IP PBX

The powers of brand and legacy in the IP telephony world

Doug Mohney — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 16:15:01 -0500

Brand names and legacy equipment provide their own special inertia to incumbent vendors, all other things being equal. With belt-tightening now a national value, smaller, leaner and meaner upstarts will have the opportunity to displace legacy vendors and legacy solutions - if they can muster a successful communications plan to let people know they exist.

The cliché of 2008 has been "Nobody ever got fired for buying Cisco." The phrase that pays for IP telephony companies in 2009 will be "Give us Cisco and a more affordable alternative." Cisco's success in the marketplace is now a vulnerability. Competitors are going to compare themselves to the top brand in the market place, not the guy standing to next to them in the trenches.

Cisco IP telephony and UC solutions will be used as the benchmark for businesses, but with everyone looking at the bottom line, people are going to want to get more for their money. Just being Cisco isn't going to win business in 2009. You're going to see pounding of the table on support, total cost of ownership and warranties.

Give you a real-world example here at Fierce - We recently replaced the key system here with a new one. One of the options on the table was a new Avaya system or a refurb'ed Cisco one. Price was about the same. Care to guess which won?

Which brings us to the power of legacy. If the brand-X key system has worked for years in the closet without a hiccup (relatively), companies are more likely to go with what they know rather than install something different (Unless, of course, it's Cisco). There may be a long-standing relationship between the business and the vendor (or more likely between the VAR/channel guy and the vendor). Incumbent equipment vendors may offer some sort of discount or trade-in program as a reward for buying in the past. And there's the day-after-day subconscious brand re-enforcement of the vendor's name - it's at the top of the phone.

To defeat the dual powers of brand and legacy in the SMB IP telephony space is an uphill battle. Winners will ultimately have to win three battles: with buyers/end-users, with VAR/channel partners (the guys who are ultimately selling this to the end users), and with the media - the influencers on the buyers and VAR/channel partners.

- Doug

Six reasons to switch to IP phones

Pete Wylie — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 14:57:58 -0500

VoIP News has released a six-point checklist for companies considering an IP phone system, and the recommendations come as little surprise. Outdated phone systems, phone system costs and customer accessibility topped the list of reasons a business manager should consider switching to an IP-based telephony solution.

The report also mentioned the efficiency gains across the company after implementation of IP phone systems as a salient reason to abandon PSTN services.

With costs rising and budgets tightening, IP phone systems also can build a strong telecommuting segment of employees, which could lower a company's bottom line by cutting back on office space and travel expenses while making an attractive proposition to quality employees. Who really wants to commute anyway?

Another plus: IP phone systems make those remote employees more efficient through presence and IM capabilities, further adding value to the company.

For more:
- VoIP News has the full report here

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SPOTLIGHT: ADTRAN speaks up

Doug Mohney — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 16:11:38 -0500

Last week, ADTRAN invited a select group of media down to Huntsville, Ala., for a visit. The event included a customer panel, an overview of voice and data products, and some pre-briefing on new products; the first product unofficially announced this week is a 3G board, er module, that goes into the NetVanta 3305 modular router.

The most impressive and humbling part of the event was a tour through the company's extensive facilities. ADTRAN employs over 1,700 people, and most of them reside in Huntsville, including technical support, engineering design and testing, and manufacturing - yes, manufacturing in the good old USA.

ADTRAN manufactures all of its pre-production prototypes and about 30 percent of its products on site in Huntsville on its own manufacturing line. (The other 70 percent is done in China, but using the exact same quality control standards as are implemented in Huntsville).

It is easy to take the process of creating a new product from scratch for granted; after walking through the assembly line and testing labs of ADTRAN, it is hard not to be in awe of the number of different disciplines and practices that go into the process of building a physical (i.e. hardware) product.

You'll find three slide shows of the various manufacturing facilities Fierce toured-

SLIDESHOW: Visiting ADTRAN - The Assembly Line
SLIDESHOW: Physical Testing at ADTRAN
SLIDESHOW: Visiting ADTRAN - Network and apps level testing

In addition, we have an "easter egg" capturing ADTRAN's press hospitality embedded in the ADTRAN gets Real editorial over at FierceTelecom.

Parsing the SMB IP telephony space

Doug Mohney — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 23:37:34 -0500

Over the past three months, I've spent quality time with executives from ADTRAN, Allworx and Digium. All three companies sell IP telephony solutions for the small to medium-sized business (SMB) space. All three use VARs and channel partners to move their products to the end user. And that's about all they have in common.

Can they all be successful in a downturned market? Are they specialized enough so that all three can survive and (preferably) continue to grow?

The good news is that buyers are more price sensitive, so they're asking more questions about total cost of ownership and what they best value for the money is. As more companies steadily migrate out of key systems bought around Y2K, IP is the only way to go - for future-proofing if no other reason.

On the other side of the coin, many traditional telco-based VARs are still gaining experience with the brave new world of IP. And everyone is having to go out and sort through which VARs and channel partners are the most effective.

Having just come from Huntsville, Alabama (I'll have a couple of slide shows up at FierceTelecom later today or tomorrow) and being wooed by good Southern Hospitality, I have a nice warm glow about ADTRAN. As the Millenials started Kindergarden, my comrades and I in the ISP industry were buying ADTRAN T1 CSU/DSUs to plug everyone into the leased-line, copper-bound Internet.

There are a lot of good people tucked away in the shadow of the Marshall Space Flight Center. The Dudes know Telco. And IP. And how to make money - nearly $500 million last year, while steadily paying cash dividends. They've got good, solid technology, free firmware upgrades, rock solid technical support, and five-year warranties on most of their products. You'll hear more over in the next day or two over at FierceTelecom about my visit to Huntsville.

Allworx does only one thing and does it well - a full IP-PBX system. They have a cadre of engineers in house and the backing of a CLEC that did about $2 billion dollars in business last year. The company has "only" been around for a decade and cleans up when it comes to third-party head-to-head comparisons with other offerings. Parent CLEC PAETEC is planning to leverage the combination of Allworx hardware with monthly billable services for its resellers.

Digium is the most youthful of the three, but has been luring away ADTRAN executives at a respectable clip over the past year. Of the three, Digium has the best story when it comes to customization and the "data VARs." Asterisk can be easily customized for many different flavors of applications and for different vertical markets. In the strange world of "coop-etition," you may find an ADTRAN switch or router gear side-by-side with a Digium Switchvox IP-PBX.

The problem here is that there is no single "right" solution that fits all possible scenarios. Each company has its own strengths as well as its own overlaps upon the turf of the others. Throw in hosting as another alternative and my head starts to hurt really bad.

- Doug

Pingtel

Doug Mohney — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 09:34:08 -0500

Founded: 2004, sort-of (see below)

Status: Suffering a death of a thousand cuts

What does it do: Scalable SIP-based open source IP PBX software

Website: www.pingtel.com

Once upon a time, Pingtel made Java-based desktop IP phones. Wisely, the company decided to get out of hardware and into software and services, moving its SIPxchange IP-PBX platform into open source. The business model was going to be just like how RedHat operated Linux subscriptions.

It was a very Fierce move. SIPxchange won wide acclaiming as being easier to work with in an all-SIP environment, and for being more scalable than Asterisk. Tthe company also picked up Amazon.com as its marquee customer.

However, the IP-PBX open source market didn't turn into the cash cow initially predicted. Sources indicated Pingtel began seeking a buyer in early 2007, but it didn't manage to find one until Bluesocket snatched them up in July 2007.

Bluesocket said the company would fit into its wireless mobility and security solutions, but it wasn't that great of a fit. Nortel came along in mid-August 2008 and paid some amount of cash to Bluesocket to pick up "key assets" and Pingtel employees.

Taken a look at Nortel's financials lately?

OnRelay, Top VoIP Company 2008: FierceVoIP, Fierce 15

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 14:35:40 -0500

OnRelay

Where it's based: London, England
When it was founded: 2000
Website: www.onrelay.com

Fierce because: OnRelay believes the desktop handset is dead. Integrating the personal cell phone with the office IP PBX - a mobile PBX or "mobile branch exchange" (MBX) is the wave of the future. The company holds fundamental patents in fixed mobile integration, so it'll be interesting to see how its portfolio plays out against other FMC/mobile UC offerings in the future.

Fundamentally, OnRelay plays to three trends in the marketplace: 1) Millenials believe that handsets are so 20^th century; 2) People use their personal phones for home and business use; OnRelay (like other mobile UC solutions, to be fair) enables the way to separate personal calls from work calls without having to pay for a cell phone; and 3) In a tight economy, nobody wants to pay for capital expense (handsets) or operational expense (leasing handsets) if they can avoid it.

We're not so sure if the desktop handset is totally dead quite yet, but you have to appreciate OnRelay's Fierce opinion on the subject.

Jajah, Top VoIP Company 2008: FierceVoIP, Fierce 15

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 17:22:05 -0500

Jajah

Where it's based: Mountain View, CA
When it was founded: 2006
Website: www.jajah.com

Why it's Fierce: Since its' last appearance on the VoIP Fierce 15, Jajah has moved out of the crowded me-to "I've got a free VoIP client with IM/I'm going to make money throw low-cost calls" quagmire with some Fierce business strategy. The company reinvented itself by becoming a backend/back-off VoIP provider for other services, including Gizmo5,MailVision, MOBIVOX, and Yahoo. It put a stake through the heart of Jangl by acquiring Jangl's senior management (OK, Jajah and Jangl had been working together for a while, so it might not be too surprising, but still--). It added a hosted SMB IP PBX offering, another cut above the me-too crowd.

Don't be impressed by Intel's venture investment; Intel throws money at anything that might remotely use its silicon. Be impressed by a ground-floor working relationship to leverage Intel's Remote Wake technology for making voice calls without having your PC turned on all the time. Getting your foot in the door to impact the next generations of PCs is Fierce.

Allworx's new President: Re-engaging channels & PAETEC bundles

Doug Mohney — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 10:39:58 -0500

With three days on the job, Allworx President Jeff Howe sat down with FierceVoIP to talk about the challenges the company faces and the advantages integration with parent CLEC PAETEC brings to the table.

"We don't have a product problem," said Howe. "Our engineering and support are good... We have a revenue issue. How do we take it to the next level?"

Howe, formerly PAETEC's Vice President/General Manager for the Agent Channel, is focusing on re-engaging Allworx's resellers and to offer them new opportunities to generate both more revenue and monthly recurring revenue.

Part of the solution is to create new bundles and services leveraging PAETEC offerings with the baseline IP PBX telephony hardware and phones so resellers can provide more than a one-time revenue opportunity. PAETEC, a national telecommunications provider focused on "business-class" customers, generated over $1.6 billion in revenue last year. With a footprint covering more than 80 percent of the nation's 100 metropolitan areas, PAETEC certainly has the reach to support channel partners of all sizes.

Allworx resellers will soon have the option of creatively financing gear through PAETEC and bundling in monthly phone services. Resellers would get a cut of the monthly revenues from the PAETEC services that they sell.

In one model, PAETEC could provide a monthly financing option for Allworx equipment along with phone services on a single bill. A leasing-type arrangement would be a much more attractive option to businesses wanting to avoid a large, out-of-pocket capital expenditure. PAETEC could also provide other managed services through an Internet-based bundle, including off-site data backup and recovery, web server hosting, and managed firewall and router support.

Microsoft announces R2 of OCS 2007

Doug Mohney — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 14:52:01 -0400

Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Release 2 (R2) has been announced and is currently in "private beta" testing. Customers will be able to buy the new release starting in February 2009.

OCS 2007 R2 (or maybe just R2) adds dial-in audio conferencing support, desktop sharing with audio communications and collaboration through a web-based interface, and persistent group chat. The persistent group chat feature provides a list of all available chat rooms and topics along with periodic archiving of discussions in an XML format; tools are available to search the entire history of discussion on a given topic, and filters and alerts are able to notify someone of new posts or topics on a particular topic.

Other enhancements include an attendant console that allows for delegation of call management with configuration of workflows to route calls, SIP trunking, a response group application to manage incoming calls based upon user-configured rules, and extension of Microsoft Office Communication Mobile functionality to Nokia S40, Motorola RAZR, Blackberry and Windows Mobile platforms. Developers get more APIs and Visual Studio integration.

For more:
- Microsoft release on the coming of OCS 2007 R2

Three wishes for Digium

Doug Mohney — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 11:01:49 -0400

As the afterglow from AstriCon fades, I think there are three areas where Digium could do a better job telling its story. To set the stage, I need to turn the clock back to June and NXTcomm with a conversation at the Heart Bar in Las Vegas

I was hanging out, ah, meeting, with Seamus Hourihan of Acme Packet, and the discussion turned to the subject of awards and customer wins and how they relate to companies and their lifecycle of announcements in building a reputation. Since Acme Packet currently has around half of the SBC market, I figure Seamus might have a clue here. [Apologies in advance to Seamus if I misquote him; it was late and there was a lot of smoke in the bar]

"When [start-up] companies start out, first they talk about awards, because that's all they have. So they talk about that," he said. "Then, they make smaller customer announcements, because that's who they get. Finally, they make large customer announcements and rack those up."

Applying the Hourihan evolutionary scale, Digium is somewhere between steps two and three. It really doesn't need awards per say; the open source community of developers embracing Asterisk is far more valuable than any sort of award you could purchase. Still, there's a laundry list of accolades (if not a PowerPoint race car logo slide) from eWeek, TMC, Linux Magazine, InfoWorld and VoIP-News, not to mention FierceVoIP.

In lieu of customer announcements, Digium has its Innovation Awards to recognize what people are doing with Asterisk. You have to dig a bit, but users include health care (Emdeon Business Services) and call center applications (Aheeva). NTT software is currently conducting a big time trial of Asterisk and adoption by a large carrier brand name would do a lot to dispel the prevailing mythology that "Asterisk doesn't scale."

(Another PowerPoint race car slide with customers/users would be a good thing as well - and I'm a guy who's snarky about race car slides).

But - at first glance, the Skype/Digium deal sounds good, but it's not Paris Hilton hot. Having access to over 300 million users on the biggest non-carrier carrier is a big deal, but the devil is in the details. Skype needs help breaking into the business market and an Asterisk box providing call routing capability to a bunch of independent desktop clients is just what the telephony doctor ordered. I'm sure Digium will sell more software, and Skype will be able to get its foot in the (product/service overcrowded, certainly cruising for a right-sizing) SMB market with Asterisk.

In my opinion, what Digium needs is to 1) better tell/communicate the stories about the customers and users it already has, 2) have a few clear big installation customer/user stories to both a) lend credibility to the company and b) dispel once and for all the "Asterisk doesn't scale" myth, and 3) Get one or two big corporate/IT endorsements.

We're starting to see work on 3) with the current announcements with Skype and BroadSoft on the partnership side, but my wish for 2009 would be to see someone like IBM embrace Asterisk. IBM has a big love for open source, is progressive enough to actually think "out of the box" to do this, and has both carrier telephony and UC/enterprise presence. I've been told that IBM would likely prefer to remain neutral since it is so entrenched dealing with proprietary/legacy hardware.

- Doug

SPOTLIGHT: Digium and BroadSoft Play Well Together

Doug Mohney — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:58:13 -0400

Digium and BroadSoft have announced that Digium's Switchvox IP PBX is certified to work with BroadSoft's BroadWorks VoIP application platform.

Since BroadSoft provides VoIP apps to eight of the world's ten largest telecommunications companies, and Asterisk is the world's most widely used open source telephony, this should mean that carriers using BroadWorks should feel comfortable with selling Switchvox turnkey IP PBX solutions to SMBs. Switchvox should go well with SIP trunking options, so carriers should have another option beyond hosted and all the proprietary solutions floating around.

One might suppose this is part of a larger "Play well with others" strategy by Digium. A few weeks ago, Digium announced it was building an interoperability solution between Asterisk and Skype.

For more:
- Broadsoft's release on Switchvox/BroadWorks interoperabiliy

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."

FORD: Skype Me, Asterisk Us

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 09:53:42 -0400

by Carl Ford

Mark Spencer had been working on projects delivering drivers and writing code that was specific to boards. Being part of the open source experience, he saw that his work could be built into something bigger that would allow the extraction of call control into an open source project that could be used for anything.

When you ask people about Asterisk, the label of "PBX" is placed on it. But that is not accurate, since it's an open source system that has call control ability. Most developers I know use the Asterisk system as a PBX in their homes as a hobby and use it as an application platform at work for their carrier employers. While at Astricon, I met people who use the system as an IP-PBX, and others who use it specifically for its ability to enhance call centers.

With Skype, like Asterisk, the starting premise is not about connecting to the PSTN, but creating something new. Using the same peer-to-peer model that is in Kazaa, Skype proceeded to deliver a new model of call control that was self organizing and used Instant Messaging as the signaling method to communicate.

This brings us to Skype's main impact. The soft client can be used to connect to people on social networks, blogs and web sites. Regardless of your connection to Skype, you can connect to people on Skype. Some people say it is like having an 800 number for the Internet.

Now the same functionality will be available to connect through to call centers using Asterisk. Since Asterisk is capable of being more than just a PBX, it can be used as an Automatic Call Distributor or just as a gateway to support the "trunk/lines" coming in from Skype.

Want to have global reach? Skype with Asterisk allows a lot of new incoming calls -- calls that may require call center staff to develop new talents. I have a friend who teaches for American Accent who has taught me how to better understand people when they speak English with accents, which may become standard training as Skype with Asterisk is deployed in call centers.

Best of all, from my perspective, is the lack of the PSTN in this model. At a time when regulators are trying to see everything VoIP as a taxable item, I would like to think that the public good is seen in the ability to drive worldwide commerce to a business near you.

Carl Ford is Strategic Adviser and Community Developer for FierceMarkets. His words of wisdom can be found at www.carlford.net.

Alcatel-Lucent gets ClubMed account

Pete Wylie — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 16:01:22 -0400

Alcatel-Lucent added ClubMed to its big name customer roster Friday and will install about 30,000 total lines in a complete VoIP telephony system for ClubMed resorts, sales offices and corporate HQ initially with more rollouts planned for the future.

The companies signed a seven-year service agreement that will see Alca-Lu's OmniPCX enterprise telephony solution deployed across Club Med's 87 locations. Club Med will use the solution to streamline existing communications, cut costs, and manage telephony centrally, and the resort chain can now add locations easily through the centralized management tools Alca-Lu provides.

Plans are also being discussed to roll out softphones in resort room TVs and WiFi in every guest room, which would cut back on costs for guests and Club Med alike. Alca-Lu has had an executive shake up this month, and big partnerships like this could help to assuage wary investors. Focusing an enterrise story about cutting telephony costs with WiFi and VoIP capabilities also seems like a wise idea going forward.

For more:
- see the press release here

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AstriCon 2008: Working through the Digium/Skype Announcement

Doug Mohney — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 18:56:26 -0400

Digium CEO Danny Windham and Skype VP Stefan Oberg met with FierceVoIP to discuss the hows and whys of the interoperability announcement Thursday. There's a little something for everyone - including customers and channel partners.

Windham said small businesses will be able to use the Skype for Asterisk connector to enable a presence on the Skype network while getting all the functionality of a PBX. A general Skype login name could be routed into a PBX for call processing and delivery to the next available person in a calling queue; a single Skype ID could be used for sales, technical support or other types of customer service queues.

"Asterisk does least-cost call routing," said Windham. "Calls from a standard handset could be routed through SkypeOut... You can save a lot of money both on inbound and outbound calls. It's easy to get access to the Skype network now."

Digium's benefits are more ethereal. The Skype for Asterisk connector will work on any Asterisk 1.4 or 1.6 release, including third-party releases. "It will work with Trixbox," Windham stated. "Any third party [project] is a candidate." He expects the enthusiasm involved will drive use of the product and "some revenue."

For Skype, the advantages are clear. "A lot of people are using [Skype] in businesses already," said Oberg. Skype's business customers want a way to distribute call queues, a better way to handle voice mail, better call logging and a way to tie Skype in with SIP-based mobile phones. "They're basically asking for a PBX. That is what this solution will give them."

While the two companies have had on-and-off discussions over the years on how they could work together, a serious effort crystallized at a June meeting at Digium's HQ in Huntsville, Ala. "We went from zero to high priority following that meeting," said Windham. A room full of people from both companies discussed alternatives, while Digium CTO Mark Spencer sat to the side writing code. As discussions went on, Spencer produced a rough hack of what a Digium/Skype solution would look like within three days.

Since the initial hack, Digium's software engineers have worked to refine the solution, making it more robust and suitable for a formal beta, but neither Windham nor Oberg would commit to a firm shipping date for a number of reasons.

On Digium's side, it is a matter of further polishing and testing the software. "As soon as we get happy that the quality is good," stated Windham. Pricing also needs to be set for the module.

Skype has broader concerns. "We want to polish our go-to-market strategy," said Oberg. Pricing needs to be set and there's a new mindset involved, since Skype has been available in a simple self-serve mode. One new area for Skype is a revenue share with channel partners on the number of minutes used. It's the first time Skype has engaged in revenue sharing with channel partners.

"We haven't had a partner strategy at all," said Oberg. "Going to business is a whole new thing for us... we're starting with Digium and we'll see how it goes... We're focusing on SMBs, Digium and Asterisk is the perfect partnership."

Voixtas to offer snom SIP phones

Pete Wylie — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 10:21:04 -0400

Voxitas and snom announced Wednesday that they will form a partnership that will see snom's SIP-based phones integrated into Voxitas's business-class VoIP services. The deal comes after Voxitas extensively tested snom's 3xx series VoIP phones and m3 IP DECT mobile phones and found them to be interoperable with all Voxitas's IP PBX customers.

Voxitas said in a release that the partnership would enhance the value proposition it offers its small to medium business customers with its SIP True Voice service.

In addition to wide-ranging support for various security protocols, snom's phones support several audio devices simultaneously, giving customers flexibility and customability, as well as knowledge that their secure communications are protected.

snom's phones will be available through Voxitas's reseller network, as the German firm continues to add partners in the SMB VoIP space. Earlier this month, snom announced a partnership with Fonality.

For more:
- see the joint snom and Voxitas press release here

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AstriCon 2008 – Future Asterisk Delivery and Support

Doug Mohney — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 02:20:50 -0400

Phoenix, Arizona - Originally expecting to see Brian Aker of MySQL give the lead keynote, AstriCon attendees were instead briefed on four new initiatives Digium is undertaking to improve and support Asterisk and its developer community.

Digium executives were left scrambling due to a phone call late Tuesday night from Aker, who was stuck in Minnesota due to a combination of weather and airline scheduling problems. Wednesday's keynote became a combination of presentations about Digium's belief in open source as the key to the company's future success, announcement of customer innovation awards, and an outline of four key initiatives to be rolled out over the next couple of quarters, covering Asterisk Now, Asterisk's marketplace, Asterisk Application Manager, and subscription support for open source Asterisk.

Asterisk Now, the company's "software appliance" designed to be a complete set of code to easily download and install Asterisk, will get a couple of face lifts. Release 1.5 will have Asterisk running on the CentOS Red Hat clone with Free PBX running on top of it. The new release is expected to appear in the next week or so.

Longer term, Asterisk will appear as a binary installation for CentOS and a number of other popular Linux flavors. Support for Debian-based releases is planned, as is the capability to do code management from a repository.

The Asterisk Marketplace will also get a face lift, moving from a static document simply listing members of the Asterisk ecosystem, to a more dynamic and deep infrastructure capable of supporting all components for delivery if companies choose to do so, including billing.

A2M, the Asterisk Applications Manager, will provide much easier updating and installation of software. It will allow users to simply browse, click, and buy a self-installed binary. A2M will work not only for commercial releases, but open source software as well.

The announcement that created the most buzz in the audience was subscription support for the open source version of Asterisk. Subscribers will receive the same quality and type of support with open source as they now do with the Business Edition of Asterisk.

CEO Danny Windham said the four initiatives are in various phases of existence, with some of the announcements in the "definition stage" with details to be worked out.

AstriCon 2008 – A chat with FreeSWITCH, PIKA

Doug Mohney — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 00:44:56 -0400

PHOENIX, Ariz. - FreeSWITCH doesn't really compete with Asterisk, but complements it, says a spokesperson. Meanwhile, PIKA Technologies appliance has secured over 75 developers including one or two familiar names.

Brian West, in charge of quality assurance, public relations and administration of the FreeSWITCH project, said that many people are using Asterisk and FreeSWITCH in a complementary fashion. While some are replacing Asterisk with FreeSWITCH, many deployments are happening in a side-by-side fashion - sometimes in the same box. FreeSWITCH supports software-based conferencing, so people can load both programs on a single server and use FreeSWITCH to provide conferencing to Asterisk without any additional hardware.

FreeSWITCH also provides native support for 16 and 32 kHz wideband audio; Asterisk currently supports 16 kHz audio.

West says that FreeSWITCH does appear to be displacing another open source telephony packages. A number of OpenSER users are switching over to FreeSWITCH for various reasons.

Over at the PIKA Technologies booth, Vice President Terry Atwood said the company's appliance - announced at last year's AstriCon - has 75 developers working with it. "About half of the developers are running Asterisk on it and the other half are porting their own [Linux-based] telephony applications on it," said Atwood.

Among the companies working with the appliance are Fonality and Intuitive Voice Technology. The latter company has already ported its application over to the low-form factor PowerPC-based device, while Fonality is in the process of moving over its code base - including its newly announced HUD 3.0 software - to the device. Atwood said moving from a PC-based solution to a lower-cost embedded processor design with a paltry 256MB of flash storage was a challenge for some companies since they had to squeeze code down into a smaller space and then recompile applications for the embedded PowerPC environment.

Visiting AstriCon 2008 - Slideshow Feature

Doug Mohney — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 21:52:34 -0400

FierceVoIP is on the scene in Phoenix, Arizona (Glendale, if you want to get picky). Pictures of Wednesday's keynote, Asterisk people you might know, and companies exhibiting here are all available in our AstriCon 2008 slideshow presentation here.

Quintum blessed (again) by Microsoft

Doug Mohney — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 10:03:01 -0400

Quintum has developed a VoIP T1/E1/PRI gateway and a FSX gateway that use Microsoft's Response Point IP PBX SMB phone software. It's not the first time Microsoft and Quintum have come up in the same press release this year.

According to the announcement, Quintum will release two Response Point Gateways compatible with and specifically designed to work with all the IP phone systems based upon Response Point. The digital gateway will support a T1, E1 or PRI connection and the analog gateway will support up to 4 FSX ports.

Both devices allow users to set up a system in a matter of minutes, with Response Point auto-configuring the analog gateway; the digital gateway has a configuration wizard to step through the config process.

Quintum's tailored hardware opens up more Response Point options for SMB users and will likely benefit businesses putting larger numbers of users onto the IP PBX; currently, Response Point will support up to 50 users.

Earlier this year, Quintum lent its support to a free Microsoft UC test drive program run by Unisys, so there's likely more Microsoft love for Quintum in the pipeline.

For more:
- Quintum Microsoft Response Point selection. Release.