Cisco to Acquire Nokia

or so rumour has it – this is a direct reaction to our previous post about HP acquiring Palm and stealing a march on Cisco. This rumour has spread across lots of Techie blogs – see a blog round up here We are not sure if there is any substance to this rumour but it would certainly make one very powerful company should the two merge.

HP Acquire Palm

I am sure you have all seen the news that HP has acquired Palm – it will be interesting to see how this develops. The Iridiacom team has all used Palm devices in the past and they were well used but they seemed to get overtaken by some of the Smartphone offerings that give you your PDA features and phone in one.

The Palm Pre has been well received and we believe that HP will bring this technology together with their product offerings such as 3COM VoIP to offer Enterprise Businesses end to end solutions including desktop and mobile solutions and they are probably the only company who can offer this in terms of hardware and software so I guess it is over to Cisco to see their next move.

Volcanic Disruption

Now the dust has settled (literally) on the Icelandic Volcanic disruption it got us thinking about people being stranded in a remote country for some time.

With modern VoIP systems and Unified Communications users could easily work from their remote location assuming they had Broadband access then they would have a VoIP Client, Voicemail and email access – in fact was there any reason for them to rush back

In the last few months with the Snow problem and now the volcanic ash we can see compelling reasons to have remote access to the office.

Vodafone Femtocells – New Name – New Price

We talk a lot about Femtocells as we are interested to see how they develop in the market place and how network providers can use them to their benefit and ultimately for the benefit of their customers.

We have previously discussed Vodafone’s offering  here and it seems they have made some pricing changes and repositioned their product for the market place.

Vodafone has recently relaunched their Femtocell with a large price cut from £160 down to £50. It has also launched a marketing campaign aimed at educating the consumer as to the benefits of the device and at the same time renamed the unit from being the ‘Vodafone Home Gateway’ to ‘Sure Signal’.

Vodafone have not commented on the reason for this new Femtocell enthusiasm, but we have seen reports that make mention of Vodafone’s recent launch of the iPhone and as we know from O2′s experience, this device places high data demand on the network so maybe this is Vodafone’s way to try to offload some of that data traffic onto the Femtocell.

As always we watch this new launch with interest.

More information from the Vodafone site here

Snow, Snow and More Snow !

Our local area has had a lot of snow this week and people are struggling to get to work, after a particularly heavy snowfall yesterday we decided it was too risky to travel so stayed at home.

We have remote email access, VPN access to the office and a VoIP phone so it was business as usual and our customers did not notice any difference as we were able to provide support as normal. It shows the power of modern technology that we could run the business as a virtual office.

The main problem we have with weather like this is the Couriers who are struggling to collect and deliver equipment but technology cannot do much if the roads are not gritted !!!

New Product – IP Contact Centre

We have just added a new product to our product portfolio the EasyRun EPICAcce IP Contact Centre – essentially this is a Unified Communications Product that will give the users a highly feature Contact Centre that can be used on any PBX either legacy or IP it does not matter.

The EPICAcce  modular architecture allows users to change the functionality and structure of their contact centre easily and smoothly, and its scalability enables an organization to grow without the need for massive re-investments. The EPICAcce product family supports both legacy PBX’s and IP based PBX’s allowing customers to use the same application across either or both telephony platforms.

Key specifications offered in EasyRun products include:

• State-of-the-art mechanisms that allow routing via skills, CallerID, area, customers and statistical information or by any criteria from an external Database/application
• Easy integration with multi-vendor platforms through an open architecture
• User friendly administrative tools that provide the ability to easily customize the system
• Multi site, call center support, with full contact center redundancy
• Telephony platform independence – essentially EPIC modules can run on virtually any legacy or IP telephony platform

EasyRun has over one thousand customer installations worldwide including the Dallas Cowboys, the U.S. Coast Guard, National Pizza and Coca Cola.

We are very pleased to add this to our portfolio and look forward to talking to our customers about this exciting product.

Happy 25th Birthday to the UK Mobile Network

We recently saw an article saying that the UK mobile network is 25 years old on 1st January 2010 and it got us thinking about life before mobiles.

We are old enough to remember a time before mobiles and email, we had pagers and the new fangled message pagers where you would get a message saying ‘call the office’ and after pulling off a main road, trying to find a pay phone that worked and if you had change only to be told it was not urgent and you could have called when you got to your destination !!!. Life certainly has changed and we are very dependant on mobiles in day to day life but of course not only for voice but with SMS and data access we are always in touch.

There is an interesting article about this over on the IET website here and the history of how the market has developed is fascinating.

Is Nokia Moving Away From Symbian ?

Regular readers will know that we are long time fans of the Nokia N Series Phones and the work done with their SIP Client on the Symbian Operating System.

We are now seeing a lot of press that Nokia may be starting to make a move away from Symbian it seems the good reviews and user response  to Nokia’s new N900 has made the company look at whether the Symbian S60 OS is the right platform for future smart phones in its N series range.

Various reports indicate Nokia will move away from Symbian in 2012 and focus on the Maemo platform. All high-end N series multimedia devices will then be running the Linux OS by 2012, but X-series and E-series devices may continue to run Symbian. Before the launch of the N900, Maemo had been used exclusively in Nokia’s range of internet tablets but the processing power of the new N900 has been described as closer to a pocket PC than a mobile phone.

Some observers have pointed to some of Maemo’s present failings as offering Services and Applications that cannot compare to the mature Symbian S60 platform regardless of Maemo’s superior user experience.

HP Acquire 3Com

We see that HP has acquired 3COM and we think their respective product ranges are very complimentary, however it is now interesting to note that part of the 3COM portfolio is their VoIP product line the 3Com NBX and VCX IP PBX and handset lines. 3Com currently has less than 0.5 percent share of the total $16 billion enterprise telephony market, according to Dell’Oro Group. But that is still more than the zero share HP has, which up to now addressed the market through partnerships with Avaya and Microsoft, among others.

The prospect of a VoIP product line branded as HP and with the backing of the HP marketing might should be a very interesting prospect and some of the current VoIP providers will be sitting up and taking notice.

View the Press Release  here

Google Snatches Gizmo5

Talk about moving fast – Google pounced on the the peer to peer VoIP provider Gizmo5 just as its chances of being acquired by Skype had been dashed. Gizmo5 is an unscaled, but proven peer to peer VoIP provider. It has six million users for its SIP based P2P VoIP service. The service would add the a PSTN link to allow incoming or outbound calls to real phones which Google Voice currently lacks. According to various sources, Google has bought Gizmo5 for $30 million, but the official announcement has yet to be made.

It is going to be interesting to see how Google is going to integrate this technology into it’s portfolio of applications for sure it will form part of the Google Voice