IP Convergence: Beyond VoIP, Beyond Cost Savings

I think everyone has at least one horror story about navigating through an Interactive Voice Recognition (IVR) menu over the phone.  You know what I am referring to...those “Press one for this, press two for that”.   One example of the miserable part about these systems is when you have to listen through the entire thing only to find out that the option you need isn’t an option at all –OR- when someone (usually my kids) talks to you during the recording and you miss some options (most likely the one that you needed!), so you have to listen to the entire announcement again.  This, my friends, is IVR hell.  Well I just stumbled upon a company that is addressing IVR hell head on, and with a whole bunch of ingenuity mind you…

Fonolo has created a novel concept.  They have transcribed the menu prompts of the major destinations – meaning they created a visual tree of the IVR menu structure, and you can navigate it online via clicking through the options.  Then you input all the information necessary.  Once all the inputs are registered by Fonolo from you, then Fonolo will place the call and automatically get you to the point that you need to be in the IVR menu.  This point may end up being on hold for a human, but just think of all the time you have saved just getting to that point.


Adam "voiploser" Uzelac

DISCLAIMER: The comments here are mine only. They don't necessarily reflect intelligence, refined thoughts, or anything that the reader should take too seriously. Should the reader expect a polished thought process in the content addressed here, then a strong dose of medication should be prescribed to address that misconception.

Click here for the SIP 4.0 IETF Draft!

Be sure to note date of posting...

Adam "voiploser" Uzelac

DISCLAIMER: The comments here are mine only. They don't necessarily reflect intelligence, refined thoughts, or anything that the reader should take too seriously. Should the reader expect a polished thought process in the content addressed here, then a strong dose of medication should be prescribed to address that misconception.

Of the more interesting developments that are emerging as SIP  technologies and products mature is the changing context that Enterprises’ IT organizations operate in.  Historically, telecommunications has been defined and provided to the marketplace by Service Providers like Global Crossing, Level 3, BT, etc.  The requirements needed to formulate an offering were provided by SPs to the manufacturers of the platforms (Cisco, Juniper, etc).  Things are changing rapidly on this front though.   Enterprises in some cases are bigger in many aspects of the definition than some smaller traditionally defined Service Providers.  In my humble opinion, this warrants of new definition of the Enterprise.  The Enterprise is the newest category of a Service Provider. 

With regards to SIP, there is ample evidence of its adoption in the Enterprise marketplace and vendors that have catered directly to Enterprises have taken heed.  As examples, see Microsoft’s, Siemens’, Cisco’s, Avaya’s adoption of SIP in their product portfolios.

The impact of this is an overall decentralization of the Enterprise communications environment that leads to a more collaborative workforce.  If you need some examples, think of the IM communications in support of standard telephony and email infrastructures.  Nowadays in our MS OCS/Exchange environment at Global Crossing, when I read an email – I not only have the ability to reply, but IM or click to call in response. This is all handled via a single user interface.  This form of collaboration is _NOT_ dependant on the traditional services that Global Crossing provides. (with the exception of the underlying IP transport), but rather the infrastructure is supported by our internal IT department.  By the way, this is all decentralization is enabled with SIP.

Adam “voiploser” Uzelac

DISCLAIMER: The comments here are mine only. They don’t necessarily reflect intelligence, refined thoughts, or anything that the reader should take too seriously. Should the reader expect a polished thought process in the content addressed here, then a strong dose of medication should be prescribed to address that misconception.

While visiting with several individuals a few weeks ago at the Ziff Davis Unified Communications Summit in Seattle, WA I noticed that some people hadn't yet realized the power of one aspect to the overall value of unified communications which relates to presence awareness. That is leveraging presence not just in instant messaging but in other communication vehicles can play an important role in transforming your business impact as an IT organization. As a result I thought I would dedicate this post to help create ideas around things that can be done to assist in helping IT in leading the way.

Here at Global Crossing in an attempt to leverage this core components of Unified Communications in an ongoing effort to incorporate the advantages of collaborative, converged services within our enterprise we've transformed internal applications from static non presence aware to anticipatory engaged communication tools that are supporting contextual collaboration with presence-awareness throughout the enterprise. In this instance presence-awareness (whether someone is available in simple terms and how to contact) is utilizing capabilities including chat, computer-based telephony, conferencing, IP video, and e-mail across tools that leveraged across the enterprise drive in principle more efficacy from consumption and corresponding execution. In fact it is my opinion that since presence has been embedded into our application infrastructure to enhance our collaborative capabilities it is natural to see transformational improvements occur around our "quality of experience" associated to the overall user experience. This is so because enabling enhanced customer experience truly enables the IT organization to drive one more component to our IT organizations transformational success in enabling the business to not only "react" but be proactive by achieving extensibility required within the distribution transparency model required for execution. Said another way the fact that presence awareness has been integrated into our application infrastructure means this action will further enhance our agility to enhance operational efficiency by allowing application "pivots" to be present thus accelerating communication by eliminating in some instances serial cognitive task execution.

As the industry landscape continues to evolve there are a few constants that will remain the same: (1) increasing business demands require more innovative, transformational capabilities between employees, partners and customers and (2) continually driving operational velocity reductions around the cost basis of delivering information technology services is imperative. It is commonly believed by many vendors such as Avaya, Cisco, Intel, Nortel and Siemens as well as software developers such as IBM and Microsoft that presence technology will continue to become an increasingly important tool at driving traditional costs out by attacking the serial nature of traditional work execution thus increasing operational efficiency.

So why is presence so important to Unified Communication services? Presence is important because it can become the intelligent communication application for converged IP communication services such as those demonstrated by our IT organization at Global Crossing. Determining where a user is and how best to reach them in our case by leveraging presence enabled applications that have been integrated into our infrastructure with the "glue" to increase the overall value of our converged IP services brought to the table and help realize substantial business transformation value.Said another way presence-aware applications offered on a converged IP communication service help evolve traditional serial actions of quickly determining and thus engaging with employees regardless of location, modality or scheduling which allows our globally dispersed users to communicate and collaborate in real time providing productivity in a truly global and mobile workforce environment. Combined converged IP communication services with presence technology provide for accelerated collaboration between our employees, partners and customers by knocking down the walls of traditional serial communications and by accelerating communication through anticipatory engagement.

Presence is the value.

Google’s Impact on the Wireless Internet

In case you missed the announcement last week, Google has tossed it’s hat into the ring for the last remaining commercially viable wireless spectrum in the US.  The 700MHz spectrum was used to provide analog TV service and becomes available to the highest bidder on January 24th, 2008.  The impact of Google’s announcement is yet unknown, but should prove to be very important in the long run.  

Some interesting datapoints:

•    From Wikipedia - Several countries, including the UK, now have more mobile phones than people. There are over five hundred million active mobile phone accounts in China, as of 2007. Luxembourg has the highest mobile phone penetration rate in the world, at 164% in December 2001. In Hong Kong the penetration rate reached 139.8% of the population in July 2007. The total number of mobile phone subscribers in the world was estimated at 2.14 billion in 2005. The subscriber count reached 2.7 billion by end of 2006 according to Informa[citation needed], and 3.3 billion by November, 2007, thus reaching an equivalent of over half the planet's population. Around 80% of the world's population enjoys mobile phone coverage as of 2006. This figure is expected to increase to 90% by the year 2010.

http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

Now allow me to pluck the germane data from the above for my point.  Phone = 3.3 BILLION -  Computers =  1.25 Billion.  Google already enjoys dominance for eyes in the computer space, and if they are as successful on wireless phones as they are with PCs, watch out world!

The problem Google currently has with wireless devices, especially in the US, is the locked-down nature of the device to the wireless network operator.  It’s actually a sad commentary that Google has to forge ahead with buying spectrum, but it makes all the sense in the world.   Boy is it interesting watching the impacts to the industry.  Check out Verizon Wireless’ announcement about opening up their network to devices.  Don’t think for a second that these two announcements are unrelated.  They couldn’t be more tied to the hip.

All this guy has to say is, “Good on ya, Google!”


Adam “voiploser” Uzelac
DISCLAIMER: The comments here are mine only. They don’t necessarily reflect intelligence, refined thoughts, or anything that the reader should take too seriously. Should the reader expect a polished thought process in the content addressed here, then a strong dose of medication should be prescribed to address that misconception.

Demo fall 2007

So I was wondering around the blogosphere last night and stumbled across an announcement regarding a company called Tungle.  They recently won the "DEMOgod" award from demo.com.  Demo.com is a conference for emerging Web 2.0 companies.  The conference permits invited emerging companies to pitch a 6 minute demo of their product to journalist, bloggers, etc. The conference was this week (Sept 24-27) in San diego.  The footage of all the demos are available on their website.  

Below is a list of the demos I thought were particularly interesting.  So go grab some popcorn and a drink of your choice, and check them out at demo.com and click on demofall07 to launch the viewer.

MY FAVORITE!! -> 360 Desktop - desktop real estate extender.  This is amazing! <- MY FAVORITE!!
DimDim - free and open source webmeeting alternative.
Earthmine - Geographic 3d visualizing.
Jasper Wireless - "local" SIM - targeting machine communications.
LiveMocha - A new approach to language learning.
SpceTime - 3d browser.
Talari Networks - Enterprise WAN alternative.
Truphone - just created VoIP client for iPhone.
Tubes Networks - a way to share files with others - P2P software.
Yuuguu - collaboration software.
Tungle - Meeting scheduling plugin.
Vello - conference call advancement - outbound calls to all participants.

Adam "voiploser" Uzelac
DISCLAIMER: The comments here are mine only. They don't necessarily reflect intelligence, refined thoughts, or anything that the reader should take too seriously. Should the reader expect a polished thought process in the content addressed here, then a strong dose of medication should be prescribed to address that misconception.

Here's the second part of our Virtualization series  and a continuation of Virtualization -  Part 1 – The Abstraction of the Internet.

A computer consists of several key elements that along with software (and firmware) provide useful applications like the browser you are using to read this blog from our web servers.

Here are some of the items that are noteworthy:

Central Processing Unit (CPU) – aka Pentium for you wintel folks, is the heart of the computer and executes instructions (software or firmware) that are programmed by a software engineer.

Input/Output Devices – Provides a method to enter , display or share information from the computer, for example:  Display, keyboard, mouse.

Random Access Memory (RAM) – Is memory that is accessed by the CPU which losses its contents when you remove power.  RAM (Typically) is the fastest memory that a CPU and “read” or “write”.

Disk Drive – Is memory that is also accessed by the CPU which doesn’t lose its contents when you remove power.  Disks are slower than RAM.

Flash Memory – Is like RAM but has the characteristics of a disk drive.

Data Bus – Depending on the CPU (8 bit, 16 bit, 32 bit or 64 bits wide) is where the CPU can read or write data from or to the various memory devices,  Input/Output devices.  Each bit is a “1” or “0”.

Address Bus – Also dependent on the CPU , this is where the CPU (using bits) selects the location in memory to read or write data.

Firmware – aka BIOS for wintel folks, is software that is used to “boot” (restart from a known state)  the computer that resides in Flash memory or a Programmable Read Only  Memory (PROM).

Software – eg Office.

Operating System – eg Windows, is a layer of software that abstracts the hardware and controls the overall operation of the computer.

Networks – Are communication systems that allow computers to share information.

Programming Languages – A CPU can only understand binary (“1” or “0” s) for the  instructions it executes.  There are various instructions to read , write, add, multiply, subtract , divide and move data. However, Humans need to abstract the instructions into words to make it easier.  These languages define the way words are used forming a grammer (just like English or Spanish) .  The first form of languages are assembler languages which are specific to a CPU and not portable, the subsequent languages like C, C++, FORTRAN, Pascal provided more functionality with Database languages like 3GL, 4GL etc..

A computer can be a main frame, a desktop or your laptop which were confined to a area (room, your desk or your lap).

Advances in networking have provided efficient methods of distributing the CPU from Disks, Input/Output devices. 

Storage Area Networks are clusters of disk drives that are no longer directly connected to the computer using the various buss’s described above. This is a key level of abstraction which has allowed distributed computing to evolve into GRID computing where the software is one place, the CPUs in another and memory in yet another.  Distributed computing provides more efficient use of computing at unparalleled  level of disaster recovery.

Why is this important? 

Computing has and will continue to be the mother of invention for advances not only in the hardware or software but also in the networks that connect everything together like the Internet or also an Enterprise VPN.

More later :

Virtualization – Part 3  - The Abstraction of Applications
Concepts of a Application Programmers Interface (API),  examples and pitfalls for APIs and the abstraction of  Web Services.

Could it be possible?  Now here's a rumor that's worth spreading.  Apple is thinking about reviving the Newton brand.  Russell Shaw, over at ZD-Net is reporting that there might be some truth to this rumor.


Here is part of the article...
Apple Insider’s take in part:

Externally, the multi-touch PDA has been described by sources as an ultra-thin “slate” akin to the iPhone, about 1.5 times the size and sporting an approximate 720×480 high-resolution display that comprises almost the entire surface of the unit. The device is further believed to leverage multi-touch concepts which have yet to gain widespread adoption in Apple’s existing multi-touch products — the iPhone and iPod touch — like drag-and-drop and copy-and-paste."

Stay tuned for more on this one.  All I can say is that Apple might be pushing this limits of what their brand can handle if this is true.

Adam "voiploser" Uzelac

DISCLAIMER: The comments here are mine only. They don't necessarily reflect intelligence, refined thoughts, or anything that the reader should take too seriously. Should the reader expect a polished thought process in the content addressed here, then a strong dose of medication should be prescribed to address that misconception.

7 easy ways to use VoIP

1) Setup a Skype account and get Skype-in/Skype-out.

2) Setup a Gizmo account at SIPphone.

3) Get a Google account

4) Setup yourself with a Grand Central Account(owned by Google)

5) Get a Dual-mode wireless phone.

6) Install Fring on the dual-mode phone.

7) Associate all numbers from Skype, Gizmo, Wireless phone, deskphone, etc to your Grand Central number, and publish your Grand Central Number.

This is what you get from all this:

INBOUND CALLING:  When someone dials your Grand Central number, all the associated numbers in your Grand Central profile will ring simultaneously.  You have your choice which phone to answer with.  You also have the ability to "move" the call or "switch" the call from one device to another associated device.  It's the coolest thing - all you do is press the '*' key and all the phones start ringing again.  You just pick up another phone and hang up on the phone you are moving from.  There are also loads of other features with Grand Central.  It's just great!!!

OUTBOUND CALLING:  The selection device when placing a call to someone else is normally dictated by your location at the time you are making the call.  If you are in a car, then wireless is really all you get due to availability.  If you are in an area that has wifi service that works with your dual-mode phone (like an airport or coffee shop), then Fring is your friend because you can use numerous options.  If you are in the office with your choice, then use the phone or network of your choice.  If I know that I am about to leave the office, I might take the call on my cell.  If I am about to settle in to a marathon of conference calls, then it's desk phone with speaker or head-phones on.

VoIP works and VoIP is mainstream nowadays.

Adam "voiploser" Uzelac

DISCLAIMER: The comments here are mine only. They don't necessarily reflect intelligence, refined thoughts, or anything that the reader should take too seriously. Should the reader expect a polished thought process in the content addressed here, then a strong dose of medication should be prescribed to address that misconception.

OK, so Web Services has been around for some time now.  XML and SOAP have been used as an easy to implement mechanism to serve as an API for distributed applications.  However, only until the last year or so has web services come to the forefront of telecom services, and I believe it will be used as a foundation for many innovative solutions that will be built under the Unified Communications/Integrated Communications umbrella.

VoIP has traditionally been relegated to basic telephony services in the telecom industry, such as VoIP/SIP Trunking and Hosted IP Telephony services.  However, with the advent of Unified Communications (check out the Unified Communications Conference at the Fall VON Show in October), which brings together telephony, messaging, collaboration, data and mobility into an integrated solution, we begin to see services using VoIP as becoming more visual in nature, bringing telephony into web interfaces rather than to phones, and using multiple distributed applications which are blended to create solutions.

Global Crossing has announced that it is providing innovative Unified Communications solutions to the UK Government.  These services will soon be expanded to provide even greater capabilities to the Enterprise, and globalization is a key element of this strategy.

Does this mean IMS?  Not necessarily.  Many solutions in the market have built interoperability through vendor partnerships using SIP from a voice signaling perspective, and Web Services brings another element into the mix which greatly improves interoperability and improves usability.  IMS is not nearly as innovative as Web Services, and certainly not as easily implemented.  However, IMS can be combined with Web Services to anchor control, signaling, and provisioning of multiple applications in a standardized fashion.  My belief is that it will take the industry some time to pull everything together using IMS.

As an example of how web services can be introduced into telephony, clients can be built into web pages using internet API's which use click to call functionality.  In addition, web services can be used in a unified communications "Dashboard" interface where a user can view presence status, conference attendance, manage services through voice portals, and trigger entirely new communications business models.  Two innovating vendors highly leveraging web services in the telecom space are Sylantro and Iperia, which bring call control and management extended to web communications, and provide visual voicemail and unified messaging services as a solution.  Very cool stuff.

Web Services brings easy programming interfaces to industry standard transport (HTTP) to bring innovation to telecom services.  As enterprises become more distributed in nature, with remote offices in multiple countries, their key workers are also becoming more distributed and mobile.  Telecom needs to keep up with these trends and the increading demand for requirements of the changing workplace with real time communications.  This is bringing traditionally separate applications together via Unified Communications, and the "unification" or blending of these distributed applications can use a combination of signaling techniques and web services functions to bring a highly visual element to the solution.