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I am in the process of “transferring the flag” from wordpress.com to my own site at http://dougonipcomm.com. As much as I like the ease of use for WordPress.com blog hosting, I can do more in terms of customization and monetization if I’m on a stand-alone site.
If you are a frequent visitor, redo your bookmark now. At somepoint i”m going to take everything down from this location except a pointer to the new site.
Glendale, AZ & Washington DC – Pictures from Thursday’s keynotes at AstriCon 2009.
IBM CTO Mike Smith talks all about Digium’s role as an ISV on IBM’s Smart Cube program. Companies with Smart Cube can pull down Asterisk from IBM’s online Smart Business marketplace.
Digium CEO Danny Windham recapping 2009 in terms of challenges and opportunities. Windham said that in the budget squeezes of the past year, companies have looked to open source as a more economical and cost-effective means of doing business — good stuff for Asterisk and other open source companies.
And what’s AstriCon without Steve Sokol? Steve founded AstriCon 6 years ago and got the shows — and himself — bought by Digium.
Glendale, AZ & Washington DC – Pictures from AstriCon 2009 on Wednesday October 14, 2009.
Keynote audience at AstriCon 2009
It was a full ballroom for both days of keynotes.
Allworx founder Jeff Szczepanski at AstriCon 2009
You run into a lot of interesting people in the hallways of AstriCon — like the founder of Allworx.
Google Chris DiBona keynote at AstriCon 2009
Chris DiBona delivers the Wednesday morning keynote, talking up all kinds of goodness about open source software. You need stats on open source downloads and popularity? He’s got ‘em.
Digium's John Todd showing off his shirt at AstriCon 2009
John Todd shows off his newest tie-dye shirt. He gets them custom made, only going to show there’s no accounting for taste.
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Glendale AZ & Washington DC – As Digium celebrated the 10th anniversary of the Asterisk IP telephony platform this week at the AstriCon developer’s conference with cake and funny hats, this year’s keynote presentation by IBM CTO Mike Smith drifted into the mundane and dull — a very good thing.
Smith, brought in to talk about Digium’s role as an ISV (independent software vendor) in IBM’s Smart Cube platform/Smart Business program, put up a series of slides and descriptions for IBM’s ISV certification process to warm the heart of any nervous SMB IT work thinking about purchasing Asterisk for a Smart Cube server through IBM’s online applications store.
Since IBM services as the single point of contact or — as Smith described it – “the single throat to choke” — for technical support on the Smart Cube, Digium had to adjust and code and jump through a number of hoops so a commercial version of Asterisk would be available through Big Blue.
Net-net of the qualification process is a product that IBM is comfortable offering. It may be dull, but this is a good thing since IBM’s process and attention to detail is the sort of thing that will give warm fuzzies to anyone prone to buy IBM servers for their business — fuzzies that extend to the purchase of Asterisk as an IP PBX solution loaded on the Smart Cube Server.
This is a Good Thing. It isn’t PR sexy like the whole Skype for Asterisk announcement last year (and BTW, we know where those Skype folks are these days), but it is another solid step in moving Asterisk into the corporate mainstream.
IBM is also providing another channel for Digium to distribute Asterisk and channel partners who sell the Smart Cube solution now get a chance to provide a PBX along with a data server — plus making some money in providing handsets and configuring a phone system for their customers. Again, contrast the potential here for Digium to grow its business through (dull but trusted) IBM and its channel partners verses last year’s talk from Skype to A) Develop a business strategy B) Find and train channel partners and C) Ultimately make money by recurring revenue on SkypeOut minutes sold…
(FYI, Skype was talking up love of channels and the Skype partner program about a month ago in Miami, but that’s what they were talking about last year at AstriCon 2008 and at CES 2009… so what’s the hold up?)
Net-net: IBM may not be exciting and flashy, but for most buyers, this is a Very Good Thing indeed.
Having bought up every other VoIP apps company it could get its hands on, BroadSoft is in the process of acquiring privately-held QoS monitoring firm Packet Island. Hmmm…
BroadSoft says the acquisition is being made to address “the critical need” for ensuring QoS and QoE (quality of experience) for real-time (i.e. phone and video) communications. The company gets an expanded portfolio to offer its existing (large, over 450 service providers) customer base of carriers, so service providers in turn can offer enhanced QoS assessments and monitoring of services and deploy VoIP and video services with guaranteed end-to-end carrier-grade service delivery.
Packet Island’s solutions offer lifecycle management for QoS/QoE, so you run them before deploying VoIP and video, do the deployment and run them to establish a baseline, then monitor and reassess (i.e. recurring revenue) on a periodic basis. There’s also the usual troubleshooting tools for pinpointing problems and some buzzwords throw in about “cloud” monitoring and DPI technology.
Terms of the deal were, of course, not announced between the two companies, but BroadSoft says it is keeping all Packet Island employees while Packet Island founder and CEO Praveen Kumar will be parked,er assume the role of BroadSoft’s chief Technologist if I’m interpreting the press release correctly.
Hmm….
OK, so BroadSoft gets a set of products and services (services = recurring revenue good) to offer its universe of carriers, but this is a couple of steps out of the company’s traditional VoIP application server space. Of course, BroadSoft has bought up pretty much all the other VoIP application server players (Sylantro, GENBAND), so it has to do something to continue to grow. It would be interesting to know the terms of the deal, since BroadSoft acquired Sylantro at a firesale price (stock swap, assumption of debt). If BroadSoft paid out cash, that would have been one indicator (i.e. generating cash so they can go buy firms). If it is a stock delay, that’s another indicator.
Regardless, it appears BroadSoft is starting to expand its taste for acquisitions so don’t be surprised to see a couple of more deals go down in the months to come.
AT&T, trying to avoid a FCC dope-slapping, announced that yes, it would allow Skype to make lower cost phone calls on the iPhone. Interestingly, this comes on the heels of Vonage’s iPhone client last week. Regardless of the outcome, don’t expect AT&T to rollover and play dead when it comes to net neutrality.
Allowing Skype and other mobile VoIP apps on iPhone to dial up phone calls on its 3G data network was in some respects inevitable. Pressure from both the FCC and Congress and a Democratic administration (Note to the Republican Party: You know where to get funding for 2010 and 2012, right?), meant either having a long, drag-out, dog-ugly PR fight with enough media floggings on how poor the AT&T’s 3G network already delivered — not exactly a winner when Verizon is looking to spin up LTE ASAP and the exclusives on the iPhone may be going away. Best to simply bite the bullet and keep the focus on more important battles.
Ironically, all those media complaints about poor iPhone/3G service will serve AT&T well when it has to go into FCC and Capital Hill hearings. “We need to have the ability to manage our network,” will cry AT&T executives, “Look at the problems we have now.” Will it quiet angry Congressmen? No. But expect Verizon to smile smugly on the panel.
There’s been a slew of announcements fluffing a second wave of anonymous-style phone calling via the web. Nobody made money on the first wave, so I’m not sure where the beef, er, green is the second time around.
Three and four years ago, it was all the rage to A) Give away free phone numbers for web usage and B) Provide anonymous phone calling between two parties over the web. Two and three years ago, smaller companies went into the tank while larger companies just ditched the idea of “free.”
Digitrad, making a big push at DEMOfall ’09, seems to be the latest of the guys marching down the old trampled path to doom, offering up a free “multimedia” phone number, a .tel domain name and “free call forwarding” and a flat fee to “free” dialing to locations around the globe.
If your business model is JUST providing voice via the browser, I can kinda sorta get it. C2Call (www.c2call.com) has got a Friendcaller.com app, but then it slips into the “Gee, you can also call phone number for only pennies (well, Euros) per minute” mode… which didn’t end well for very many of the Telecom 2.0/Phone 2.0 wave…
Vivox may have the most interesting play in the space, just having announced its beta launch in Facebook and using a wideband (but not G.722) codec for all of its logged minutes on SecondLife and multi-player games where part of the fun is talking smack in real-time.
Hmm, I’d love to leave short voice messages to certain people in “Mafia Wars”…
No sooner than the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) talked up formalizing Net Neutrality policy than did Verizon CTO Dick Lynch appear a week later and talked smack about metered bandwidth options. Hmm, could these items be related? Hmm…
In the past, Verizon lobbyists have left the option of a metered plan open, prefacing it with the thought of “We don’t need it since FiOS just slays cable company infrastructure.” The party line out of Verizon last week was “We can’t continue to grow the internet without passing along the cost to someone” and the idea floated about at the Fiber-to-The-Home conference was a tiered approach with people paying more for the amount of bandwidth they consume per month.
Currently, Verizon DSL and FiOS customers pay a flat rate per month for the speed they get delivered to their home, paying much more for the very highest tier of service than the entry level and mid-range speeds.
For those of us with gray hair, this isn’t the first time Verizon has invoked the idea of paying per byte. It has come up with dial-up and mobile broadband, so this not really “new. But the current crazy talk is Verizon’s way of signaling its discomfort with the FCC’s latest proposals.
One also might wash to consider the potential for anti-trust considerations if Verizon and the cable companies introduced tiered pricing at the same time net neutrality legislation came into the fore.
After plenty of foreshadowing statements on earnings conference calls, Vonage has released Vonage Mobile, a free downloadable application for low-cost international calling on smartphones. The app is said to provide “seamless” low-cost international calling while on Wi-Fi or cellular networks.
Vonage says the service will have custmers more than 50 percent on calls to “dozens” of counties as compared to rates charged by wireless carriers — and no calling cards required. Vonage Mobile will be available for download on the iPhone, iPod touch, and BlackBerry and features include the ability to use an existing contact list for click-and-dial, using the existing clel phone number for caller ID identification, and real time balance updates.
By the end of the year, Vonage says it will enhance the app to include the Vonage World plan initially intro’ed for home service in August, giving mobile customers to make unlimited calls to over 60 countries for one flat monthly fee.
While the concept of a mobile app to make long distance calls sounds “old,” Vonage is the largest independent carrier/ITSP to load up the concept and cooperation with Apple to make the app available through the Apple app store implies that Vonage has played nicely (i.e. maybe some sort of recurring revenue) with Apple.
Be interesting to hear the field reports once the app is more widely deployed.
Yesterday, Cisco announced it bought Tandberg for $3 billion. The deal effectively gives Cisco a video sales pipe into the enterprise boardroom. Speculation today is that Polycom might be next on the shopping list.
It’s an interesting premise, since purchasing Polycom would give Cisco an effective lock on the videoconferencing/telepresence market AND add some sizzle to Cisco’s enterprise desktop phone line. As of Friday morning trading, Polycom’s market cap is around $2.1 billion, so if you were to pay a 2x premium, that’s be a top end cap of $4.2 billion — pocket change for Cisco’s warchest.
But I don’t see it happening today, or tomorrow. Cisco needs to assimilate Tandberg first and, judging from the *ahem* way Linksys fits so neatly in with Cisco, the process is likely to take a while. If someone at the Department of Justice is awake, there also might be some anti-trust implications — Cisco suddenly grabbing up a large chunk of the IP phone market. It would likely make people uncomfortable.
Others are trying to spin the purchase of TANDBERG as a Good Thing for other nimble telepresence players in the market since it will take a while for Cisco to assimilate TANDBERG and the whole process may slow TANDBERG down in the marketplace. Not sure if I’m hip with this interpretation, since Cisco has a big marketing force, a big marketing presence, and is probably cutting a deal to do some product positioning for TANDBERG gear on “NCIS” or some other hot TV show.
