During the second presidential debate the other evening, a question was raised "What should Americans be prepared to do during this economic crisis?" and the question contrasted to the times of the Great Depression. I gave the question some thought. My short answer is above.
You’ve read it correctly. Why would a customer want to go from an IP based solution back to a TDM, legacy Norstar system?
This post was written by Bob Emmerson, No Jitter Contributing Editor for Europe.
British Telecom (BT) led the charge into all-IP, next-gen networks. A £10 billion (US$18 billion at the time of writing) investment in its 21st Century Network (21CN) was announced back in 2004, and while there have been some glitches, changes of technology direction and delays along the way, the main objectives have been realized. IP infrastructures have significantly lower operating costs; annual savings will be £1 billion (U$1.8 billion) when the transition is complete and of course it’s the optimum way to deliver broadband services and applications. But more — much more -- is needed to recoup that investment.
American Power Conversion introduced some new products that will reduce energy consumption while providing surge protection and or battery backup for equipment and computers.
I love telecom and still argue that telecom is the place for entrepreneurs. Of course I know the old saying "love is blind" and even still in every love relationship there’s always a little bit of less loving and hopefully more forgiving. With that, hopefully my criticisms are forgiven.
ISO 14064 is an independent and voluntary Green House Gas (GHG) accounting standard that consists of three parts. Part I (14064-1) details requirements for entity level GHG inventories. Part II (14064-2) lists requirements for measuring, monitoring and reporting on emission reductions. Part III (14064-3) states the guidelines used for conducting GHG validation and verification.
The Telco landline is slowly retiring. A Jupiter research report surveying landline decline for 2006 and 2007 has landlines declining at 1% to 1.7% each quarter. Is this a good thing?
I attended the Everything Channel Virtual Trade Show, "Green Day: Capitalizing on Going Green." This "virtual" event was good for the "experience" but not great. The content was excellent but some misunderstandings about energy and sustainability still prevail.
Allan Sulkin asked the bottom-line question to his panel here: When will 10% of users abandon desktop phones in favor of softphones, mobiles, or whatever else they come up with?
When I first spoke with Adtran in 2005, during VoiceCon, about their new planned IP-PBX and later met with them in the fall, I remember thinking that the battle to gain market share would be an uphill one for Adtran. When I reviewed the initial Netvanta 7100 offering a year later, I noted market differentiators in "Adtran Pushes the Convergence Window."
Here's a very cool thing: Eastern Management Group is conducting a survey to try and size the market for Open Source IP-PBXs. As far as I can tell, no such quantification exists for this market, so it will be really great to see what John Malone and his team at Eastern Management come up with. You can take the survey by going here.
2B Channel Transfer (TBCT) is a Central Office (CO) feature found in Lucent's Class 5E and Nortel's DMS switches.
What is TBCT?
It’s the glue that allows your phone system to transfer an inbound caller to your home, cell phone or other number without tying up two trunks (trunk to trunk transfer) and uses the CO features that are the same as those found in Centrex. Call it mobility.
Robin Gareiss of Nemertes Research was kind enough to give me a peek at the slides from which she'll be drawing her talk for this Friday's VoiceCon Webinar (register here), and one thing I'm really glad about is that Nemertes is continuing to ask enterprises about the costs and benefits of a fundamental IP telephony implementation. The reason I'm glad is that this might seem like an outdated issue and one that could easily be neglected as old news, but of course it isn't--the cost picture has continued to evolve, as has the enterprise's own abilities to deal with the deployments as they gain experience. What Nemertes found should help you understand the ongoing picture.
Well, what a way to end the workday last Friday. Read about my chicken experiences, watch Bill Gates attempting to be Moist and Chewy –Hey PC, you blew it! But I have to give a tip of my hat to Nortel again. Nortel’s “Piles” commercial says a lot about Cisco’s energy usage and raises more questions about Cisco’s lack of greenness. Watch the ad here.
As a followup to Building Your Own Power Plant, I wanted to share some of what we’ve learned over the past year in our building and energy projects.
For those that are wrestling with how to get more juice to their closets or somehow perform a juggling act with facilities, then supplementing your power with green sources may be the solution. According to Costco, "Green is Gold."
Gary Audin and I are doing a Webinar tomorrow with Teresa Dixon of Unimax on how to improve management. Register here.
Unknown to me during our budgeting efforts last year for the buildout of our new offices was the cost of new “high tech” lighting. Lighting continues to be a major line item that sends utility bills soaring. Lighting is also a source of heat, and heat is unwelcome in data centers and in places where you just can’t seem to get enough cool air flowing. The vicious circle is, upsize the cooling to meet the growing demands of IT, which usually means burning more juice.
I believe that not soon, but eventually, the IP PBX will become the dominant PBX architecture--sometime after 2010. I am sure there is no single compelling factor that will make my opinion come true. There are many factors that all appear to be pushing the industry and their customers in this direction. Part of the value of the converged PBX is its support of legacy phones and trunks. As the legacy support requirements diminish, the less attractive the converged PBX is.
There’s always a besserwisser in the crowd and after receiving a couple of anonymous emails from one claiming to be an IEEE engineer, I brought together again, a collection of forces to help me better understand power factor correction.
An article in the print version of Telecom Reseller (couldn’t find it online) caught my attention, on NEC’s reported 64% growth in hospitality sales. Kevin Ruhman is NEC’s Director of Hospitality Market and he was kind enough to speak to me about NEC’s success in the hospitality market.
Toshiba has always had a strong position in the small-business market for PBXs and now IP telephony, but the company today announced a new product release that scales into a higher tier.
For August, I’ll be reporting on energy and what we’ve done at Telecomworx to trim our energy consumption and improve our energy efficiency.
Skype is a free Internet based telephone service that many enterprise employees access and use. Some enterprises use Skype for internal use. One French and U.S.-based company used Skype for their development team’s collaboration. So should an enterprise allow Skype on their internal network? Not necessarily according to Blue Coat Systems, a security and WAN optimization vendor.
Suppose we depend on web sites like Google, Yahoo and others for supporting the enterprise business instead of or in addition to the private enterprise sites? How far would you go in this direction? There are issues of privacy, security and compliance. What about availability, disaster prevention and recovery?
Allan Sulkin was kind enough to send me his thoughts on the Siemens Enterprise (SEN) deal this morning. Allan knows SEN as well as any analyst out there; here's what he says:
As if the Siemens news wasn't enough, Alcatel-Lucent announced today that its CEO, Pat Russo, and Chairman, Serge Tchuruk, are resigning. Russo will stay on until a new CEO is named, and Tchuruk's resignation is effective October 1.
Updates throughout the day on this as well.
This entry was written by Mark J. Fletcher, Product Manager, E911 Emergency Services for Nortel, and was edited by Gary Audin.
What if 9-1-1 does not work? What if the location is incorrect? Suppose you implement 9-1-1 and E911 in one office because the law says so but not in another office because there are no E911 regulations? Does an enterprise create more liabilities with uneven 9-1-1 and E911 deployment?
Panasonic issued a memo to its dealer base stating:
Effective September 1, 2008, we are changing the way we provide telephone technical support for the following products:
Various media outlets are quoting German newspaper reports that the new front-runner to acquire Siemens Enterprise Communications is The Gores Group, a Los Angeles-based private equity firm that also is a part owner of Enterasys, the LAN/WAN switching company. Gores Group, together with Tennenbaum Capital Partners, another private equity firm, acquired Enterasys in 2006.
Technology, according to Gerald Celente, Founder of The Trends Research Institute:
It’s a quickly spreading worldwide epidemic that will get much worse. All colors, classes, creeds and races are addicted and they can’t break the habit. Before 2008 ends, the TechnoSlave trend will be so pervasive and so deeply embedded into the fabric of society that Old World communication styles will be seen as quaint and ridiculed as stupidly boring by the high-tech "hip."
In the slides for next Tuesday's webinar on Performance Management for IP Telephony (register here), Dr. Mike Hollier of Psytechnics has a great section where he discusses the importance of making sure your ability to measure performance keeps pace with the technology you're deploying. Since network management and monitoring deployments always seem to lag the core technology they manage, it's good to know where you're going--that is, what you'll be needing to measure and control in the next deployment phase.
As we've begun discussing the program for November's VoiceCon San Francisco conference, Fred Knight and I have been looking for ways we can program sessions around the issue of communications' role in saving energy. Since energy costs appear to be on a permanent upward trend, it seems clear that enterprises will have to take a fresh look at this problem from all its various aspects, and it's inevitable that communications technology will be the preferred solution in at least some of the situations.
AOTMP (Association of Telecommunications Management Professionals) is based in Indianapolis, IN. Long ago, the telecom business during the late 1970’s and early divestiture years was pretty nutty and with good reason. Companies sprang up promising to get telecom expenses under control, and in those days shaving pennies off your long distance rate meant something. Teletron was one of those companies serving large enterprises with early TEM (Telecommunications Expense Management) solutions. Before this period, most companies just paid the bills on time without any analysis since telecom was considered “just another utility.” Back then many folks just assumed that the bills were right.
We've just posted our latest podcast, an interview with Steve Guthrie of CA. Steve spent much of the interview talking about the role that configuration errors play in causing problems in IP telephony implementations. This hearkens back to the maxim, "The major cause of failures are fingers," explained to me by Terry Slattery of Netcordia a couple of months back.
Just when the retailers thought it would be in vogue to hawk telephone systems alongside Ebay where pretty much anything sells, Dell Computer is on the act too, selling what they advertise as “Affordable Enterprise-Class Phone Systems by Fonality.”
Love and hate seems to best describe the attitudes toward the many automated attendants used to front end the modern era business. The feelings aren’t just here in the U.S.A. but extend globally, and I think even to a greater degree of harshness.
Siemens corporation finally confirmed rumors and reports of nearly 17,000 job cuts/restructuring. This announcement was made by the Siemens parent company, a conglomerate that manufactures myriad products including medical and energy systems. It's unclear at this point whether or how the cuts affect Siemens Enterprise communications; I'm in pursuit of answers on that score. But the (accurately) reported size of the layoff made it a topic of considerable interest within our industry over the last week, so we'll follow up to determine any impact on the Siemens communications company.
Afternoon update:
A study from the Uptime Institute reveals that most data centers would max out electrical capacity and cooling capabilities during the next 12-60 months. According to the Uptime Institute, 1U server space costs $1,600 per year in facilities costs, and $700 of that cost is just for electricity.
Fred Knight and I had the opportunity to travel down to Huntsville, AL, last week to visit with the folks at Digium, the company founded by Mark Spencer, creator of the Asterisk open source PBX. What we found was a company that appears to be making the familiar tech industry passage from a young startup focused on breaking new ground, to VC-funded company on the IPO track, focused on execution and building its market.
I always wanted to create a headline without words. This is my chance. You have heard of Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS), but Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS) may be new to you. MPLS has been available for a few years. VPLS was announced by Verizon in March 2007. AT&T and Qwest are also beginning to offer VPLS, which is a new service for both the service provider and enterprise, so the experience level is low. It is now possible to consider either or both of these services for VoIP calls among sites.
One area where IP telephony has the potential to make a clear impact is in the hospitality industry; most vendors have a solution or set of solutions for this market. One example is Avaya’s new SIP iPhones from Teledex, which let hotel guests experience visuals, which hoteliers should appreciate. Adding the visual to the phone isn’t just cool, but it provides interlinks to the hotel’s services, moving hotels beyond selling rooms at rack rates, beyond just staying competitive, and to potentially greater profitability by adding all the trimmings offered by the hotel and surrounding area of interest to their guests.
First the disclaimers. Hosted Asterisk, IMHO is something to consider only if you are SOHO or very small businesses that don’t have capital for either a TDM key-system, small Hybrid or low end IP-PBX and even then, you’d better know exactly what you are getting into. First impressions and attitude are everything. Never, regardless of how small or big you are, ever, put your dial tone on the line and get into that “we are committed” way of thinking if too many indicators or red flags sound off. You will likely have a bad experience that will stick in the users’ minds for a long time afterwards even if you are successful, and usually you’re just more accepting because you bought off on the concept.
The cost for VoIP/IP Telephony service calls is 150% more than every other category of IT technology--higher than cabling, software, servers, PCs, you name it. This translates into $449 for the average service professional work order as compared to the next highest work order cost of $282 for wiring and cabling followed by software at $255. This is according the report just published by OnForce covering the first quarter of 2008. The report, “State of the IT Industry Report”, covers a wide range of analysis, by locations and IT categories.
I’ve been seeing and hearing about one significant change in the delivery of telephony systems to customers. Distribution is providing the installing company (Interconnect / VAR/Dealer) with staging services to save time and money, and to avoid costly mistakes on deploying IPT systems. Distribution, for a small fee (I’m not exaggerating) will pre-configure the IPT system with the necessary licensing, firmware updates and other initial configuration requirements that are necessary to get the system initially up and running for each customer.
It’s common knowledge that Siemens AG, the Munich based conglomerate that spun off its carrier systems division into a joint venture with Nokia, has been seeking suitors for its enterprise division as well. Nortel and private equity firm Cerberus Capital are the companies whose names most often come up these days and June has been the month when the wedding bells were widely expected to ring. Plans have apparently changed at bit.
In several posts I’ve made mention of the Power-Save capacitor that we have been installing on sites including our own office. We’ve logged our site data including a unit installed at one of our technicians’ home for three months.
What’s really interesting is my site is consistently down 18%, and my tech’s home is down 17% on power consumption.
Via Forbes.com, Charlie Giancarlo told Reuters today that he won't consider the Avaya president/CEO job on anything but an interim basis.
The Lou D’Ambrosio news from Avaya certainly drew a lot of attention. With that attention, new insights emerge, as is often the case.
Judging by the Comments to my original story on Lou D'Ambrosio's resignation from Avaya, and from some email I've gotten, there seems to be a feeling that I was casting doubt on the stated explanation for the resignation. I certainly wasn't doing that.
A commenter on my Unified Communications blog at Information Week (where I moonlight) made an interesting argument, drawing a parallel between Avaya now and Seagate Technologies in 2000, when it too was acquired by Silver Lake Partners. The basic argument is that if things go for Avaya the way they went for Seagate, Avaya's got a bright future ahead of it.
I agree with Eric Krapf’s earlier post and with the Avaya press release, that in roughly two years as CEO, Lou D’Ambrosio has, “shaped a compelling strategy, built a strong team, and led the company through important technology transitions…”
My first thought is to pause for a moment and support Lou in a rapid return of his health.
Then, what about Avaya?
As Eric pointed out, leadership changes are afoot at Avaya. Lou D’Ambrosio has stepped down for medical reasons, Charlie Giancarlo has stepped in as interim CEO, and the company has stepped up its search for a permanent leader.
Here's the letter that Lou D'Ambrosio sent out to Avaya employees today as he stepped down as the company's CEO and president:
Avaya today announced that Lou D'Ambrosio (left) is stepping down as CEO for unspecified "medical reasons," and that Charlie Giancarlo (right), who left Cisco late last year, will step in as interim CEO and President while a search is conducted for D'Ambrosio's successor. Giancarlo left Cisco last December to move to Silver Lake Partners, the private equity firm that acquired Avaya in mid-2007.
Sign up for our weekly newsletters
Follow us on TWITTER!
VOICECON AMSTERDAM: 14-16 October
VOICECON SAN FRANCISCO: November 10-13
Cisco built on its market share lead, while the market as a whole felt the effects of the bad economy READ MORE »
A survey suggests enterprises may view UC more tactically than strategically READ MORE »
Advertisement
 |
||||
 |
|
|||
 |
||||
 |
|
|||
|
||||
 |
|
|||
|
||||
 |
|
|||
|
||||
 |
|
|||
| |
||||
