Category: Telecom Industry
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Heading out to VoiceCon, Aug 20-23 in San Francisco. Will you be there?
Continue Reading: Heading out to VoiceCon, Aug 20-23 in San Francisco. Will you be there?If any of you reading this will be attending VoiceCon out in San Francisco, August 20-23, please do drop me a note. I’ll be there from August 20-22 and am looking forward to connecting with a range of people from around the industry.
FYI, if you are a Facebook user and are attending, there is a Facebook event for VoiceCon to which you can add yourself to facilitate networking with other FB users at the show.
Technorati tags: voicecon, voip -
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CRN: "The Coming VoIP War" (between Microsoft and Cisco)
Continue Reading: CRN: "The Coming VoIP War" (between Microsoft and Cisco)Is “the coming VoIP war” to be fought out between Microsoft and Cisco? So asks a column “The Coming VoIP War” by Larry Hooper in today’s issue of CRN. On one level, the debate isn’t as interesting to me as the venue… “CRN” is “Computer Reseller News” and has been around the industry for many years.[1] At various times I’ve personally had a subscription to the print version or at least had it around the office to read.[2] Supported by advertising and theoretically sent to a targeted profile of subscribers, I’ve always seen it as one of the more “established’ newsmagazines of the information technology space… and one obviously targeted at resellers of such technology. So to me it is interesting that the question is being discussed within CRN’s print and web pages.
As to the larger question of whether “the coming VoIP war” will be between Microsoft and Cisco, one can’t ignore that these two companies are giants in the overall IT industry with extremely significant resources and yes, the point is valid that as the interests of the two companies have converged in this merger of communication that many call “unified communications”, they are now definitely going to be competing…
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Vonage drops below $2/share!
Continue Reading: Vonage drops below $2/share!Russell Shaw has the details: “Did you ever REALLY think Vonage stock would go below $2 a share?“
I’ve not written here much about Vonage or the many other “consumer VoIP” players. Partly because I guess at the end of the day I just don’t find their proposition all that compelling. Partly because the lack of voice security in so many of the consumer VoIP players just really offends me. Partly because I don’t see them really as all that “disruptive” because their positioning really seems to be “We are cheaper than the other guys”. Yaawwwwwwwn.
Note to Vonage and friends: Someone will always be cheaper.
Technorati tags: vonage -
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Ooma, ooma, ooma… a collection of links about the buzz
Continue Reading: Ooma, ooma, ooma… a collection of links about the buzzLate last week there was quite the buzz in the VoIP part of the blogosphere about “Ooma” a new company with $27 million in funding that claims to “transform telecom services” and let you “make local and long-distance calls anywhere in the US for free” (provided, of course, that you live in the US). I saw all the coverage and thought about writing something here, but I just couldn’t get overly excited to do so. My first reaction was, well, “how is this different from PhoneGnome or other similar systems?” (And I enjoyed the fact that PhoneGnome promptly came out with a “Build Your Own Ooma” Challenge!)
My second reaction was that with their peer-to-peer architecture (letting others share your phoneline) there are bound to be security concerns (opinions here and here) and that it looks like it involves changing out your existing firewall/router and that simply isn’t something I see people wanting to do.
Anyway, there’s been a whole lot of words written on this issue and so I thought I’d point to some of the pieces out there. First, some nice summaries:
- ComputerWorld’s IT Blog Watch: “Ooma selling free phone service”
- Jon Arnold: “Ooma – a Triumph…
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YouTube video shows the Sun / Mitel collaboration – voice/data hot desking via card…
Continue Reading: YouTube video shows the Sun / Mitel collaboration – voice/data hot desking via card…One of the many cool things I’ve been hoping to find the cycles to write about coming out of Mitel Forum last week is the collaboration occurring between Mitel and Sun Microsystems. First announced June 19th, there are really two components to the collaboration: 1) the Multi-Instance Call Server (MICS) that can have up to 200 instances of our 3300 ICP call control software running on a Sun server; and 2) a very cool integration of a SunRay thin client computer into the base of one of our phones. With the phones, a user can simply insert their “Java card” into the base of the phone and the user is automagically signed onto the computer and to the phone. Pull the card out, the user is logged out. Insert another user’s card and the computer and the phone are logged in as that user. It takes the “hot desking” we’ve had for years and extends that to now also include the PC. As I said, it’s very cool!
The good news is that I can actually share a bit of the experience with you courtesy of Sun blogger Craig Bender, a.k.a. the “Thin Guy”, who writes the Sun Ray Blog. I…
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Google acquires GrandCentral… and enters further into the PSTN side of telecommunications
Continue Reading: Google acquires GrandCentral… and enters further into the PSTN side of telecommunicationsNews breaking out today is that Google has acquired GrandCentral for something around $50 million. GrandCentral is a service that gives you one phone number that can ring multiple numbers, provide one common voicemail – and all sorts of the other features (see “howitworks” for a list of features). As the GrandCentral blog entry says:
We started GrandCentral because we wanted to create a service that puts users in control of their voice communications and not the other way around. As you have discovered, with GrandCentral you get all of your phone calls through just one number that never changes and you can link and ring up to six phones to ring when somebody calls you. But that’s just the start. You can set different rules for each caller (some ring all your phones, other can go straight to voicemail), create personal voicemail greetings for each of your callers, and even check your voicemail on the web with all of your messages in just one inbox. We’ll even save your messages for as long as you want.
I first learned of GrandCentral quite some time ago from Andy’s blog and subsequently heard GrandCentral CEO Craig Walker talk out…
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Bandwidth.com to supply SIP trunking to Mitel solution centers
Continue Reading: Bandwidth.com to supply SIP trunking to Mitel solution centersYesterday, Bandwidth.com announced that their SIP trunking service would be powering Mitel solution centers across the US. From the news release:
Bandwidth.com, a leading nationwide provider of complete business communications solutions, today announced that it will be powering all Mitel(R) Solution Centers across the country enabling customers and VARS to preview innovative solutions, including SIP Trunking technology in a live environment. Mitel operates solution centers in five locations; Chicago, Costa Mesa, Atlanta, New York and Herndon (Virginia), all of which will be equipped with Bandwidth.com’s SIP Trunking VoIP solution by the end of June.
There’s been a relationship between Bandwidth.com and Mitel since last September. This announcement yesterday is a logical evolution of that relationship.
There’s a lot to write about the incredibly disruptive power of SIP trunking… I don’t think we yet fully understand how the power to obtain SIP trunks from anywhere in the world is going to so severely disrupt the global telecommunications infrastructure. With IP, geography no longer matters… and there are all sorts of local carriers – and tax authorities! – who I don’t think fully understand how much this messes up their business models. I really need to write that up……..
Two…
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ShoreTel joins the VoIP IPO game…
Continue Reading: ShoreTel joins the VoIP IPO game…Per Russell Shaw, ShoreTel has filed it’s paperwork for an IPO. Reuters also has the story.[1] Ken Camp also provides his opinion. I’m sure that more will be written in the time ahead. ShoreTel is one of the many newer entrants into the enterprise VoIP market and have been doing some interesting things (and yes, in the spirit of full disclosure, they do potentially compete in some areas with my employer, Mitel). Kudos to them for getting things together to go for the IPO. It will be interesting to see how that moves forward – best wishes to them all.
[1] Side note: It’s interesting to me to see that the Reuters story about ShoreTel IPO filing in the US was actually filed by a reporter in Bangalore, India at 6:54am. At that time most North American reporters were probably only getting going.
Technorati tags: shoretel, voip -
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Heading out to Arizona for US DoD/JITC conference on telecommunications
Continue Reading: Heading out to Arizona for US DoD/JITC conference on telecommunicationsIn a few short hours, I will be catching a plane heading out to Fort Huachuca, Arizona, to swim in an alphabet soup of very different acronyms and jargon than my normal work – the “OSD-Sponsored, JITC-Hosted DOD Telecommunications Services Information Conference“. As noted on the page:
The purpose of the conference is to provide an open forum where DOD and vendor representatives can discuss issues related to interoperability of systems providing DOD Telecommunications Switched Services.
The conference will present the current program and discuss ongoing developments to the interoperability certification and information assurance procedures and test documentation. Other topics for discussion include emerging technologies, standards and their integration into the systems providing DOD Telecommunications Services.
I attended last year as well and it’s definitely an interesting experience. The US DoD is really doing some intriguing things with how they make use of VoIP / IP Telephony. Obviously security is rather important. They are also driving IPv6 adoption into their infrastructure and so, with the June 2008 mandate only a year away, it will be quite interesting to hear where they are with regard to IPv6 adoption. Obviously, their huge size and buying power is of strong…
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Mitel announces $723 million agreement to buy Inter-Tel
Continue Reading: Mitel announces $723 million agreement to buy Inter-TelYesterday after the close of the market, my employer, Mitel, announced an agreement to acquire Inter-Tel. There’s not much I can say beyond what’s in the news release… but I can say that I am quite excited by the news!
Technorati tags: mitel, inter-tel, telcommunications, voip
