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.