FierceVoIP

Windham parses Digium

Doug Mohney — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 23:53:59 -0400

Danny Windham has been CEO at Digium for nearly twenty months and realizes there's still a lot of work to be done at the open source telephony company. FierceVoIP caught up with Windham at Astricon a few weeks ago to get his latest thoughts on Digium's progress, the marketplace and challenges that lay ahead.

FierceVoIP: Are you happy with the way Switchvox has gone to market?

Windham: I think not, we haven't been at it long enough. We have gigantic work to do to reach small to medium-sized businesses. The reaction [to Switchvox] is so encouraging, it makes you want to do channel development even faster. The reason why we're not happy is we haven't been at it long enough.

Is it successful? The projections we made at the time we acquired Switchvox were pretty aggressive. We have met those projections and we're where we hoped to be at this point in time. The core team is still there and the strategy is improving month to month.

FierceVoIP: So where do you go from here?

Windham: There are a lot of investments we've been making. If you look at the first year of investments, they're all product related. There [have been] changes in strategy, the Switchvox acquisition, trying to decide what Digium is going to do. There's so much opportunity across so many customer bases. If we try to do it all, we can't do it very well.

It's hard to say, but we can't put all the children on the life raft with us.

Now it's about selling, and investing in sales.

FierceVoIP: How many resellers do you have right now?

Windham: Our reseller count has doubled in the last six months and is between 378 and 400. To get access to SMBs, there are millions of them out there, it's just a big job to get a channel to access them.

[Windham said that he'd like to have about 5 resellers in "lots of geographies," but enabling them to sell and be successful takes a while. VP of Global Marketing Leslie Conway said there was a lot of work to develop sales tools and training and getting in front of resellers to educate them]

FierceVoIP: Fonality sells their product through Dell's website and catalog. Do you see yourself in a mass market channel, like Microsoft's Response Point is down at Costco?

Windham: Dell is very much a marketing organization, it looks at [the catalog and web] as a way to be a profit center. If Dell is coming to commit activity to it, there are plenty of people supporting it. It takes a lot of energy to sell through that channel, just like through CDW, TechData.

[As for the mass market/"bigbox" consumer outlets] I don't think we want to try to address that market. It's so different, those channels are massive too. We won't be going there any time soon. We're selling to a little larger end-user than Respone Point with Switchvox, closer to a 30 end-user installation.

The thing we've heard that what sells Response Point is its really cool voice recognition technology. Most people turn that off after a month. We don't know why, but they do.

FierceVoIP: So what will you be offering to carriers?

Windham: That's one of those children we're not putting in the life raft.

In the short term, we have no plans to create a turn-key solution to sell to carriers... This is not a technology question, this is an availability of resources question. The life raft is not that big.

FierceVoIP: Why hasn't Digium landed a big customer endorsement?

Windham: I don't pretend to understand why. We have larger customers, but there is a reluctance [on their part] to talk about Asterisk. Some of it is they don't want their competitors to know what they're using for competitive reasons. Or they don't want to reveal network details for security considerations.

There may be some hold over from the image of open source in general. "Open source is for hackers, not for business." I don't know.

We do have installs of around 10,000 end points we can talk about....Integrics builds it, it's carrier class, running on clustered Asterisk. Enswitch is the product.

[There is] the premise that Asterisk doesn't scale. There are a lot of issues associated with scalability, but Asterisk can scale, the premise that it can't scale is wrong. Or at best, dated.

Could it be better? Of course, but it scales well today.

FierceVoIP: Any acquisition plans you can talk about?

Windham: Now that we've worked past the Switchvox acquisition, we can consider something else. There's nothing on the radar..[if we do] we would look for things that are very, very unique and specific that we can't go build.

FierceVoIP: You're hiring a lot of talent out of the open source community. Are you worried about taking too many in-house?

Windham: The company is no more than the sum total of its employees. We want the best people out there, the most knowledgeable, to do what we're trying to do, that's been our approach.

Taking developers out of the open community and putting them on other projects could have a downside. However, the group of open source developers is bigger and we're continuing to support them. We're spending more dollars then we ever have.

Take the concept of our two acquisitions. They were both in the last year, and they have worked out very well.

It is a good thing that [Digium] runs AstriCon. People are more comfortable if we run. But when we run it, we try to put on that third-party hat as tightly as it fits, and try do what is in the best interests of the [Asterisk] open source project. Some small factions could see that and think we have ulterior motives.

The Switchvox acquisition alienated some small portion of the community. They said: One, "We're so glad you did this, but we'd rather sell our own solution;" or Two, "I'm not happy about it, I'm building a solution, I'm going to continue to sell that solution."

SPOTLIGHT: Israel greenlights VoIP over WiFi test

Doug Mohney — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 21:36:17 -0400

Israel's Ministry of Communication has granted a special license for a "marketing experiment" to deliver domestic fixed-line phone services using VoIP through a WiFi hot spot.

Under the license NSR Ltd is providing VoIP through end-user equipment, including a WiFi "interface." The experiment is supposed to examine "participants' motivation" to use the service, plus operational and marketing aspects.

Last week the Ministry published a document on amending the country's wireless LAN policy draft on hotspot telephony.

For more:
- Cellular-News UK reports on Israel's changes in WiFi VoIP policy

Skype responds to security breach

Pete Wylie — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 14:55:58 -0400

Josh Silverman, president of Skype, responded in his blog Thursday to media reports about unauthorized storage of text messages and user data by Skype's Chinese partner TOM Online. Silverman explains that Skype considered the possibility of texts not going through because of Chinese censorship standards that TOM had to meet in order to operate in the country. He stressed that TOM had to ensure Chinese government access to the communications to operate at all, but that Skype leadership was assured any "offensive" communications would simply be deleted.

"Breaching Trust," the report that sparked Silverman's response, found a security breach on the servers where "offensive" communications are stored that enabled public access to the information. Silverman assured Skype users that TOM remedied the security breach after Skype made them aware of it. He also noted that Skype was working with TOM on the storage of the "offensive" text conversations and accompanying user data.

Silverman also stressed that the compromised communications only affected text conversations in which at least one of the users was using TOM, and that Skype-Skype communications are completely secure and safe.

For more:
- see Silverman's blog post here

Microsoft Live Messenger VoIP arrives (again)

Pete Wylie — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 14:30:43 -0400

Microsoft has re-introduced VoIP functionality to Windows Live Messenger, after removing the feature earlier this year.

Outbound calls can now be made through the messenger with Telefonica's Voype service. Microsoft had previous agreements with Verizon and Net2Phone for VoIP service on the Live Messenger. Telefonica is offering the dial-out service for $0.014 cents a minute, compared with $0.021 cents a minute for SkypeOut. However, Telefonica does not have a comparable offering to SkypeIn, so that could be one barrier to widespread use of the voice feature.

For more:
- see the tmc.com blog post

Is China monitoring Skype calls?

Pete Wylie — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 14:50:20 -0400

"Breaching Trust," a 16-page report released yesterday by Nart Villenveuve of the University of Toronto Citizen Lab, has unearthed disturbing monitoring practices of TOM Online, Skype's partner in China.

Text messages and call logs of communications on the TOM-Skype network are being stored on poorly secured public servers along with the encryption codes for the transmissions, according to the report. Text messages are filtered for keywords that trigger logging of the message, namely, messages mentioning dissidents, Taiwan, Falun Gong, or independence. These texts are not delivered to the intended recipient; instead, the full text of these messages is stored on the publicly-accessible servers, which the study's author was able to access and decode. Also, many texts were filtered and stored that did not contain any of the flagged words on the file the report's author was able to access. This, according to the report, insinuates that individual users of the software could be flagged for surveillance of all communications, once a banned word has been found in messages of voice transmissions.

The findings of the report suggest that TOM Online and perhaps Skype itself are much more complicit with the Chinese government than they will admit. Skype has denied cooperation with the Chinese in call and text monitoring numerous times, and responded to the author of the survey asserting that records of texts were discarded and not displayed or transmitted anywhere, according to the report. But Villenveneuve was able to find records of IP addresses, usernames and other identifying information on the servers dating to August 2007. Skype representatives attribute the security issues to TOM's practices, not Skype's, but the evidence is rather damning that they at least had to be somewhat aware of the volume and sensitivity of data being stored by the Chinese.

For more:
- see the full report "Breaching Trust" here