Disruptive Telephony

Life takes very interesting turns. Yesterday afternoon I faxed off my acceptance of an offer from a company I'd really never heard of that turns out to be doing some extremely fascinating things. They found me through this blog. We've talked. I've visited. I start on Monday, October 22nd. I'll be actually in a role very similar to what I was doing before, but with more of a direct focus on social media, at least initially. I will still be working remotely from Vermont and will be traveling to similar conferences as in the past. It's exciting and I'm very much looking forward to getting started. Great people. Great company. Profitable. Strong developer community. Been around for a while. In the right space, in my opinion.

For now, though, that's all I'm going to say. More on (or near) the 22nd. :-)

Until then, I'm expecting to be blogging less here and on my other blogs. I'm traveling to a PR/Communications conference next Monday and Tuesday to do a "Podcasting 101" workshop and so I'll probably be blogging about that. There's a hundred things I want to blog about! My queue of articles to write is probably the longest it has ever been. I have about 10 Blue Box Special Editions recorded and awaiting post-production and 2 video podcast episodes to release. There are so many amazing things going on right now in all the areas I write about.......

But there's also the reality that I need to use this calm before the storm to: 1) spend some time with my family, who have admittedly been a bit short-changed in recent weeks; and 2) deal with a whole range of really more mundane issues. You know, things like getting new files set up... getting my office re-organized after the older equipment has been moved out... addressing some household projects that were dropped when the layoff occurred. A whole realm of things like that. And I know that once the 22nd rolls around I'll be doing my usual "pedal-to-the-floor" mode with much less time for such matters - so I need to seize this moment. I don't expect to be writing much. We'll see.

Finally I have to say a HUGE "Thank You!" to everyone out there who offered assistance in ways both big and small. Thank you for your kind words in blog posts and in emails. Receiving those was a wonderful lift, especially on days full of doubts. Thank you for the contacts... for the introductions made... for the links... it was all an incredible demonstration to me of the power of the friendships, the social networks and the communities we wind up being a part of. In the process I have met some truly amazing people at a wide range of companies. It was a fascinating exercise in transparency that did in fact get me to the delightful position of having multiple options to choose from and being able to have a choice. Certainly a wonderful spot to be in - and for that I have to thank so many of you out there. Thank you!

The power of the (social) network is certainly amazingly strong.

Now it's time to go dark for a bit... please do understand if I'm not answering email quite as promptly or responding to IMs or blog posts. I'll be back soon... stay tuned.

P.S. Thank you!

Technorati Tags: danyork

The SMB VoIP game is changing. Fundamentally. And in a pattern we've seen before in other industries. In the news release out today, Digium and 3Com announced that:

Under the terms of the agreement, 3Com will offer Digium’s award-winning Asterisk Appliance™ to small businesses that need a reliable, easy-to-deploy voice solution based on open standards. 3Com Asterisk will be available through the company’s proven channel of partners worldwide.

Let's think about that for a minute. 3Com will make Digium's Asterisk appliance available through "the company's proven channel of partner's worldwide", which some reports are putting at around 60,000 resellers. Digium just wound up with a large global sales channel. Yet to be seen is whether there will be any channel conflict with existing Digium Partners/VARs, but regardless, Digium just wound up with a way to deploy Asterisk-based solutions globally. It does, however, get one step better (my emphasis added):

“3Com is focused on delivering products and solutions for converged secure networks, in which voice is an application that can be readily integrated with many others,” said Bob Dechant, senior vice president and general manager for 3Com Corporation. “We’ve announced a complete voice strategy and new product offerings for small businesses, including the 3Com Asterisk Appliance. We also offer innovative enterprise-caliber 3Com Global Services for customers who purchase the 3Com Asterisk. We chose to partner with Digium because of the company’s position as the Asterisk leader, its commitment to open standards and the ease-of-use of the appliance.”

Yes, indeed, Digium winds up with a global support organization behind Asterisk. Powerful announcement. Global sales and support - for an open source PBX... According to information from Digium, the "3Com Asterisk", priced at $1,595, will include a 3Com-co-branded interface and easy configuration/provisioning of 3Com SIP phones (as can be done today with Polycom phones). Given last weeks' announcement of the SwitchVox acquisition, I would think that rolling some of that GUI/functionality into the offering would be another logical step longer-term. The implications of this announcement, though, go far beyond the commercial relationship between Digium and 3Com. Those of us who remember Linux in the late 1990s and early 2000s remember that Linux took a trajectory like this:

1. Techies/geeks/early-adopters started to install Linux into their businesses to solve specific needs. Often it was installed without corporate permission as a DNS server, web, server, etc.
2. A range of small, specialized vendors started to ship servers with Linux pre-installed. Very often these companies were founded by people within the Linux community (ex. VA Linux, Penguin Computing)
3. Larger, more mainstream but still lower-tier manufacturers started to ship servers with Linux. (I forget the first one I saw doing this.)
4. Tier 1 manufacturers (ex. IBM, HP, Dell) started to ship servers with Linux.

Asterisk just moved to step #3 (after already moving through #1 and #2). While 3Com does not have the same market status as Cisco, Avaya and Nortel (or Mitel in SMB), 3Com definitely has a presence out there and to me their endorsement of Asterisk certainly brings a level of credibility to Asterisk-based software and hardware. It's good for Asterisk. It's good for Asterisk-based products and services (including those of Digium's competitors). It's good for open source. Ultimately, in my opinion, it's good for all of us.

Yet to be seen is how good it is for 3Com's own SMB offerings and that will be interesting to see. Right now it seems that they are all about "offering customers choice" between 3Com's own product and the Asterisk-based appliance. Will that last? Will 3Com continue to maintain its own SMB products long-term? Or will it cede that lower-end market to Asterisk and focus on apps that interoperate with Asterisk and/or phones for Asterisk (and 3Com's higher-end offerings)? Interesting questions to consider, particularly in light of 3Com's announcement on Friday that it is being acquired by Bain Capital and Chinese giant Huawei as well as their announcement today of new VCX systems targeted at the SMB market.

Nor is it clear to me how much of a short-term impact there will be on the SMB market. 3Com has been less of a presence in that space in recent years although its clear from their various announcements today that they are intent on playing a larger role in the space. Will Mitel, Avaya, Cisco, etc. lose any sales today as a result of 3Com selling Asterisk? Maybe. Maybe not.

Longer-term, though, I personally view this as a huge validation that open source telephony has a role in the business space. The cracks in the wall of proprietary telephony just got a whole lot larger today. Congrats to Digium and 3Com... and now the question is - who's the next vendor to get on board?

What do you think? Is this a validation of Asterisk? Or a flash in the pan? (Or as one more cynical person put it to me, "a desperate move by 3Com to stay relevant?") What do you see as the short-term and long-term impacts to the SMB market? Should the existing vendors be scared? Or just ignore it?

More coverage:

• Alec Saunders: Digium Scores with 3Com
• Greg Galtizine: 3Com to Offer Customers Asterisk Appliance
• VoIP-News: Digium Targets Mass Market Again With 3Com Deal
• ZD Net (Russell Shaw): 3Com fills SMB nices with new IP Telephony products
• eWeek Channel Insider: 3Com Preps VOIP Switches for SMBs

Technorati Tags: opensource, asterisk, digium, voip, 3Com, telephony

Not necessarily a great day over at Skype today - per the eBay news release, Niklas Zennstrom stepped down as CEO, eBay paid $533 million to "settle obligations to certain Skype shareholders" and is also taking a $900 million charge to write down the value of Skype. From a Bloomberg article:

``It has not performed as well as we would have hoped in the short term,'' EBay spokesman Hani Durzy said in an interview. Skype was profitable the first half of the year, he said.

Many others out there have already offered their analysis and so I'll point you to them today:

• Skype Journal (Jim Courtney): The Metamorphosis Begins: New CEO Sought for Skype
• VoIP Watch (Andy Abramson): Management Shake Up At Skype
• Bloomberg: EBay Takes $1.4 Billion Charge Related to Skype Unit
• Skype co-founder Janus Friis' blog: (not) just another monday
• Thomas Crampton: Zennstrom defends Skype while stepping down
• Technorati search on 'skype'

Technorati Tags: skype, ebay

As I finished up my last post with additional thoughts on Skype and hotel networks, I naturally went to look for the TrackBack URI on my first post so that I could have the link show at the bottom of the article. However, when I went to look - there was no TrackBack URI shown! I went into TypePad's control panel and, sure enough, the checkbox for allowing TrackBacks was unchecked. In further investigation, I found it was unchecked for all my other recent posts! (Now, fixed... they all should accept TrackBacks.)

The reason was relatively easy to find. When I started using my new MacBook Pro about two weeks ago, I started using a new offline blog editor, ecto. Over in the options area, there is a checkbox for TrackBack's that I apparently had left in the unchecked state. I have now checked it and clicked the "Make Default" button so that it remains in this state. Details, details, details... (and my apologies to anyone who was looking for the trackback URI).

P.S. If any of you are Mac users and have opinions on what is the best offline blog editor to use on a Mac, I'm looking for opinions (in this other post).

Technorati Tags: blogeditors, blogging, ecto, tools, trackback, typepad

To my immense surprise, my article yesterday about my challenges with Skype and my hotel Internet connection just hit TechMeme today, so welcome, anyone who is coming my way from there. But that also prompted me to want to offer up some additional thoughts on the subject.

First, I'm actually quite annoyed at the Best Western here in Ontario, CA, for essentially blocking Skype by virtue of their network security traffic policies. If travel shall bring me to Ontario, CA, again, you can be pretty sure that I will not be staying here. Skype has become an important communication tool for me and <cue violins>was the way I was intending to call home and stay in touch with my family</violins>. Skype has worked great at the hotel I was at earlier in the week in Phoenix and in fact at every other hotel I've been at lately. I do intend to contact Best Western to express my dissatisfaction at being unable to use the program.

Having said that, as a security professional I do understand WHY the security team at the Internet provider to this Best Western hotel has the policies in place that they do. As Phil Wolff commented, Skype's launch "can look like the beginning of port scanning or a bot-gone-wild". Given that this provider is dealing with hotel rooms where random strangers are connecting who-knows-what onto the network, they have to be extremely vigilant (especially because customers like me while complain quickly if Internet access is slow/unavailable). The more I think about it, hotel networks are really an absolute nightmare from a security point-of-view. You have no way to enforce virus protection, people can put all sorts of machines in all sorts of states onto the network, systems with spyware can easily be scanning/attacking your network -it's really pretty crazy and I'm glad that I'm not involved with running such a network! (Although the security geek in me would admit that the aggregate data they must get from network traffic would probably be fascinating.) However, there is probably a compromise out there where the ISP can tune its filtering rules so that if it sees such traffic and can identify it as Skype traffic, it can not trigger the MAC lock-out.

Which brings me to the final point that there's a lesson here for anyone developing P2P apps, or I suppose any other apps that have a similar traffic profile. If the apps generates traffic that looks like a bot or port scan, odds are that it will be blocked in some places like this one (and the hotel Phil was at). It would be great if developers could take that into account and either: a) naturally put in some kind of rate throttling; or b) perhaps provide a "hotel mode" where it throttles back the number of sessions to some (perhaps user-settable but with a default) value. This of course would make it longer for things like presence information to appear, but would at least let you continue to operate the program without triggering the network security alarms. Of course, you'd have to change to that mode, which many people would forget to do and wind up being locked out, but it might be an interesting "advanced" option for those who know what to do with it.

Any other "lessons learned" you see here?

Technorati Tags: P2P, security, skype

UPDATE: I have now posted some additional thoughts about this issue.

---

It's been a frustrating time here at the hotel in Ontario, CA, where all I've been trying to do is use the Internet connection. I'm staying at the Best Western and did so largely because they advertised free high-speed Internet (they were also cheaper than others). First annoyance was discovering that I was too far away from their APs to use wireless, but since I had an ethernet cable I just plugged into the wall jack and expected to get access. The very first time I connected, I did get an IP address and could see an entry in my routing table for the default gateway. However, I couldn't ping it.

Being rather used to network troubleshooting, I did the usual things... bringing the interface up and down, disconnecting and re-connecting the cable. I even went to the hotel lobby and got a new cable in case the issue was with my portable/retractable cable.

Nothing. No net.

In desperation I did the thing that tech support always tells you to do but I avoid... reboot. Nothing.

So finally this morning I got on the phone to the Best Western tech support and after waiting, oh, 20 minutes or so I got through to a tech and ultimately we figured out the problem:

Skype!

More specifically, all the bizillion connections that Skype was making out into the P2P cloud. The tech reset the switch and asked me to connect again and his immediate response was "Whoa! Something on your computer is generating an incredible number of sessions out to the Internet! You are tripping our filters and it is blocking out your MAC address." With him on the phone, we tried some experimentation. I shut down Skype, at which point he said I was generating much more normal traffic. As soon as I launched it again, he noticed a very large jump in the number of session connections I was establishing. He said it was something like 396 sessions he was seeing coming from my computer. He also said that I'll keep being locked out of their system if I keep Skype running.

So I shut down Skype. Which, of course, is annoying. Part of why I wanted to use the high-speed Internet is to use Skype for IM and for voice/video calls.

I find it a bit odd that Skype was generating so much extra traffic, but then again I am pretty much always connected into several persistent group chats and had maybe 8 or 10 individual chat windows still open that I'd left open from when I'd last been chatting with the person. (The Mac Skype client makes this easy to do, but I'll write about that sometime.) The persistent group chats, especially, do generate a good number of connections as they link out into the P2P cloud. Perhaps if I closed all of those windows and killed off all my individual chat windows Skype might have behaved better. (Or perhaps not, I might have had to leave the persistent chats in order for Skype to stop making those connections.) I don't want to try it out, because I do want to keep my Internet connection up right now.

In any event, should you be at a hotel and find yourself unable to connect... it might be a P2P app like Skype tripping off the hotel's filters and blocking your access. Fun, fun, fun....

So it seems I've done something to mightily mess up my new MacBook Pro. The other night while in my hotel room at AstriCon, I was using my headset for some Skype calls and then had it in when I started to play some music. Wanting to listen on the built-in speakers, I just pulled the headset out and was then surprised to hear no audio. If I plugged the headset back in, I could hear audio fine. Remove it, no audio. It was about then that I noticed the red light coming out of the side of the MacBook Pro. I didn't know what this was and tried several other things before finally just forgetting about it.

The next day at AstriCon, I was on the IRC backchannel when someone else in the same physical room as I was figured out who I was and then asked why my MacBook had a red light coming out of the side. In further discussions with others on the channel, it turns out that Apple has done something that on one level is rather cool. They've overloaded the functionality of the headphone jack so that it is both a regular 1/8" audio jack and also a S/P-DIF "digital output", essentially an optical connection. I'm assuming you'd do this if you had high-end audio equipment and wanted a very pure signal going out to that equipment.

In any event, I seem to be stuck in S/P-DIF mode with no access to the internal speakers. I'm not alone, though, as I found two other mentions (here and here) in the Apple Support forums. But, get this, the answer seems to be:

simply take the headphones and place them in and out the socket until the light goes off.

Yes, indeed - keep plugging and unplugging your headphones until the MacBook clues in to the fact that you don't have a S/P-DIF cable connected! They were joking, right? Apparently not, because one person said this fixed it for them.

Alas, this did not work for me... I inserted and removed my headphone jack a dozen times with no effect. In fact, I took out another headset and tried it a dozen times, too. Tried different intervals. Thought about trying to say some magic words. (The words I was saying would be unprintable in a family magazine.) Looked around for a goat I could sacrifice while bowing in the general direction of Cupertino but couldn't find any (and that would be rather messy in a hotel room in any event)...

So there I am... with a MacBook that still looks like something out of the Borg of Star Trek, beaming it's read light at all around me. I did try mucking around with the MIDI settings, which others seemed to say fixed it, but that, too, seemed to have no effect. I guess I'll be visiting the Apple dealer from whom I bought this two weeks ago when I get back to VT.

Any MacBook users have any other thoughts? suggestions? magic incantations?

Technorati Tags: apple, audio, macbook, sp-dif

Imagine you are a customer service rep (CSR) at a small/medium company and a phone call comes in from a customer. As your phone rings, up on your screen pops all the information about that customer, pulled from your CRM database in Salesforce.com or SugarCRM, plus other information from other databases and finally a nice Google Map showing you where that customer is located and potentially other information like the locations of your nearest offices. During the call, the CSR needs to bring in a subject matter expert so the CSR consults their web panel and looks at the presence information displayed for each of the other people in the business. The CSR can then contact someone showing as available and potentially bring them into the call.

Now imagine that all that is running on top of open source telephony... specifically Asterisk.

You can now stop imagining, because Digium just bought the company that does precisely that. There will undoubtedly be much attention today (at the very least in the VoIP blogosphere) about Digium's announcement here at AstriCon today that they have acquired SwitchVox. I am going to bet that much of the reporting today will focus on angles like these:

• Digium now has very competitive offerings (SwitchVox SOHO and SwitchVox SMB) for going after the small / medium business market.
• Digium bought themselves a very sophisticated/simple/easy GUI/management interface that moves them forward dramatically in making Asterisk easy to use, deploy and manage.
• Digium just got 1400 paying customers with over 65,000 endpoints.
• Digium bought themselves parity (or more) in their ongoing competitive feud with the folks at Fonality/Trixbox.

All of that is true. The SwitchVox products offer a very seriously competitive list of features (you have to go through and expand the subsections to see all the features). The GUI is very well done and simple. The price is quite compelling for the servers and also the support. I mean, for $1200 ($995 server plus $199 support) an SMB gets an IP-PBX with a very broad range of features and an unlimited number of users! Yes, the business still has to pay for IP phones, but they can buy any of a wide range of phones at varying price points to suit their needs. Considering that almost all the mainstream IP-PBX vendors charge on a per-user basis for licenses, the unlimited user model is certainly disruptive in its own right. (Digium has also been doing this with their Asterisk Business Edition.) And yes, Digium now has an answer to the growing competitive threat of Trixbox and it's management interfaces, support, hybrid model, etc.

All that is true - but it's not the really interesting story.

To me, what is far more compelling is that Digium just bought themselves a whole group of people who "get" the world of "unified communications", business process integration, Web 2.0 mashups, etc.

Digium has had no story at all around "presence" within its core offerings. Now it does. While Asterisk has always been a platform play where you have the ability to integrate Asterisk with other apps, doing so has not exactly been for the faint-of-heart. Hire yourself some programmers and you can do pretty much anything with Asterisk... but that's not something that many businesses want to get into. SwitchVox now gives Digium a way to do easy integration with databases and web sites. The integrations to Salesforce.com and SugarCRM are slick. The Google Maps popup is a seriously cool mashup! (And where is that on the roadmap of the mainstream vendors?)

Throw in a "click to call" add-in for Firefox to let you dial any number you see on any web page, plus a plug-in for Outlook, and you've got a very compelling offering. For a very nice price. My only knock (other than the fact that I can't find a picture of their Google Maps mashup anywhere on their website) is that it doesn't seem like their presence capability is yet integrated with existing instant messaging services. Given Asterisk's XMPP (Jabber) capabilities, this seems an obvious path that could get them connected to Jabber and GoogleTalk presence information. If they don't have that yet, I hope they add it soon, as we really do NOT need yet another place to change/update our presence info.

Regardless, this integration capability is, to me, the real story. Phones are being commoditized. I have to believe call servers/IP-PBXs are on their way to being commoditized. (Folks like Microsoft are going to help in pushing those prices down.) The money will ultimately go away from those areas.

The future of "unified communications" is about platforms. About mashups. About web services. About exposing APIs. About making it easy to combine different sources of data into interfaces that make people more productive. Microsoft gets that. Some of the traditional IP-PBX vendors get that. Digium has always known that, but this acquisition gives them a far better ability to make it happen.

Congrats to the folks at both Digium and SwitchVox for making this happen... I very much look forward to seeing where it evolves! (And in the meantime, I'm going to have to go down to the AstriCon exhibit hall and get some video of the Google Maps mashup to show how very cool it is...)

Read more:

• coverage in the blogosphere
• Digium FAQ about the acquisition
• Digium blog post by Bill Miller (more posts will apparently follow today on their blog)

Technorati Tags: asterisk, astricon, digium, mashups, opensource, presence, switchvox, telephony, voip

In watching Jay Phillips do his great presentation here today at AstriCon about Ruby and his Adhearsion package, I found myself wondering what the interesting little softphone was that he was using. It turned out to be "Zoiper", an IAX or SIP softphone that was previously called "Idefisk". (I can understand perhaps why they changed the name... "Idefisk" does not exactly roll off your tongue.) There turn out to be two versions (comparison chart here): a free version and a "Zoiper Biz" version which includes more functionality and starts around 30 euros.

Clearly built for Asterisk, it was interesting to note that it supports both SIP and also Asterisk's own IAX protocol. Anyway, I just thought I'd share that this softphone is out there if you were not aware of it.

Technorati Tags: asterisk, iax, softphone, video, zoiper

Great sessions out here at AstriCon... way too much to write about - my head is exploding a good bit! It's been a bit frustrating to try to blog from the conference rooms, though. The hotel WiFi is struggling a good bit under the strain of all the people here with laptops.

Technorati Tags: asterisk, astricon