ALLAN SULKIN
President, TEQConsult Group
Allan Sulkin, president and founder of TEQConsult Group (1986), is widely recognized as the industry's foremost enterprise communications market/product analyst. He is celebrating 30 years telecommunications market experience this month and has consulted for many of the industry’s leading vendors participating at VoiceCon. Sulkin has been a long time Contributing Editor to Business Communications Review and its current online incarnation No Jitter, and has served as a Program Director and featured tutorial/seminar presenter for VoiceCon since its 1991 inception. Sulkin is the author of PBX Systems for IP Telephony (McGraw-Hill Professional Publications) and writer of the PBX chapter in the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology.
Blog Entries by Allan Sulkin
Whatever term is used, I bet it will not last as long as PBX did, because the life span of today's products and naming conventions are shrinking at an accelerating rate.
The new release of the IP Office system is part of Avaya's SME roadmap strategy to converge its product lines, including its Partner platform, and reduce the number of SME product offerings.
Supporting a mix of communications and third party non-communications software applications is what makes the new Mitel offering unique from previous implementations of virtualization.
Shipments of its OpenScape platform are beginning to take off substantially for both voice and UC/messaging licenses
Home or business, Cisco plans to be the leading video communications market player.
Google touts "an exemplar of what's possible on mobile devices through Android--when cool apps meet a fast, bright and connected computer that fits in your pocket."
The primary reason for a near term IPO is that the company needs the money sooner than later.
The merged entities will have annual revenues of about $5.5 billion, an industry leading total, with strong financial ratios.
How does one have any sense of market revenues if one or more of the tracked products are often used in isolation of others, i.e. "non-UC" situations?
If you would like to see more attention paid to the Small Business market on No Jitter or at VoiceCon please comment below.
Every dollar of revenue Cisco earns on voice communications pulls through an additional $3 in network infrastructure revenue.
The Nortel Federal operation is larger in size and scope than Avaya's, so it makes sense to retain Hackney.
Akhavan will have a lot of tangible and intangible assets to build on when he assumes his new position early next year.
From virtualization to holographic displays.
As we begin the second decade of the century, it is beneficial to remember that SIP has been among us for many years, as have other now hot topics such as Cloud Computing and virtualization
Major developments may be ahead for open source software and for Huawei Technologies.
I will be covering several topics of interest during my talk, but perhaps the most important will be how the competitive landscape is evolving
It is in multi-vendor environment that the capabilities of Session Manager are required to disable boundaries between disparate systems.
One large financial services company saw the payback period shrink from 30 months to fewer than 13 months.
For the second straight quarter, total market shipments have increased, following two quarters of substantially declining shipments.
In a crowded market with intense competition it now takes a lot to capture mind share, and Cisco was already starting with a significant amount when it decided that more was needed.
It sometimes seems the whole world is transforming into an IT ecosystem, and that may or not be a good thing.
Logitech's decision to move into a business systems market, and compete with the likes of Cisco and HP, is somewhat surprising, but not without logic.
When the future of the desktop telephone instrument is in question, leading telephony system suppliers continue to announce new models for existing product lines and/or newer generation models.
"Communications & Collaboration" ought to replace the hackneyed term "Unified Communications," because it far better describes how people interact and work with each other.
It will be up to Avaya/Nortel to convince customers that traditional telephony requirements should not be comprised and must be evaluated on its own as a best in class basis, not as a single element of many.
More virtualization announcements from enterprise communications system suppliers are on the horizon.
UC is selling today in bits and pieces, not the whole enchilada.
The $2.9 billion deal is a signal that Cisco believes that smart phones will play an increasing role in the delivery of data and information to mobile consumers and workers, especially in the form of video.
The new Avaya mid-size market solution requires far fewer hardware servers than most competitive offerings.
If they continue to enjoy revenue and profit growth they may not be able to fly under the radar of their larger competitors much longer.
Now is the time NEC must boost its presence among enterprise-level customers.
Positive responses to the acquisition outnumbered negative responses by several percentage points, but trailed neutral responses.
The Tandberg acquisition perfectly positions Cisco at the desktop and relatively inexpensive room solutions, with Polycom as its primary competition.
Most, if not all, consultants left the meeting with a more favorable impression of Microsoft's chance of success.
If Avaya can keep transition costs down, and do it quickly, the Nortel buy could be a bargain. But will Silver Lake and TPG ever recover their original purchase cost of about $9 billion for Avaya and Nortel?
Now that Avaya has won the auction of Nortel Enterprise Solutions for $900 million, some of the important questions and issues about the future fate of the acquired company include:...
The more knowledgeable a consultant is about a particular vendor's offerings, the better they will support you in your employ.
If Avaya were to acquire Nortel the combined Enterprise segment market share would be at least 35% and as high as 50%.
The final cost to Avaya for acquiring Nortel ES, even assuming its current bid of $475 million is the winner, will easily top more than $1 billion.
The NetLink Partnership is a positive step in the right direction to address Siemens' problems in North American distribution.
There could certainly be more synergy between Avaya and Skype than EBay and Skype exhibited.
There is a saying that the only two things in life you can count on are death and taxes, and Nortel is now experiencing both big-time.
At a time when virtually every PBX system being shipped and installed is either designed for IP telephony (most systems) or is IP-capable, the terms IP-PBX or IP telephony system are redundant.
Imagine how large Nortel losses would have been if they didn’t have such well-paid board members.
The developer says that it will focus on platform design, software and cloud applications.
if Dell wants to compete head-on against competitors such as Apple and RIM, a successful outcome is very far from certain.
Software can make for a potentially high margin sale, but if necessary it can be used as the primary sales incentive to sell the system.
Each of the three market leaders--Cisco Systems, Avaya, and Nortel--reported increases of at least 10%.
Quarterly revenues increased by 4% sequentially over the previous quarter, and fiscal 2009 revenues were $135 million, up 5% over last year's revenues of $129.0 million.
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