Via the VAR Guy, VOIP blogger Garret Smith talks about the apparent slowing of growth in the VOIP market. Smith discusses residential and business, which are very different animals, but appears to see slowing growth in both markets. This notion of a softening market, at least in North America, also emerges from a just-released study by the market researchers at Infonetics.
Here's the PDF of Blair's and Nancy's report on UC productivity (they'll be discussing that report during our webinar next Wednesday). Mostly what I think the report does is provide empirical data points to back up what most people have thought they knew all along about how users would use UC.
By now we've all heard about--or possibly experienced--the benefits of Unified Communications: Improved responsiveness, reduced costs, increased revenues, enhanced customer satisfaction, etc. Nancy Jamison and I recently interviewed end users to determine how and if UC is helping them be more productive and effective at their jobs, and while the interviews produced results we were expecting, it also uncovered hidden UC benefits, results that we weren't expecting.
I just got a demo of some of the new aspects of ShoreTel's recently-announced ShoreTel 8.0 release (announcement here). What's cool about the cool stuff in this product is the regard it has for the communications environment that customers actually operate in today.
No one really likes to discuss what-if scenarios unless of course you work for some underground agency or security firm or are one of those earning a buck to see the dark side of IT and peer into the inner workings of everything vulnerable.
A Review of Webster’s New World Telecom Dictionary by Ray Horak
Many folks who entered the telecom trade during the 1980s and the go-go years of the 1990s came to rely on Newton’s Telecom Dictionary, from long-time BCR columnist Harry Newton, as their guide to the wild and wooly world of telecom.
This post was written by Jason Alley, lead consultant at Vanguard Communications.
After reading C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, I began to wonder if like correspondence existed that had to do with IP Contact Centers. After a long and arduous search, such writings fell unexpectedly into my hands. While I take no responsibility for the content, I thought it important to publish the letters to help equip the contact center market to combat the devilish schemes revealed.
Cisco made a major announcement today regarding their Mobile Services Architecture, and it represents a significant development in the wireless LAN market. Dubbed Cisco Motion, this multi-faceted announcement introduces both a product and a platform for the development of wireless communications-enabled business processes (CEBP).
I've been writing and thinking a lot recently about interoperability, and about the widespread expectation within the enterprise communications industry that real-time communications will move toward software-based architectures. That migration certainly is under way, and it's inevitable that, as voice and video traffic ride on IP networks, applications using voice and video will function in a fashion similar to "data" applications.
Some direct responses to my reply about the status of TDM generated some important points made by readers and another publisher. After recently attending a boot-camp training session, I collected a few comments from that group comprising 16 members from large-enterprise including two others from SMB/E.
Understanding how to calculate bandwidth requirements for a converged WAN link requires an understanding of the traffic we are trying to converge. If we were just calculating water flow through a pipe we could add the demands of each appliance that needs water and determine the size of the pipe. But the two types of network traffic we are converging have very different characteristics, and this needs to be taken into account if we want to deliver good performance for both types of traffic. IT teams understand data traffic well because they have supported it for a long time. But real-time traffic is different.
We've posted a new feature on interoperability here. One of the annoying features of our web design is that we don't (yet) have the ability to leave comments directly on the Features in the right-hand column. So feel free to use this blog post as the place to comment on the feature.
Cable ISPs, although they appear to deny these allegations, were found to be blocking peer-to-peer trafic like BitTorrent. The Max Planck Institute for Software Systems report, “Glasnost: Results from tests for BitTorrent traffic blocking” differs from the cable company’s press releases. Comcast and Cox, the cable companies, were at the top of their list of blocking ISPs. None of the DSL ISPs were found to be blocking traffic.
I’ve been spending a little time coming up to speed with Aastra lately. You may recall that the company just closed on its acquisition of Ericsson’s enterprise business. It was the latest in a string of M&A activity that brought DeTeWe, the PBX businesses of Ascom and EADS, and some of Nortel’s European operations into the fold. Also in the mix is Intecom, the PBX developer that continues to market itself as Aastra Intecom; Intecom had been acquired by EADS and was part of its PBX division.
We asked that simple question in yesterday's VoiceCon webinar, allowing the audience respondents to decide for themselves what UC meant and was going to entail in their enterprise. The question--whatever UC will be in your company, is your IT organization ready for it? The answer, based on 97 responses: 60% said no. To me, that almost seemed low, given how nascent a technology UC is, and how sparsely deployed. In fact, according to data presented by one of the webinar speakers, Sandra Palumbo of Yankee Group, many companies are still learning about IP telephony.
Via the Newark Star-Ledger, Avaya is laying off 400 people, after also eliminating 600 positions via attrition since the start of the year. Earlier this year, Nortel and Siemens had both announced layoffs of more than 2,000 workers each.
I caught up with Chris Formant, president of Avaya Global Services, to get his perspective on HP's planned $13 billion-plus acquisition of EDS. I particularly wanted to get Chris's view because he goes back a long ways in the consulting business, and it turns out he was at PWC back when HP was trying to acquire that company (which wound up going to IBM) in 2002. Chris is very bullish on the HP-EDS deal.
We’ve had several No Jitter posts and also VoiceCon webinars that touched on the issue of managed and hosted services for IP telephony and Unified Communications, and the upshot seems to be that enterprises will consider some level of managed service, but probably aren’t yet at the point that they’ll dive into a service provider-hosted solution as a fully-outsourced way to deliver real-time communications.
When a new technology or application of a technology surfaces, there are usually many books published about the technology and how it works. Less frequently, there a books that do not tell you how to build the technology, but inform you how to operate and administer the technology. The latter case is Mike Finneran’s new book “Voice over WLANs, The Complete Guide”, published by Newnes, an imprint of Elsevier (Amazon link here). This is NOT a book for the hardware/software designer.
In my adventures to find more about power generation, storage and transfer, the folks over at DOE gave me some great resources in addition to their Energy Star site:
We've posted a new feature over in the right-hand column; it's Allan Sulkin's review and analysis of his RFP workshop from VoiceCon Orlando 2008. It's so chock-full of detail on the 10 participating vendors' offers that we hand to break it into two parts. You can get the original RFP document here. Enjoy.
We've just posted our latest podcast, an interview with Chris Thompson, senior director of solutions marketing at Cisco. Chris and I discussed Telepresence, the economy and the role of Unified Communications in the enterprise.
There are a few network situations where QoS appears to be set up correctly, and yet packet loss still occurs. These situations can be mystifying for those who don’t understand the behavior of the priority queuing mechanisms. Let’s take a look at some of these situations and the right approaches to ensure queuing works properly to give us low packet loss for voice and video.
There doesn’t seem to be much doubt that the concepts of “software as a service” and “cloud computing” and network applications are all on a roll. There also seems to be at least some chance that the economic angst we’re experiencing could make any form of outsourcing seem very attractive. All of this could add up to a kind of perfect application storm, and this would of course create a pretty significant impact on the whole enterprise IT organization and its mission. What has to be done to prepare?
Last week, Interactive Intelligence made some exciting product announcements and fellow-blogger Nancy Jamison has already skillfully covered those related to Customer Feedback Management. The other major piece of the story centers on integration with Microsoft Office Communications Server. Interactive Intelligence joins a field already populated with the contact center solutions of Nortel, Aspect Software and Mitel (and others?) but adds an aggressive edge to their story that reminds one of David and Goliath.
AT&T claims that the Internet will run out of bandwidth by 2010 and thus their massive investments in deploying new infrastructure to handle new demands. Then, the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems reveals in their study that Cox and eleven other ISPs are blocking BitTorrent traffic during all times of the day. Gary Audin recently wrote about the biggest source of security threats in the world being from the U.S. Then, we’ve heard again about the Chinese government’s deployment of very deep-inspecting firewall technology (Great Wall of China Exploit) embedded in the routers from Cisco, so users can be blocked or censored.
UCStrategies.com’s first annual UC Summit was a big hit – with resellers, system integrators, consultants, and vendors gathered together in a heavenly resort in Scottsdale for 2 ½ days of networking and education (and even relaxing in the sun for a little bit). Aimed at helping resellers/SI’s and consultants better understand some of the issues and trends in the UC world, and to help forge better relations between and among consultants, resellers, and vendors, the UC Summit certainly met its goals.
This post was written by Fred Knight, GM of No Jitter and VoiceCon.
We hear much about how Unified Communications will trigger massive changes in the enterprise communications markets and how it how it will be used to redesign and recreate business processes. But for that to happen, some changes have to be made in trenches of telecom/IT organizations--specifically the tools that are used when acquiring UC and related communications products and services.
Vampire Loads are also known as Phantom loads that are caused by equipment that while turned off, still draw current that you are paying for. A few months ago we put to task measuring and documenting our internal phantom loads- an inventory of our gear to determine what energy savings we could identify and then achieve.
This guest post was written by Peter Brockmann, President of Brockmann & Company, a high tech marketing consulting company.
Telepresence has really improved the video communications experience. High definition (HD) video conferencing has really improved the video communications experience. The life-sized, blur-free and crystal clear presentation of remote meeting participants, the directionally-synchronized artifact-free audio quality, excellent and flattering lighting placement, the clever mind-tricks of the curved furniture and simple session engagement mechanisms all make for an awesome, technology-transparent business meeting.
We've written a fair amount this year around the topic of operational expenses (opex) of IP Telephony. I say written "around" the topic because we've mostly discussed whether the potential for opex savings could be what's driving the market to continue investing in IPT despite the overall economic slowdown. But we haven't really taken a systematic look at the opex picture. That's why I was so glad to get Robin Gareiss of Nemertes Research on a VoiceCon webinar on this topic (go here to get the replay, and here for the archive of recent webinars).
This could be big news in Unified Communications: HP is acquiring EDS at a cost of almost $14 billion.
This post was written by Jason Alley, lead consultant at Vanguard Communications.
We see end user companies continuing to streamline investments in communications technology and vendor relationships. This often manifests itself in the form of a decision to standardize on an enterprise communications suite, including a common IP PBX/ACD infrastructure. On the other hand, we also see contact center management (often referred to as “the Business”) defending their territory, or staking new claims, by investing in a standalone contact center suite to liberate themselves from the rest of the enterprise.
Some large enterprise executives, staff, and economists are among those who doubt that implementing energy efficient network and telephony gear today will have a positive benefit. A theory that came alive during the oil crisis of the 1970s known as the Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate that states, “reductions in energy intensity of output that are not damaging to the economy are associated with increases, not decreases, in energy demand.” This theory goes on to state that “improvements in energy efficiency lead to ever and ever-greater levels of energy usage.”
In a triple announcement this week, Interactive Intelligence scored a hit on three fronts, adding survey functionality and speech analytics to the contact center, and integration with Microsoft OCS. Today, I’m going to focus on the first two as they are what had me nodding in agreement when I was briefed on them. They also, unlike the OCS integration, fall under the umbrella of what Interactive Intelligence is calling Customer Feedback Management.
We had a fantastic webinar last week in which we basically turned the hour over to Robin Gareiss of Nemertes Research, who delivered a really useful talk on opex in IP telephony (watch it here). I'll post this week's VoiceCon eNews here tomorrow, in which I discuss Robin's main findings. In the meantime, some side points were noteworthy.
Cisco today announced its next iteration of telepresence, moving both up and down in scale from its initial table-based system. As you can see in the photos with the release, the new designs are "personal", i.e., one-to-one; and double-rows for bigger groups.
Back in the early 80’s before adoption of any Category-X standards for wiring, we were faced with a decision that couldn’t wait. At the time, we spoke with and visited AT&T (Atlanta Works Wire Division) Dupont, Belden, and Mowhawk Cable companies. The decision to begin the cabling project was pending as was the effort to begin selection of a product for the cable plant. We were about to wire a national landmark and everyone agreed it needed to last.
In my postings I have addressed a series of the design issues associated with deploying QoS and getting clean voice or video traffic across the IP network. I lump those topics into the ‘design’ category, meaning that you structure the network according to those principals (classification, forwarding behavior, bandwith demand and management, etc). But many of us have a set of problems in the network I call ‘implementation problems’ which are basically bugs that go unnoticed until we introduce real-time traffic.
WebMessenger, announced WebMessenger Mobile for Microsoft OCS, enabling enterprises to extend their investments in the Microsoft UC platform out to BlackBerry and other mobile devices. WebMessenger provides mobile real-time presence, IM, VoIP, and collaboration products for enterprises and mobile professionals. It also targets persistent group chat users who have alerts set up so they can act on new information or requests quickly and efficiently, and it provides other communications management solutions. For example, the company developed Message Alerts Enterprise Edition in conjunction with a large and very well-known financial services firm, using rules to trigger alerts and notify users when they get an important message or messages with specific words, for example.
Individual user productivity is to Unified Communications as VisiCalc was to personal computing. VisiCalc, of course, was one the first software programs that enabled individuals to harness a PC to accomplish a task--to create and calculate spreadsheets. Everyone who needed to do these sorts of calculations immediately understood the benefit once they saw it in operation.
One of our favorite network troubleshooting gurus, Terry Slattery, has put together a very cool-looking network diagram showing the 25 Biggest Network Problems. Not surprisingly, virtually all of them are either directly or indirectly relevant to real-time/voice traffic. I talked with Terry about some of the high- (or low-) lights.
One last observation to wrap up my musings on the Microsoft-Aspect alliance. Tucked into the press release announcing the whole shebang was this curious line:
At Interop last week, I had a chance to sit down with Manfred Arndt, who's Distinguished Technologist with HP ProCurve Networking, which has been aggressively going after market share in the switch/routing business. Manfred is co-author of a standard that's going to be increasingly important as enterprises deploy IP telephony and unified communications: Link Layer Discovery Protocol-Media Endpoint Discovery, or LLDP-MED, which is standardized as ANSI/TIA-1057-2006.
The never-ending saga that is WiMAX has thrown us yet another surprise.This morning’s papers bring news that Sprint and Clearwire will be combining (or “re-combining”) their WiMAX offerings still using the name Xohm. The combined company will take Clearwire’s name , though it will be headed up by Sprint’s CTO and long-time WiMAX booster, Barry West. More importantly, Comcast, Intel, Time Warner Cable, Google, Bright House Networks, and Trilogy Equity Partners will jointly invest $3.2 billion in the new venture. The investments still falls far short of what will be needed to deploy ubiquitous nationwide coverage, and the target deployment date for the first major rollout has slipped from 2008 to 2010.
If you're in a conference session, and an Ethernet switch vendor tells you to use 10/100 instead of Gigabit wherever you can, you must be in a session on Green IT.
The WAN optimizer is hardware designed to reduce bandwidth consumption. WAN optimizers are designed for TCP traffic, which dominates the IP network. TCP traffic has a lot of redundancy and can be compressed; it does not have the network performance requirements of VoIP traffic.
During last week’s Interop convention in Las Vegas, Cisco and Nokia announced a number of trials for their mobile unified communications solution, but the news included little in the way of new capabilities. The problem is that while most of the other fixed mobile convergence (FMC) solutions on the market can deliver an automatic hand-off; Cisco still must depend on the user to manually transfer the call. That automatic hand-off function is critical, because without it, there is no way of ensuring the users’ calls are being sent over the less costly WLAN option when they are within range.
Over the last two months or so we’ve had the opportunity to interview about 100 IT executives from end-user organizations of varying size and scope about their organization’s approach to unified communications. We’re asking IT executives about their UC plans, experiences, business drivers, and concerns. In most interviews one key concern emerges: Interoperability.
Here's a WSJ blog that says, among other things, that IT datacenters are responsible for half as much pollution as the airline industry. Green was a big topic at Interop last week, and I'll have more on it in tomorrow's VoiceCon eNews, which will be posted here as well. But for now, some random facts and comments.
At Interop last week, I heard a variation on Marty Parker's taxonomy of IT/communications organizational structures that I blogged about recently.
Response Point is Microsoft’s software based IP PBX. Its initial offering is for the S in SMB. It does not fit the medium and large enterprise location, but could satisfy the requirement of the small office of 5 to 50 phones. The retail branch, insurance office and remote government offices are all candidates, if the organization does not plan to interconnect these offices by an IP or legacy T1 network. In some companies, the remote offices are locally managed and independent, making them candidates for a key system replacement. Response Point may satisfy these situations.
Header compression is always mentioned in the same breath as QoS when we discuss supporting voice on an IP network. But it is not about QoS, it is about reducing bandwidth consumption. Header compression is most important on the WAN because that is where bandwidth is constrained and expensive. Let’s take a look at why header compression helps for voice.
Whenever economic issues threaten budgets, management looks at outsourcing to cover budget shortfalls. Networking in the US has long been dependent on in-house technology while in Europe, managed services have dominated. Given this, US executives are already looking harder at managed services, and network operators here are expanding their programs. The question is whether managed services are a good idea, and if so, where optimum value could be obtained.
The UCStrategies.com team has been differentiating between the two types of Unified Communications: UC User Productivity (UC-UP) and UC Business Process (UC BP).
What's another word for "features," as in "PBX features" (the infamous list of 500-800)? Well, the word that one of the audience questioners used in my SIP session this morning was: Value. As in, "People I talk to are concerned about the danger of losing value in the system" if they migrate to a SIP-based system that provides fewer functions.
Of course: "Functions" = "Value"
NoJitter reader Kevin noted that Aspect is by no means the first to integrate Microsoft Live/Office Communications Server with its contact center solution. Mitel has in fact been doing this for a while. It’s a great point, so I spoke with both Mitel and Aspect about what contact center integration with OCS means to them.
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VoiceCon makes its European debut 14-16 October, 2008, with Johan Krebbers of Shell keynoting. More information HERE
IT should encourage user's implementation of Web 2.0 technologies, and look for ways to integrate with Mobile UC. READ MORE »
The PBX is not dead. But it is on an evolutionary path towards a new incarnation: Federated Communications System or FCS READ MORE »
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