Breaking the 40 day silence
Breaking the silence of 40 long days today, a silence protesting the ugly 8 long years of telcom recession. That is one reason. The other reason is that I have been working on some custom research projects while you guys were watching the markets throw those familiar tantrums. Anyway, the blogging will be light for the next few months, but we will have a full-time blogger for you sometime in December. I have not recruited for over a year now. In India, that means attenuation to the tune of 50%. Almost an organized attrition. And that is a killer especially if you have to do the baby sitting while they stay!!!
Some comments on the major developments over the past month or so:
US elections: Easier to say things when you are out of power. The moment you assume it, you get a microscopic view of things you were previously seeing with your naked eye. Anyway, as long as the US produces innovation, there should not be a major problem. In the context of communications industry, the problem is to monetize that innovation. In ICT, some new and equally competitive pockets of innovation are opening up - areas like Eastern Europe and Ireland. I would probe the BRIC countries next.
The financial crisis: not quite Correction 2.0. However, I wish the VC model would implement some longer term correction. There is at times excessive optimism among the young entrepreneurs about their business plans (in the ICT industry). The VC model of nineties has also cultivated the culture of ‘let us work ridiculously hard for 18 months and then market ourselves as an acquisition target’. That sort of culture just defeats sustainable entrepreneurship. I wish that could go away. Other than that I think the financial crisis of Oct 08 could precipitate something that has been cooking over the last few years. A couple of telecom giants will fall. Their places will be taken by Huawei and ZTE. Open Source could gain importance in communications. I wish the landline could make some sort of a comeback with the fiber deployments. I can’t stand Internet over wireless, especially time sensitive apps. The crisis has also been conveniently used by some companies to do layoffs.
Cisco BTS: Biggest surprise of Oct 08 for me. I thought Cisco was doing well here. I am not sure who the cable companies like Comcast and Time Warner are going to source their softswitches from. Cedar Point must be in there somewhere in the cable segment but they are small. Sonus had some traction going with Comcast on the media gateway side. I think there is a chance that Comcast and Time Warner will be shifting to Nortel. Nortel is number one in Cable VoIP. NSN is not doing bad in cable either. I would also suspect that some open source elements are being used at the cable companies now for call agent functions.
LinkedIn apps: They came but they failed to impress. I use Huddle and BlogLink so far. BlogLink is painfully slow. Huddle ports over but not with all the features. For example, you cannot update a subset of colleagues about some file you updated. You have to either tell all or none. Slideshare is also there and a couple other bits. Nothing to do with communications apps like IM and VoIP yet. But I would expect conferencing type stuff like Iotum. Some Jaxtr type apps maybe. Skype never. Not sure why things like virtual PBX is not being promoted by LinkedIn.
FierceVoIP 15: They named their choice of 15. I wasn’t sure what the criteria is for these things. If it is the perceived future prospects, I agree with the choices of Genband, Digium/Asterisk and Truphone on the list. My other choices would be companies like GIPS, Kamailio, Ribbit, iSkoot, Spinvox, Acme Packet, Covergence, U4EA, and maybe some more. These are ones I think are going to play an important role in VoIP over the next few years. That is apart from the larger vendors in the market.
Vonage refinancing: unfortunate the company is struggling so much. Vonage had revenues. It could play around with some innovative stuff. Acquisitions of some small players like in mobile VoIP etc would have kept the investor interest going.
Sightspeed acquisition by Logitech: this should boost spirits of some video companies like ooVoo etc. Like mobile VoIP, Skype has missed the video game. There is room for some fresh new faces.
Kineto funding: purely on the basis of its work in femtocells I guess. That is what I was talking about in case of Vonage above. If you have nothing new to say, the investor interest will evaporate. Having said that some of the cell operators might be deploying femtos now. I am not so bullish on femtocells.
Mobilkom deal with Fring: mobilkom was one of the first mobile VoIP providers. The client was built in-house. It is a small deployment. I think they had less than 10k subs some 6 months back. This could be a revenue sharing arrangement like iSkoot-H3G or partnership deals that Nimbuzz in putting in place. I think Nimbuzz is slightly ahead of others in this operator-partnership game. Fring has only just joined, it seems.
Microsoft IPPBX: no surprise. The technology that Microsoft had inside OCS etc was effectively a full SIP server technology. They only needed to add feature server module to make a PBX out of it. IP phone segment has so far been dominated by IP PBX makers mostly. With Microsoft entry, you might see smaller IP phone manufacturers emerging.
xG Technology’s $75m VoIP deal: Do not have a clue what this is about! Have not heard of xG before.
