Tag Archives: voip

10 points about the death of Voice over IP

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Is it a cliche to quote and abuse T.S. Eliot’s poetry?

This is the way the VoIP world ends
Not with a bang, but a whimper

Pulver pretty-much said this two years ago: VoIP is dead.  It became the “draw commodity” I hoped it wouldn’t, due to its promise and unique ability to transform the state of the telecom world.  But the politics of the device makers, carriers, and regulators proved to much, and VoIP became just another “more of the same” transport mechanism. It’s there if you need it–there if you need to draw on it, but not uniquely compelling.

Here are the ten things that prove VoIP is dead:

1. Vonage still hasn’t turned the corner. Further burying themselves in debt (what bank took THAT risk in this crummy credit market, seriously?), there’s just no way out for the pure-play provider.

2. Alec Saunders declared VoIP dead and he has some good reasons why.  (OK, Jeff Pulver, we’ll believe you next time.)

3. Everywhere you look, former VoIP honchos are turning to social media applications as a focus area–from Jeff Pulver to Ken Camp to myself. It’s a trend. Social media is where the opportunity for innovation in unified communications still exists.

4. End-to-end VoIP is never going to be a reality, at least not not under the current competitive structure for telephone companies.

5. VoIP is a tool of application delivery. It does not differentiate the service the way it used to.

6. VoIP companies offering really cool features should’ve made deals to make those features a part of pure-play companies’ service.  This would’ve compelled adoption and brought both types of companies closer to the black. Instead, we saw no joint ventures between pureplays like BroadVoice and “oh that’s neat” players like TalkPlus.   The result–VoIP pure plays were no different from the bundled phone service provided by cablecos and telcos, and the public couldn’t see what the big deal about VoIP was.

7. I stopped consulting on business VoIP some time this year.  In most of the United States, the demand for VoIP in the SMB sector is just not there (despite all the manufactured hype about it).

8. Hosted VoIP PBX as a business model died on the vine. It’s probably not going to get much bigger than it is today. This isn’t the hosted players’ faults–it’s the fault of our sorry North American telecom infrastructure.

9. VoIP today is an infrastructure networking skill, no longer demanding the high pay of years past. Get a Cisco certification in voice and you might have some sort of earning premium, but with the slow-down, I doubt it.  Bottom line is, like ethernet and TCP/IP, if you don’t understand unified communications and you claim to be a network engineer, you’re screwed.

10. Cisco’s vision of unified communications sucks and they’ve foisted it upon the business world, scaring many SMBs away from VoIP altogether and elbowing open technologies like SIP out of the large business space.

My Favorite VoIP & Telecom Blogs for 2008

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(Or, ten folks whose blogs I should’ve post more comments on in 2008.)

10. Darla Mack.  If you’re a Nokia nut, there’s no better destination.  The self-proclaimed “mobile diva”, Darla tries just about everything with her Nokia phones.

9. Rich Tehrani. The brawn and brains of TMC, Rich has been in the industry as long as any of us, and his blog is a great mix of gadget news and insider industry info.

8. Alec Saunders.  Alec’s in the trenches daily as a VoIP visionary (he declared VoIP dead this morning) and application developer, so he’s usually weeks or months ahead of trends.

7. Om Malik and his band of creative cohorts. It’s pretty hard to ignore the guy that breaks just about every telecom industry rumor 24 hours before it turns into news.  Some of his underling’s stories are habitually wacky (obsessed with all this overstated carbon economy BS, for example), but generally,
Om’s is one of the best blogs around.

6. Ken Camp and Sheryl Breuker.  I’ve been in the Ken Camp camp for years now. Now that Sheryl’s on board with Mr. Camp, they’ve begun leading the way in a movement I expect will become the norm in 2009: VoIP people concentrating on social applications instead of VoIP.  That’s my plan anyway, so I’ll be keeping tabs on Ken and Sheryl.

5. Esme Vos.  No longer the lone female in my list (thanks to Darla and Sheryl), Esme is primarily known as a event/expo organizer who concentrates on municipal WiFi, having founded the MuniWireless expos. But she’s got something to say about software, Apple, Nokia, publishing, and a bunch of other stuff I care about.

4. Andy Abramson. A keen observer and predicter, and a new media relations specialist by day, Andy has more contacts than any two other people.

3. Phone Boy.  Dameon “Phone Boy” Welch-Abernathy: the only guy I know with a name longer than my own.  His blogging habit is better than mine, too.   He mainly blogs about gadgets, Nokia stuff, and social networking.

2. Jeff Pulver. Like Camp, Breuker, and others, Pulver is leading the retreat from VoIP charge to social media through video and social web applications.  I love reading Jeff’s blog. He posts a ton of photos and track logs.

1. Martin Geddes.  He doesn’t post often, but it’s always worth the read.  Also, this guy pulls no punches. Just as I aspire never to do, Martin Geddes never sets off the the bullshit detector.

Why Cisco is owning the UC space — and what Avaya can do about it

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A follow-on to the white paper I wrote a few years ago (2004 or so), “Cisco Versus the World”, this piece attempts to explain why Cisco has risen to a seat of dominance in the UC telephony space, largely at Avaya’s expense, and what Avaya should do to remain a prominent player.

1. Cisco’s brand has a better reputation. The Cisco name means one thing: networking.  When your name is identified with your core competency more than any other name, it means you make good products, and have done so for a long time.  Avaya, on the other hand, has a name that is new since the late nineties or early 2000s, a name that was cooked up as a way of shaking the legacy image of Lucent/AT&T.  But, as the old saying goes, if you put crap in a pretty box with a bow, it’s still crap.   Of course we know that Avaya’s products aren’t crap, but, in hindsight, and setting aside trademark law for a moment, would it not have been better to stick with the name Lucent?

2. Cisco has a more qualified sales channel. Cisco’s resellers are data people, many of whom have also been supporting software applications for decades.  Avaya’s resellers are “phone guys”.  Two entirely different kinds of folks. Software people understand the needs of users.  Phone guys often don’t.  The reason is thus: software can be made to do whatever the user wants, however telephone systems, a la TDM, always had a rigid feature-set that didn’t evolve around innovative user ideas.  So Cisco resellers, having sold and supported software for a long time along Cisco’s gear, are often more experienced at tailoring solutions.

3. Cisco spends more on product placement than Avaya does on payroll.  OK, maybe not THAT much, but you get the picture. Everywhere you look, Cisco’s products are on the screen and in print.  If you were an alien from outer space watching American TV or movies for the first time, you would think that every phone in America was a Cisco 7970.

4. Cisco, with the Bells’ help, convinced the public that SIP is some kind of new, experimental, risky protocol. Of course, nothing could be less true.  But, since SIP holds the key to creating interoperability between all UC telephony platforms, Cisco has been in no hurry to hype it.  Not to mention all the licensing fees they’d be giving back if their customers began to abandon the Skinny protocol.  Avaya, now’s your chance.  Hype SIP’s scalability and global compatibility before Cisco grabs another 15% of your market share and converts those endpoints to SCCP.

5. Cisco has succeeded in defining the “standard features” of a VoIP phone setup. This despite the fact that those features aren’t all that different from a traditional TDM setup, and despite the fact that there are actually fewer features and less flexibility in CallManager than there is in Avaya’s solution.  Avaya, if you want to win this skirmish, open up your media server and let users create their own features–not by selling them expensive call-center add-ons (that would be Cisco’s approach), but by just including EVERY piece of call-center software in EVERY distribution.  You’ll be surprised how quickly customers flock to you.  Remember that you’re locking customers in to a 12 – 15 year platform investment.  If you GIVE them the flexibility and power that Cisco will only SELL them, they’ll come.

How to fix the iPhone’s crappy speakerphone

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Working on a review of the Garmin Nuvi 880 automotive GPS that will be published very soon, I paired the GPS with my iPhone 3G via Bluetooth, expecting there to be zero interop between the two.  To my surprise, quite the opposite was true.  Not only did hands-free calling work perfectly, but the audio came through the Garmin loud and clear.  I think I’ve found the solution to my dissatisfaction with the iPhone’s speakerphone, which, by itself, is hardly louder than its earpiece.  Look for the review in an upcoming issue of Macworld magazine.

2008 in Review: Twitter, PS Home, VoIP, and more

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Well, it’s the time of year again.  Time to look back, and forward.

2008: the harbinger year for a revolution in the telecom industry?  No, not exactly.  Nor was 2008 the year of action of for end-to-end VoIP.  But 2008 was a good year for me.   I more or less quit consulting on VoIP, as the majority of clients who need help with VoIP are too small for my firm, and the top 5% of clients available in the field are too big for it.  The in-betweeners are dominated by a group of recruiters who beat each other up and submit VoIP candidates to internal employment positions I can’t be interested in.

Twitter was an interesting subject, retrospectively, in 2008.  On one hand it’s dying at the hands of Facebook. On the other hand, it’s got so much vigor and a following, too.  Twitter is one of those things that, even as an objectively expert witness on the subject of social media, I still struggle to grasp.  I wonder what the sex appeal is, minus all the fluff of a LinkedIn or a Facebook, of Twitter.

Sony launched a social network for the PS3.  The world essentially yawned, already beaten to death with the concept as previously implemented by things like Second Life, Sims Online, and World of Warcraft.  Now, if Nintendo had launched a social network along the lines of Animal Crossing–now that might be cool.

I received a pool table and air hockey table for Christmas and have nowhere to put either of them. At the moment my basement is full.  My son wants me to move the foozball table to the living room. A-hem. Kids take a while to develop decorating taste, I guess. Maybe in 2009.

Social Hierarchies: I had an Experience Like Sheryl’s

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Check out this bit that Sheryl post on her Facebook (regarding the recent addition of a Unified Communications category to AllTop), and then read my story that follows, as it’s very similar:

The other day I had a discussion going on twitter. The discussion sort of detoured and something came up about how we can’t expect people who are celebrities to engage us. My response, though directed toward that topic was really a bigger answer and one that I live daily.

Many people live their lives accepting life as a social hierarchy. They don’t ask questions and don’t have expectations. I’m not like that. I live daily attempting to live in the here and now and engage my larger community. Instead of just accepting life as it is, accepting that people won’t engage me I always ask the question, “Why not?” “Why aren’t I worthy of engagement?” Why should I just expect my opinion or my thoughts are not important enough for someone to pay attention to them?

I have a good example of why my perspective is valid.

Today Ken sent me a message and said Unified-Communications is on Alltop. Why does that matter? Well, not to toot my own horn, but I sent Guy Kawasaki a note on twitter and asked him why it wasn’t there. We proceeded to send messages back and forth ending in email and me researching links for Unified-Communications for them to put on Alltop.

The answer then to my why not question is simple. “Indeed! Why not?”

Sometimes it feels like stretching upward and outward into the social status quo may feel like beating your head against the wall. I know this primarily because I’m a salesperson as well as a consultant. I do have to find customers, after all. This is why I spent 2 1/2 hours at a council meeting tonight trying to get a misguided city I.T. appropriations ordinance overturned in my 60,000-person town tonight instead of watching the Browns get spanked on Monday Night Football, which I’d much rather do.

Needless to say, like the Browns trying to cope with the superior Philadelphia Eagles, I went to this meeting expecting my pleading to fail, but hoping I could convince enough people of the silliness of the proposed ordinance that maybe, just maybe, I might have a chance of getting the vote to fail.

Well, it’s 17 to 3 Eagles in the second quarter, and as I’ve just arrived home from the council meeting, put my kids to bad, and cracked open a Miller Lite, I’m feeling like the Browns.  I got my butt kicked tonight. The measure passed by 3 votes.  I only got one Nay vote I wasn’t expecting.  So I lost and lost hard.

But it doesn’t always have to be like that.  And I was encouraged by Sheryl‘s post, because it reminded me that I had a very similar experience a few years ago.

I had just been laid off from a very cushy job as an I.T. manager for a construction firm, and I was pretty upset about it. Long before I’d ever entertained the notion of surviving (forget about thriving) as a consultant, I’d been a full-time I.T. manager, and the job meant almost everything to me. I loved the company, the people, and the work.  It was devastating to me when I lost my job.

A few weeks prior to being terminated, I’d been looking for books to help me with a VoIP project I was working on for the company. I turned immediately to O’Reilly Media, whose epic masterpiece Sendmail was probably the only reason I was able to succeed in the I.T. field back when I lived in Detroit.  O’Reilly didn’t have a book about Voice over IP, so I thought to myself, who can I e-mail to find out when O’Reilly’s VoIP book would be published?  Who better than the publisher himself?

At the time, Tim O’Reilly was an absolute icon. Perhaps more of a rebel than now, Tim O’Reilly was the freewheeling open-source fanatic that I knew I could count on to publish just the right VoIP book, and I was certain he had one up his sleeve.  So, while still employed with the excavating contractor (the fifth-largest in the country), I e-mailed Tim a quick note to ask him when such a book would be forthcoming.

A week went by, then another week. And I thought, bah, the guy’s busy. I understand.

Lo and behold, one day prior to my termination, I get an e-mail in my inbox from Tim referring me to one of his networking editors. They informed me that they hadn’t identified an author as of yet to write the O’Reilly VoIP book.  Me being an English hack (I spent many hours writing poetry and short fiction instead of attending chemsitry class in high school), I volunteered myself to write the book, expecting Tim and Mike Loukides, the editor, to turn me down almost immediately.

But that’s precisely the opposite of what happened. Not only did I get a contract to write the book, but it provided me with much-needed income during my time of unemployment and the extremely difficult divorce that followed. The book went on to be the most successful book of its subject (aside from O’Reilly’s Asterisk-specific book, which came out about a year later), but I also got a second book contract and began to roll with a whole new group of folks. My first book, Switching to VoIP, had its seventh printing two weeks ago.

My status as an honest-to-goodness thought leader was secured, despite my periodically goofy thought patterns (ask anybody who reads this blog regularly, LAWL), and I was able to transition that thought leadership status into a consulting business, of which I recently purchased the sole stake.

The point of this story is that, if I wouldn’t have the mustard seed portion of faith required to e-mail Tim O’Reilly when I was an absolute NOBODY, I would’ve missed out on an awful lot. Today, I get to say I know folks like Ken Camp, Jeff Pulver, Alec Saunders, and Andy Abramson. I get to run my consulting business with an authority and gravitas I would’ve never thought was possible for a poor kid from inner-city Detroit. I started to actually see some of my dreams come true. I could do it.

And then, I realized, I could suddenly do a whole lot more.

So when Sheryl wrote about how she reached across a genuinely invisible social barrier to reach Guy Kawasaki, and got something positive out of the interchange, I totally, totally, totally get where she is coming from. She made a connection that perhaps she didn’t expect to yield much, yet it yielded something very positive indeed.  That’s my story as well.

And you should take this to heart. No matter where you’re at: if you want it, it’s a matter of going out and getting it.

Having the balls. Believing you’re more than what you appear to others to be.

Make those connections. If you’re in a council meeting expecting your business opportunity to be pummeled by a bunch of uninformed politicians, GO ANYWAY.  If you’re the Browns and you’re competing for last place with the dregs of the AFC, go anyway.  Be bold.

People will eventually appreciate it.

Freeing Middle America from Tech Hostage Status, One Little Town at a Time

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When I started my company, I used to jab that I was “bringing Silicon Valley thinking to my own backyard”, which, at the moment, is Lorain County, OH.   My firm, Best Technology, has its office in the county seat and the crown jewel of Lorain County (ask anybody) is a community college called LCCC.

The county seat, and home of the college, is the City of Elyria, and tonight I attended a council meeting during which the 11 council members were deciding whether or not to establish an official I.T. Dept. and increase the number of I.T. staffers from 2 to 7.  Of course, the city is also considering Police and Fire layoffs, so this issue is a natural hot potato.

The vote came up to tonight on Council’s agenda.  So I donned my best charcoal grey suit and purple tie, jotted down five pages of notes assembled from the talks I’ve had with various councilmembers and the city’s two I.T. managers over the last six months, and addressed council in a speech that went 6 minutes over my allotted time.

In my pleading, I wanted to know: where did they come up with 7 staffers as the ideal?

The Mayor responded by telling me, and all present, that the software consultant ACS, a Minneapolis-based firm that specializes in municipal line of business ware, was instrumental in coming up with the 7 number, and so, apparently, was the college. OK.  Free consulting MUST be superior.

The city wants to hire a full-time web developer to work on its 5 web sites–again, while considering laying off public safety officials. The Police Chief was on hand, glock-in-holster, to let Council know that he could cut nothing except people at this point, if asked to shrink his budget.

Haven’t these guys ever heard of WordPress?  It’s pretty hard to justify a $80k guy when you can get a consultant to do a Parks and Rec template on Joomla for a grand or less.  Not that I would take that sort of work.  But here’s where it got fun:  when I dropped the term, “content management”, I could just FEEL the wind getting sucked out of the room. Nobody had the faintest clue what I was talking about.

And then it dawned on me. Municipalities like Elyria have been left behind.  Little midwestern towns have been convinced that I.T. is what it was 30 years ago: expensive, inflexible, and inaccessible to people with more than 5 grey hairs on their heads.

Another local municipality, North Ridgeville, also in Lorain County, which runs its servers on a certain formerly-dominent networking product that now runs only on Linux, just can’t justify putting out the money to go with Windows and Active Directory, despite 95% of the world having moved to Windows Server some years ago.

How in the bloody heck will I ever be able broach the subject of VoIP with these guys?

These organizations are Tech Hostages, made inept and held to zero progress because their decision makers are committees that spend 39 minutes reading identical ordinance description over and over and over with a chairman saying “first reading” after each iteration.  It’s like listening to paint dry.  No, it’s worse.  I’m very much a democracy supporter, but if we can’t get these folks to innovate in the democratic process, how can we expect them to use technology more fervently, more effectively?

That, dear friends, is the job of Ted Wallingford.  Convince the Midwest that, at least when it comes to the silicon part, it’s OK to emulate Silicon Valley.