatened to strand some signficant investment.
Here's a terrific short article about telecom and "infotech" business models--how and why they differ, and the implications, especially for telecom, going forward.
Lots of great insights throughout, but here's what I thought was the key paragraph:
There's a lot of talk about how important it is for network managers to understand the business of the enterprise they work for--it's one of those cliches that has the advantage of being true. At the same time, the IT department has a network to run.
So how do you put these two imperatives together? I found a great little nugget over at Terry Slattery's blog:
In reference to the poll we recently posted, Art Rosenberg dropped me a note with some useful points on the issue of single vendor vs. multiple vendors when UC procurements get going. His comments are after the jump:
You know, when I went to Google Images to look for an illustration, I entered, "Crystal Ball," and one of the images returned was a picture of a woman named Crystal Ball.
Anyway...
(cross-posted at VOIPLoop.com)
Tradition would have that we make our New Year's resolutions- things that we want to do and accomplish. I remain hopeful that in 2008, I'll be writing more about solutions that we have sought and implemented and yet are still coming to terms with how to manage them in 2008 and beyond. Implementation and change go hand-in-hand and change isn't always welcome or convenient.
So, for 2008, here's what you can expect.
JUNE 2008 MAY 2008 APRIL 2008 MARCH 2008 FEBRUARY 2008 JANUARY 2008 DECEMBER 2007
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VoiceCon makes its European debut 14-16 October, 2008, with Johan Krebbers of Shell keynoting. More information HERE
The PBX is not dead. But it is on an evolutionary path towards a new incarnation: Federated Communications System or FCS READ MORE »
SIP trunks could save money and deliver better feature/functionality to IP telephony. But there have been obstacles to overcome. READ MORE »
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