Disruptive Telephony

FYI, while I don't usually write a whole lot about Mitel here, I do in fact work for Mitel and after I return from a week of vacation I'll be heading down to Las Vegas on Monday, June 25th, to speak at our Mitel Forum event for resellers, consultants and analysts.  If any of you who read this weblog will be down there, I'll look forward to seeing you there (and please say hello).  You'll find me giving presentations on... gee.... "VoIP Security" and "Business Continuity"!  (Surprise, surprise...)  Should be a very good event.

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.)

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!

(Continuing my effort to flush my "queue of things I want to blog about"...)

Some time back, I stumbled upon this post "Top Ten: Most underrated VoIP Contributors".  Yeah, okay, so I liked the list because it had my employer on it, and mentioned the work Mitel has done with VOIPSA, which is really the activities that I do. So, yes, it's nice to be recognized and nice to hear the kind words about Mitel's contributions.  Some of the other people on the list were also interesting as well, so it was good to be introduced to others whom I haven't read.

In my incredibly long queue of things I've wanted to write about for the past few weeks, one item was the Mitel news release about making a direct SIP connection to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Unified Messaging. The cool part is that you can just use our basic 3300 ICP communications platform (or IP-PBX, or whatever you want to call it) and connect it directly into a Microsoft Exchange Server to use the Exchange Server for a unified inbox (email, voicemail, fax, etc.).  No other boxes or gateways necessary.  Just a nice, standard SIP trunk.  As a long-time proponent of open standards and general "standards geek", it really can't get much better.  It's great to see.

I just realized that I never wrote here that an article I wrote recently came out online.  Published in Mitel's "Presence" magazine, it's titled "Using IP Communications as a Tool for Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity".  Okay, so the title's not overly catchy, but here's the first paragraph:

If a hurricane devastated your main office, how rapidly could you restore telephone connectivity? If a branch office had a fire or other disaster, how soon could you connect back into the main office? Or if Avian flu or some other pandemic created a situation where you needed to stay out of the office, could you access remote phone capabilities equal to that at the office? How long would it take your business to recover? How much (and how many customers) could you afford to lose in the process?

I go on to talk about why IP communications/IP telephony/VoIP fundamentally changes the traditional way you might address these issues and offers tremendous benefits.  In fact, to me, the ability to put an IP phone pretty much anywhere you can get an IP address remains one of the major - if not the single biggest - disruptive aspect of IP telephony/communications.  Remove geography as an issue and suddenly things like disaster recover and business continuity take on a whole different view.

While it's in a Mitel publication, there's nothing in the article that is really Mitel-specific.  Listeners to Blue Box or readers of Voice of VOIPSA probably won't find it terribly new since I've been talking about this before in those sites... but for those of you not familiar with DR and BCP and how VoIP can change that, I think you'll find it a useful read.

Jon Arnold tagged me.  Of course, we really have to blame Luca for starting it and Jeff, phoneboy and others for pushing it along - and Moshe Maeir for adding the phone angle. I don't usually like to play the meme games... but it's Friday, it's lunchtime, I have a horrid cough and generally feel lousy... so I'll take a moment of distraction to blog my setup.  Plus, I get to talk about phones.  So here it is (click for larger view), and courtesy of 5 minutes in PowerPoint I've even numbered the phones.  What you are looking at is two computers with three screens.  The screen in the corner of the room is my rather old home desktop PC.  My (also older) laptop is then connected to the second monitor in the right foreground.  You can see pieces of my podcasting rig, although much of it is hidden by the laptop screen.  I write on either computer depending upon what time of day it is and which of the 5 or 6 different blogs I'm writing in. 

As to the phones, proving that VoIP teleworking can be secure (unlike what ComputerWorld.au thinks), most of the Mitel phones are hanging off of different teleworker servers back up at Mitel's office in Ottawa.  Why do I have so many phones?  Well, part of my job role is to test and experiment... so I'm always trying out new things - and from a security point-of-view, trying to break them.  So here goes the list:

1. Uniden cordless handset for household land line 
2. ancient Mitel 5020 that I started using as a secure teleworker set 4 years ago and never bothered to upgrade (see, we protect your investment ;-)... actually, the truth is I got a newer set to replace it and then decided to use that new set as a SIP set instead 
3. DUALphone for Skype calls (and yes, I could also use it for my land line) 
4. Mitel 5340 IP phone - connected as a secure teleworker set back to an IP-PBX in Ottawa... excellent phone, great acoustics, backlit 
5. Mitel 5220 IP phone (now replaced by the 5224) - running in SIP mode and connected to a local SIP proxy 
6. Mitel Navigator - perhaps the coolest phone I have... see the long silver bar under the monitor - that's the phone!  Handset is off to the right.  Connected as a secure teleworker back into Ottawa.

Plus I've generally got 1 or 2 softphones running on my laptop.   Using our "hot desking" support, I am usually logged in with my extension to either #4 or #6.  Often #6 because the Navigator has the excellent feature of acting as my PCs speakers and allowing me to have music playing in the background - and the music cuts out when a phone call comes in.  Very nice for someone working alone in a home office.

So now, who to tag:

• Alec Saunders 
• Martyn Davies 
• Irwin Lazar

With that, I think I've now down my blog meme playing for 2007....   off to get some cough medicine.

Scanning RSS feeds early this morning, I was pleased to see that Rich Tehrani will be speaking at our "Presence 2007" event in Costa Mesa, CA, today. I've known the tour was going on, but wasn't tracking who was speaking at the various stops.  Glad to see Rich there... I'm sure he'll give a great talk for whoever attends.  The good news for Rich, too, is that at least he was flying out of the New York area yesterday instead of the day before when the glorious storm played havoc with air travel all over the northeast.

Rich Tehrani now understands why I and many others continue to work for Mitel.    Rich's post does indeed capture some of the infectious enthusiasm and passion that spreads from Terry Matthews on down into the organization - as well as into the other sister companies.   The telcom revolution is well underway... and it's definitely fun to be a part of an organization that has that vision.

P.S. Rich also wrote about Terry's other investments in real estate and, yes, Rich, I can understand why you liked the Brookstreet Hotel.  When I up visiting Ottawa I often stay there and yes, it is definitely a very nice place to stay.

(Originally posted to http://dyork.livejournal.com/258085.html)

Now I realize that often in sales and marketing, some folks tend to exaggerate claims... or split hairs to make various claims... or (more often) don't do enough fact-checking to verify their claims... but it rather annoys me when I see someone making claims that are just wrong - especially when the claims overlook products made by my own employer! As readers know, I don't really tout Mitel products here all that much, but in this case, I feel compelled to write a bit about one. In the recent announcements by Siemens of their new OpenStage SIP phones, which Ken Camp covered so well here, Siemens makes the claim in their PowerPoint presentation (available from Ken's post):

The first time an enterprise desktop phone has been able to connect to both wired and wireless infrastructures.

Um... no. You see, Mitel has been shipping this little product called the "Mitel WLAN Stand" since July of this year (2006) which just clips onto the back of any of our enterprise desk phones and allows that phone to connect to a 802.11 network. I've got one here in my home office... I'd be glad to show anyone if they'd like. In fact, our product has a few advantages over what Siemens announced:

1. It is available and shipping today.
   
2. It works with existing Mitel sets. You don't need to purchase new sets... just use your existing (52xx/53xx) sets and order some WLAN stands to make them wireless.
   
3. It works across our full range of sets, not just the top two most expensive sets.
   
4. A PC can be plugged into the PC port on the back of the IP phone and use the wireless connection (in fairness, I don't know from the info provided thus far in the announcements whether the OpenStage phones would support this... but ours can).
   
5. A Mitel set with a WLAN stand can be either a 802.11 client or a 802.11 access point.

Think about this last point for a moment if you have a rapid deployment you want to make. Say you want to drop a team of auditors into a client company location for a few weeks. You have Internet access at the location, but you want the employees to have extensions off of your main office wherever that may be and you want them to securely be able to talk back to your main office. So you ship to the location a bunch of Mitel sets with WLAN stands - all configured as Teleworker sets that will connect back to your Teleworker server on the edge of your corporate network. One of those sets gets a connection to the local wired network and has its WLAN stand configured in AP mode. All the other sets have their WLAN stands configured in client mode... and previously all the appropriate WPA/WPA2 keys were set up so that all communication between the sets is secured. Ta da... beautiful little rapidly-deployed "branch office"... all secure... wireless... and to make it even more convenient, through our "hot desking" the auditors can login with the same extension that they use at the main office. Powerful stuff... and it works today.

On the more mundane level, I have a WLAN Stand here in my home office which gives me the flexibility to move my IP phone to wherever I want to plug it in. So if I wanted to work out on the back patio (a wee bit too chilly right now), I just run an extension cord out there, plug in the phone, and I'm operational. (Next summer I'll have to get some pics sitting in our hammock...) In an corporate office environment, these stands could be used to locate phones in areas that are not served by LAN connectivity... or where you don't want the various cables running across the floor or tables (of course, you still need power).

So the net is that someone there at Siemens needed to do a wee bit more fact-checking, I'd say. Perhaps someone junior was assigned the task. Perhaps they just simply missed it. I know a good number of folks there at Siemens and I have great respect for what they do... so I'm certainly inclined to think this was just a fact-checking mistake.

Now, I'll grant them that their OpenStage USB key is definitely a neat solution. Smaller form factor and very easy to distribute updates when you want to support a new 802.11 variant. (Of course, the security guy in me also thinks... "very easy for someone to steal or misplace".) So if they want to make the claim:

The first time an enterprise desktop phone has been able to connect to both wired and wireless infrastructures using a USB WLAN adapter.

Well, okay... they are probably right on that one. It's that last clause that's the important part.

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