VOIP News

Having your cake and eating it too is how it think about this article in the San Francisco Chronicle with a quote from TMC’s Tom Keating and TMC friend Om Malik. Here is an excerpt: 

Tom Keating, chief technology officer for Internet Telephony Magazine, said he’s heard from a number of businesses that rely on Skype to keep workers in touch with each other as well as clients. He said the instant-messaging feature is particularly popular with users because it works around many company firewalls. Keating said the outage may be related to some maintenance work Skype completed Wednesday night. He said it’s unlikely the problem was caused by an outside attack from hackers. ”It’s very possible that the change they did with maintenance could have had some unanticipated cascade affect,” said Keating.  Technology blogger Om Malik said the failure may reveal some weaknesses in the peer-to-peer technology on which Skype relies. Normally, peer-to-peer systems work to route traffic around problems, ensuring a consistent connection.  ”Venture capitalists who have been funding (peer-to-peer) services should take this as an early warning on the fragility of the whole (peer-to-peer) ecosystem, where a small glitch can cause widespread problems,” Malik wrote Thursday on his blog GigaOm.

Tags: ip communications, om malik, p2p, san francisco chronicle, sfgate.com, Skype, tom keating, Voip

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You may recall yesterday that I wrote about Skype having problems. It seems most of the service is back to normal according to Skype’s Heartbeat Blog. Here is the latest blog post: 

As Europe has woken up to a new day and Asia is entering the evening hours, here’s the latest on the sign-on problem.

We’re on the road to recovery. Skype is stabilizing, but this process may continue throughout the day.An encouraging number of users can now use Skype once again. We know we’re not out of the woods yet, but we are in better shape now than we were yesterday.

Finally, we’d like to dispel a couple of theories that we are still hearing. Neither Wednesday’s planned maintenance of our web-based payment services nor any form of attack was related to the current sign-on issues in any way.

We’ll update you again as soon as we can. Thanks for hanging tight.

Tags: heartbeat, outage, problems, skype, tehrani, tmc

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Ken Kuenzel, Founder, VP Engineering and CTO for Covergence recently chatted with me about the impact of wireless technology, and the way in which SIP has changed communications, among other topics. Offering its customers “the edge in SIP”, Covergence specializes in a variety of communications solutions. Read this story on TMCnet to find out more about them. Please outline your new corporate initiatives.  One of the most exciting trends we are seeing in the market is the rise of voice and other real-time communications embedded into business applications. We had a number of customers that were using Eclipse, our next-generation session border controller, and wanted to add real-time capabilities into customer-facing applications to improve the customer experience and streamline complex customer interactions. We also had service providers who were looking to add new offerings to their portfolios. To address these business needs, Covergence has introduced the Covergence Policy Manager, a policy enforcement solution that allows developers to build real-time applications into existing architectures without writing complex codes and models. With this new solution, organizations can build session policy enforcement into applications quickly and easily. Designed to automate and simplify policy enforcement, the Covergence Policy Manager ensures that communication-enabled applications such as VoIP, video, presence and other forms of SIP-based real-time communications comply with security, regulatory, quality and other business measures. It is the first solution to allow developers to define and enforce real-time policy through familiar object interfaces. How is IP communications changing your company’s strategy?  Both enterprises and service providers are developing or extending applications that include real-time services to give users offerings that combine the best of wireless, wireline, and IP communications. This move beyond voice to real-time services has opened new markets for Covergence. As a company that architected its solutions to meet enterprise-grade security, quality and reliability measures, Covergence is uniquely positioned to help organizations secure, manage and control IP communications and the enhanced business processes it promises.  How has SIP changed communications?  By bringing together diverse applications, devices and communication processes, the Session Initiation Protocol is transforming the world of communications. The convergence of real-time applications including voice, video and other multimedia services is delivering a powerful new set of capabilities and features. By enabling unified communications, the Session Initiation Protocol is driving organizational cost reduction, revenue generation and productivity enhancement. As users demand networks that provide access to a new wave of real-time services, organizations are shifting away from simply building VoIP networks and giving access to basic services to finding ways to connect users to a broad range of services across different networks. In order to deliver these services securely and reliably, organizations must standardize on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and focus management and scaling practices along the access edge. What is the biggest request coming from your customer base?  We are definitely seeing a trend among our service provider customers of extending their services beyond VoIP to increase subscribers and create new sources of revenue. We call these “pre-IMS” deployments. A common pre-IMS theme that has emerged this past year is service providers using Eclipse to incorporate Microsoft’s Live Communications Server (LCS) into their offerings to add IM, presence, multimedia conferencing and other services to their existing VoIP offerings. Service providers also use Eclipse to offer LCS federation services to their customers, to enable broader use of IM and to enable the use of Office Communicator as a phone for “on-net” calling between federation partners. We are also seeing a rise in the number of organizations looking to embed real-time communications into business applications. We have customers that are now using Eclipse and its Web services interface to integrate voice capabilities into customer facing applications. For instance, one customer has integrated its CRM system into Eclipse so that its sales force can use the CRM system to initiate calls to connect with prospects. If a call is not answered, Eclipse delivers a pre-recorded voicemail to the prospect, and the sales rep can move onto the next prospect without losing time. We have other customers that have integrated Eclipse with their Call Center applications to route inbound service calls based on the logic contained in their Call Center applications. How are you answering their demands?  As organizations deploy communication-enabled applications, they are faced with a complex set of security, control, regulatory and business policy-enforcement challenges that require developers to invest an incredible amount of time learning new models or writing code. By introducing the Covergence Policy Manager, we have removed the complexity and are making real-time applications policy enforcement accessible to millions of developers instantly. The Covergence Policy Manager allows developers to deploy communication-enabled applications without investing an incredible amount of time learning new models or writing code. For the first time, it makes real-time applications policy enforcement accessible immediately and ensures that these applications meet industry compliance requirements.  What do you think the future of the market is? We are entering the next phase of the evolution of real-time communications. In this phase, multi-modal, IP-based real-time services reach all the way to end users, and these services will transform how we communicate and collaborate. Securitywill remain a big issue and even reach heightened levels of significance as enterprises start to get serious about the technology and look to make sure they have the systems in place to protect themselves properly. Participating in that transformation is tremendously exciting to our team. We gain a lot of satisfaction from building a solution that allows our customers to overcome complex problems to reach their business goals. How does the growth rate in the US compare to the rest of the world?  The market is evolving and all indicators point to growth in the United States, EMEA and Asia. In the US, consumer VoIP is on a growth track and the market is expecting to see an up-tick in the small-to-medium sized business (SMB) market. There is a tremendous amount of international activity in VoIP now, surpassing the activity in the US. The telecommunications market in Asia is the largest and fastest growing in the world. Unified Communications deployments are also anticipated to hit a new high within the US and abroad with the release of Microsoft’s OCS this year. What do you think of Google and Apple entering the telecom market? How about Microsoft?  It was simply a matter of time before the large companies entered this space. However, this is not necessarily a bad thing for other companies because smaller companies and start-ups are creating solutions that will augment the larger, broader offerings. To realize the potential for the unified communications market, larger companies such as Microsoft and Google will need to work with a wide range of industry partners, such as smaller vendors, to create best-of-breed solutions that work across networks and devices. A great example of this collaboration between large companies and start-ups is Covergence’s recent announcement with Interoute, a pan-European service provider. Interoute selected Covergence’s Eclipse Session Border Controller to enable its new clearinghouse service, which allows enterprises to connect their Microsoft LCS Server and its successor, Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 (OCS), to OCS/LCS deployments in other organizations securely and reliably. This means companies with LCS/OCS can communicate directly with other companies using all of the Microsoft Office Communicator functions to their full potential (IM, Video, Calls, presence). Interoute One is using Eclipse to secure VoIP, video, IM, presence and other real-time collaborative services based on Microsoft’s LCS/OCS in order to extend reliable unified communications beyond the walls of individual enterprises. How will wireless technologies change our market?  The wireless technology market is booming and will continue to grow as the industry moves forward. As more devices and applications become available, quality and security will remain the critical issues. By adopting standards and using solutions such as Eclipse that can provide a single point of security, monitoring, control and interoperability, wireless technologies will give providers and enterprises a new vehicle for growth and enhancement. How will communications evolve over the next five years?  We are entering the next phase of the evolution of real-time communications. Rich, multi-modal, IP-based real-time services are reaching all the way to end users and large corporations such as Google and Microsoft are extending full force into the IP space. Over the next five years, offerings will become increasingly intertwined so that real-time communications, business applications, web development, etc. will be deployed simultaneously from a single provider. Consumers may no longer have to go to several providers for varying business and communications-related services. Playing a role in this transformation is critical for Covergence and tremendously exciting. We look forward to introducing innovations that allow large providers to leverage our security and real-time session management offerings. We will continue to develop solutions that allow our customers to overcome complex business/communications problems because one of our primary concerns is customer satisfaction and meeting next-generation IP needs. What sort of things will we be hearing about during your presentation at ITEXPO?  I will be participating in three sessions at the conference: “FMC: Driving the Transition to IMS,” “Introduction to Security” and “Migration to IMS.” I am looking forward to discussing the intelligent evolution of provider infrastructure and how carriers can ready their networks for the future. Why is your presentation a “Can’t Miss?”  In order for the floodgates to open as far as VoIP and real-time adoption is concerned, providers need to address the chief concern of the market, which is security. In my sessions, I look forward to discussing the importance of standards and discussing how providers can mitigate next generation challenges and add revenue-generating services to their portfolios today.  What do you want the industry to know about your company?  At Covergence, we are focused on enabling the mass adoption of new and more effective forms of real-time communication and collaboration. Our goal is to give organizations the confidence and knowledge that their real-time communications platforms have the same security, reliability, performance and quality as their existing IP applications. Covergence is the creator of Eclipse, a series of next-generation session border controllers that combines traditional session-border-control functionality with comprehensive security features and management tools. Eclipse is purpose-built to securely and reliably connect users to VoIP and multi-media services while giving organizations the complete control and visibility they require.  Please make one surprising prediction we will see in 5 years My prediction is that you will see organizations begin to phase out PBX systems in favor of a unified communications platform that integrates VoIP with other forms of communications, including instant messaging, conferencing and e-mail. The next generation of office workers will interact with a rich set of presence-based real-time, multimedia services, both fixed and mobile. Voice will be one application in a rich, multimedia communications toolbox.



Tags: apple, collaborative services, Covergence, fmc, google, IM, ip communications, ip pbx, Ken Kuenzel, LCS, Microsoft, OCS, presence, real-time, SIP, video, voip

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Skype is out and the blogosphere is abuzz. I learned about the outage from TMCnet’s Tom Keating and now it seems both Andy Abramson and Irwin Lazar have written about the outage as well. I am actually surprised this outage didn’t happen sooner as Skype is just so popular that it should strain even the best infrastructure.



Tags: andy abramson, im, irwin lazar, presence, skype, tehrani, tmc, voip

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A keen eyed blog reader of mine pointed out American outsourcers could do well by taking jobs from the UK by taking the country’s call center work. This article published months ago by the BBC shows just how bad customer satisfaction is in the UK. In fact, just 4% of people have had a good experience when dealing with a call center, according to a recent survey by YouGov. Over half of those asked said their biggest gripe was having to contact call centers outside the UK and more than a third admitted to shouting and swearing at agents because they got so frustrated. On the bright side, at least agents in the US will be able to understand the profanity being directed at them.

Here is a long term update on my Tissot High-T watch which when working properly is a technological marvel. My original review which was quite favorable can be found here. While the watch is certainly state of the art… It does break often. Mine has broken twice in about eighteen months. The first time the watch took 2-3 months to repair and get back to me. The watch recently broke again and I am going through the same waiting period it seems. I have to deal with a dealer in New York who does not pick up the phone and a Tissot headquarters who seems to think customer service is only for other companies and doesn’t apply to customers shelling out hundreds of dollars for their watches. With all the talk about Swiss engineering, it is the Swiss customer service that is much more important to me than the precision of their timepieces. I don’t mind losing a few seconds a month on my watch. I do mind waiting months on the year for my Tissot watch to be fixed.



Tags: call center;high-t, clock, crm, damage, repair, swiss, tissot, watch

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I recently had the opportunity to speak with Ray Adensamer of RadiSys about the evolution of the IP communicationsspace, the company’s application-enabling platforms and more. RadiSys specializes s in developing open standards building blocks, especially in the ATCA and more recently MicroTCA spaces. To get some more background the company, read my recent blog entry detailing the company’s success.  Please outline your new corporate initiatives. RadiSys is a leading provider of application-enabling platforms for next-generation networks. Our Promentum ATCA (AdvancedTCA) family is built around the industry’s first fully integrated 10 Gigabit platform and modular building blocks, with the most recent family addition being our new high-density ATCA-9100 media resource blade. Through our 2006 acquisition of Convedia, RadiSys now also offers a comprehensive product family of Internet Protocol (IP) media server products and technology. Recent developments with the Convedia product family include our new Convedia Software Media Server, which runs on various Linux platforms–including the Promentum ATCA-4300 Compute Module. Our collaborative business approach and product portfolio helps our OEM, systems integrator, and solution provider customers save time-to-market and development costs for their IP product programs and network deployments.  How is IP communications changing your company’s strategy?  RadiSys is celebrating our 20th year of operations this year. While our early success came from supplying TDM-based boards and technology, our engineering teams embraced the trend towards IP-based telecommunications years ago, and our Promentum ATCA products are well positioned for a variety of datapath and control applications in the IP communications network. And our new Convedia media server family was a pure IP-based media processing platform right from the start!  How has SIP changed communications?  SIP has emerged as the defacto standard for signaling in the IP communications world. I can’t even think of any telecommunications equipment vendors who have not adopted SIP as a core element of their IP product strategy. The capabilities and flexibility of SIP are facilitating multi-vendor interoperability between IP communications vendors at a much deeper and broader application development level. What is the biggest request coming from your customer base? Our customers are the leading vendors of next-generation networking products and technology. They are continuously looking to accelerate the introduction of new products to market, while reducing risk and development costs. Our customers largely want to focus less on hardware platform development and focus more on value-added differentiation, such as application development, end-to-end solution integration, deployment, and even the ongoing network operation for their service provider customers. How are you answering their demands?  RadiSys has responded with standards-based application-enabling platforms that pre-integrate our hardware products with 3rd party operating systems, media processing, management, and high-availability software offerings. RadiSys is committed to being a leading supplier for a broader range of the telecommunications platform supply chain, so our customers can then accelerate their own application and solution development lifecycle, lower their R&D costs, and focus their resources on differentiated value-add activities.  What do you think the future of the market is? One can guess that eventually most communications will involve personalized video capabilities with speech-enabled control commands and ubiquitous presence, but unfortunately these changes will happen slowly due to many factors including pricing of last-mile broadband access, regulatory constraints, and interoperability issues (particularly multi-vendor interoperability between video components). RadiSys continues to forecast a growing demand for more processing power and capabilities in the core of the network to deliver these capabilities. We also envision a future where RadiSys may someday take full responsibility for all of the hardware and systems software for our customer’s network equipment product portfolio. How does the US growth rate in the US compare to the rest of the world?  RadiSys is a global company. While the US will continue to be the leaders in telecommunications technology innovation, we believe the regions outside the US, particularly China and other Asian countries, will continue to be the leaders in telecommunications technology adoption. What do you think of Google and Apple entering the telecom market? Google and Apple are both innovative companies which have and will continue to introduce fresh new ideas into next-generation communication services. However, my opinion is that they also view telecom as the conduit between their desktops and devices, and their centralized information, application, and media servers. It is important for incumbent telecommunication service providers to continue to leverage the ownership of their subscriber relationships. Through building open, yet secure service delivery architectures like IMS, service providers can provide the retail storefront for 3rd party application developers, and maintain ownership of the customer relationship through service bundling and customer service, instead of having these same application developers completely bypass the value-add of the network. How about Microsoft?  Microsoft’s entry into the telecommunications industry is also a good thing. Microsoft’s involvement in PCs and IT has benefited all users through ubiquitous, inexpensive, and standardized computing. We have no doubt that Microsoft has the capabilities and resources to deliver many innovations to telecommunication services as well. How will wireless technologies change our market? Mobility makes it easier for users to stay in touch and increase their overall usage of telecom services. Users have a huge pent-up demand for broadband mobility services, but continue to be price sensitive to the current cost of mobile broadband access. As the subscriber cost of mobile broadband decreases, adoption of mobile broadband services will grow dramatically. How will communications evolve over the next five years?  Telecommunication evolution over the next five years will not be as disruptive as the past five years of IP communications. Instead, vendors and service providers will focus on refining reliability, security, and interoperability around many of the services that are already envisioned and understood today. IMS, video, speech, and collaboration (including conferencing) will all continue to grow. We also expect to see more features wrapped around presence, such as presence-based conferencing. Progress will be made in some of the key challenges in IP communications technology, such as honoring quality of service (QoS) and SLAs across IP peer-network boundaries, VoIP security, and true multi-vendor video communication interoperability. ATCA will become a prominent platform standard within carrier networks, and the only unique telecom hardware being built will be for bleeding edge products that are pushing technology. What sorts of things will we be hearing about during your presentation at ITEXPO?  The industry continues to hear lots about convergence in the context of end-user experiences, such as service convergence or fixed/mobile convergence. While convergence from the user’s point of view is the key goal to improving telecommunications experiences, achieving operational efficiencies and cost savings requires convergence in the core service delivery architecture as well. RadiSys presentations at IT Expo will discuss the merits and benefits for converged, standards-based platforms and capabilities in IMS service delivery architectures. Why is your presentation a “Can’t Miss?” OEMs, systems integrators, and solution developers working on IP communication solutions will learn more about the strategies and benefits behind ATCA-based application enabling technology. What do you want the industry to know about your company? RadiSys this year is celebrating 20 years of technical leadership and innovation in embedded systems for telecom and commercial markets.  Our company continues to make substantial investments in our ATCA platform integration capabilities. RadiSys is also a well-financed public company with a strong balance sheet that will be around for the long haul. Please make one surprising prediction we will see in 5 years. This is maybe more of a wish then a prediction, but my vision is that telecommunications collaboration technology will become so ubiquitous and easy to use that virtual meeting rooms and video conferencing will become as productive as face-to-face meetings, resulting in a downward trend in the frequency of business travel.



Tags: apple, asterisk, atca, google, ip communications, ip telephony, itexpo, linux, microsoft, microtca, open-source, qos, radisys, sla, unified communications, voip

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I recently had the opportunity to ask Mohamed El Mohri, CTO at Dialexia Communications, about the evolution of the IP communicationsspace and the direction his company is taking. Dialexia Communications is best known for its next generation communication software and services. The company develops and markets a complete suite of IP-Telephony software and applications. It also provides advanced IP communications solutions to enterprises, service providers as well as resellers. To get some more background the company, read this TMCnet article. Please outline your new corporate initiatives. For the next few years, Dialexia’s new initiatives will turn around the IMS architecture, core technologies, and services. Our current products will migrate to IMS-readiness. The main outcome is expected to be more sophisticated and attractive IP communications services that will be able to run on various IP and legacy networks agnostically of the underlying access technology. How is IP communications changing your company’s strategy?  Since Dialexia is an IP communications software company, it is obvious that the business strategy is dramatically affected by the IP-based technologies’ evolvement. This mainly translates in creation and deployment of new IP communications services.  Further, Dialexia uses its own IP communications products  as corporate communication system.  This has the effect to bring to Dialexia the same advantages as to customers, chief among them remote working, which enables some distant employees and collaborators to remain in touch with their colleagues and share information and documents. What pains does your company solve for customers?  The same as the IP communications technology does: low prices, high administration and usage flexibility, elaborated services, easy installation and deployment. We make our products affordable so that even the smallest start-ups are able to switch to VoIP and get into the market. From a support and customer management perspective, Dialexia is able to provide enhanced services including IP Centrex, Pre-paid Cards, Call Shop service, resulting in high retention rates and a return on their investment in less than six months.  The Dialexia platforms also offers a SOAP/XML APIs that has enabled ITSPs to provide an automated customer signup process from registration to activation without manual intervention. How has SIP changed communications?  Nowadays, SIP has become the de facto IP communications signaling protocol. The changes it brought to communications are substantially those of the IP technology: service creation flexibility, wide range of access technologies, new services, unified communications, network convergence, etc.  How do you think the future of the market looks?  I think the future market will be portrayed by network convergence, service and application combination, universal accessibility, and universal mobility. These concepts are actually the target of the IMS standard. How does the growth rate in the US compare to the rest of the world?  VoIP is better adopted in the US then in the rest of the world, we are still facing regulation authorities in some countries banning VoIP or licensing it at a very high price.Another factor of growth is  based on Bandwidth Price, if the xDSL, Wireless and Cable broadband lower in price the demand will grow and usage of IP device will augment. What do you think of Google and Apple entering the telecom market?  They will grab a lot of shares in the residential market only. Although these are giant corporations their entry into the telecom market will not pose a big threat on existing companies who have been able to provide their customers more than satisfactory telecom solutions.  They might just be able to reach out to new customers who haven’t tried VoIP yet since they already trust these large corporations and know them well. How about Microsoft?  Microsoft will play a big role in the enterprise level but none at the Service Providers level. Their OCS will enable the recalcitrant enterprise decision makers to migrate to VoIP. Its ability to integrate Internet Telephony into its current products allows it a good chance to grasp those customers that have still not switched to using VoIP solutions. It will pave the way to new type of applications and services for desktop users, like integration to exchange Server, CRM and other type of collaboration services. How will open source technologies change our market? Open Source is free but not cheap, it takes more resources to. It is too risky to deploy Open source VoIP application in a Class 4/5 type of services where high availability and scalability is a must. Open Source is a good tool to learn about the technology or to start a small business. What are your thoughts regarding hosted solutions?  Delegation is always attractive. Hosting is the fastest way to try a new technology, the investment is low and Return of Investment is fast. Easy to upgrade for new services without investing on new equipments. How will communications evolve over the next five years?  The combination of WiMax and IMS are the next five years’ driver. Cellular, Cable TV and other type of Communications services will evolve to IP. What will the industry see at your booth at ITEXPO?  A new look of IP-Centrex and Conference Server. Why is your booth a “Can’t Miss?” Conference Server What do you want the industry to know about your company?  A young talented brilliant Team with always new ideas. A company that was born with SIP, believes in it and grows with it. What’s next for communications?  We don’t say triple-play, quadruple-play communications but ALL-PLAY communications.



Tags: apple, asterisk, cable tv, cellular, google, ip communications, ip telephony, itexpo, itsp, linux, microsoft, open-source, soap, triple-play, unified communications, voip, xml api

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I recently got the chance to sit down with Bob Cordes, Vice President of Product Management for Telrex. We discussed his company’s business strategy, as well as the future of the IP telephony market in general. Telrex is a leading provider of IP call recording and contact center optimization solutions. Their CallRex platform provides easy and affordable software solutions for companies of all sizes to protect, grow and optimize their business. Telrex offers premise-based solutions for SMB and enterprise, and hosted solutions for service providers. Read more about their hosted solutions in this article previously posted on TMCnet. Please outline your new corporate initiatives.At Telrex, we continue to add solutions for quality monitoring and contact center optimization, leveraging our CallRex platform for IP call recording and multi-media recording in IP telephony and UC environments. How is IP communications changing your company’s strategy? We have been committed to IP telephony from the start, so the market is validating our strategy. How has SIP changed communications? SIP enables CallRex to deliver IP call recording to a wider range of IP telephony systems. It does make supporting different systems easier, though a high level of complexity remains across platforms, as various flavors of SIP extensions are implemented by IP telephony vendors. What is the biggest request coming from your customer base?Open platform for extensibility, integration with business applications and scalability. Telrex has responded by re-architecting the system earlier this year to deliver a services-oriented software architecture that delivers enterprise-class scalability across multiple locations. We also released our latest—a client-side API that provides full access to all of the core functionality of the CallRex recording and monitoring platform. We provide the API free of charge. We find that many of our VAR partners have development resources on staff. Additionally, with our Microsoft LCS and OCS integrations, our API is attracting a wider range of partners. In fact, the CallRex interface is developed on top of our API, so the API is very robust and well-supported. What do you think is the future of the market? Call recording and monitoring is quickly becoming an industry-standard application. We are seeing organizations of all sizes deploying recording and monitoring solutions to protect their business. This means recording calls for regulatory compliance, dispute resolution, increased security and employee productivity. Protecting the business is a driving factor. For instance, by deploying call recording for dispute resolution, our customers find they actually avoid disputes altogether because they have an objective record of what was discussed on the phone. It enables them to drive stronger relationships with their good customers, and it can save a lot of money for the business in finding better ways to address issues.  Going forward, many companies are now recognizing that by recording interactions with their customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders, they are creating an asset for the business that should be leveraged as a valuable resource. Growing the business is becoming a new driving factor for IP call recording and monitoring solutions. This is not just for companies running formal call centers; rather it’s for every business that has one or more teams of people doing business over the phone every day. These people may be sales representatives or account managers, insurance claims adjustors, or any other type of employee that is highly trained, is expected to follow specific policies and procedures, and is in a position to impact the business. We find customers are leveraging our quality monitoring solutions to evaluate their call recording assets to find new ways of growing the business and operating more efficiently. This includes accelerating training by more quickly and objectively evaluating employee performance, understanding why customers are calling in order to increase first call resolution, capturing the “voice of the customer” to understand the customer experience, streamlining business processes, and identifying ways to increase the value of transactions. We are pleased to see many companies beginning to realize that they are creating a valuable asset by recording interactions. So growth is occurring among businesses with what we have termed “informal contact centers”.  How does the growth rate in the US compare to the rest of the world? We find IP call recording to follow the growth of IP telephony. Penetration has been highest in the US, with APAC and EMEA second, while we find our LAT or CALA regions are leap-frogging technologies to provide significant growth opportunities. What do you think of Google and Apple entering the telecom market? Telrex has been committed to IP Telephony from the start. It has always been a fast moving and exciting market, and we look forward to Google and Apple driving additional innovation.  How about Microsoft? Microsoft is helping to drive an inflection point for IP communications. Telrex partners with Microsoft and supports their initiatives. How will wireless technologies change our market? The infrastructure requirements to record and monitor customer interactions from an ever-increasing mobile workforce will continue to drive the need for all-software IP-based solutions. The market trends favor the approach Telrex has taken from the beginning. What makes your upcoming ITEXPO presentation a “Can’t Miss?” Attendees should come to hear about the fastest growing industry-standard business application – IP call recording and monitoring. It offers all types of companies an easy and affordable way to protect, grow and optimize the business in ways never before possible. IP call recording is an excellent example of a solution that fulfills the promise of IP telephony – the idea that communications will evolve from expensive, complex and proprietary hardware systems into software applications running on a data network that are affordable, easy and open.



Tags: api, apple, CallRex, google, ip communications, iphone, ip telephony, Microsoft, sip, telrex, voip

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I recently had the opportunity to ask 3CX CEO Nick Galea about the evolution of the IP communicationsspace and the direction his company is taking. 3CX is well known for its SIP-based 3CX Phone System for Windows, a software-based IP PBX that replaces a traditional proprietary hardware PBX/PABX. To learn more about the company, read this TMCnet article from earlier this year. Please outline your new corporate initiatives. We have launched version 3.1 of our phone system recently, which is a complete software based small business phone system running on Windows. Our main drive for Q4 of this year is the release of version 4, which will include a SIP VOIP client and have many innovations. How is IP communications changing your company’s strategy? Our company is based on the future potential on IP Communications, so it’s pretty fundamental to our company strategy. What pains does your company solve for customers? The pain of the traditional proprietary phone system shackle. It is expensive, difficult to manage and entirely outdated. We remove that shackle-bind by liberating the PBX from the proprietary hardware. As software running on Windows, it is much more flexible and can finally integrate with the Windows business applications we use each day and takes IP Telephony to an entirely new level. How has SIP changed communications? I think SIP is the main driver in the acceleration of the IP Telephony revolution. I think the standard will continue to gain power and soon enough it will beat and hopefully eliminate the proprietary SKYPE protocol. Once that is done I think the telecom revolution will accelerate even more. How do you think the future of the market looks? SIP based. Open standards with best of breed solutions for software, hardware, add ons and so on. How does the growth rate in the U.S. compare to the rest of the world? I think IP Telephony is growing everywhere. I don’t think it’s particularly any different in the U.S. For example, we are seeing rapid VOIP take up in France and Italy. What do you think of Google and Apple entering the telecom market? They are much welcomed but let’s evaluate their products on the strength of the actual product, not just on the fact that there is a big name behind it. So far there is Google Talk and Apple iPhone. Google talk still has a long way to go and doesn’t seem to be going anywhere fast. Apple iPhone has a great coolness factor but other then that it does pretty much the same as what mobile phones have been doing for years. How about Microsoft? What about them? Microsoft Response Point is nowhere to be seen, and Microsoft Office Communications Server is touted as the next VOIP platform though it doesn’t even have elementary PBX switching in it. How will open source technologies change our market? I don’t think open source technologies are changing the market. I think the emergence of standards such as SIP are changing the market. The open source principle has some major flaws. It assumes that companies want to get into the source code of products, which is generally not what they wish to do. Open source does not encourage long term investment in a code base, something that is required to build stable and mature products. If you draw an analogy to political movements, then open source is like communism (free for all - kind of) and closed source is the free market principle with investment offering long term rewards. I think it’s quite clear that the latter is what is required. Closed source with substantial investment and long term commitment. This will lead to IP Telephony platforms that will help businesses increase mobility and productivity. What are your thoughts regarding hosted solutions? They will have a place in the market, but considering the fact that most companies still host their own mail server it’s quite easy to see that companies hosting phone systems remotely is a long way away. How will communications evolve over the next five years? Mobility. Mobility. Mobility. Anything that can provide that will do well, anything that won’t – wont. What will the industry see at your booth at ITEXPO? 3CX Phone System for Windows — a revolutionary product from a manageability perspective. Why is your booth a “Can’t Miss?” It is for all those companies wanting to do IP Telephony, but who want easy installation, configuration and management, and is therefore not Linux. What do you want the industry to know about your company? That we intend to take the lion share of the SMB phone system market by providing a quality, low cost and innovative telephony platform on Windows. What’s next for communications? Mobility. Mobility. Mobility. Anything that can provide that will do well, anything that won’t – wont.



Tags: 3cx, apple, Asterisk, google, intel, ip communications, ip-pbx, ip telephony, itexpo, Linux, Microsoft, nick galea, open-source, unified communications, voip, windows

Search Technorati: 3cx, apple, Asterisk, google, intel, ip communications, ip-pbx, ip telephony, itexpo, Linux, Microsoft, nick galea, open-source, unified communications, voip, windows