Disruptive Telephony

If any of you reading this will be attending VoiceCon out in San Francisco, August 20-23, please do drop me a note. I'll be there from August 20-22 and am looking forward to connecting with a range of people from around the industry.

FYI, if you are a Facebook user and are attending, there is a Facebook event for VoiceCon to which you can add yourself to facilitate networking with other FB users at the show.

Is "the coming VoIP war" to be fought out between Microsoft and Cisco?  So asks a column "The Coming VoIP War" by Larry Hooper in today's issue of CRN.  On one level, the debate isn't as interesting to me as the venue... "CRN" is "Computer Reseller News" and has been around the industry for many years.[1]  At various times I've personally had a subscription to the print version or at least had it around the office to read.[2] Supported by advertising and theoretically sent to a targeted profile of subscribers, I've always seen it as one of the more "established' newsmagazines of the information technology space... and one obviously targeted at resellers of such technology. So to me it is interesting that the question is being discussed within CRN's print and web pages.

As to the larger question of whether "the coming VoIP war" will be between Microsoft and Cisco, one can't ignore that these two companies are giants in the overall IT industry with extremely significant resources and yes, the point is valid that as the interests of the two companies have converged in this merger of communication that many call "unified communications", they are now definitely going to be competing head-to-head.  All I can say is that the time ahead in this industry shall very definitely be quite an interesting one!

P.S. In full disclosure, my employer, Mitel, has had a partnership with Microsoft for several years now. A lot of Mitel equipment also gets deployed on a Cisco infrastructure and I communicate with a number of Cisco folks on standards issues.

[1] I would love to find out when CRN started, but the CRN.com site seems to have no info about its history and there's no Wikipedia article on it yet.
[2] At the current time, I do have a subscription to CRN.  Sometimes my subscription has lapsed when I've forgotten to annually fill out their subscription form.

Russell Shaw has the details:  "Did you ever REALLY think Vonage stock would go below $2 a share?"

I've not written here much about Vonage or the many other "consumer VoIP" players.  Partly because I guess at the end of the day I just don't find their proposition all that compelling.  Partly because the lack of voice security in so many of the consumer VoIP players just really offends me.  Partly because I don't see them really as all that "disruptive" because their positioning really seems to be "We are cheaper than the other guys".  Yaawwwwwwwn. 

Note to Vonage and friends:  Someone will always be cheaper. 

Late last week  there was quite the buzz in the VoIP part of the blogosphere about "Ooma" a new company with $27 million in funding that claims to "transform telecom services" and let you "make local and long-distance calls anywhere in the US for free" (provided, of course, that you live in the US).  I saw all the coverage and thought about writing something here, but I just couldn't get overly excited to do so.  My first reaction was, well, "how is this different from PhoneGnome or other similar systems?"  (And I enjoyed the fact that PhoneGnome promptly came out with a "Build Your Own Ooma" Challenge!)

My second reaction was that with their peer-to-peer architecture (letting others share your phoneline) there are bound to be security concerns (opinions here and here) and that it looks like it involves changing out your existing firewall/router and that simply isn't something I see people wanting to do. 

Anyway, there's been a whole lot of words written on this issue and so I thought I'd point to some of the pieces out there.  First, some nice summaries:

• ComputerWorld's IT Blog Watch: "Ooma selling free phone service"
• Jon Arnold: "Ooma - a Triumph of Technology or PR?"

And here are a range of the other articles out there:

• Om Malik's original post which has now attracted 130 comments: "Ooma wants voice to be free"
• Aswath Rao critiques it:  "Ooma? No Ma"
• Ken Camp gives it a thumbs-down: "Oompa Loompa Oooma"
• Stuart Henshall rips it apart: "Ooma - Will Blow $27 Million"
• Alec Saunders provides some good details and analysis: "Ooma revisited"
• Mark Evans is excited about free local calls: "The Dawn of the Free Local Call"
• Markus Göbel outlines security concerns: "Why Ooma is a security risk"

More details direct from ooma through the ooma FAQ.  Kudos for them for calling their beta program the "White Rabbit" program - it's cute for those who understand the reference.

In the end, it will be interesting to see what, if anything, comes of it all.  I have a really hard time believing that a huge number of people will shell out $399 for a box like this.  We'll see.

P.S. I noticed that the FAQ says this about international calling:

If you want to call overseas, you can use ooma by pre-purchasing international minutes at ooma.com for rates as low as five cents per minute.

In the era of Skype, Yahoo!Voice, Microsoft's Windows!Live, AIM and countless others that are essentially driving the cost of international calling down toward $0, it seems hard to believe that they will get people to pay "rates as low as five cents per minute".

 One of the many cool things I've been hoping to find the cycles to write about coming out of Mitel Forum last week is the collaboration occurring between Mitel and Sun Microsystems.  First announced June 19th, there are really two components to the collaboration: 1) the Multi-Instance Call Server (MICS) that can have up to 200 instances of our 3300 ICP call control software running on a Sun server; and 2) a very cool integration of a SunRay thin client computer into the base of one of our phones.  With the phones, a user can simply insert their "Java card" into the base of the phone and the user is automagically signed onto the computer and to the phone.  Pull the card out, the user is logged out.  Insert another user's card and the computer and the phone are logged in as that user.  It takes the "hot desking" we've had for years and extends that to now also include the PC.  As I said, it's very cool!

The good news is that I can actually share a bit of the experience with you courtesy of Sun blogger Craig Bender, a.k.a. the "Thin Guy", who writes the Sun Ray Blog.  I didn't realize he was at our show, which is a bummer because it would have been great to meet, but he posted this video to YouTube:

You can see my colleague Stephen Beamish demonstrating the capabilities at the Sun booth at Mitel Forum.  Craig did a nice job editing the video and it's great to see it up on YouTube.

News breaking out today is that Google has acquired GrandCentral for something around $50 million. GrandCentral is a service that gives you one phone number that can ring multiple numbers, provide one common voicemail - and all sorts of the other features (see "howitworks" for a list of features). As  the GrandCentral blog entry says:

We started GrandCentral because we wanted to create a service that puts users in control of their voice communications and not the other way around. As you have discovered, with GrandCentral you get all of your phone calls through just one number that never changes and you can link and ring up to six phones to ring when somebody calls you. But that’s just the start. You can set different rules for each caller (some ring all your phones, other can go straight to voicemail), create personal voicemail greetings for each of your callers, and even check your voicemail on the web with all of your messages in just one inbox. We’ll even save your messages for as long as you want.

I first learned of GrandCentral quite some time ago from Andy's blog and subsequently heard GrandCentral CEO Craig Walker talk out at O'Reilly's Emerging Telephony conference at the beginning of this year.  It seemed to be an interesting service, although unfortunately I didn't sign up for the service at the time. (Now you have to wait to be invited if you want to try it out.)

As to Google's motivation, they discuss it in the Google blog entry:

GrandCentral is an innovative service that lets users integrate all of their existing phone numbers and voice mailboxes into one account, which can be accessed from the web. We think GrandCentral's technology fits well into Google's efforts to provide services that enhance the collaborative exchange of information between our users.

GrandCentral offers many features that complement the phone services you already use. If you have multiple phone numbers (e.g., home, work, cell), you get one phone number that you can set to ring all, some, or none of your phones, based on who's calling. This way, your phone number is tied to you, and not your location or job. The service also gives you one central voice mailbox. You can listen to your voicemails online or from any phone, forward them to anybody, add the caller to your address book, block a caller as spam, and a lot more. You can even listen in on voicemail messages from your phone while they are being recorded, or switch a call from your cell phone to your desk phone and back again. All in all, you'll have a lot more control over your phones.

So will we ultimately see voicemail inside of Gmail?  One would assume that we will eventually see integration with GoogleTalk, which would give that service its first direct PSTN connectivity.  With a GrandCentral integration, GoogleTalk essentially winds up with a "SkypeIn" kind of service that can route calls to you on GoogleTalk.  The "WebCall Button" and "Click2Call" services also fit in with other Google efforts to expand further into "click to call" (as you can do now in Google Maps).

All very interesting to see... congrats to the GrandCentral team and it will be very interesting to see what emerges from the integration.

Yesterday, Bandwidth.com announced that their SIP trunking service would be powering Mitel solution centers across the US.  From the news release:

Bandwidth.com, a leading nationwide provider of complete business communications solutions, today announced that it will be powering all Mitel(R) Solution Centers across the country enabling customers and VARS to preview innovative solutions, including SIP Trunking technology in a live environment. Mitel operates solution centers in five locations; Chicago, Costa Mesa, Atlanta, New York and Herndon (Virginia), all of which will be equipped with Bandwidth.com's SIP Trunking VoIP solution by the end of June.

There's been a relationship between Bandwidth.com and Mitel since last September. This announcement yesterday is a logical evolution of that relationship.

There's a lot to write about the incredibly disruptive power of SIP trunking... I don't think we yet fully understand how the power to obtain SIP trunks from anywhere in the world is going to so severely disrupt the global telecommunications infrastructure.  With IP, geography no longer matters... and there are all sorts of local carriers - and tax authorities! - who I don't think fully understand how much this messes up their business models.  I really need to write that up........

Two notes for Bandwidth.com:

1. On the positive side, they have to get credit for one of the coolest graphics I've yet seen for SIP trunking!  I'm talking about the image above that is also on their bandwidth.com/mitel page.  I'm going to have to see about getting permission to use that graphic in some presentations... I just really like it from the design side!

2. On the less positive side, it continues to astound me the number of companies that do not immediately post their news releases on their web site "news" area!  This news release went out yesterday (June 11) but yet it's still not on Bandwidth.com's news page!  It's too bad, because they are missing out on a good potential for inbound links to their site.  Instead, we're left to link to either TMCNet or PR Newswire, both of whom I'm sure don't mind the traffic.  Our (Mitel) PR team have moved to getting the news releases posted on the site right away... I don't know the stats on what kind of traffic we get, but I do know that it lets bloggers like me link directly to the site if we want to.

(See also Ken Camp's commentary about the rising importance of SIP trunking in SMB.)

Per Russell Shaw, ShoreTel has filed it's paperwork for an IPO.  Reuters also has the story.[1] Ken Camp also provides his opinion.  I'm sure that more will be written in the time ahead.  ShoreTel is one of the many newer entrants into the enterprise VoIP market and have been doing some interesting things (and yes, in the spirit of full disclosure, they do potentially compete in some areas with my employer, Mitel).  Kudos to them for getting things together to go for the IPO.  It will be interesting to see how that moves forward - best wishes to them all. 

[1] Side note: It's interesting to me to see that the Reuters story about ShoreTel IPO filing in the US was actually filed by a reporter in Bangalore, India at 6:54am.  At that time most North American reporters were probably only getting going. 

In a few short hours, I will be catching a plane heading out to Fort Huachuca, Arizona, to swim in an alphabet soup of very different acronyms and jargon than my normal work - the "OSD-Sponsored, JITC-Hosted DOD Telecommunications Services Information Conference".  As noted on the page:

The purpose of the conference is to provide an open forum where DOD and vendor representatives can discuss issues related to interoperability of systems providing DOD Telecommunications Switched Services.

The conference will present the current program and discuss ongoing developments to the interoperability certification and information assurance procedures and test documentation. Other topics for discussion include emerging technologies, standards and their integration into the systems providing DOD Telecommunications Services.

I attended last year as well and it's definitely an interesting experience.  The US DoD is really doing some intriguing things with how they make use of VoIP / IP Telephony.  Obviously security is rather important.  They are also driving IPv6 adoption into their infrastructure and so, with the June 2008 mandate only a year away, it will be quite interesting to hear where they are with regard to IPv6 adoption.  Obviously, their huge size and buying power is of strong interest, so the number of vendors will no doubt be high.  Also, and I would think "obviously", I won't exactly be writing about things that I hear or learn there.

If any of you reading this happen to be out there at the conference, do drop me a note as I'm always interested in meeting readers or listeners.

Yesterday after the close of the market, my employer, Mitel, announced an agreement to acquire Inter-Tel.   There's not much I can say beyond what's in the news release... but I can say that I am quite excited by the news!