As voice becomes just another application that runs on an organization’s shared IT infrastructure, it is critical that this shared IT infrastructure minimizes delay and jitter. What separates voice from other enterprise IT applications is its real-time, interactive nature that is very susceptible to milliseconds of delay and jitter. The ITU recommends that round trip delay be less than 150ms, wherever possible.
The Bloom box is no longer one of Silicon Valley's best-kept secrets. After much media fanfare and a slew of announcements, the Bloom Energy website finally came to life with information after weeks of waiting. For those charged with powering the data center, consider what General Colin Powell said to his wife, "Don't worry about a generator honey, we'll get a Bloom box for our backyard instead." This is the goal that Bloom Energy has put in its sights but for data centers today, it's tested, proven and in use.
PBXs have taken a beating for many years now, and their death has been proclaimed time and time again. Is the time finally here?
UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) manufacturers have been given notice to submit comments to the new UPS guidelines being formulated under the Energy Star program no later than April 2, 2010.
Avaya has announced the latest release for its SME market flagship offering, IP Office R6.0. One of the objectives of the new release is to make some UC tools and applications more affordable to its customers with relatively small line size requirements (less than 20 stations). Among the new IP Office options and capabilities are the following:
This last few months, I've had the fortunate opportunity to spend some time talking with our service provider partners and a number of enterprises about their plans to adopt SIP Trunking. One of the questions I always ask is, "What do you think is holding back SIP Trunking from wider adoption?" As you can imagine, I heard all kinds of interesting feedback and thought it was time to share it with you.
I guess I did strike a nerve and I and got plenty of good feedback from the prior post: Mitel Virtual Ice Cream. The readers' comments are all good and it really comes down to perception, sort of. Mitel's virtualized PBX adds tools so the data center can make itself redundant on the voice side by using the second data center to back up the first. You can argue that the old PBXs didn't have this and then you can also argue that old PBXs most times, didn't need this feature.
As businesses move to VoIP, all too often, voice quality is not given a high priority in the quest to lower costs. Poor voice quality leads to less productive conversations and lower customer satisfaction. As bandwidth costs continue to decrease, businesses should re-evaluate if the pennies saved to lower the cost of a conversation are worth it.
The Mitel news of late has been very exciting for me but purely for selfish reasons, in hopes that soon, I'll still be able to become a "virtual Interconnect."
Virtualization is all the rage as IT managers look to reduce capital and operating expenses within their data centers, and/or meet Green initiatives to reduce power consumption. Thirty percent of companies are decreasing the number of servers they support, while 93% of companies we recently interviewed have virtualized all or part of their application server platforms. Indeed many companies are now requiring any application they deploy to run on virtualization platforms from companies such as VMware, Microsoft, or Citrix.
At VoiceCon Orlando, Marty Parker and I will be moderating a panel discussion about "How Much Voice Mail Do You Really Need?" with speakers from AVST, Avaya, Cisco and Microsoft. The session’s premise is that even though the need for voice mail is changing significantly due to evolving voice-calling patterns and the availability of alternative communication modes, voice mail remains an important tool for controlling costs, serving customers and enhancing workflows.
Will large enterprises start using Skype now that they offer SIP trunks? Skype recently announced a beta program for SIP trunking. They partnered with industry SBC leader, Acme Packet, to create the service. While Skype has offered its Skype In/Out services as a way for Skype users to talk to others on the PSTN, direct connectivity between Skype clients has its advantages including:
Earlier this month, Siemens Enterprise Communications announced a new release of OpenScape Voice. One of the highlights of Version 4 is OpenScape Branch, described as offering "scalable, feature-rich communications for cost-conscious customers with multiple branch offices." It seemed to me that every press release on branch solutions seemed to promise similar benefits, so I decided to investigate further and see what differentiated OpenScape Branch.
My buddy Scott Amoros, I've known since he was at NBX Corporation and then later at 3Com. Scott now works for Convergence Systems a San Diego not-so-new start up in hosted services. Convergence Systems is a Gold Mitel dealer that started building a hosted solution using the Mitel platform five years ago. Scott is now working on the east coast building the channel partners.
Ten years ago, Mitel's telecom solutions were pigeon-holed in the hospitality industry. But the company embraced VoIP quicker than most of its TDM peers and worked to diversify its offerings. TEQConsult now ranks Mitel as the third largest North American telecom equipment supplier, and other reports rank Mitel as number one in SMB in the U.S. and U.K. During this period, Mitel did not experience any leadership changes or undertake any extraordinary marketing changes; instead it quietly focused on its products. Now the company is leading telephony into virtualization.
Mitel Networks is jointly announcing with VMWare a truly virtualized offering of its core 3300 ICP telephony system. Mitel has previously used VMWare's virtualization platform to support a combination of its core telephony and communications application software solutions on a single physical server, including Mitel Communications Director (MCD), Mitel Unified Communicator (UC) Advanced, Mitel Contact Center Solutions and Mitel Enterprise Manager.
Over the holidays we were discussing ideas for cost savings and what would save customers money. Then the attention turned to SIP trunking and back again to the carriers. Later, I had a couple of conversations and then a conference call with Lory Johnson of Teleplus Consulting.
Typically a press release reporting that one company had joined a program that allows it to develop a solution that interworks with the solution of another company would not be worthy of much more than a quick glance. But last week Genesys announced that it has joined the Cisco Developer Network as a registered developer. Given that the two companies have long been rivals in the high-end, multi-site contact center space, I was intrigued enough to investigate further.
Anyone who currently supports enterprise multi-site IP Communications networks knows that getting a network up and running presents one set of challenges, but trying to assure ongoing, consistent quality ("Day 2"), particularly on an endpoint-specific basis, is quite another. Quality-related issues can be difficult to detect and isolate. particularly in:
I had a briefing yesterday with Empirix, which just announced OneSight Voice Quality Assurance, its newest product for measuring voice quality. It's a pretty slick-looking system, but in some ways it also shows just how much of a moving target voice quality monitoring and assurance is.
It's easy to dismiss what failed miserably in the past but here's some news about Apple and the recent iPad announcement.
What some telecom managers see as a threat, others may see as an opportunity. Telecom managers think that IP Telephony is mostly an opportunity. Many consider outsourcing and managed services as threats. I learned this from an article in Voice Report, "2009 National Salary Survey" December 17, 2009 issue. The Voice Report an information service for telecom professionals.
In the past few weeks I've had the opportunity to consult with several large multi-national organizations on their IP telephony plans, as well as speak to several others for our ongoing research on unified communications and collaboration adoption. One point has become clear: large companies are resisting the call from their vendors to accelerate replacement of their legacy phone systems with IP.
MACs stand to be a lesson to potentially improve the old ways of getting things done and closing doors to prevent what falls through the cracks. While in Huntsville last year meeting again with ADTRAN for the event, Chris Thompson, Senior Product Manager and Samir Kakkar, IPT Product Manager of ADTRAN both affirmed what I heard about deleting an extension on the ADTRAN UC solution: Admins need only to delete the extension once in the ADTRAN solution. Here is the minor detail.
New enterprise locations may wind up never be opened; some locations are closed while others are downsized. Enterprises migrate from wired to wireless services. What if the network group ordered and possibly installed WAN services that are no longer needed? This is a real possibility in today's economy. Can the enterprise shed these services; reduce WAN expenses without penalties or risk?
Netcordia, the network monitoring company, has released its predictions of the likeliest sources of IT headaches in 2010, and at the top of the list is complications arising from virtualization projects. They write:
I had a chance to chat on the phone with Lou D'Ambrosio today, following up on my brief post from last night. He told me a bit more about his new position and how he's doing.
A dial plan establishes the expected number and pattern of digits for a telephone number, with E.164 defining the International standard. This includes country codes, access codes, area codes, and all combinations of digits dialed. For instance, the North American Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) uses a 10-digit dial plan based on the North American Numbering Plan (NANP) with the format of NPX-NXX-XXXX where N = 2-9, P = 0-8, and X = 0-9.
Ensuring end-to-end QoS for VoIP and video services and networks is a challenge for both large enterprises and SMBs. Broadsoft acquired Packet Island in October 2009, to address the critical need of ensuring QoS, and quality of experience (QoE), for real-time communications. BroadSoft's expanded solutions portfolio will now enable service providers to offer enhanced QoS assessment and monitoring capabilities of their communication services. The PacketSmart solutions enable service providers to rapidly and cost-effectively deploy VoIP and video services with guaranteed end-to-end "carrier-grade" service delivery.
Good news about Lou D'Ambrosio, whose tenure as CEO of Avaya was cut short when he resigned for health reasons in 2008. D'Ambrosio evidently is well enough to take on a new role with a new company. He was named to the board of Sensus, a company that makes smart grid technolgy for utility companies.
Just like in IPT, traveling involves a great deal of planning. An end of year trip was to the Big Apple and here's what I did to get there and what I did once I got there--speaking of technology of course.
Ever have one of those days where the corporate VPN is running so slow that you find yourself clicking on something, waiting, then tearing out several tufts of hair that you can ill-afford to lose, then coming up with creative new combinations of words you usually reserve for other drivers on the commute you're avoiding by working at home, then restraining yourself from choking your laptop as if it were the sworn enemy it has opted to become, then finally when all seems lost, whatever you clicked on responds?
Your energy saving plan for 2010 should speak dollars, not BTUs or kWhs. That is the way to gain attention and put the plan into a business perspective. Speak the language of the CEO, COO and CFO. Developing a plan that management can understand and buy into is paramount. The plan should cover ALL, not just IPT energy usage. The plan developed for IPT may be a subset of the total enterprise plan.
The Department of Technology and Information (DTI), which provides the technology infrastructure for the State of Delaware, deployed over the past year the Acme Packet Net-Net session border controllers (SBCs) to unify its disparate communications infrastructure.
Outbound voice trunks can be supplemented with SIP trunking to get a quick ROI for an organization, with minimal risk.
Let me count the ways, IP phones, lines, systems sold and revenue. How you count makes a difference. There seems to be a small group of pundits that work on this question. The market share has not only changed due to competition, but by acquisitions, with the latest being Avaya buying Nortel.
Yesterday, AT&T experienced a spike in call volume that led to callers getting fast busy signals. Some Fortune 100 companies reported that ~20% of their in-bound Toll Free customers were getting a fast busy. I personally experienced a couple yesterday.
In a major development over the year-end holidays, AT&T filed comments with the FCC in which the carrier explicitly calls for the phasing out of the legacy Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) and the accompanying POTS service. AT&T pressed the commission for a date-certain, and warned that the current situation is "exacting a substantial toll on ILEC revenues."
Another memorable year passes and after another internal analysis here’s what's new but old news still. I've been doing our annual report and number crunching and went back to the past 14 years to get a good look again at the details. Our Moves-Adds-Changes revenue trend is spiraling downward to near non-existence while our Maintenance revenue is spiraling upward, more than doubling over past trends. Hmmm. I think Professor Pinder-Schloss would call this "displacement."
Mitel Networks has filed for an initial public offering (IPO) of up to $230 million, for which it plans use the proceeds to repay its revolving credit and loans, and for working capital and general corporate purposes, such as acquisitions.
Technology is always changing, but how? Prices are always better--really? You can get more bang for your buck--if you’re careful. Holiday shopping wasn’t on my agenda but since I needed a couple of high powered SD cards I took a look at the consumer side.
I recently stumbled across an old acquaintance I hadn't seen in a long time: a peer-to-peer voice system for small businesses. Systems of this sort caused something of a stir a few years back. All the hullaballoo seemed to start when Avaya purchased a start-up called Nimcat, which developed a set of IP phones that could auto-discovered one another across a network. All intelligence was co-resident on the end stations, along with voice mail and automated attendant, so no independent PBX system or applications servers were needed. Sure, a lot of bells and whistles were missing--unified messaging, CRM integration, etc.--but it was in theory good enough for the very small businesses that were these things' target market. Rebranded one-X Quick Edition, Avaya sold them to customers not interested in a full-blown IP PBX or a traditional key system. Siemens Enterprise followed up with a peer-to-peer telephony system of its own, BizIP, which it sold exclusively in Europe and planned to later sell elsewhere as well.
Cisco Systems last week celebrated the one year anniversary of its Small Business initiative and it got me thinking about how the Small Business market for communications systems and solutions almost always gets the short end of the stick when it comes to articles, presentations, and discussions in general within the industry. Most of the focus is on large customers who buy so-called big ticket items for products and applications. Search through the first two years of No Jitter blog posts and articles and discover for yourself how much attention has been give to Small Business or check the VoiceCon agendas; the scarce results should not be surprising.
This year Avaya decided to forgo their annual industry analyst meeting. Even had the economy not been an issue, it would have been a good call. Until the Nortel acquisition is finalized, and the company is ready and able to talk about the combined roadmap, a meeting in the traditional November timeframe would have been at best frustrating and at worst a waste of time.
Skype selected Net-Net OS-Enterprise (OS-E) session border controllers from Acme Packet for its Skype for SIP beta offering. Acme Packet provides session border control (SBC) solutions and is the sole SBC partner for the Skype-for-SIP beta program.
I don't agree that there is a "drop in phone prices" songs being sung by the marketing chorus. Here’s an old reality--users don't see what the phone is connected to and supported by. Here's a newer reality--buyers don’t really see the true cost of phones.
As I gathered my thoughts in preparation for my Virtual VoiceCon (registration is free) keynote presentation this Wednesday I reminded myself that significant changes in the enterprise telephony market take time to gain a foothold and spread to the masses.
There are two good articles in today’s business section of the NY Times that you should check out. One is about open source software and the other is about Huawei Technologies. The former is focused on the pending acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle and the issue the European Union has, because Sun previously acquired MySQL, an open source alternative to costly Oracle offerings. Would Oracle stop or slow down MySQL software development to benefit its own highly profitable software? That is the question. The article also discusses some acquisitions of open source software developers by much larger established companies. Makes one wonder if Digium is a potential acquisition candidate by someone who does not want to be weighed down by an installed base of proprietary hardware.
I am scheduled to presenting the keynote presentation at the start of the upcoming Virtual VoiceCon on December 2, 2009. I will be covering several topics of interest during my talk, but perhaps the most important will be how the competitive landscape of the enterprise communications market is evolving and who will be the key players that the majority of customers will look to for guidance and solutions during the next decade. Cisco Systems is currently looked upon as the alpha dog of the market, though the Avaya acquisition of Nortel’s enterprise business unit will certainly give them a major boost in terms of market share (installed base and annual shipments), product offerings, and distribution network compared to the traditional telephony system suppliers. Both Cisco and Avaya, however, need to keep a close eye on Microsoft in the immediate future and Google farther down the road.
Phones. Love 'em, hate 'em, they're everywhere. We carry our phones with us, they're found in virtually every room we enter and, increasingly, our laptops and office PCs are used for telephony.
The Cisco Collaboration launch reported on earlier on this website included an overwhelming number of new product/server offers and capabilities, but the bottom line for many customers is if they save money by implementing any of the launch offers. Good news customers, because a new Cisco white paper is available that provides TCO saving guidelines for several of the key elements of the launch.
The third quarter shipment reports are in from the leading enterprise communications systems suppliers and the trend is looking good, because line shipments are up for most vendors on a quarterly basis. This is the second straight quarter total market shipments have increased after two quarters of substantially declining shipments.
There's been plenty of talk about SIP trunking in the market and on NoJitter (see Gary's latest, a summary of the VoiceCon session on the issue), so why shouldn't I weigh in? This week, I'll be participating in a webinar on the topic, along with AT&T and Network Equipment Technologies (NET); we'll discuss SIP trunking as a cost-effective alternative to traditional PSTN connections; the challenges of integration and interoperability; and lessons learned from SIP-PSTN integration into environments such as Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2.
A few weeks ago I was researching Mac products for a couple of upcoming projects to test IP-PBXs on Apple and I came across the new Apple Mac Mini Server, only the product isn't exactly a new idea, since customers have been using the Mac Mini computer as a server for several years. Then I ran across Macminicolo, a company with a niche that offers co-location services in their spiffy data center that they play host to over 500 Mac minis and Xserve servers (see photo below).
Connecting to SIP trunks is more than a technology decision as I learned in the San Francisco Voicecon workshop, "Implementing SIP Trunking." Sorell Slaymaker divided the session into five parts. He opened with the most important question, "Is SIP trunking right for you?" His entire workshop presentation is on the Voicecon SFO site, Powerpoints and audio (available only to conference attendees with username and password).
Register for VoiceCon Orlando 2010, taking place March 22-25.
|
