We have seen companies like Level 3 trying to offer wholesale PBX. It did not really take off. What are the niches you have identified for your wholesale PBX offering?

We mostly serve small cable operators. Platform providers like Broadsoft and Sylantro do not have the reach and resources to serve all the small providers like these. They are focussed on larger carriers. On the other hand the small providers themselves do not have the resources to manage complex Class 5 feature set.

Some of the managed service providers now bring in their own proprietary BSS solution? You also have a BSS solution I guess.

BSS is critical to the success of our offering. Our BSS allows us to do all the backend stuff like number management, number porting, etc cost effectively. On the front end the system integrates with the cable operator provisioning systems including modem management modules.

In the cable space who do you compete with in the managed services offering? Net2phone used to be active in this space sometime back.

We are seeing some attrition of Net2phone customers. In fact two of the largest customers we have were former Net2Phone customers. There are a couple of competitors like Momentum Telecom. And of course you see Sprint to a certain degree. We also see NGT every now and then. Sprint obviously pushes termination side mostly.

Are there any elements of Packetcable in the offering you have, or is this SIP based?

We can do Packetcable but none of our operator customers want Packetcable. Our offering is SIP based and it gives a lot of flexibility.

Continue reading "Interview with Matt Phillips, CEO, SinglePipe Communications" »

When I first looked at VoIP I thought it was a great technology to reduce your ISD bill. What was the first thought that crossed your mind when you first stumbled upon VoIP technology?

Back in 1996, there were a handful of VoIP products in the market. It wasn’t really an industry. So you could not envision all the other pieces in the puzzle. But you got the sense that it was a new way of communications. By 1997 we had decided to start a magazine in this space called Internet Telephony that has been dedicated to VoIP only. So we thought this was going to be big.

Did you work with the first generation VoIP vendors?

Absolutely. We worked with companies like Vocaltec, Dialogic, Natural Microsystems and others. Strangely enough, Microrsoft also entered the market early with their Netmeeting. You would not expect them to enter the market that early. That further cemented the feeling that VoIP was going to change communications.

And then nothing happened in the area of Netmeeting for a long long time. In fact nothing in the area of VoIP from Microsoft up until the recent introduction of OCS.

The people that I spoke within Microsoft tell me that they shifted a lot of people from VoIP projects over to Internet services side. And they have become a leader on that front. Some three years back they realised that there was an opportunity in communications on the enterprise side. So they re-invested in the communications.

VoIP has been reasonably disruptive. But VoIP architecture itself has evolved quite a bit over the years: from monolithic boxes to softswitches to IMS and further onward to Voice 2.0. What do you envisage to be the impact of VoIP from here on? How can something evolve and yet be disruptive at the same time?

Continue reading "Interview with Rich Tehrani, President, TMCNet" »

It must be hard trying to sell hosted VoIP to SMEs in Europe. Which verticals have you found traction in?

Certainly some of the verticals are adopting it much more quickly. Some of the traditional business segments such as legal and accountancy firms are slower due to almost the definition of the style of their business. We have found traction among IT and media companies in particular. Recruitment consultants and travel agencies are also keen on trying VoIP. The overall response has been better than what we had expected.

What has been your unique selling point in trying to win business away from the incumbent Eircom?

We have a fiber based network. For business customers we offer both fiber and DSL access. In the residential segment we have laid fiber to the home, and we have just started offering 50mbps service. That is winning a lot of business away from the incumbents that are trying to sell their traditional leased line and premise-based PBX services. We also have our own transatlantic fiber infrastructure to support our growth in IP services.

What is the plan for the residential market?

We are focusing on the housing development projects and have over 80% penetration there. We are planning to offer triple play services there including IPTV.

Which vendors are you working with for IPTV and VoIP?

Continue reading "Interview with Mark Kellett, CEO, Magnet Networks" »

Some of your business focuses around numbering. What happens when users dial by username rather than a number in the future? What do you foresee you role in those scenarios?

A dialed address whether a series of numeric digits or a qualified name involves very similar processing. They both have rules associated with them that deal with uniqueness and appropriate lengths as well as mappings between the customer address and the routing within the networks to connect that call. A move to alphanumeric identifiers will however present challenges as it is likely that customers will want to be able to assign abbreviated versions of their contacts that will be accessible across a range of domains and to be able to search for contacts based on limited information that they have about them. The various strategies by which these will be tackled are still in early stages and Evolving Systems will continue to track these initiatives as they move forward.

Just like service providers typically charge higher tariff for a vanity number, can you make a business out of selling a vanity username in the future?

The major difference between a vanity number and username is within the complexity of identifying and tracking what are appropriate vanity usernames and ensuring that trademark owners do not have their rights infringed. Evolving Systems current products help enable network operators to differentially charge for vanity numbers and we certainly foresee those operators wishing to continue to monetize desirable identifiers in future.

Continue reading "Interview with Thad Dupper, CEO, Evolving Systems" »

With reference to VoIP, your product allows Class 5 switching via GR.303, which has been one of the ways carriers were migrating to VoIP. Why have they instead gone for over-the-top VoIP option instead of migrating Class 5 voice infrastructure to IP? And what impact has that had on your business?

Occam’s customers have varying business models and service migration strategies. While it is true some have leveraged an ‘over-the-top’ VoIP approach to primary and/or secondary voice service, many of our wireline service provider customers are actively migrating from traditional circuit based class 5 infrastructure to a softswitch model. There is still a noticeable majority of network operators that utilize GR303 but even those operators have an eye towards a pure packet softswitch model in the foreseeable future. But anyway, our BLC 6000 system can support both models from a common service-aware, Ethernet based system.

You also enable another type of Class 5 VoIP migration which is by use of access gateway in the BLC. Carriers like BT have implemented that type of migration option. Are you aware of any others that have followed this migration model?

We have numerous customers employing this approach with initial deployments ranging in size from hundreds to tens of thousands of voice lines served from our line access gateways. We have shipped well over 1 million POTS ports with our BLC systems – each of these capable of native VoIP support. In fact, every one of our POTS interface modules is in fact a native IP line access gateway – a unique differentiating feature of our access solution.

Will carriers at some point bridge their narrowband and broadband infrastructures? What about countries like France where operators do not feel such need (since broadband VoIP lines are quickly replacing pots lines)?

An excellent question. There is evidence that many carriers are doing this now. It’s arguable that one of the world’s largest networks – Verizon – has started this process by deploying FTTP with their FiOS initiative. FTTP by definition is a broadband connection. While the traffic types have not yet converged in that network, the infrastructure is being put in place to support that kind of convergence. To a smaller scale, Occam sees many Tier 2/3 service providers that are embracing a converged infrastructure and a converged traffic approach. Those operators that have migrated to IP based softswitches and are also delivering IPTV are also likely to embrace a pure packet access and aggregation infrastructure. When these two service and infrastructure strategies intersect, you have effectively bridged the narrowband and broadband domains. Occam counts many of its over 300 Tier 2/3 customers in this arena.

Continue reading "Interview with Bob Howard-Anderson, CEO, Occam Networks" »

Enterprise media gateway business is dominated by Cisco. My understanding is that it is a tough business to be in unless your shipments scale significantly. Would that be a fair assessment?

Scale is important and we are looking for channels to scale our business. But I think there are a number of ways you can compete. When we looked at this product category we decided to go after the SME market. Cisco has products that serve this market segment but this is where they tend to be more vulnerable. Most of the competing media gateway vendors have not done a good job targeting the SME segment. So that is where we see an opportunity.

On the other hand, the fact that there is a big player in the market validates the potential of the segment.

Yes, Cisco’s presence validates the market potential. That is the good news. But the bad news also is that they in there. They are a 900 pound gorilla that can dominate the market. We have had to put in a lot of attention into how we compete.

What is your main focus of your product differentiation?

We believe that SMEs are really looking at UC and that is an important element for us in terms of differentiation. Our gateway is engineered to efficiently handle the UC environment providing features like routing, security, QoS, and data integration.

Why do you think Cisco has not had a competitor of their strength in enterprise media gateways? They surely do not come from voice background. I think Nortel or Alcatel-Lucent might have been able to do a better job given their voice expertise. Why is Cisco dominating the market?

Continue reading "Interview with Ken Epps, CEO, U4EA Technologies" »

I guess the first major success GIPS had was Skype. You have been behind Skype which became a big phenomenon. You also have new startups like Nimbuzz as your customers. Who in your opinion has the right strategy in place to emerge as the next major player in consumer VoIP?

I think the competition now is not about emergence of another Skype. VoIP is being added as a capability to almost all the major messaging softclients out there. Most of them are GIPS customers. You also have VoIP integrated into the mobile handsets. If Skype is to see competition, it is likely to come from mobile VoIP companies.

How far has GIPS been able to leverage the success it had with Skype?

Skype was certainly the customer that put GIPS on the roadmap. That opened the doors for many of the deals that we did subsequently. Fortunately the reverse is not true. When we lost Skype as a customer we did not lose other deals. Over the last few quarters we have had some great wins such as Baidu.

I think media gateway wins would have been a bigger source of revenue for GIPS. Why is GIPS not targeting media gateway vendors? Is it because they tend to have their own voice processing solutions?

You have probably not come across our customer list. Out customers include companies like Cisco, Nortel and Avaya. You should assume that we will in the future move from pure P2P client implementations to gateway deployments. That is a logical conclusion to have and you can assume that we are going in that direction.

Continue reading "Interview with Emerick Woods, CEO, GIPS" »

Over the last two years you seem to have shifted focus from PC centric communications to mobile centric communications. What opportunities do you see on the mobile side?

Many of our customers are mobile operators as well. So unifying the user experience across desktop and mobile is a big opportunity for us. Apart from the service providers we also have our OEM partners like Nortel collaborating with us across our desktop and mobile product offerings.

You have invested in FMC and handover technologies through the Firsthand and Bridgeport acquisitions. What are the prospects of handover technologies once wireless broadband becomes ubiquitous?

The FMC and handover technologies turn the Internet into a large roaming network. That is very valuable for a service provider. It also enables a service provider to offload a lot of voice traffic over to IP. So from a service provider standpoint there are several benefits at this stage. This kind of technology also facilitates a lot of new wireless data services.

How far have the Firsthand and Bridgeport acquisitions been assimilated into your other product lines? And are there going to be further acquisitions?

We have had two new deployments that involve 3 of the 4 solutions acquired by us. So the integration of the acquired solutions has been satisfactory. There are more things we can enable through a more tighter integration: things like mobile centrex and widgets for various features. We are working on those bits. We were partners with these companies before we acquired them. We validated the prospects of joint products with our existing customers prior to the acquisitions.

On the acquisitions front, making three acquisitions in nine months is a huge task. We grew from 50 people to 150 within a year. So we have to be careful. But if they make sense and they have interesting solutions around mobile, identity, presence, and they add value to our existing customer base and strategy, we are prepared to consider. But it is not going to be our big focus for the next two quarters.

Continue reading "Interview with Donovan Jones, CEO, CounterPath" »

My impression is that your revenue model is currently based on advertising and whitelabeling? How soon do you expect those sources to generate meaningful revenues for you?

We don’t do whitelabelling exactly. Although apart from consumer solutions we also have industry solutions, those industry solutions are social networks for mobile operators and device manufacturers. These are outsourced IM and VoIP platforms that we operate for a mobile operator. We also bring mobility to web based social networks.

Is that not whitelabelling?

No. In whitelabelling you would typically charge a certain license fee per subscriber. We do not charge the operator anything. Our solution is used for free. What we do is share the ad revenues.

How many social networks and operators have you partnered with? What is the usage among the operators right now?

We have signed up 10 social networks and 3 mobile operators. One of the operators is using the full Nimbuzz solution. The other two, for now, are promoting our web client to their mobile users. With regard to social networks we will go live with our joint offering with a social network in Germany in August.

You will also have PSTN termination business in place. Which part of your business do you expect to be bigger: ad revenue sharing or the PSTN termination?

Continue reading "Interview with EJ Lugt, CEO, Nimbuzz" »

There are several approaches to prioritizing multiple applications on a converged network. Zeugma does it with a product that analysts are beginning to call Service Delivery Router. One of the major issues – going back to the RSVP days – in convergence is how to offer a multi-tiered service. For example, it would be plausible to assume that somewhere down the line a service provider would offer a two-tiered voice service … one that is a high-quality high-price HD voice service, and the other that involves an inexpensive best efforts voice service. Zeugma product does exactly that sort of thing for multiple application types.

Peter Blackmore is actually going to take charge as CEO of UTStarcom from July 1st. The present CEO - Hong Lu, an equally charming guy - updated us yesterday on NGN voice and the service providers they are trying to win over. Hong revealed that one of its softswitches in China (just outside Shenzen) is serving around 3 million subscribers. That is perhaps the biggest single softswitch POP I have heard about.

Anyway, back to the interview with Peter. I caught up with him right after the company’s analyst event here in New York today. We talked about (1) UTStarcom’s ability to cross sell its complementary triple play product lines to customers, (2) company’s strong focus on IPTV, (3) reasons for offloading the IP CDMA business, (4) strategy to address opportunities in Eastern Europe, and (5) strategy to address the issue of lower gross margins in the handset business.

Apart from the video content above, I would add the following notes from his presentation that we sat through earlier during the event:

Continue reading "Interview with Peter Blackmore, CEO, UTStarcom" »

Why have you so far stayed clear of direct-to-consumer B2C offering?

That part of our business has not received much attention yet. But that will change and my guess is that millions – if not tens of millions – will be using our direct-to-consumer service. So there is going to be much more emphasis on viral marketing, search engine optimization etc to drive that. There will be more handset OEM deals.

Like your B2B offering, your B2C offering will also be dependent on MNOs somewhat. Right?

Not so much. Rather than hosting the termination management POPs at the operator NOC, we will host them on our own NOCs. We have NOCs around the world that we use for direct-to-consumer business.

How do you make money from your B2C offering?

The SkypeOut feature is turned on in this B2C offering and that is how we generate revenue, generating SkypeOut minutes.

How many B2C customers do you have?

Right now we have hundreds of thousands using our B2C service.

Going over to your B2B solution, why would a mobile operator want to work with you? Are you not cannibalizing their high margin long distance business?

For Skype-to-Skype calls what the operators have determined is that we are not cannibalising their business. In fact we are adding to their business because if I am on Skype and my friend in Hong Kong is on Skype, I was not going to call that person for two dollars a minute anyway. I would have waited to Skype them over PC and completely cut out the operator. So by putting Skype on mobile phone at least the operator is able to use up the free minutes. With SkypeOut which involves calls to a non-Skype user, you probably had no choice but to call with very expensive ILD rates. So some of the operators prefer not to turn SkypeOut on. At least not at first. They are however realistic about the ILD rates substantially reducing over time with the calling cards and callback and Skype etc. At some point therefore they will also turn on SkypeOut.

Continue reading "Interview with Mark Jacobstein, CEO, iSkoot" »

What made you choose the name mig33?

We wanted something simple, memorable and not tied to a functional name like ‘chat’ so that we keep the flexibility to grow and evolve the product as we like. We wanted something that would translate well across different markets easily too. After evaluating a few options and working closely with our early beta testing group, the name mig33 emerged. Our users love it so it’s worked out well.

What has been the key in signing so many subscribers?

A few factors: The product delivers a compelling proposition of communications and social network features like chat, IM, SMS, picture sharing, profiles, cheap calls and email. This combined with an effective seed strategy helped us grow over 11 million users in over 200 countries.

Has the marketing been mostly word of mouth thing?

Word of mouth, in addition to other marketing.

What is your Facebook strategy? Are those sort of social networks important for you?

Continue reading "Interview with Steven Goh, CEO, mig33" »

What is driving mobile telephony arbitrage in form of callback and VoIP?

Skype is not covering mobile VoIP well. There is demand for intelligent and cost-efficient apps on mobile. From user perspective mobile prices are high. So there is an opportunity there. Why should a call from fixed line be nine times cheaper than from mobile?

Xing was the first Web 2.0 company to go public. You were co-founder at Xing. What is common between that experience and your present one at Cellity?

Like Xing, we are developing the market because this is all new. People are not used to things like mobile LCR and mobile callback. Going back to my Xing days, there was no market for social networking. The market was developing while we developed and created it. People were not used to putting up their details online.

Your application is based on Least Cost Routing.

Yes it is based on LCR and no VoIP. That app is available to German consumers only because you need to have a German SIM card. Another offer we have is mobile callback which you can use in any country. We also do SMS via GPRS.

Continue reading "Interview with Sarik Weber, CEO, Cellity" »

You let service providers outsource some of their VoIP infrastructure. How many service providers use such services and what kind of growth are you experiencing?

We now work with 150 service providers. Our average revenue growth is in the region of 50%.

What is a typical profile of the service providers you serve?

About 5 to 10% are Voice 2.0 companies. Another 30 to 40% are traditional VoIP providers. The remaining are wholesalers.

With an outsourced model we typically see service providers initially use the service but as they move up the knowledge curve and the subscriber base gets bigger, they tend to have preference for deploying their own infrastructure. What kind of implications does that market behaviour have on your model going forward?

That is exactly what has happened to some of the white label hosted PBX service providers in fact. Sometimes your customers might counter problems that are platform related and therefore not under your control. As a provider of managed system we asked ourselves where the leverage was. And the leverage is really in our OSS/BSS.

How many customers of yours use your outsourced OSS/BSS?

We have 8 such customers now.

Continue reading "Interview with Micah Singer, CEO, VoIP Logic" »

Within a triple play bundle, the actual IPTV usage may be limited. If IPTV is relegated to a secondary TV service, what implications does that have for the industry?

The telecommunications market is very price sensitive and subscribers generally migrate to the operator who can give them best value for their spend. Service providers have realized they can increase subscriber stickiness with bundles. In some cases, their bundles are on such favourable terms that a household ends up with 2 TV services. The reality, though, is that as the introductory bundle pricing expires, customers are likely to settle for a single service. In the long term, the economics have to work both ways – the consumer will migrate to the best value and the operator has to offer profitable services. The consumer may end up with a combination of IP-only or IP plus cable or terrestrial. From their perspective, the delivery infrastructure is less a concern than the level of service and the richness of the TV service.

With consumers in France getting IPTV from the likes of Free and Neuf, there is no way of knowing how many are actually using the service. In the UK, BT customers do not rely on its IPTV service as their main TV source. This is something additional on top of the Sky service they have. A bit like using VoIP as a secondary line.

From what we’re seeing, this is likely geography specific. For example, the UK has a Freeview service which has about 3 to 4 million subscribers. It is a terrestrial service which you do not find in, say, North America because North America relies on cable as the distribution network of choice. Freeview provides around 50 digital channels. BT is piggybacking on Freeview for linear TV and they are using IPTV for on-demand TV. In this case, these services co-exist since the TV economics in the UK allow this.

Continue reading "Interview with Jaison Dolvane, CEO, Espial" »

You have introduced CDMA Femtocells. What is the addressable market given that it only works on CDMA networks?

CDMA operators control some 15% of the mobile handset market. But in the US, 60% of all users are CDMA. So the majority uses CDMA. Moving forward, most operators will evolve towards LTE standard. The next Femtocell that we will launch will certainly be an LTE base station.

Among the CDMA operator customers you have, what level of interest have you seen in Femtocell?

Tremendous interest. RFPs are coming out from all the major tier 1s and tier 2s. We have been responding to RFIs on a regular basis over the last one year.

What is happening with Sprint’s femtocell trials?

Sprint began trialing the technology last year, and now offers femtocells in Denver, Indianapolis and Nashville. The company announced when it began the trials that it planned to make the offering nationwide during 2008, but hasn’t yet announced specifics.

Several operators are also reportedly moving away from the softswitch architecture. How do femtocells fit into that move?

Continue reading "Interview with Serge Pequeux, CEO, Airwalk Communications" »

How would you categorize various flavours of mobile VoIP?

I would say there are three main categories of mobile VoIP players. Providers like Fring I will place under voice-over-data category. Then there are players like EQO. The third type include the likes of Rebtel that predominantly provide voice only.

You are one of very few mobile VoIP players that are getting some traction. How would you compare your offering to other successful mobile VoIP plays such as Fring and iSkoot?

Like Fring we believe that VoIP is one of the capabilities but certainly not the only one in our context. The power is actually in the aggregation model services. At some point in time our paths will firmly cross but in the meantime we are offering services on top of a variety of handsets and not just the high end $400-$500 handsets.

iSkoot is very much involved in developing applications around Skype system and establishing deals with MNOs. We focus on multiple networks, the ability to connect to any type of network whether public IM or private MNO users.

Why are you not productizing your solution like others?

It defeats the whole notion of the calling experience that we enable. Licensing your platform to an MNO is no different than being able to connect to just one public IM service such as MSN. Your friends may not necessarily be on the same network or subscribe to the same MNO. That was something that we wanted to avoid specifically from the outset.

Continue reading "Interview with Bill Tam, CEO, EQO" »

What are carriers doing in the area of mashups?

There has been a lot of activity going on over the last few months. They are keen to grasp the mashup movement and it is changing really fast. In North America big operators are investing in this area. BT is certainly much ahead. At least in their reference architectures carriers already have it in place. It will take some time though. We are certainly seeing something we have not seen before.

How many customers do you have trialing your SCIM?

There are more than 10 in Europe and North America.

Out of those how many will leverage your SCIM for mashups?

In most of them this is one of the capabilities our SCIM is providing.

What is the role of SCIM in the mashup game?

The role of SCIM is providing an enabling point. SCIM by itself does not provide a service. It allows services to be delivered to fixed and mobile networks whether they are legacy or non-legacy networks. In some of the cases SCIM is embedded in a solution - more often embedded in an SDP or an application server. In some cases it is a standalone element carrying out the service mediation.

Continue reading "Interview with Dr. Ayal Itzkovitz, CEO, Convergin" »

I have posted some of the past CEO interviews in case you can’t have enough of them! These interviews date around mid 2006 to mid 2007 i.e. prior to July 2007 when we started the blog on this site. Most of these interviews were conducted by my colleagues but I enjoyed reading them again. It is like going through some of your favourite books that you have read in the past.

Among the ones that I posted are CEO interviews with Hanaro Telecom, Asterisk/Digium, Ubiquity (now Avaya), Fring, and Gizmo. I hope you find the content stimulating. Below are the links.

Arcturus Networks | Broderware | Centile | Bridgeport Networks | Fring | Mediaring | Cognitronics | Convergin | Damaka | Deltathree | Digium / Asterisk | Gizmo Project | Hanaro Telecom | Latinode | Natural Convergence | NewHeights | Pirelli Broadband | SeedNet | Ubiquity | World Telecom Labs

Where do you think voice as an application is headed?

If you look at the recent developments you have cellular companies offering unlimited voice for $99 per month. And as we move more towards IP-at-the-core there is no justification for a particular packet to be billed higher than other packets on the network. Just like the wireline operators are moving towards a flat rental of the broadband pipe, the cell operators will be moving towards a flat rental of spectrum. How you utilize your rented asset in terms of the applications mix will be up to you.

What sort of role do you think web will play in transforming voice?

These web based voice startups have not done anything significant so far. Their impact is marginal at best. There is no true innovation yet. Usage has not ramped up either. AT&T probably handles more traffic each minute than what these startups manage for an entire month. The biggest impact on voice comes from IP itself and not necessarily the web in the sense that volumes of traffic keep growing with the increasing use of IP backbones.

But there seems to be a lot of money being pumped into the web based VoIP startups.

Let us not confuse investment with rationality and market reality. VCs believe that this is going to be a huge market but you are up against 120 years of user behaviour with the plain old phone. Even among the younger generation, you don’t see them replacing web for their cell phones.

Continue reading "Interview with Om Malik, CEO, GigaOM" »

What is the total addressable market for mobile VoIP?

There are about 75 million phones in the market today that can do mobile VoIP. Over a billion can do some sort of bridged mobile VoIP solution.

What has the traction been for you geography wise?

We have customers in 149 countries. So the interest is broad. Our number 1 country in UK, followed by US and Italy.

With fixed VoIP you need ATAs to get going. With mobile VoIP, if you have a smart phone you don’t really need any other adaptors. So in that sense mobile VoIP is going to be even more disruptive than fixed line VoIP.

Yes. It is relatively easier to use. You don’t have to locate any junction boxes and find sockets to plug things in and out. You press a couple of keys on your phone and set it up and use it. So yes, a lot more disruptive than fixed line VoIP.

There seem to be four major mobile VoIP players out there in the market (apart from Skype): Fring, iSkoot, EQO and yourself. What are the ingredients of success in mobile VoIP?

Mobile VoIP is technically quite complex, both on the server side as well as the handset side. There are lots of developers that have announced support for Nokia phones that come with VoIP capability. They give you username and password which you can put into the device. And that is way too hard. So basically very few companies have been successful in doing the integration work and making it work. You need to be smart. Apart from that you need to be well funded. The ones that you mentioned are all well funded. Hopefully we are smart too.

Continue reading "Interview with James Tagg, CEO, Truphone" »

COTS hardware has been around for more than a decade. What is keeping equipment makers from deploying these solutions?

A suitable COTS architecture has only been available for two years. Other COTS architectures like Compact PCI were basically enterprise technology. So COTS suitable for core telecom applications that can support five nines did not exist until ATCA availability. And ATCA availability goes back a couple of years.

I do see ATCA growing to be a multi-billion dollar business, but, as with all things in telecom, it will take time. The biggest complexity has not been about ATCA itself. It is about porting applications over to ATCA and, in particular, making a move to Linux. So moving to ATCA hardware is quite easy to do, but a lot of legacy applications simultaneously moving to ATCA are also moving from proprietary, 20-year–old, home-grown OSes to Linux.

One of the biggest motivations for using COTS hardware is the time-to-market factor. How far have vendors been able to achieve that in practice?

We have customers, who, using ATCA, have brought applications to market in under 12 months versus classic 24-to-36 month development period. We have a customer in Asia that chose our ATCA platform in Spring 2007 and, before the end of 2007, had live service up and running for a wireless application.

Can you perhaps name some of the application categorises that are being enabled by COTS hardware such as ATCA? How would you generalise the type of applications being ported over to ATCA platform?

ATCA will be the hardware of choice for a wide spectrum of applications. Over the last few years we have seen particular strength in the wireless arena: media gateway, RNC, SBC, and IMS applications like media server. IPTV has also been a very good adopter of using ATCA. From the fixed network side, we are seeing elements like access consolidator and echo cancellation as prime candidates.

Continue reading "Interview with Scott Grout, CEO, RadiSys" »

What value does your product Accedo Application Provisioning Solution add to an IPTV installation?

Our product enables an operator to distribute value added applications in a cost efficient way to any STB. We have integrated it with all the leading STB manufacturers and many middleware platforms.

What kind of value added applications are IPTV service providers deploying?

Value added services are largely confined to gaming in IPTV deployments. Within that we see multiuser games in demand. With the traditional broadcast networks it was not possible to have multiuser capability. Over the IPTV it can be done easily.

How has the gaming and related applications bit done so far in the IPTV segment?

After the movies, gaming is the most interesting application for end consumers. We normally get 20-25% of subscriber base that play games on a monthly basis. It’s a very very high usage of casual gaming on the TV. TV is created for light entertainment. People like to play games like Suduko, Poker, etc. while waiting for their favorite programme to start.

Continue reading "Interview with Michael Lantz, CEO, Accedo Broadband" »

Charlie discusses managed services model for IPTV advertising, the trials PacketVision has so far been involved in, and how the company's solution matches buyers and sellers of advertising time thus effectively operating a clearinghouse. Charlie also talks about the IPTV advertising benefits for the emerging new channels.

You are focusing on the SOHO and micro enterprise market. What special requirements does SOHO and micro enterprise segment have that demands a service provider like you dedicated just to them?

They typically do not have a dedicated bandwidth connection. They do not have IT support in-house. And despite that they want to project the image of a large setup. Those requirements will not be served by either the large telcos or those serving the smaller businesses such as Fonality and Packet8. You have to offer solutions that maintain voice quality over low speed connections, are easy to setup and offer features such as auto-attendant etc.

You also offer other enhanced services such as the search dialling feature. How does it work and what does it do basically?

Search dialling lets you dial someone just by searching the name describing who and what you are looking for. It searches your PC based directory and the online directories. Our PC integration lets you do that. Search dialling is simply not possible on standalone phone. PC interface also simplifies several other things such as the conference set up process for instance. Using phones to set the conferences up is a tedious process.

What software and hardware do you use at the backend?

It is a combination of our software and GIPS elements in the data center. The client is all ours. For people who want to use our service with a regular phone, the adaptor we use is a custom design of a standard chipset that is used for USB phones.

What about the feature set? You source that from people like Broadsoft?

No that is actually part of GIPS solution as well. They modified their existing platform. They did not have features like auto-attendant. So we worked together on their new version of software to incorporate those features. The solution was custom designed for us but they are now making it available generally. We are the launch customer for the solution that incorporates hosted PBX features, firewall traversal and the voice quality software.

Continue reading "Interview with Peter Sisson, CEO, Toktumi" »

Which markets are you finding more traction for IPTV these days?

IPTV is picking up in Asia and Eastern Europe. It is not doing so well Western Europe and North America. The only major player in North America is AT&T.

Within Asia what has been your experience in markets such as India, Japan and China?

China and Japan are 2 different markets. In Japan it is all about HD. In China we see 50-100 channels kind of set up and that is nearly all SD. We do not see HD in China yet. Another aspect about China is that some of the operators are not using middleware. Subscribers go up and down the channels on the remote control. Some of the deployments I have there are live TV channels. There is little conditional access and in most cases no video-on-demand. I am not aware of any installation in China that uses VOD.

Moving over to India there was a lot of noise recently from players like BSNL, MTNL and Bharti Airtel.

BSNL’s IPTV will be based on our solution. In fact all but Reliance are using our solution. Bharti has not started the service yet. In India the lowest number of channels you start with is 150. But it is mostly SD.

What will be the single biggest trend during 2008 in IPTV?

The main trend we are likely to see is the popularity of Internet TV. This is a major competition for IPTV providers going forward. Internet TV is especially gaining popularity in the US. If you log into the websites of content owners such as Fox you see good quality videos that you can download.

Continue reading "Interview with Yosi Aloni, President, Optibase" »

I have not come across a lot of companies with an ASP model that are offering VoIP as well as IPTV.

That is right. We are trying to unify three services into one, which include communications, information, and entertainment. We have designed our IPTV services to incorporate social networking from day one. We enable real-time opinions and real-time ratings and multiple ways to communicate around the content.

You don’t own the last mile. So how can you reliably offer IPTV with all the QoS issues?

Our technology accommodates for a great deal of latency. We are also very light on the bandwidth consumption for IPTV delivery. Most services out there require 500 to 600 kbps kind of bi-directional connection. We don’t need that kind of bandwidth. We operate in about 280kbps kind of range.

You have over a million users. How does that subscriber base break down by the application subscription or usage?

We have near about 3 million users now. I would say that over 80% of our subscribers use the communications side which includes IM and VoIP. The IPTV side and Video-on-Demand is utilized by about 60% of the subscribers. There is obviously an overlap.

Continue reading "Interview with Greg Parker, CEO, Raketu" »

What is the existing conferencing market in India like? How does your offering fit in?

Conferencing market is currently a tedious process and an extensive one. You have to go to one of the service providers, sign up for an account, and sign up the agreement plan they have. They are charging between Rs 3-4 a minute per user which is expensive for a lot of SMEs. These providers are not based in India. They are extensions of certain global payers.

We are offering a free audio conferencing service. People can call in a number which is either local or national long distance to them and wont cost more than Re 1 a minute. There is no incremental cost. We make money by playing a 5-second pre-roll voice advertisement.

So what has the signup and usage been like?

We are seeing serious signups happening and conference calls going on. The longest so far has been for around 3 hours. We are seeing requests coming for toll free numbers, offering calls with more than 10 people. We are seeing Indian as well as global players using our services.

The feedback you have had so far, what feature are you getting the most requests for?

What we are missing right now in terms of a key feature is a scheduler.

Sabeer Bhatia and you have so many projects live online – VoiFi, Aarzoo, etc. and now Sabsebolo. Which one of these is a hundred million dollar idea?

We strongly believe Sabsebolo has the potential to be a dominant player in the market. Not only in the audio conferencing but may be the whole voice platform.

Continue reading "Interview with Yogesh Patel, CEO, Sabesebolo.com" »

Why provide a service rather than license the platform to service providers?

Our background is actually building platforms for carriers. Our team built platforms, and enhanced applications on top of those platforms, for AT&T, Sprint, Pacbell, GTE and several wireline and wireless carriers. What we experienced is that innovation always came from carriers and at their own initiative. Your fantastic features and APIs don’t mean much to them. At the end of the day, what we found was that carriers did not have the infrastructure or the business model to allow their networks to be opened for third party developers. With Ribbit, we have switched gears a little. We decided instead to open the platform to developers. And we are not going to wait for two years to bring new features to consumers that could be offered yesterday.

There are service bureaus out there like Tellme that offer something similar to enterprises. Would you regard them as similar to Ribbit?

We have seen service bureaus out there that serve large enterprises providing APIs that are telco oriented. These companies use SIP APIs but there are very few developers out there that really understand SIP stacks. We are trying to make those APIs one level easier. We provide Flash APIs so that the developer does not have to necessarily know the bits and bytes of telephony protocols.

Is time-to-market the main reason why you go direct to the consumer or is it the lack of compatible carrier infrastructure?

The issue is the time it takes carriers to incorporate things into their network. The issue I think is much less how they open up their APIs to the core elements of their network. You see some of the progressive carriers attempting to do this. BT has their web21c program. But even so it is coming on slow. And again if you look at the interfaces that are being provided it is being provided with the concept of deriving a telephony application, adding telephony to an existing workflow type of application for example.

This model can easily be replicated by social networking sites like Facebook. Are we looking at some sort of competition from those guys in the future? They could aggregate these Voice 2.0 applications and offer a services bundle.

It is possible. But telephony is a different game than providing various types of web services. You have to have telephony experience. There is also the billing issue. In communications we have applications that we need to bill for and we are going to see that for a long time to come. Social networking sites generate revenues based on advertising. It is very hard to subsidise phone calls through advertisements today. Social networking sites have a different mentality. We help developers monetize the application. Facebook type sites are not concerned about monetization aspect of the applications.

Continue reading "Interview with Ted Griggs, CEO, Ribbit" »

Alastair discusses factors determining FMC growth and reasons for slow FMC uptake so far. Tango Networks claims that its hybrid FMC architecture is a win-win solution for both the PBX vendors and carriers thus avoiding possible cannibalization of revenues of these two important players in the FMC game. You can hear more from Tango Networks during our upcoming webinar on FMC security.

What sort of VoD content do you see out there in the IPTV market? Is it the same VoD content that you find with other forms of delivery?

The most popular content for VoD is recorded TV. You record the TV channels and you make that available on demand. The second most popular VoD content is movies. Local content is also becoming a big factor especially in IPTV services. These are the three major VoD content forms that are popular with IPTV users but none of these three are IPTV specific only.

What in your experience are VoD demand trends in emerging versus established markets?

In the US, the initial IPTV deployments do not necessarily have a VOD component. They rather focus on linear TV. You see more openness in deploying VoD in emerging markets versus the US where the traditional telcos have been more cautious about the introduction of new services. They typically go for linear TV first and then add some VoD and only later the real promise of IPTV services which is the new services over TV.

Are you involved in any hybrid offerings such as Verizon that is offering the VoD component over IP and the rest over legacy network?

We have a few customers in Israel, Far East and Europe, where the channels are being delivered over the air – either over satellite or over digital terrestrial – and the interactive on-demand content is delivered over IP connection through DSL or FTTH. We definitely see the hybrid approach as a trend.

When you evaluate central office of a telco for possible IPTV deployment, what would you ideally want to see there? What are the ingredients of a suitable telephone plant for an IPTV deployment?

Continue reading "Interview with Ervin Leibovici, CEO, BitBand" »

You have recently articulated three main areas of focus: your traditional hosted PBX offering, mobility and Voice 2.0. How do these three areas gel together?

We are focussed on re-inventing voice for carriers. Although the contribution of voice in the overall telecom business is diminishing by the day but voice business generated over $1.2 trillion dollars for carriers last year. Re-inventing voice is a huge business opportunity. It can mean several things. It can mean integration of voice with PC based and mobile based applications. It can also mean making voice services available to the user anytime and anywhere he is.

From operator perspective they want certain common capabilities in their network. Take BT21CN project which is a reference blueprint in the industry. There is a push to minimize complexity of managing tasks. There are some common capabilities across networks and across services. That is what voice will have to adapt to. Sylantro’s multiplay application server will become a key application building block of tomorrow’s network architecture. It will serve as that common capability platform for different services. So in short our strategy has evolved to serve two areas: common capability multiplay platform and re-inventing voice.

You mentioned multiplay platform. There is one such deployment at Swisscom where the same feature server is being used for fixed as well as mobile voice. Right?

Yes. Swisscom deployed Sylantro platform when Siemens was their systems integrator. We deployed fixed line voice for consumer voice. At the beginning of this year Swisscom decided to merge and evolve their network to an IMS architecture to combine and converge two network architectures. And Ericsson took the lead and worked directly with us as supplier for the IMS architecture. Swisscom asked Ericsson to use the same feature server that was used in fixed voice. Today Sylantro platform serves the common voice capability in Swisscom network.

Any other operators out there that have deployed your platform for both fixed as well as mobile voice services?

Yes. Wateen in Pakistan is the largest IMS based VoIP over Wimax network. The service enables mobile Wimax at the access side serving both consumers as well as businesses. They launched the services in November and it has been a big success. Similarly we have a project going on with Korea Telecom. That is also a Wimax project where business customers are integrating VoIP with their Microsoft OCS platform. There are two large trials – one of them in the US – that also use our platform as a multiplay platform. These deployments really challenge the traditional FMC set up. We see a much more creative convergence than the traditional definition of FMC.

Continue reading "Interview with Marco Limena, CEO, Sylantro" »

You offer services to SMBs mainly, which is now a crowded space? What is your unique selling point there?

Apart from maintaining high call quality, we also deal with organizations that require diversity on their network as well as flexibility in their growth. We are probably the only provider for contingencies in the network to ensure service availability.

You have been through the market downturn having managed Nx Networks. What advice would you have for start up companies in VoIP?

Everyone thinks that VoIP is an easy business to replicate and support. It is probably a lot more difficult operating in an unregulated market. A lot of new companies get into this market and panic and start selling on price alone forgetting to provide quality. So if they are going to enter this market, they better know what they are doing. Otherwise not only will they suffer but their customers will suffer fairly quickly.

You have been involved in acquiring VoIP companies in the past. We see some of the startups merging in the VoIP market. Does merger of startups usually work?

Everybody wants a rollup strategy right now especially since VoIP is a crowded space. Problem is that everyone thinks that they are worth a billion dollars even if they are losing money. They believe they are selling services like MySpace and Google is buying. They don’t realize they will be selling dial tone which has being commoditized for over 100 years now.

Continue reading "Interview with Steven Francesco, CEO, Cohere Communications" »

Gareth talks about SIP trunking integrated with Microsoft OCS, possible hosted model for OCS, and Arena. Arena is a service offered by Interoute that includes things like switch partitioning and VoIP peering. This is a much shorter version of the video conversation. A full transcript of the interview will follow later this month.

Your offering very much emphasizes connecting IP PBX to digital proprietary phones. What is the logic here? Utilize the existing phone wiring?

Exactly. The existing phone wiring as well as the existing phones as well. We make an adaptor that connects over 24 proprietary digital phones manufactured previously by the likes of Nortel and Avaya. So with our offering you take benefits of VoIP without getting rid of your digital phones and wiring.

Is the adaptor like a multi port ATA ?

It goes a step beyond that. It supports not just analog phones but also digital phones that the PBX manufacturers have made historically. You cannot take a Nortel business phone and plug it into an RJ11. Your proprietary phone at your desktop at work speaks a totally different language. It only knows how to talk to the PBX made by the same manufacturer. Our intellectual property is about how each of those proprietary digital handsets signal when you press ‘Conference’ or ‘Hold’. In our case it sends that signal to our box and our box then relays that signal onward to an IP PBX or a hosted PBX making the features transparently available to proprietary phones.

When we bought our PBX, we bought for about $1000 and the desktop phones cost really peanuts, something around $20 kind of range. I thought that it was counter intuitive to be concerned about handset costs rather than the PBX? But since you tell me that you preserve investment in digital phones, the approach makes sense.

Those phones used to cost upwards of 500 to 1000 dollars. They are really sophisticated phones with 20 buttons on them. And the old ones have better audio technology. They have better quality proprietary chips rather than cheap chips in the present day IP Phones.

Continue reading "Interview with Jose David, CEO Citel" »

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.

Continue reading "Interview with David Hattey, CEO, FirstHand Technologies" »

Your TSB applications platform comes with a few web mashups which seems like a progressive move. What traction are you getting for this product?

As of now, we are seeing interest both from Italian and EMEA tier 2 operators and large multinational companies. We are basically positioning our TSB product to both the telco operators and enterprises that want an easy integration of web 2.0 services in the existing fixed mobile and enterprise networks.

What role do you see the social networks playing and could they become your future customers?

Social networking is a fundamental aspect of web 2.0 evolution and is changing the way people interact with the media and communicate. Due to the rise of social networking, media companies have to spend more on technology to handle such interaction. Cisco recently announced it is designing a new kind of operating system called EOS (entertainment operating system) dedicated to on-line communities. Italtel is evolving its next generation networks strategy with robust web 2.0 applications in order to support service providers’ transition to new media. For example, we enable live calls on Second Life and set-top-box interaction for IPTV open environment.

Does your TSB platform support advertising based telephony?

Advertising on free phone calls is effective on the Internet and it is becoming a viable business model also on cellular phones. We are ready to support service providers that decide to adopt this type of models. TSB can mix existing and new services with advertising in a fast and easy way to fit in with the time-to-market requirements of service providers. As an example, through TSB, it is possible to make a selective and personalized introduction of messaging with personalized advertising, either on mobile phones or on TV platforms.

Continue reading "Interview with Giorgio Bertolina, CEO, Italtel" »

Stay tuned during the month of February. SeaMeWe permitting, we will post for you a brand new CEO interview each working day for the remainder of this month!!! That is right. We take you direct to the horse each day. Drink deep from the fountain of Wisdom 2.0

That is what I have been doing myself. Over the last year or so, I have enjoyed interacting with the top bosses at some of the most innovative outfits. Think they are a bunch of accountants managing company books? Think again. While they may need to be calculated and careful about what they say, I have usually found them approachable, open, and intelligent. I hope you find the content from these CEO interviews stimulating.

Most of my interviews take place on phone. Some however will come in form of video clips.

Is there a need for a dedicated video search engine? People on Internet usually prefer to use just one search engine?

Search is all down to relevance and accuracy. The existing search engines were developed for text search and are optimized for textual web pages. Video search engines are optimized for analyzing all the components – moving pictures and sounds. This is where the technology from Blinkx comes into play. Our technology literally watches and listens to the video. We are able to understand frame by frame what is inside that video. That understanding allows us to deliver higher accuracy level and position on the video searching.

But Google and MSN type companies have also added video search capabilities.

If you look at Google for example, its focus on video search is around searching their own video content from YouTube and a little bit of external content. Yahoo has a video search engine which they acquired 8 years ago. That has never pushed on the front page because the accuracy is low. There have been products in the video space but not truly video search engines.

The only big player having a true video search engine is AOL. AOL got it by acquiring Truveo 3 years ago. But even AOL has not really pushed video search capabilities because Truveo is also dependent on reading and analyzing text rather than looking at the video content itself. For all these reasons the average user using text search engine isn’t really finding the videos they want.

How does your search engine really crawl the videos? I mean how is the visual analysis carried out?

We have a web spider which basically crawls the web. Every time it finds a web page it analyses the page for a video and if it finds video files on that page it goes further looking at how that video is positioned and analyses it from a visual point of view. Based on that it extracts words or text around that, which seem relevant to the video: things like titles, descriptions, tags, etc.

Once that is done, our software plays back that video. It is similar to a human being watching that video. We literally sit back and press the play button. When the video plays, the Blinkx system analyses the visual elements. It looks at things like text on the screen, it can also do some limited facial recognition as well that can spot the faces of famous people. Other than this we also analyze the speech track of the video. That helps in knowing the words spoken in the video.

We check all this information - text, visuals, speech - and combine them into a single conceptual record about the video. It checks what the video seems to be about, what the main context is that is all indexed into a search engine index. So when you come along with your search, you can do exact search to all these conceptual records we have.

Continue reading "Interview with Suranga Chandratillake, CEO, Blinkx" »

Let us start with numbers. What is the number of customers you have, number of POPs, amount of traffic you are handling etc.

These are numbers that we are comfortable to release: We have over 500 million numbers in the registry. That consists of a combination of blocks of numbers allocated to service providers and individual numbers. We have now just over 400 service providers on a worldwide basis utilizing our services from pure ENUM registry exchange all the way up to a complete federation model whereby we are delivering not just registry services but also signalling services, security services and other wide range functions. We have millions of minutes flowing through our systems and that continues to grow.

How many ENUM queries are we talking about per month?

We have a few hundred million ENUM queries occurring on a monthly basis.

These few hundred million ENUM queries you handle exclude the in-country federations. Right?

Yes that is correct.

Out of the 400 service providers that you serve, approximately how many utilize your capabilities other than registry queries, stuff like call signalling and security?

Probably around 100+.

Continue reading "Interview with Eli Katz, CEO, XConnect" »

How is Broadvox positioned in the next-generation telecom market?

Our vision is to become the leading provider of SIP Trunking services to SMBs and enterprises in North America. Currently, we have an excellent business as a carrier's carrier but we seen the rapid adoption of IP telephony as an opportunity to evolve our business. We can provide the same cost savings and reliability of our traditional business to this rapidly growing business customer base.

What specific markets does Broadvox SIP Trunking serve?

Any business wanting to leverage their new investment in IP Telephony equipment such as an IP PBX or SIP Phones and any business using an IAD to connect their legacy gear to an IP Server.

How does Broadvox tailor their solution to the various markets it serves?

Our SIP Trunking package can be customized based upon the desired number of simultaneous calls, long distance volumes, in-bound and out-bound toll-free volumes, number of DIDs, local number portability requirements, and other capabilities. Each business defines its service package with Broadvox, not the other way around. Moreover, as we are using an indirect channel of Value Added Resellers to sell the product, this gives then greater flexibility in address the unique demands of their customers.

Continue reading "Interview with Andre Temnorod, CEO, Broadvox" »

The underlying theme in your products seems presence, and presence integrated with public networks. Are we ready for presence integration with something like PSTN and public cellular networks?

I think the bigger question is integration of presence with applications and not the networks. When we started out we used to go out there and say we have an application for your networks when really we should have been saying we have solution that applies presence to your applications. So for instance we have built conference calling application for Facebook that uses some presence features. That has generated a substantial amount of interest and is acquiring users at a fairly quick rate. It is much more successful than anything we have done in past. So the lesson learnt was that presence is applicable to lots of places and it is just the matter of bringing it to those places.

Your Talk-Now for Blackberry and Relevance Engine product lines are two different products in the sense that one is for consumers and other for operators or OEM vendors. How do you plan to handle both consumers and operators as customers?

We are not focussed on targeting operator customers at this point of time. It is long ritual to sign up an operator. In the end we decided to provide the service to end users directly.

Any figures you can share with us about your Talk-Now downloads so far?

We haven’t announced publicly about Talk-Now downloads but I can tell you our Facebook downloads has exceeded 90,000 users.

Continue reading "Interview with Alec Saunders, CEO, Iotum" »

You had a quiet launch. Is the obvious name of the company - phone.com - compensating for the quiet launch?

Obviously when you hear the company name it stands out. That is what attracted me as well. If you have a quality product with such a name it lends added credibility and perception of a bigger company. All of that leads to a lower marketing cost direct and indirect. We are three months into our launch. We see steady growth in traffic and customer acquisition. There is direct typing traffic and search results traffic via Google where the word phone is one of the most searched word. People find us very little advertising.

Do you think some of these visitors could be people who want to purchase phone.com domain and their search leads them to your page?

I don’t think so. The history of this domain name is interesting. It used to belong to a company that was acquired a long time ago and it sat idle for few years. After it was re-purchased and I came in, we kept a sign-up page where we did a survey of visitors asking them why they came to the site and what kind of phone related services they are interested in. We got statistics. Among those answers, there were a few questions about purchasing the domain. But whoever is serious about purchasing a domain knows how to find the owner. A vast majority of the traffic we had pre launch was people looking for phone services.

If you are getting good amount of traffic you could monetize that by offering advertising space. Is that a possibility in the future?

When you hear the name phone.com everybody has suggestions what to do with it. We took a decision to offer services ourselves rather than being a referral site for telecom services of other companies. Looking at advertising models, the answer is yes this is definitely something we will be exploring.

Continue reading "Interview with Ari Rabban, CEO, Phone.com" »

You offer turnkey IP Centrex and wholesale residential VoBB services to ISPs in EMEA. What in your experience are the main factors while scaling up the deployments?

Provisioning is becoming more and more important for our customers. The technology is obviously important but equally important is how to provision these services to the end customers. I guess security is the other main challenge while scaling up the deployments.

Your customers are telephony operators, ISPs and system integrators. So far which segment out of those customers have you seen more inclined towards VoIP services?

Broadband ISPs continue to be the segment where you see the largest uptake. VoIP is obviously the way to attract more customers and also maintain the market share besides providing a revenue stream on top of the broadband delivery.

The ISPs are obviously not going to stop at VoIP. They want to offer triple play and perhaps explore quad play as well. Are you contemplating some sort of wholesale offering for VoIP plus IPTV plus wireless?

We see IPTV coming in to allow triple play and we have a number of partnerships for that. Further when the customers will move into a quadplay scenario we have secured a number of partnerships to allow them to deliver a quadplay service. We have worked with a number of billing companies to ensure we can bring a single billing BSS/OSS platform to help them deliver triple play and quadplay.

What is your wireless VoIP strategy?

Certainly we have seen a lot of development going on in VoIP over WiMAX. We are watching that technology very closely. We have already secured one customer which is a wireless operator deploying VoIP successfully using this technology. We see it as a very interesting alternative where DSL network isn’t well established.

Continue reading "Interview with Sean Brady, CEO, VoIP Solutions" »

How big a proportion of your business comes from VoIP providers as opposed to call centers and radio stations etc?

It has so far been mainly the radio stations and call centers. We serve over 450 radio and TV stations: businesses with high call volumes. VoIP is a new sector for us.

Can non-telco businesses really generate high call volumes?

It is interesting how people treat only Internet as the interactive media whereas radio has been interactive since the day when the DJ sat behind the turn table and took calls on listener lines. One of our radio station customers generates about a quarter million calls a day. Another customer, Radio Disney, does about 5 million calls a month across their network.

How did you stumble upon this idea of ad insertion into telephony call streams?

We were originally in the business of collecting data on inbound radio station calls, data related to what people wanted to hear. Along the way we realized that we could turn this into a targeted marketing opportunity where we could promote complementary products and services: Movie releases, CD releases, Concert tours, etc. And it was very successful ... to the extent that we had no more traffic left to monetize and so we had to explore other high call volume segments.

Which segments did you probe after the radio stations?

After radio stations and call centers, we explored the calling cards segment. We work with a lot of calling card companies including the largest calling card company in the country, IDT. We are picking hundreds of millions of calls from calling card companies on a monthly basis. We have now focussed our attention towards VoIP providers. We are about to sign two large deals.

Continue reading "Interview with J. Scott Hamilton, CEO, voodoovox" »

Your incoming call solution is essentially click-to-call where you forward the incoming call to either a VoIP client or an IM client or a designated cell phone or land line. Now, we have had the first generation of web telephony vendors like Net2phone and eFusion (which is now eStara) enable similar features. What is different now in terms of capabilities?

Our basic intention has been to enable VoIP without the need to download anything. The click-to-call capability fits within our overall solution accordingly. Suppose you don’t have access to your laptop and you need to call from some place where you have just plain old Internet connection. With our solution you can make the calls without downloading anything. The VoIP capability is enabled by a web integrated dialer.

But we have had companies like Dialpad and couple others who offered web integrated VoIP dialers.

I don’t know much about those companies. But there have been a previous generation of companies that offered Java based clients. We do Flash based embedded clients. Flash is now ubiquitous. Our web based Flash VoIP client is merely 3k in size. It shows up instantly upon clicking.

Do you think the differentiating factor in your click-to-call approach might be the fact that you had previous click to call application targeted mostly at the businesses, and now you people have extended that offering to consumers?

That is right. There are numerous personal sites and so many profile pages on social networking sites now. That drives the demand and makes the timing right for extending click-to-call to consumers.

Continue reading "Interview with Yusuf Motiwala, CEO, TringMe" »

We have published an interview with Ivar in the past as well. However this time you get to actually see him talk about things. He talks to me about mobile PBX. Ivar discusses the evolution of the PBX product, how companies including Microsoft and Asterisk could define the value chain in mobile PBX space, and the impact his company - OnRelay - could have on the business of PBX/handset vendors.

OnRelay is actually one of the very few companies that have commercial mobile PBX deployments. Ivar talks about the number of licenses they have sold so far. We also talked about the types of mobile PBX service models that OnRelay enables: models including enterprise hosted, carrier hosted, or hybrid mobile PBX set up. I had a somewhat similar discussion with Alastair Westgarth, CEO, Tango Networks a few days back. I will be posting that video interview next week. Alastair was not allowed any make up either.

There are quite a few companies providing mirror numbers now. Where are we headed with this interesting new business model?

Rebtel was actually one of the first ones that created a local phone number for (both) the party to be called and yourself, and then to either connect the two local calls or enable direct calling. That concept of telephony has now been applied in various different contexts. The nice thing about this service is that it is viral. You invite a friend into the service and they can invite you and that way it spreads, so the market for this service is quite big.

But with SIP, these mirror numbers were possible several years ago. Right?

It is not about getting the local numbers and using the latest voice technology. It is about leveraging the internet for an ordinary mobile phone.

Is this model going to scale? If this trend catches on, we might probably need a trillion phone numbers worldwide?

People today are not calling phone numbers they are calling the name associated with number, which is a major behavioral change. We are using numbers in a smart way. The usage pattern of our subscribers shows that those who call international numbers, they only tend to call their top five contacts frequently. And for business callers they spent 90% of their calling time with top five contacts too. It is easy to type these five favorite numbers in the address book.

You must be paying to procure the numbers. How do you make money? Is it mainly through the phone charges you put on calls or is there any ad insertion as well?

There are phone charges. But we also get a small share in the interconnect revenue which offsets the cost used in connecting the numbers and in converting TDM to IP.

Continue reading "Interview with Hjalmar Winbladh, CEO, Rebtel" »

What are the synergies of NexTone-Reefpoint merger? Are we confining the synergies to FMC or are we looking at Fixed AND Mobile AND the FMC opportunities?

That is the first time anyone has asked the question that way. And that is very insightful. One of the component parts in this merger comes from the mobile world and the other from the fixed world. And we will let the products from the component parts serve their respective markets. Bringing these two entities together is also complementary. One such complementary product is the IBG which we have already announced.

Is the thrust area for the combined company going to be mobile operators?

The thrust area will be operators that are looking at blending the two networks. For example we are talking to cable MSOs who are exploring the femtocell option. As the world moves towards SIP mobile devices, our offering will be very compelling to the operators.

What will the combined company have in terms of capabilities that competitors like Acme Packet on one hand and Azaire/Stoke on the other hand will not have?

We don’t see companies like Acme Packet having mobility capability like we have. Nor do we see startups like Azaire and Stoke having the signalling sessions management capabilities that we inherit from NexTone platform integrated into one IBG.

NexTone on its own has been playing in the tier 2 market. Reefpoint on the other hand has a couple of tier 1 customers. What are the prospects of the combined entity getting tier 1 business?

NexTone has started to gain traction in the tier 1 space. As a new merged company we will be pursuing the partnership approach versus direct sales approach in order to get inside the tier 1s. Partners like ZTE – we made the partnership announcement today – are significant players in their respective geographies.

Continue reading "Interview with Woody Ritchey, CEO, NextPoint" »

Do you envisage a time when people will leave a voicemail for you on Facebook rather than on your landline?

Yes absolutely, I think for younger generation under 25 they would rather do it that way. It will be easier for them to be on social network than have a phone with a list of numbers to program in. They prefer to buy a phone and be connected with network where all their information controls are setup. On a social network you can, for instance, prioritize voicemails. And as an extension device or a UI to social networks, all those preferences are stored on your phone as well.

How will OpenSocial affect the take up of your services?

Very positive. Remains to be seen how quickly OpenSocial deployment will become reality.

Do you think OpenSocial like any other standard will commoditize or homogenize social networking experience? Because you will get the same features and applications on all social networking sites?

What has happened to every standard in the past is that you propose and put a standard up there and everybody agrees to it and starts to implement it. But in reality every stake holder has their interest in their mind as well and tries to differentiate from everyone else. So it doesn’t become a uniform experience in the end. My prediction is if you are as big as MySpace you have incentive to provide OpenSocial and proprietary extra extensions.

Continue reading "Interview with Joe Heitzeberg, CEO, Snapvine" »

Does the market have a workable business plan for leveraging femtocell topology for WiMAX?

I believe we do. If you look at Sprint WiMAX plans they are putting femtocells in McDonalds and various such places. It is definitely part of other service provider plans as well, such as in Korea. These service providers realize that having just the macro cell infrastructure is not enough for WiMAX.

Do you see CPE vendors working right now on integrating Mobile WiMAX with the existing residential gateways so that it could be affordable to a certain extent?

Absolutely. Most of the CPE guys are on it. WiMAX started initially with fixed nomadic deployments which is really CPE based. On the CPE side you have many types of devices which are either just for data or the residential gateway. Many of them, particularly ODMs in Taiwan like Quanta, Alpha, Gemtech, etc. have some kind of residential gateways for this.

Right now how mobile and fixed WiMAX end users do you see?

If I talk about pure WiMAX it’s around half a million subscribers.

What sort of subscriber forecasts are you working around?

Take Sprint again as an example. Sprint will cover 100m users mid next year. Let us say they have 10% penetration. That means about 10 million subscribers that you can reach in North America quite quickly. This is all a question of timing more than a question of technology. Within our plan we see around 30 million subscribers by 2010 which is not very aggressive in reality.

Continue reading "Interview with Dr. Georges Karam, CEO, Sequans" »

How many users have you signed up?

We are not giving out numbers. But we are going to have hundreds of thousands if not millions in a short period of time.

How has Facebook integration been for you? How many sign ups through Facebook?

The integration with Facebook has been very good. We are very happy the way Facebook has opened its platform to allow us to integrate. However the reality is that there are thousands of applications on Facbook. When you are one of seven thousand or even more it is very difficult to get the exposure. We are not banking everything on Facebook. In fact we have far more users today coming to us through Talkster website than through Facebook.

What are the opportunities opened up by OpenSocial for a company such as Talkster?

OpenSocial is a way for us to build an application which will be written once and which will run in many different environments. It is a wonderful opportunity for companies like us to create communications applications and we are really applauding what Google has done. What we are most excited about are blending the capabilities of OpenSocial together with the mobile platform which they call Android.

I still don’t understand one part of your service. Why is the called party required to hang up and dial the number they received? Is this to make sure that the other party also listens to the ad?

It is not really the issue of inserting ad because we can do that at anytime during the conversation. The reason we require the called party to hang up is because in order to keep the call interconnection tariff free, the call needs to be bound together as two incoming calls. Otherwise we end up paying termination charges which can be very high in certain scenarios. Having the called party hang up and call the Talkster number makes sure that the call is free.

Continue reading "Interview with, James Wanless, Co-Founder, Talkster" »

Congratulations with your win at BT 21CN. You were originally competing for business there two years back along with your partner Marconi.

Thanks. This is certainly an important win for the company, and we’re very proud to be an official 21CN vendor. Our strategy since day one has been to associate with all major network operators that have embraced IP as the future of communications networks, and BT is certainly a pioneer on that front.

I have couple of questions about your strategy for competing with the legacy vendors. But let me touch upon another big opportunity, the wireless space. You have had great success with AT&T in wireless. If this part accounts for 10-15% of your business right now, how far do you think that opportunity is going to develop in the future?

It is good to think in terms of a timeline. Major changes in the telecom world typically evolve over 20 years. Today we are eight years into the transition from digital switching to IP. The wireline industry is moving from early adopter phase to larger scale deployments, but even here, there’s still a major opportunity for growth. Wireless is following wireline in the sense that adoption is happening in the core of the network first and then the edge. But keep in mind, the wireless market started about six years later. While I cannot point out a particular year, overtime our wireless revenues will exceed our wireline revenues because wireless is fundamentally larger in terms of the subscriber base.

What drives IP adoption in the core of the wireless networks?

Traffic and subscribers are growing at a rapid pace in the wireless world. Much of the traffic – such as roaming and long distance traffic - for which wireless operators are able to charge is actually becoming free. As a result the traffic is growing. As a wireless operator you should be looking to reduce the costs at the core.

With regard to wireless, are you limiting yourself to core packetization for a while?

Continue reading "Interview with Hassan Ahmed, CEO, Sonus Networks" »

Are the wireless networks going to migrate over to VoIP in much the similar way that fixed networks did: core first and then the edge?
That is one logical path of pushing packetization to the edge. But in the wireless market, the end user VoIP is taking off in parallel. That is something fixed networks did not see in late nineties.

There are various flavors of end user mobile VoIP. How would you categorize them?

Well, apart from mobile callback, which is not necessarily mobile VoIP, you have the likes of Skype and Fring that are targeting PC based VoIP users more and trying to transfer or migrate them over to mobile VoIP. They are looking to leverage the existing PC VoIP user market to build their user base. We view mobile VoIP as a new standalone market where PC is cut out of the equation. Truphone type companies leverage SIP client capability of existing smartphones. They are not able to control user experience. Those three approaches determine the various flavors of mobile VoIP you see out there.

Would you consider FMC providers as part of the mobile VoIP thing?

There is definitely a space for them. But the FMC services rely on hardware based solutions which make it difficult to upgrade in terms of functionality and dynamically change according to the market needs. A software application on the other hand can be upgraded more frequently and allows you to brand and give you so much more control. It is much easier to add value added applications to software based mobile VoIP service.

Do you see companies like yourself adding handover capability in the future?

We can do so. It is not beyond our capability. However the users are still trying to understand difference between GSM call and a VoIP call. It becomes very difficult to communicate with the FMC user why the cost of the call changes, when it changes, and why it changes. It just complicates things a bit more for the service provider.

Continue reading "Interview with Rapelang Rabana, CEO, Yeigo" »

Is mobile VoIP part of overall mobile telephony arbitrage that includes mobile callback, FMC, and Voice over Wireless Broadband (VoWB)?

So far as termination into traditional public network is concerned, you could view it like that.

How long have you been providing mobile VoIP?

We have been around since 2001. By 2004 we had our VoIP softphone ready. We have built our technology around SIP, and not any proprietary technology. We offered the downloadable version for mobiles in 2005 and also combined that with callback solution so from the softphone people could initiate callback.

What is the advantage in building a SIP mobile client?

Nokia and other handset makers are coming out with WiFi-GSM dual mode phones supporting SIP. This will drive the mobile VoIP market and serves as just one of several reasons for building a SIP mobile client.

When exactly did you decide to focus more towards white labeled mobile VoIP?

We launched our mobile VoIP retail service called Challenger Mobile in December 2006. During 2007 however we changed the focus towards white labeling our offering.

Who are your potential customers for white labeled offering?

We believe that players like MVNOs and wireless ISPs will be interested in providing this service to their customer base. MVNOs will be the first ones to move in this direction. As soon as we see one MVNO success, the others will follow.

Continue reading "Interview with Christina Sundman, CEO and Co-Founder, Challenger Mobile" »

Your company is almost 30 years old. What has been your experience as an entrepreneur? Often times, it is not the pioneers who become billionaires? Do you have any advice for the new entrepreneurs in the area of semiconductors?

I have enjoyed being entrepreneur. I enjoy being a pioneer and have separated being a billionaire from the equation. I think that being a billionaire would significantly destroy my pursuit of happiness. Before I started WDC I asked Glen, founder of ICE, one of my mentors: “What is it all about?” He responded immediately without hesitation: “It is doing what you like doing.” I have always loved and have been passionate about what I do.

So where is the value in entrepreneurship then? Satisfaction?

Well, knowing that my microprocessors have benefited many in early PCs, were used in billions of communication system modems, brought joy to some in entertaining game systems, help support life on a daily basis (pacemakers and defibrillators) gives me an uncommon satisfaction. So my advice would be to pass along Glen’s advice he gave me. I would probably add, “If you become a billionaire I hope that doesn’t diminish your happiness and consider giving your fortune to good causes.”

Continue reading "Interview with William D. Mensch, Chairman & CEO, Western Design Center" »

Your focus seems too narrow. Why only micro enterprise?
When we launched the product in 2005, we made a conscious choice to focus on the micro enterprises. There are 5 million businesses in the US and nearly 90% of those businesses have under 20 employees. That is the segment we target. That segment has traditionally been underserved mainly because the ROI to serve those companies does not fit the traditional telco distribution model.

Why do you think the micro enterprise market is not a lucrative business for telcos? At worst the telcos could treat them as residential or SOHO customers?

They could and maybe one day they will. But servicing a business is not like servicing a consumer. They need a business grade product and support. Most big telcos do not know how to reach these businesses in the first place.

How do you reach these businesses yourself?

We reach them through web marketing campaigns. The ROI was not there when Internet advertising was based on banners. The pay-per-click advertising model has helped a great deal in getting the sales leads. And our background is an Internet company so we are very good at targeting prospects online.

Is the Internet the main marketing medium for you?

Continue reading "Interview with Phil Hill, President, Vocalocity" »

What is the significance of the word ‘Ruckus’ in the company name?

‘Ruckus’ represents our spirit of making a lot of noise in the market. Most people basically said WiFi is unreliable technology and we are able to make it reliable enough to be used as a utility.

You seem more inclined towards leveraging WiFi for Video.

Yes. Look at iPhones and devices like that. Video is already in our culture, and if there is no cable involved they are going to love it even more.

Continue reading "Interview with Selina Lo, President and CEO, Ruckus Wireless" »

I have recently spoken to a few enterprise FMC vendors and the feeling I have is that there have not been many deployments. Can you tell me something different?

We are deployed at over twenty customers. In fact we have announced a couple of them and we should be able to make at least 2 or 3 more names public soon.

The twenty customers that you mention, typically what sort of verticals do they come under?

The most popular verticals for us thus far are healthcare and education. These two verticals tend to be early adopters of new technologies. The other reason is that these two verticals have been the biggest adopters of WiFi technology till date. And the reason they have adopted WiFi wholeheartedly is that people within these verticals tend to be highly mobile within the campus. These are what we call road warriors that can use FMC to be more productive in their jobs. The value of availability is very high in these organizations. Other areas we are finding traction in are construction, hospitality, and high-tech.

A lot of the FMC vendors do not bother about the WiFi part. What are your thoughts on their approach?

Continue reading "Interview with Vivek Khuller, CEO, DiVitas Networks" »

What specific challenges will you address as the new CEO of Ditech Networks? What will be the thrust areas?

The biggest challenge we have is to achieve wide deployment of our technology within the tier 1 networks. We already have a lot of traction with the tier 1 service providers. The challenge is to achieve wider deployments, particularly with the tier 1 mobile providers.

What products and geographies will you be pushing more?

For us, the mobile market place is significantly larger than VoIP marketplace. So our primary focus is to sell voice quality solutions into the mobile networks. And we do that worldwide. We do have traction in the area of VoIP but it is a smaller piece of our overall business, and we are for now targeting the North American market for that product line.

VoIP industry has been talking about better-than-TDM voice quality for over a decade now. Why do we still have quality issues with VoIP? What is it that service providers are not doing right?

Continue reading "Interview with Todd Simpson, CEO, Ditech Networks" »

Click here to read Part 1 of the interview.

Any issues with TRAI? They recently came down hard on the tele-callers?

First of all, TRAI is more concerned about the telemarketers who make voice calls. Text based messaging is not that an issue. Secondly, their recent regulation is for Unsolicited Commercial Communications (UCC). Ours is completely solicited. The user permits us to send messages. So we have no issues with TRAI.

Any issues with service providers? You could at times be competing with them for mobile advertising revenue?

Not at all. Infact most of them that we met are very happy with such a service, because they think we are kind of subsidizing the users' mobile bills. We are getting calls from them to ensure that subscribers on their network do get our messages.

Do you have your own sms servers?

No we go through SMS aggregators.

Continue reading "Interview with Chaitanya Nallan, CEO, mGinger (Part II)" »

mGinger, a garage startup, introduced solicited mobile advertising services in India based on social networking. In a short span of time the company has near 1 million users whom it pays for reading the campaigns. The services are being offered across the country over all major cellular operators.

Click here to read Part II of the interview.
What sort of response are you getting from the advertisers? Who have you signed up so far?

Since 4 months of our launch we have done around 150 - 200 campaigns. We have 70-80 advertisers signed up so far. Besides this we are getting advertising enquiries from all types of advertisers, from small outlets at the street corner to the big boys like HLL. Big names advertising with mGinger would be Taj Gateway Hotels, Tanishq, ICICI prudential mutual fund, Pritish Nandy Communications, etc.

Is there any particular segment you see more advertisers from?

We are seeing a good traction in segments like Hotels, pubs and education. However there is no single category we are confined to.

Continue reading "Interview with Chaitanya Nallan, CEO, mGinger (Part I)" »

You are one of very few FMC vendors that do not care about the WiFi part. Why is that?

We did not start with the WiFi-GSM handover solution. We were always focused on extending PBX features on to the cell phone. We never approached the market with the WiFi angle. You must have noticed that in enterprise FMC, there has been a shift from plain handover to extension of features on to cell phones. That in a way substantiates our market positioning. FMC in enterprises is not about saving costs by routing calls over WiFi.

But FMC and mobile PBX can save costs on calls. Why not highlight that aspect?

Yes, you will see most of our competitors pushing savings on mobile calls as one of the key drivers for mobile PBX. And we too did that early on. But we realized fast that the savings are really not big enough, if any at all. When you drive the use of mobile telephony in the business segment you actually drive up the talk time. So even if you could do some toll bypass and WiFi substitution what we see in effect is that mobile bill remains roughly the same.

Continue reading "Interview with Ivar Plahte, CEO, OnRelay" »

You took around $60 million in funding within a span of just 6 months? What do you plan to do with it?

We have actually taken $50 million since 2002. Our first VC funding came in 2004. The second round of it came in November of 2006, and that was $32 million. The current round of financing takes us through the 3rd quarter of 2008. That is when we will be shipping in volume and selling into PCs and digital cameras onwards to cell phones.

When should we be able to see this technology in our cellular handsets?

We have talked to and are working with several manufacturers. However, I cannot announce anything more on this right now. But one of the companies we are working with is among top 5 cellular manufacturers and we expect the handsets with the upcoming high-speed Bluetooth standard out in 2009-2010.

Continue reading "Interview with Colin Macnab, CEO, Artimi" »

How many mobile WiMAX users would there be at present and what percentage of that is served by SOMA Networks platform?

Many analyst firms have estimated the size of the Mobile WiMAX market and according to analyst firm Visant Strategies, there will be expected 12 million subscribers using 802.16e powered services in 2010, with well over 50% of these being primarily "fixed" wireless customers.

As Mobile WiMAX is not yet a certified standard, there are no subscribers on certified Mobile WiMAX systems. Estimates by another analyst firm, Maravedis, count approximately one million current broadband wireless subscribers using WiMAX-ready technology. Many of these will have an upgrade path to Mobile WiMAX, but such statistics are not well understood at the moment. The industry is currently at an inflection point and is poised to take off. We anticipate this to be a multi-billion dollar market within a few years, and SOMA Networks will command a sizeable share of the market.

Continue reading "Interview with Yatish Pathak, CEO and Founder, SOMA Networks" »

How would you sum up the competition you face in UMTS and Femtocell areas?

In UMTS, there is competition on the big base-station level from Nokia, Ericsson, etc. But innovation comes from the smaller side of base stations. We are going from macro base stations to pico and femto base stations. This is where we can offer cost effective chip solution.

On the femtocell we don’t yet see competition. But I am pretty sure there will soon.be some: companies like ST, TI, ADI and others are all exploring this space.

What about competition in WiMAX area?

WiMAX is a new market and we entered WiMAX three years ago as one of the early entrants. It is more data centric market. Data centric market has traditionally been open to new comers like PicoChip. On the telecom side, change in suppliers is made reluctantly because there are many standard conformations, etc. WiMAX is a much open market and the smaller ones have jumped in. On the big base station for WiMAX it’s mainly TI and Xilinx.

It can also be complicated sometimes. Freescale is sometimes a competitor as well as partner for WiMAX. They have a way to implement PHY which is part of the base station we specialize upon and at the same time we use their processors. ADI competes with DSP but we use other components from them. You have some smaller companies in WiMAX which are focusing on terminal end but may provide solution for base station also.

Continue reading "Interview with Guillaume d'Eyssautier, CEO, PicoChip" »

Applications market was supposed to be huge in NGN networks. What we have seen instead is a simple PSTN emulation led by softswitches and not application servers. What are the reasons for this?

There are several key barriers depending upon who you speak to. New comers have to at latest match the existing core offerings and that is their first priority. For established players there are integration issues. The applications technology exists but the business models are still in emerging stages. Obviously user adaptation is also a delay factor.

There are not many generic application server vendors in NGN market right now. Dynamicsoft and Ubiquity were acquired some time back. Why has the market not sustained many application server vendors in NGN, when all NGN is about is applications?

Continue reading "Interview with Bibi Rosenbach, CEO, Personeta" »

What changes have you seen in the customer demands related to chip features over the last couple of years and what is CEVA doing to address those demands?

With the triple play and quadruple play, there will be demand to significantly reduce the cost of these offerings, and the only way to accomplish this (in the context of chips) is to start integrating everything into a single chip solution. And the licensing model is the only way to achieve such advanced technology in a cost-effective manner.

Companies like TI, Freescale, ST and Broadcom cannot specialize in every one of these areas. They may be experts in the modem function of the fiber or in the modem function of DSL or WiMAX. But to have the in-house expertise in every technology required for triple or quadruple play products is very difficult. It is much easier for them to license a full solution for a block of the technology such as VoIP and integrate it into the chip. This is where CEVA comes into the picture.

Continue reading "Interview with Gideon Wertheizer, CEO, CEVA" »

You are based in Scandinavia. How are you doing on your home turf and what prospects have you explored outside your region?

Dreampark is currently the dominant IP TV middleware vendor in Scandinavian market covering Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark where we have approximately 70% of the market share in terms of number of operators on the IPTV field. We are trying to expand the business outside Scandinavia. We are looking across the Baltic sea towards Eastern and Central Europe. As of today we have about nine prospects outside Scandinavia.

How many customers do you have?

The total number of installations so far is 14.

Continue reading "Interview with Per Skyttvall, CEO, Dreampark" »

You are very bullish on Eastern Europe. Can you tell us a bit about IP TV potential in that region?

Well, apart from the specific large IP TV deployments like France Telecom, Telefonica, Fastweb, PCCW, certainly the strongest growth is in Eastern Europe. For us also Eastern Europe represents the largest growth area. We are seeing a lot of growth in Russia, Estonia, Latvia and Slovenia. Obviously they are putting an infrastructure in to those countries that is driving IPTV. In addition, there is not a strong cable and satellite presence. So there is not so much competition.

You are a UK based company. What is the current status of IPTV market there?

In general, IPTV market in UK has been slow in comparison to other areas of Europe. The major reason is the dominance that Sky, the biggest satellite TV operator, holds in the market. With Sky having such a strong influence on both the content and broadcast, it becomes difficult to come in with a competitive offering.

How many subscribers are we talking about in the UK?

There are under 100,000 IPTV subscribers in UK at present.

Continue reading "Interview with Bob Giddy, CEO, Amino" »

Can you give us some background information about your company? When did you get started with VoIP?

We are based in Germany. The company was formed in the year 1999 to develop software based IPPBX. We have an installed base in Europe where we deploy and deliver our solutions to the small and medium enterprise markets.

Within the SME segment, what is your focus area?

Our focus is business set ups ranging from 20 users up to 1000 users.

You obviously compete with the likes of Cisco. But what is your perceived position in the SME IP PBX market in Europe?

I believe we are leader in the space in Europe followed by Cisco and Siemens.

Continue reading "Interview with Günter Junk, CEO, Swyx" »

How did you get started and what made you target hosted VoIP?

In 1998 I came up with this concept of hosted phone system. I would say we are the first to come out with this hosted PBX system. We launched our service offering and at the same time two other players - Gobeam and Telverse - also launched similar offering. Fortunately we grew very fast and raised our second round of money in 2001.

What has been the progress so far in terms of the number of customers?

We serve about 250 enterprise customers.

Are you mostly serving the SMEs or are there any large customers as well for yor hosted offering?

It is mainly the smaller businesses, organization with 100 to 500 employees or at least 100 or more people per site. Although one of our largest clients has around 6000 employees but it is stretched across 600 locations.

Continue reading "Interview with Bob Paulsen, CEO, Unity Business Networks" »

How many customers do you have at present?

We have over 10 deployments worldwide. They are mainly in Europe. We have some in Asia. We have Jazztel in Spain, Latvia Telecom, Georgia Telecom and Blockbuster in Israel as our customers.

In terms of the cumulative shipments, where do you stand at present?

We have shipped capacity of over 500,000 subscribers worldwide.

Who do you typically compete with in the RFPs?

We are mainly shortlisted with Alcatel and Nokia-Siemens.

Your undersatnding of Orca's market share in IP TV middleware?

By subscribers numbers, we are almost third in Europe.

Continue reading "Interview with Haggai Barel, CEO, Orca Interactive" »

Which VoIP services do you offer in Denmark?

On the residential market we are providing basic services, which mean the telephone line and all the residential features such as call forwarding and unified messaging etc. On the SME side we provide hosted PBX solution, hosted in Copenhagen.

Denmark is a very competitive telecom market. What is your strategy to attract customers?

On the enterprise side we have an open architecture that makes it possible for the business manager to develop his own features on his side. On the residential side we try to provide on-screen services such as e banking, travel information, booking information, and all those things. So the strategy there is to provide value added services which are not 100% IP telephony stuff. But we feel we can get more customers if we do that.

Continue reading "Interview with Mark Arthur, CEO, Primo Telekom" »

You have worked with Australian and UK customers mostly. What similarities do you find in these markets?

UK and European markets are very hot at the moment. There are a lot of players trying to create new solutions for the consumer. It is not as hot in Australia yet. Broadband penetration is about 4-5 times more in the UK market than the Australian market. The Australian market is far more regulated than the UK market.

However what we have noticed is that the products that consumers want are very similar. People want simple computer-off products. They want plug n play devices. The main thing is that consumers are consumers. They need simple messages to win them over. I would say that the price elasticity of a UK customer is the same as that of an Australian customer. For a typical consumer item or service you require about 15-20% price differential for customers to shift over. However in communications market, we are now talking about 30-40% change to woo the customer.

Continue reading "Interview with Michael Carew, Founder, FreshTel" »

Click here to read Part 1 of the interview.

Which vendors have you been working with?

All our gateways are from Cisco. The call switching platform is from Tekelec. For the end user devices we use Cisco phones.

What made you choose Tekelec and Cisco?

With most other hosted solutions you have a call switching platform and then there is the voice firewall to be sourced from SBC vendors. With Tekelec both the voice firewalls and the call switching platform are made by the same company. That reduces the finger pointing when there are technical issues. And we essentially like the feature set that was available from Tekelec and the price point was right. (iLocus note: The products that are mentioned here are now owned by GENBAND).

Continue reading "Interview with Vignesa Moorthy, CEO, ViewQwest (Singapore). Part 2" »

Could we start with a brief background to ViewQwest?

ViewQwest was founded in 2001. It was originally an ISP focused on data connectivity in the central business district of Singapore. From there on the company started adding value added services such as managed VPN services, back up services, disaster recovery etc. Viewqwest made a niche market for itself in the financial services industry where we provide a lot of outsourced IP management services to merchant banks.

Tell us about your VoIP service.

Over the last two years we have been testing various VoIP platforms. In February last year a service called One Voice was launched. The One Voice service which is essentially targeted at the corporate market with people who have offices in Singapore as well as globally, the primary motivation is to replace existing PABX systems. We are using a hosted Centrex model.

Continue reading "Interview with Vignesa Moorthy, CEO, ViewQwest (Singapore) Part 1" »

Click here to read Part 1 of the interview.

As a consumer, I can share one broadband connection on several home PCs. Why I am not allowed to share entertainment like that over TVs or other output devices?

Not sure if that is really the case. In the U.S., the consumer can get several STBs for multiple home connections. The satellite or cable TV provider is not charging two or three times per TV. They are charging an incremental amount though you do have to pay for the entire service.

Yes but when you share a broadband connection at home you do not pay incremental charges.

Yes, that is right. There is that difference.

What if the regulators allow multiple TV users within a home without incremental charges? How would that affect your business?

We are not really providing additional links to the WAN per se. What we are doing is allowing the distribution of content inside the home. So it is a totally different model than what you are thinking about.

Continue reading "Interview with Patrick Henry, CEO, Entropic (PART 2)" »

Entropic, established in 2001, has been focused on Home Entertainment networking. It provides chipsets along with software in this segment. C-Link, its flagship product allows the sharing of multimedia content over COAX infrastructure. The company recently acquired RFIC providers RF Magic and Israel based Arabella Softwares.

Your market focus is home entertainment networking and broadband access. What changes have you witnessed in these markets over the past six years, and what have those changes meant for you as a chipset vendor?

The home networking space historically has centered around data and voice. We are seeing an emerging trend toward digital entertainment including streaming video. The vision of Entropic is to capitalize on this trend. The other trend we are capitalizing upon is the need for higher speed which out chipset facilitates.

c-LINK is your flagship product. Can you share with us its current market status in terms of shipments and other data?

Our growth has been spectacular. We have shipped cumulatively more than five million c.LINK chipsets.

Continue reading "Interview with Patrick Henry, CEO, Entropic (PART 1)" »

NewPhone is a triple play service provider offering services in Norway and Sweden using the incumbent service providers' broadband and mobile Internet. The company has grown from a turnover of SEK 8 million in 2004 to SEK 51 million in 2006.

You are a mobile service provider in Sweden. To what extent have you utilized VoIP so far?

We integrate the IP PBX with mobile phones. If you have a fixed line phone, we can take the fixed line numbers, put them in the PBX and when somebody calls that number the PBX will divert the call to the mobile phones. Between the PBX and the mobile phones we send calls through a SIP tunnel and that is where we use VoIP. Being IP based, subscribers can take calls on their handsets anywhere in the world provided they have IP connection and our wireless IP Phone.

Which VoIP vendor do you work with?

We have deployed Broadsoft solution.

How would you compare fixed line VoIP with the mobile VoIP in Sweden?

All the research we have done so far tells us that the market here in Sweden is going mobile and that makes it even more relevant to just go mobile with VoIP from the beginning.

Continue reading "Interview with Andreas Khoshnou, CEO, NewPhone" »

Minerva has been involved in video-over-IP space since late 90’s. The company is one of the pioneers in the world of IPTV. The main product Minerva sells is iTVManager. iTVManager has two components: middleware and applications. Applications include EPG delivery, pay per view, video-on-demand, PVR etc. The middleware itself has two components: a back office server component and a client component that resides on the subscriber’s set-top box.

A bit about Minerva’s background?

We have been traditionally engaged on two major fronts: video processing (i.e. video encoding and transcoding systems) and service delivery (i.e. middleware and applications). Over the past couple of years we have been morphing into a pure software infrastructure vendor.

Which geographic region are you mainly focused on?

Our initial focus was in the United States, targeting small and medium size independent operators. We are now gaining significant traction with large operators in Canada, the United States, Latin America and Europe.

Can you share some numbers with us related to your deployments?

We have over 120 installations worldwide. Surewest, one of our customers, has the largest IPTV deployment in the US. Large operators in both North and South America will launch services by the end of the year, significantly boosting the number of subscribers enjoying television services powered by Minerva software.

Continue reading "Interview with Mauro Bonomi, CEO, Minerva" »