Author Archives: Dan York

Reminder: Free Training on IPv6 and Communications Apps (including SIP) on Thursday, May 5, 2011

voxeologohoriz.pngAs I mentioned last week, I’m speaking in a “Developer Jam Session” on this Thursday, May 5, 2011 on the topic of:

IPv6 and How It Impacts Communication Applications

I’ll briefly cover IPv6 basics, talk about how it impacts building communication applications and the SIP protocol and then have some demonstrations of SIP-over-IPv6. You can learn more about the session and register on the Jam Session web page.

It’s free to attend the session – and it will be archived for later viewing if you can’t get there live during the session.

It should be an educational session and I expect I’ll be writing a good bit more about IPv6 in the weeks and months ahead. (You can see some of my writing over on Voxeo’s blog at http://blogs.voxeo.com/speakingofstandards/tag/IPv6/ and here on this blog at /2012/05/17/ipv6/)

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Mitel Reorganizes – President Leaves, Business Units Simplified, More Changes

mitellogo.jpgMitel today announced a series of organizational changes, including the departure of Paul Butcher, Mitel’s President and Chief Operating Officer. The news release indicates they are merging together various sales organizations and simplifying the business units into three:

  • Mitel Communications Solutions: responsible for delivering unified communications and collaboration products and services to businesses.
  • Mitel NetSolutions: responsible for network and hosted services, mobile services, and broadband connectivity.
  • Mitel DataNet: responsible for the distribution of third-party products to partners and customers.

It also briefly mentions the departure of Paul Butcher as of Saturday. From a product point-of-view, there were two statements I found interesting:

  • “a re-direction of our R&D investment to products serving the high-growth market of 100 to 2,500 user organizations.” Which makes sense, given that this area is one in which Mitel has traditionally done well.
  • “we intend to exploit our significant market leadership in voice virtualization.” i.e. continuing their partnership with VMware. Again this also makes sense given that people are looking for solutions to deploy more applications with less hardware… and looking at virtualization as one of the potential solutions.

To me, all of this is naturally to be expected after Mitel appointed Richard McBee the new CEO back in January 2011. A new CEO comes in and he’ll listen for a few months… and then start making changes. Obviously this is his reshaping the organization in the way he thinks it should go.

In that vein, the departure of Paul Butcher is not surprising. Paul had been in the CxO part of Mitel since 2001, coming in at the time when Terry Matthews bought the company back and launched it on its current course. Over that time he was quite involved in many aspects of the company and worked quite a bit with the now-retired CEO Don Smith. With a re-org of this magnitude and with a new CEO wanting to reshape the organization, it’s not surprising that some of the previous leadership would leave. I wish Paul well with whatever comes next.

I wish Mitel well, too. I haven’t been writing about Mitel all that much lately, but that’s more because my own interests are no longer as much with the IP-PBX space that Mitel plays in. If you look at my recent writing, it’s mostly been about SIP, Skype, mobile devices… with a handful of IPv6, Voxeo and other topics thrown in. I haven’t been really writing about any of the IP-PBX and Unified Communications vendors for a while.

Regardless, I wish them well… though I only recognized a couple of the names in the news release and much has changed since I left Mitel back in 2007, I still have good friends working there and Mitel still has outstanding technology. Their challenge has always been around getting that story out to the larger world. Perhaps these changes will help. We’ll see.

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Watch the Royal Wedding? Or talk about XMPP? Join VUC on April 29th for an XMPP-fest

VucSo which would you rather do? Watch the Royal Wedding? Or talk about all things XMPP with a bunch of VoIP and telephony geeks?

If you’d prefer the latter, then join the VUC conf call at 12 noon US Eastern on Friday, April 29, for a lengthy dive into all things XMPP. (XMPP being the “Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol” originally known as the Jabber protocol.)

As noted on the show page the session will feature Emil Ivov of Jitsi.org (formerly SIP Communicator) and Thiago Rocha Camargo (of Nimbuzz) and is going to cover a whole range of topics:

  • What is XMPP/Jabber
  • How does one do telephony with XMPP
  • How does XMPP/Jingle compare to SIP and (why) is it better.
  • Who supports it
  • Facebook and their XMPP gateway
  • Google Talk
  • Nimbuzz – one of the biggest VoIP providers using XMPP as their primary protocol
  • NAT traversal
  • How does one do it with XMPP
  • Again, how is this part different from what we have with SIP
  • Media relaying with TURN and Jingle Nodes

I am a big fan of XMPP on the IM/messaging side so I’m very much looking forward to this conversation.

You can join the live call via SIP, Skype or the regular old PSTN. There is also an IRC backchannel that gets heavy usage during the call. It will be recorded so you can always listen later.

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Interested in IPv6 and SIP? I’ll be speaking in a free webinar on May 5th…

voxeologohoriz.pngAre you interested in understanding how IPv6 affects SIP and other VoIP protocols? If so, you may be interested in a free webinar I’m giving on Thursday, May 5, 2011. The topic is:

IPv6 and How It Impacts Communication Applications

It’s part of Voxeo’s “Developer Jam Session” webinar series and is targeted at a technical audience. I’ll briefly cover IPv6 basics, talk about how it impacts SIP and then have some demonstrations of SIP-over-IPv6. You can learn more about the session and register on the Jam Session web page.

As I mentioned last week, I’m down outside of Washington, DC, right now at the SIPNOC event… and IPv6 is a topic of discussion tomorrow (Tuesday). Naturally, I’ll be in those sessions. (In fact, I’m now moderating that BOF…)

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Where Was I in the Summer of 2010? My iPhone Tells Me! (Courtesy of iPhoneTracker)

Where did I travel with my iPhone? Given all the recent kerfuffle over the logging of location data on an iPhone, I naturally had to try it out. First stop was getting the Mac OS X app at:

http://petewarden.github.com/iPhoneTracker/

The app itself is super simple… simply launch the app and it goes off and finds your iPhone backups, extracts the location data and shows you a map.

In my case, the Mac I ran the app on only had data from my iPhone 3G and only for the period of time from when I updated it to iOS 4 in July 2010 through when I stopped using it in September 2010 (because I replaced it with an iPhone 4). Still, the data is kind of fun to see. Here’s what it looked like overall:

IPhoneTracker 3G overall

During that time period, I traveled down to Voxeo’s corporate office in Orlando, went to a SIPit test event over on the New Hampshire seacoast, and spent a chunk of time in New York City attending SpeechTEK 2010.

Diving into the data a bit more, here’s a close-up of the northeast. It’s amusing to see the train trip I took down to NYC (for SpeechTEK) as well as the corridor of travel I take from Keene over to Manchester, NH, to fly out of the airport there:

IPhoneTracker 3G northeast

It’s curious to see that it shows me wandering around Vermont. We did make a number of day trips around that area and I do carry my iPhone with me (even though I often don’t have coverage in some of those areas). No clue what those icons are out on Long Island as I never traveled out there. Obviously the phone must have picked up some signal from towers out there or something like that.

Zooming in on New York is also interesting because you can see, I guess, where AT&T towers must be:

IPhoneTracker

Zooming in on Orlando also shows where I traveled in that region:

IPhoneTracker 1

Now, it would be great if Apple would get around to telling us WHY they are collecting all this data… but in the meantime it’s also quite fascinating to take a look at it and see where my phone thinks I’ve been. 🙂

Another day, I’ll have to run this app on my laptop where I sync my iPhone 4. Should have lots more interesting data.

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Speaking at SIPNOC Next Week on SIP Interoperability and Security (and Joining an IPv6 BOF)

Sipnoc2011Next week in the DC area (Herndon, VA) there will be a unique event taking place – SIPNOC: The SIP Network Operators Conference. This event is organized by the SIP Forum and will bring together a great collection of service providers and carriers to share and learn from each other about the realities behind providing SIP-based services today. It will be a great place for those providing real-time communications over IP networks to look at how we can continue to expand and improve the services.

There’s a packed agenda at the event that includes many great sessions I’m looking forward to attending. I’ll be there speaking about SIP interoperability and some of the lessons we’ve learned at Voxeo as we’ve interconnected our SIP cloud to that of so many carriers. I’ll also be donning my VOIP Security Alliance (VOIPSA) hat to participate on a panel about security.

And naturally given my intense interest in IPv6 these days (and all my writing about IPv6, I’ll of course be joining in to the “IPv6 Readiness” BOF planned for Tuesday, April 26.

I’m very much looking forward to this first SIPNOC event… if you are already planning to be there please do say hello, and if you are interested in attending, you can still register to attend.

We need events like these to help improve the overall IP infrastructure and help move us faster to the time when we can have even more of our connectivity all happen over IP. Great to see!

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Today’s VUC Call: InPhonex Talking About Televate

VucToday’s VUC conf call at 12 noon US Eastern will feature guests from Inphonex speaking about their new “Televate” system. From the abstract:

InPhonex recently launched Televate, a cloud-based telephony system that combines the business-communications capabilities of a hosted PBX, hosted IVR and hosted CRM. Televate, to be sold through channel partners, is designed to help SMBs appear larger than they actually are and ramp up productivity to compete more effectively. The service works anywhere inside or outside the office, enabling SMBs to support global operations and customer bases.

I am not familiar with the product myself, so I’ll be joining in to listen and learn.

You can join the live call via SIP, Skype or the regular old PSTN. There is also an IRC backchannel that gets heavy usage during the call. It will be recorded so you can always listen later.

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Want To Learn Best Practices in Multi-Channel App Creation? (Voice, SMS, IM, Twitter, etc.)

voxeologohoriz.pngWant to know industry best practices in creating apps that work across voice, text messaging/SMS, IM and social channels like Twitter? Would you like to know some of the latest research on what channels customers are using to communicate with companies?

Next Tuesday, April 19, at 11am US Eastern time, I will be joining an industry analyst in a webinar called “Best Practices in Multi-Channel Customer Interaction“. We’ll be covering topics such as:

  • what communication channels customers are choosing for interacting with businesses
  • best practices you can implement for each channel
  • where customer interaction is heading, with particular focus on social and mobile channels
  • how you can create applications that interact with customers across multiple channels
  • best practices in cross-channel analytics and integration into business intelligence systems

I think you’ll find it quite educational if you’re wondering how to expand your customer interaction beyond simply voice or web. The session will have some solid quantitative data and will take a look at what’s ahead in terms of customer interaction.

Registration is free and simple and is open to anyone. We’ll also be recording the session and it will be available for listening after the fact if you can’t attend on Tuesday.

Please do join us… and bring your questions… it should be a good time!

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Comparing Skype 5.x For Mac And Windows – Jim Courtney Makes Some Recommendations

SkypelogoWhat did Skype do right in Skype 5.x for Windows that they need to bring across over into Skype 5.x for Mac OS X?

That’s essentially the question that Jim Courtney has taken on in two new posts building off his initial post I wrote about last week. He continues the series with:

No longer having any Windows machines in my life, I hadn’t ever seen the Skype 5.x client for Windows so it was useful to see Jim’s comparison. The “Compact View” he describes in Step 1 would go very far to addressing my greatest issue with Skype 5.x for Mac, namely the ability to have multiple chats open in separate Windows.

I applaud Jim for writing this series of articles and I do hope Skype is listening…

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Video: Walking the EnterpriseConnect show flow in March 2011

Last month down at Enterprise Connect in Orlando, Florida, I wanted to experiment a bit with using the iPhone 4 with Qik for recording videos. As you can see below, I shot a quick video (using Qik 🙂 ) of about a minute-and-a-half of me walking through the trade show flow. It was purely a test of using Qik on the iPhone… and ironically I actually forgot about creating the video for a bit.

Anyway, here it is… it’s certainly not the best produced video I’ve ever done… in fact that was zero post-production. I just pointed the camera and started shooting (and undoubtedly look a bit silly walking through a trade show floor holding my iPhone in front of me!).

If you’ve never been on the exhibit hall floor of one of the various industry trade shows and conferences, this is the type of thing you will see…

Next event, I’ll try to do a few more of these… perhaps if I can find one with good WiFi I’ll even try some live streaming… 🙂

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