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.

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.

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

Yet Another new Acronym – VoIM

Our industry is renowned for producing lots of acronyms – it makes sure no one else knows what we are talking about !

VoIM or Voice over Instant Messenger is the ability while instant messaging to then have a voice call using VoIP, the question here is are we talking an IM client with VoIP capability or a VoIP client with IM capability, by this we mean MSN Messenger which most users will use for Instant Messaging and probably not think about the VoIP capabilities or Skype where most people will use the VoIP capability and not think too much about Instant Messages.

I guess this technology will grow and grow as it seems logical to turn an IM conversation into voice if more clarification is needed (we can still talk faster than we can type – for now anyway !)

Currently this is very much a Peer to Peer type technology but more solutions are being implemented in the Enterprise space for group chat which will then lead to the ability for group calls, conferencing etc.

IBM puts a toe back in the PBX Market

We are old and grey enough to remember when IBM with ROLM were a major force in the PBX market but after stellar success they faded and were overtaken by the competition. It seems IBM are dipping a toe back in the PBX market by pairing up with Digium and offering a version of the popular Opensource Asterisk PBX system as an add on to their Smart Cube office in a box package.

Customers purchase the Asterisk application from IBM’s Smart Market, and then go to IBM for support. Digium support staff is on call to IBM for tier 2 support, but customers will dealy directly with IBM. The PBX software is sold in two sizes, 20 and 40 concurrent calls.

Smart Cube is sold as a hardware platform with a base set of applications on it and a second set of applications available for customers to buy via Smart Market to address their specific business needs. The Asterisk software can be configured and managed via IBM’s Smart Desk management dashboard, which gives a common look to management of all the Smart Market applications.

Lets see how successful this is and maybe IBM will produce their own flavour of Asterisk in the future.

Has Skype Taken a Wrong Turn ?

We see it has been announced by Skype that it is terminating its Extras Developer program, they stated that  not enough people were using  the tools to justify it.  No new projects will be certified, and existing ones will be allowed to expire over the course of time. We are not sure that this is the right thing for Skype to do.

So the Extras program has failed, but why ? – We believe it was because developers did not have the capability to produce deep integrations. In reality third party developers have never been able to do much more than skim the surface of Skype functionality. What developers have been asking for is to be able to treat the Skype call function as a service, and build it directly into their applications. Today in the main to make a Skype call requires the Skype client to be opened.

Could this be because Skype are moving towards the Skype for SIP service that gives existing SIP based products easier access to the Skype base of users with little support or development from Skype.

Skype have new owners so lets see what direction they take in trying to make more products Skype enabled.