Interview with David Hattey, CEO, FirstHand Technologies

Note: This interview was done a few days before CounterPath acquisition of FirstHand was announced.

What is the update on your commercial deployments?

Through the second half of 2007 we had thousands of seats out there through beta tests and trials. And those tests and trials across multiple OEMs have gone well and there have been related announcements related to general availability of PBX products integrated with our solution towards the end of 2007. We have pipelines built up with all our OEMs to supply our products for large enterprises as well as SMEs as we go into 2008.

There was a lot of interest in FMC at the end of 2006 but during 2007 there has been a lull although there was relatively more action on enterprise FMC side.

On the carrier side there has been a lull due to the fact that wireless carriers are asserting their control. And the way they are doing that is by exploring other FMC options like femtocell. However we did see some offers being launched in 2007 such as T-Mobile UMA based FMC service. On the enterprise side we have seen FMC continue to march forward. The delay there has been due to delays from PBX vendors in integrating this and bringing it to market. Nortel’s CS1000 which is their main PBX platform took six months till the end of 2007 to integrate our product. There are 3000 test cases just from the mobility aspect to validate a product for CS1000 platform. So it is a very strenuous process. We have also seen similar delays with Cisco and Avaya. But all major PBX vendors have announced their products now and hopefully that lull will disappear during 2008.

What percentage of IP PBX extensions do you expect to add FMC capability to, going forward?

Three years out we are looking at estimates of anywhere between 8% to 24% of enterprise PBX extensions being installed as mobile or FMC enabled. For 2008 I expect adoption of under 1% range. And that is a large figure. Enterprise PBX market is a huge market and we are looking at something in the region of 100 million lines per year being shipped worldwide.
So when you say 1% penetration, you mean 1% of the existing PBX base or 1% of the new PBX lines?

1% of the new PBX lines.

IP PBX or all new PBX lines?

All new PBX lines. Almost all PBXs shipped today are at least IP enabled. But we have integrated our solution with both the IP PBX as well as the traditional PBXs of companies like NEC.

There are various flavours of FMC available. Which FMC flavour is being favoured as per your experience?

What we are seeing among the early adopters is that they want to extend the desktop PBX features to the cell phone. That is what FMC has come down to in the enterprise space. The enterprise is concerned about productivity and control in context of communication with the person rather than the device.

Extending PBX features over to cell phone sounds much more that plain handover. Is the industry still sticking to the term FMC the way you position it, or are you calling this something else now?

We started by morphing FMC to enterprise FMC and as we add more features such as IM and presence management, visual voice mail, we started calling it Mobile Unified Communications. And we see that echoed by the OEMs we are working with like Nortel and NEC.

I have noticed that a lot of the FMC vendors have also moved away from calling the technology FMC. What other reason are there for this conscious shift in terms of branding?

There are two reasons for that. One: FMC became popular as voice call continuity. And what we do is far beyond simple voice call continuity. In terms of capabilities, VCC is perhaps just 10% of our solution. The rest is the extension of PBX features and other new features. The other reason is that FMC has become a carrier catchphrase. We are seeing carriers working with IMS and UMA to deploy these kind of solutions and that has enforced the view that FMC is about VCC and is owned by carriers.

How is the multimedia aspect doing as compared to plain voice in these FMC deployments?

Our solution is not intended to bring data continuity across networks for other applications. It is really our own enterprise applications that work across various networks and devices within our enterprise FMC implementations.

So you enable data continuity of applications tied in with the PBX mainly?

Exactly. That is what we enable in terms of data continuity.

One final question: How many extensions are FMC enabled right now? What are your estimates?

Right now it is fairly limited. It is in thousands. As we roll out into 2008 we have visibility into hundreds of thousands of FMC enabled extensions just through FirstHand products.