In this Issue:
-People on the Move:
People moving on to Cisco:
Kathy Meier recently left Lucent and joined VocalData as VP of Marketing.
Michael Spencer has joined TrulyGlobal as their CEO.
Don Jackson has put his consulting practice (Clark Communications) on hold and joined Tellme Networks as Vice President of Advanced Telephony
Pelle Svensson recently left Ericsson and joined connectBlue, a new Bluetooth company.
Yves Hupe left Alcatel and recently joined VIPswitch as Director, Product Marketing.
Jonathan Taylor, former founder and CTO of IRDG and MediaGate has started a new venture at Voxeo Corporation as CTO and President.
Nelson Hsu left NetCentric Corporation last quarter and has joined Voxeo Corporation as VP of Strategic Alliances. Voxeo is a stealth mode company based in Scotts Valley, California. Besides other usual duties he'll also establish an East Coast presence out of the Greater Boston area.
Ken Williams left Telcordia Technologies to join NeTrue Communications as Vice President of Operations.
Mary Hofmann recently left AT&T (NYC) to join Net2Phone, as an International Provisioning Specialist.
Frank De La Renta former Sr. VoIP Network Specialist left Telocity to join Sun International Resorts in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida as Technical Telecommunications Manager.
Doug Moeller has left Nortel Networks to join Advanced Telcom Group, Inc.(ATG) as Vice President of Advanced Technology.
(Please email: people@pulver.com to report a change in your position. Please put: "People on the Move" in the subject of the email.)
- Companies on the Move:
Acquisitions:
Broadcom recently announced the acquisition of Silicon Spice for US$ 1.19 billion.
Cisco recently announced the purchase of Komodo Technologies at a valuation of US$ 175 million.
ITXC recently announced the acquisition of eFusion at a valuation of US $151 million
Clarent Corp. recently announced the acquisition of Peak Software at a valuation of US$ 60 million.
Net2phone recently announced the acquisition of Aplio.
Funding:
dynamicsoft recently announced they have raised $40 million in new funding from investors including UBS Capital, U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray and The Sprout Group as well as their first-round investors ComVentures and VantagePoint Venture Partners.
iBasis recently announced they have made a US$ 5 million investment in eYak. This is in addition to the recent US$ 10 million investment made by meVC Draper Fisher Jurvetson Fund
Pagoo announced they have closed on a US$15 million in new funding from meVC Draper Fisher Jurvetson Fund I, Hummer Winblad and Selby Venture Partners.
VirtualCom, Inc. announced that they have closed on $15 million in financing from the AIG Global Sports and Entertainment Fund, L.P. and the AIG Southern Cone Fund, L.P
Other News:
Metatel has changed its name to eDial and recently launched their eDial service.
Unisphere Solutions recently filed their S1.
The past 30 days has seen volatility with the VoIP stocks tracked in the pulver.com Index. ( http://pulver.com/vonindex/ ) From 80.33 on July 3rd, the index closed at 60.32 on August 7th
For up-to-date daily Industry news, please feel free to visit ( http://pulver.com/news ). If you have news you would like to see posted, please email: editor@pulver.com.
With this issue of The Pulver Report, I am entering the start of the 5th year of publishing The Pulver Report. When I started writing this back in August, 1996, I started by emailing the first issue to a list of 300 friends. During the past four years the core subscription base has grown to over 55,000 people as of August, 2000.
I'd like to personally thank everyone who has contributed to the growth of the readership of The Pulver Report over the years.
The Enterprise marketplace has not been as quick to adopt Internet Telephony technologies as many vendors had expected and industry analysts had forecasted during the past three years.
Just because the IP Telephony industry has discovered that it is possible to re-invent a PBX as an iPBX and enable more service providers to compete in the Centrex space doesn't mean there is a real demand from either Enterprises or Service Providers who want to compete in the space and offer such services.
While it is easy to make excuses, the reality of the situation is such that the existing infrastructure, telephony and corporate politics in many enterprises are such that there is no easy way to introduce a new technology when the existing, albeit older technology works just fine.
One place where this becomes evident is in the discussion about engineering for Internet Telephony. Is the existing trunk count too large (since VoIP can provide stat mux capability), or is the backbone to small since (depending on the codec, you can take advantage of most of the available bandwidth), or need to segment it. What authority in the enterprise is prepared for this? Even if they are dealing with Service Level Agreement contracts, this can be perplexing.
Another problem which hasn't really started to surface yet is that most enterprise networks were not designed with Gigiswitchs. This should not be a real problem for companies which anticipate less than 100 simultaneous phone calls (assuming they don't have any remaining 10MB LAN segments), but assuming G.711 is used and each call requires a 64k stream (plus overhead) and there are 1000 simultaneous calls, the bandwidth consumed at will can start to be noticeable. One feature I expect to see requested is an instant busy signal based on how many calls are engaged and what the relative condition of the corporate IP network is.
There is also an inherent assumption that the enterprise network is a well managed network - because if it isn't, it will have to be in order to get good results using IP telephony technologies. IP Telephony just doesn't work well under hostile conditions. So while these core technologies work great in LAN environments, unless a company has a 10/100MB link between branch offices, proper care and attention will need to be given to remote office network segments or there just won't be enough bandwidth to allow this technology to breath properly.
And if they are managing well, lets assume the company has a firewall, which may want to enable off-net traffic for Internet Telephony, but unlike the extranet implementations, can readily identify a secure solution.
However, my expectation is opportunities do make markets.
Look for growth of adoption in areas of new construction such as office buildings and hotels. Vertical markets like the financial services industry where move/add/changes are a way of life in telecom support will be one of the first to benefit from and adopt these technologies and the recent successes by vendors selling to this market segment is very encouraging.
Over the next few months there will be more stories appearing where certain brand-name companies have made the commitment to purchase 1,000, 5,000, 10,000 even 20,000 IP enabled phones for their offices. Please keep in mind that at the end of the day most telecom managers don't know and don't care about the fundamental technology running inside their telephones and wires and care more on the reliability of the systems, their ability to scale and in some cases the ability to grow when needed. It's not a question of H.323 vs. MGCP vs. SIP. It's a question of staying with something that is familiar vs. going with something that isn't in an area where it is very difficult to find enough world-class system integrators who know how to introduce new technologies into the enterprise and help find the talented new pool of systems/telephone people who will be responsible for the new systems. Today it is very difficult to find quality people to hire to help maintain and grow the investment once the system integration is completed.
So what will it take to for IP Telephony to really "happen" in the Enterprise? A few things, some which are not technology related but rather a change of telecom politics within the office. Again, to date I have not seem many compelling stories for why an enterprise should give up their existing and fully functional PBX for something which well, just isn't.
These days I'm looking for the introduction of corporate LDAP based directory services (such as netnumber) connected to corporate Presence Management, Instant Messaging and next generation telephony services which become the change agents / market accelerants and drives the adoption of these technologies inside the corporate enterprise.
The Presence and Instant Messaging industry is now a step closer toward supporting operability (once operability is reached they can focus on interoperability).
The three approaches which are still in the running include: Instant Messaging and Presence using SIP (IMPS), IMXP and Simple Instant Messaging Protocol (SIMPLE). All of the approaches are reasonable, but are based on the perspective of their respective experiences. Presence the Priority for some, Multimedia email for others. And while the press got off track by AOL, the lack of technical merits in the recent AOL proposal never made them a viable candidate. Regardless of the perspective, I remain hopeful that the industry will start to enjoy improved scalable interoperability by end of year. However, I do expect AOL / ICQ to remain separate from the rest of industry for at least a year.
By August 21st a report is due back to the IETF from the leaders representing these three teams which is supposed to outline the commonalties and differences in each approach together with a statement of whether or not these three teams can merge their efforts into a single protocol.
Before the Internet happened, brand loyalty was something which a lot of companies and consumers took seriously.
These days, companies which were once familiar have started marketing themselves with unfamiliar names. One sign that something is up (and maybe going wrong) is when a company issues a press release to announce a new spin-off and in the first sentence of the press announcement has to include instructions on how to pronounce the name of the company. Look for the continued introduction of Aramaic names to the English speaking Internet culture.
While some name changes are mandated when companies merge and for other legal reasons, what I'd like to know is how many company names are chosen these days just based on the availability of the accompanying domain name?
People who live in Bell Atlantic territory are wondering to themselves these days how "Verizon" is derived from the merging of "Bell Atlantic" and "GTE"? Why would anybody want to give up usage of strong and established brands with have a positive history and positive recognition in exchange for a company name which has no history or name recognition?
The truth is many good .com names have been lost due to mergers and acquisitions, and of course the homesteaders. Good names should be recognized for their value and not cast aside quickly.
Before the net, there were companies which managed to keep the same name for a hundred years. These days companies seem to be proud if they are able to keep the same name for a hundred internet days.
During the past five years, companies which have been marketing products and services on the net first called these services [i] services/businesses, then [e] services/businesses and now in 2000 with the influence of the wireless/mobile internet - [m] services/business.
As time moves forward look for the alphabetizing of Net services and businesses to continue.
During the past few months we have been working on a new pulver.com resource page - our Commercial SIP Products Resource which is available at: ( http://pulver.com/sip/products.html ). If you have a product (or service) in the SIP space and would like to get listed, please follow the instructions at the top of the SIP page.
I don't really like making phone calls, even though it is great to actually talk to the person. When people call, it's quite intrusive, and phone calls are taxing. What's taxing about them, though? You're just talking, right? Well, then I thought about it. The thing that's different about a phone call is that unlike face-to-face talking, it requires constant attention. Because you know that you're tying up limited bandwidth (especially if you don't have call waiting), because you yourself are tied to the phone, you feel compelled to keep talking.
Meeting in person always revolves around something - lunch, dinner, pool, a bar - some environment that gives you something else to talk about and also something to focus on during pauses or lulls. The person who talked about that flirting service at Instant Messaging 2000 pointed this out. Compare this to a phone call from a car. The reason this is so much harder than having the person in the car with you, even on a hands-free set, is that during tricky spots of driving, the person on the other end is just sitting there waiting for you, because the phone call is engaged. This is one reason Instant Messaging is so successful - it's so much more passive than voice because you can use a spare second or two to chat whenever something comes to mind, instead of having to allocate full half-hour chunks and actively recall topics to discuss. So find-me/follow-me is great, but it's just the start. Whenever I log on to a computer, it should register me on a presence network that automatically opens a conference IP voice channel with everyone on a list of people I'm willing to talk to.
A speaker at VON Europe who spoke about designing user-friendly tools gave me this idea. She pointed out how in a company where a similar service existed, communication increased dramatically. The pertinent stat is not minutes, nor call completion, but the number of non-comfort-noise minutes. And it doesn't seem like too much effort in terms of protocols or technology has gone in this direction. This is also where Jeff's voice everywhere idea comes in - if I'm cooking, why shouldn't I be able to talk to my friend, hands free, with negative/zero effort.
If I'm watching "Who wants to be a Millionaire", I should be able to talk to my friends watching the show, or everyone watching it, even. It's a way to build community, but the voice needs to be divorced from calling or computers...it needs to be as easy as an on/off switch. I mean, it's the same reason that when you give people walkie talkies, they talk so much more than is necessary for whatever task is at hand - the easy on/off and the passive conferencing invite use. Obviously there are certain conversations that need to be kept private, and perhaps work could be done on how to "whisper" in an always-on, always-conference voice modality..And then there is the issue of allowing people to join your conference, unioning and disunioning conferences, etc...
At Spring VON this year we announced a new initiative to speed the reality of the Broadband Home. Sponsored jointly by pulver.com and System Dynamics Inc., our Broadband Home newsletter and Summit conference in June have attracted a worldwide audience in industry sectors ranging from chips to content.
The progression toward broadband connections to the home (DSL, Cable, fixed wireless, satellite and fiber) and within the home (in various flavors of wired and wireless) is happening around the globe. After meeting with many companies in North America and Europe, some similarities and differences between countries are starting to become clear. These help clarify the actions suppliers could take to customize offerings for different countries.
First, the similarities. Service providers in developed countries around the world all aspire to deliver "the full bundle" to the home -- telephony, high speed Internet, television, games and e-commerce -- and most believe these services all migrate over time to IP.
The differences lie in service platforms, applications, and timing. PC penetration, government policy, housing density and behavioral patterns explain many of the differences between geographies. In Sweden, all factors are aligned to speed penetration of converged broadband services to and in the home. The government has subsidized PC purchases and is encouraging universal penetration of home broadband within five years. Widespread fiber to the home is practical now since over 60% of the population lives in multi-unit buildings. Led by Bredbandsbolaget (B2), service providers are competing to offer bi-directional 10 megabit-per-second symmetrical service - for PCs today, IP voice soon and then TV via IP multicast.
By contrast, England has a number of vendors focusing on converged services that grow outward from the TV and the set-top box. Because of its lower PC penetration, BT's control and pricing of high speed services, and the long history of Teletext as an information source, TV-based services are a plausible path for convergence in England.
The Broadband Home Report
This monthly report covers all sectors of the rapidly-evolving broadband home industry, and is complimentary to qualified subscribers. Past issues, available on the Web, have covered broadband technology and service providers in North America and Sweden. The upcoming issue will include a report on the UK.
To subscribe to the report and view past issues, please visit ( http://www.thebroadbandhome.com/report )
At VON Europe 2000 and at the Summer 2000 VON Developers Conference, Microsoft started to make strong statements in support of SIP.
Microsoft believes that SIP and some related protocols address a number of important needs regarding next-gen communications, but they have not made any specific product announcements to date regarding SIP. In fact, Microsoft continues to solicit input from their partners and customers regarding if/how to support SIP.
Microsoft recently co-authored several IETF draft RFC documents related to SIP that are noteworthy. These documents shed some light on their thinking about how SIP can be integrated with other important technologies, such as XML, Instant Message Presence Protocol, etc.. The other authors with whom Microsoft worked on these IETF documents are noted industry experts regarding SIP and I understand the collaborative effort to produce these documents was very positive. These specific draft RFC documents are posted on the public IETF Web site and were discussed the recent IETF meeting which took place last week in Pittsburgh, PA.
A list of these IETF documents, as reference:
- SIP Extensions for Presence ( http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-rosenberg-impp-presence-00.txt )
- SIP Extensions for Instant Messaging ( http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-rosenberg-impp-im-00.txt )
- SIP Extensions for Presence Authorization ( http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-rosenberg-impp-qauth-00.txt )
- A Data Format for Presence Using XML ( http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-rosenberg-impp-pidf-00.txt )
- A Lightweight Presence Information Format (LPIDF) ( http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-rosenberg-impp-lpidf-00.txt )
- An XML Based Format for Watcher Information ( http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-rosenberg-impp-watcherinfo-00.txt ) )
- An XML Format for Presence Buddy Lists ( http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-rosenberg-impp-buddylist-00.txt )
Some companies have a person with the job title called "evangelist". The role of an evangelist is to spread "the word" and when Carl worked for Telcordia, he considered that a pretty good description of what he did, when talking about the benefits of using Internet Protocol [IP] as a delivery method. In a recent visit to RAD, he heard the good news that IP worked even for Time Division Multiplexing [TDM]. RAD's IP Mux takes TDM T1s and sends the signal over IP. It includes a CSU/DSU function, but needs an external device to multiplex for DS0s. Similar products exist using ATM and Frame Relay from companies including ACT Networks and the major manufacturers. If you have ever explained the benefits of using IP to circuit switched users, you will find it strange that an IP mux can experience almost all the benefits of VoIP technology.
While the IP Mux solution does not benefit from statistical multiplexing or silence suppression, no savings in bandwidth are realized. However, the interesting lesson is that its simplicity makes it an easy to implement solution. Many companies do not have the internal resources to manage VoIP systems, particularly when they involve new protocols. Since the circuit is fully emulated protocol analysis should not be different from the end points.
While most of the economics proving IP today is based on saving bandwidth, a consequence of the backbone network being data is managing the core as a common network is probably a larger benefit. Therefore a mux that allows everything to be managed in common is valuable.
We are currently looking for speakers to participate at Geolocation Opportunities 2001 which will be taking place in April 2001 in Tokyo, Japan.
The conference will focus on emerging new technologies and opportunities in geolocation. Suggested topics for GO2001 are geolocation technologies and services, wireless E911, navigation, intelligent transportation system (ITS), location business opportunities, location and the Internet. Other related location topics are also welcomed.
Please send your speaking proposals to the technical contact: Joseph Hoshen, jhoshen@att.net. The deadline for speaking proposals is: October 30, 2000.