Disruptive Telephony

Here at VON in the "Innovator's Forum", we've now bashed out a schedule for the "unconference" portion of today's schedule. For those interested, it is posted on the VONCamp page and is:

• Social Networking Conversation 1:30 PM - 1:55 PM
• Residential VoIP - Can it be Sold as a Product? Dennis Peng, Ooma and Jon Arnold, J Arnold & Associates (M) 1:55 PM - 2:20 PM
• The Ruby Way / Watch a mashup in real time 2:20 PM - 2:45 PM

Should be fun...

Technorati Tags: conferences, fallvon, voip, von

The big news out today in the world of Skype is that Skype and the mobile carrier called "3" have released the "3 Skypephone" that lets Skype users take Skype truly mobile. Skype-to-Skype calls and IMs are "free" provided that you are on "3"'s mobile network. I say "free" in quotes because of course you have to have a wireless plan through 3. There are actually two options in the UK, which is the only country in which it will initially be available:

• Monthly - With this plan, the 3 Skypephone hardware itself is free and the rates are 12-17 British pounds per month. Apparently you have unlimited data connectivity with this plan, so you can in fact make unlimited numbers of Skype calls or IMs.
• Pay-As-You-Go - With this plan, you pay 50 pounds for the 3Skypephone phone itself and then keep your account filled with credits. Apparently data usage decrements this account (but it's not clear by how much), so you have to wonder how often people will need to recharge the account. (UPDATE: Julian Bond, who is in the UK and has a 3 Skypephone to experiment with, informs me that there is apparently no charge for data usage on the Pay-As-You-Go, but it is only available for "30 days after your last top-up". So as long as you top up each month you would apparently get the data usage for free.)

These plans also factor into your non-Skype calls, i.e. calls to regular PSTN phone numbers. The phone does work just like a regular cell phone, but calls you make do not go out via SkypeOut but rather through 3's mobile network. So if you are: 1) calling other Skype users; and 2) on 3's wireless network; then all your calls are "free" (subject to your calling plan).

All in all an interesting play. We won't see it in North America for some time (and I probably won't see it in Vermont until the next millenia) but it will be available in the UK on Friday and by the end of the year in Australia, Italy, Hong Kong, Sweden, Denmark, Austria and the Republic of Ireland.

The phones themselves look quite nice. There are three colors (or two colors with one of the colors having two different color bands):

Luca Filigheddu also notes that the 3 Skypephone has a "Web 2.0" component to it in that you can easily access various social networking services:

I understand from folks who were at the launch event in the UK this morning that 3 Skypephones were made available to reporters and bloggers this morning, so we can expect to see more articles appearing in the hours ahead. In the meantime, here are some links to other sites that have been covering the launch:

• Skype Journal: "3 Skypephone for 50 pounds on 2 November"
• Skype Journal: "The 3 Skypephone is a test"
• Alan Williamson: "The 3SkypePhone Arrives ... first thoughts
• Blognation UK: "Skypephone unvieled - an interview - includes an audio podcast
• Engadget: "3 Skypephone is free in the UK"
• ZD Net: "Skype and 3 launch mobile phone"
• Tech Crunch UK: "Three to launch Skype phone today"
• CNN Money article

Information directly from Skype or 3:

• Skype blog post
• Skype product page
• Buy 3 Skypephone page
• 3's page on the Skypephone
• 3's "Fast Guide" for the Skypephone
• 3's information about the 3skype.mobi website

Naturally, YouTube videos are starting to appear. Here's a 9-minute overview from an Italian Cellular Magazine (in English):

Stay tuned for more info in the days ahead.

I'm in Boston this week at Fall VON. I'll be speaking on Thursday at 12:45 on (predictably) " Strategies for Solving Security". If any readers are at VON, feel free to drop a note. I'm always interested in connecting with readers.

Technorati Tags: conferences, fallvon, voip security, voipsa, von

Boy, did I choose the wrong week to go dark! Way too many amazing things going on out there this week... here is a quick view of some of the disruptions with relevant links:

• Microsoft formally announces release of Office Communication Server - tons of coverage out there but I recommend the analysis by the UC Strategies team.
• Skype will be providing voice to MySpace IM - again tons of coverage - Skype Journal has more info and a screenshot. See also the Skype blog.
• Per Business Week this morning, Skype will be rolling out its own mobile phone, starting in Europe.
• MySpace
• Apple, meanwhile, announces an upcoming developer kit for the iPhone via a note from Steve Jobs (some reactions here and here).
• And finally MySpace says it will open up to application developers in a similar manner to Facebook.

All in all a rather busy week! (And it's not over yet...)

Technorati Tags: apple, applications, facebook, iphone, myspace, microsoft, ocs, unifiedcommunications, skype, voip

O'Reilly just cancelled ETel for 2008. Yes, indeed, it's sadly true as shown here:

Due to changed circumstances since ETel 2008 was announced, we have decided not to move forward with the conference this year.

It is somewhat ironic that part of the ETel 2008 graphic was this:

Obviously O'Reilly did.

Those of us on the ETel Program Committee were just informed of the decision yesterday. We are admittedly still in a bit of shock. This year's program had over 100 submissions and we were very much looking forward to what was shaping up to be an excellent conference this year. Great mixture of technical sessions, thought-provoking sessions and so much more.

We are not privy as to exactly why O'Reilly made the decision and on many levels it doesn't really matter. As far as O'Reilly is concerned, ETel is now dead for 2008.

Personally, I think it is a loss to our industry. I think it is also, frankly, a loss to O'Reilly. But I'll get into that perhaps in another post next week.

Right now, we on the ETel Program Committee are starting to look at what's next. I think for many of us ETel served a purpose in helping connect people who were looking at the bleeding edge of communication that just can't be found at any of the other shows. There are a lot of folks passionate about ETel... and quite a community has grown up around it. Many folks told me it was THE show they liked to attend most.

We've got a number of ideas about how to replace ETel... and we'll definitely be looking for feedback after we have a chance over the next week or so to put together a couple of proposals for folks to kick around.

For those of you who are passionate about ETel and what it came to mean, stay tuned.... (we'll need you soon!)

Technorati Tags: conferences, etel, oreilly

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

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

Here in Phoenix, Arizona, AstriCon has kicked off with two pre-conference sessions that run all day. "Asterisk 101" is running next door and providing a basic introduction to Asterisk. I'm sitting in the "Developer 101" session (pictured) where there are about 100 people gathered in the room. It turns out that this is about developing with the Asterisk code base, i.e. "how to become an Asterisk developer" versus what I was personally thinking it was, which was "how to develop apps that work with Asterisk"... although that is really just an extension of the first. So far, an hour into the session, lead developer Kevin Fleming has been discussing the various tools you need to use in order to work with the Asterisk code base (ex. subversion, makefiles, etc.). Right now he's been dealing with the fun subject of licensing code, the GPL, and the requirement of developers to sign a disclaimer over to Digium that: a) asserts that the developer can contribute the code (i.e. it is original), that it is not patent-encumbered, etc. and b) gives Digium the right to redistribute the developer's code under a different license.

One interesting note - Kevin stated very definitively that Digium has NO plans to move GPLv3. They are quite happy with GPLv2 and see no reason yet to move.

The afternoon session sounds interesting as they will be getting into the overall Asterisk architecture, diving into the code, talking about APIs and debugging. Certainly a day to feed my inner developer...

Technorati Tags: asterisk, astricon, conferences, opensource, voip

Earlier this month, the folks at Digium rolled out their own group weblog, "Inside the Asterisk", which gives a view of activities inside Digium. A true group weblog, there are posts from a number of different people, including Digium CEO Danny Windham (ex. talking about his first days) and many others on staff.

Technorati Tags: asterisk, digium, opensource, blogs