Subscribers are Over-rated

All these years, I have heard a lot about how India is an awesome destination place for mobile application/product vendors because of the huge subscription base. The 50 million, 80 million subscriber base per service provider makes all vendors lick their lips thinking that if they can even take a 10-20% of that pie, they would make it big.In fact I have had the chance to review quite a few business plans which goes on the above surmise.

I have always been convinced, subscriber base means nothing in India. And the reason for that is because even though there are so many existing consumers and likelihood for even more in the future years, the problem is that the revenue per consumer is so less that even huge volumes do not mean a whole lot of profits. And I have been harping about this for a long time. Service providers DON'T pay upfront and the model widely used is managed services/revenue sharing, which means the cut that goes to each of the vendors involved in the overall solution is so less that sometimes it is even negligible.

This is the reason why you don't see a whole lot of Telecom product companies in India enroute to success. Yes there are the Jatayu Networks/Saskens of the world, but they are more the exception than the norm and I am making an educated guess that they survived because of their international orders and not because of local sales.

Today, Sunil Mittal, the chairman of Bharti Airtel has issued an interview where he says
the Indian Telecom sector has reached a stage where prices could not decline further and would only firm up in the future. I am one of the better users of Airtel ( I pay a huge monthly fee, make international calls, roam around a bit), yet my bill is still close to 40-50$. So think of the millions that have a cell-phone only for incoming calls (incoming calls are free in India) and pay a very nominal monthly fee. Bottom-line is when analysts take about the subscriber base in India, they would need to consider two kinds of bases. The one which gives a decent ARPU (Average revenue per user) and one which is dismal. That would give a more truthful picture.

At the same time,the only people who will benefit because of the huge volumes are those companies that are looking to load-test and benchmark their products.Nothing is as good as testing your product in live scenarios and if yours has withstood 80 million subscribers, it HAS to be good. India, sadly, as of today is more a testing ground than a viable market.

I believe the subscription rates are going to rise and that is good for the Telecom vendors/service providers. Not so good if you are merely a consumer.

Nortel's take on Cisco-Microsoft Partnership

Tehrani has posted Nortel’s Tony Rybczynski reaction on Microsoft-Cisco partnership. What it tells me is that Nortel is not concerned too much about the new found love between Cisco and Microsoft.

It stems from the fact that Steve Ballmer made it very clear that they were on the same page with Nortel and were natural partners. Must have something to do with talks about Microsoft making a bid at Nortel. I predict it's not going to be too long till we see a formal bid by Microsoft to buy Nortel!!!

Third Party Voice Control

There are enough mechanisms and more ( like JTAPI, TAPI) etc which allow you to write applications that can do third party call control. My question is, are there mechanisms to do third party voice control?

Let's say that there are two ip phones which are controlled by your centralized IP PBX. Now I can write applications that can do a makecall(), answercall() etc on these two phones. But media will be to/from these phones. What I want to do is makecall() from one phone, but have the media terminated somewhere else.

I don't want to connect and then do a transfer, that would be a round-about way. But having said that, if there are no other ways to do it, then this would be the way to take. Let's come to the scenario where this would be useful ( would this be the next killer app?)

Let's say I have a dual-mode mobile phone with wifi and let's say that termination to a TDM line ( mobile/landline) is cheaper or has better quality through the GSM network. Or it could be as simple as I have way too much free minutes available during the weekend. Now, it is obvious I would be carrying the phone all the time. What if my wife is sitting somewhere else and wants to call somebody through my mobile GSM connection? Assuming she is connected on the Net, she should be able to reach the wifi enabled side of my phone and should be able to make a call out through the GSM world. But the media coming in should go to the softphone she has in her desktop/laptop rather than to the mobile I have.

The media will take the following route. Laptop->wifi side of mobile->GSM network->end user and vice-versa. This is more like a three party conferencing, only thing me sitting in the middle am not doing it, rather the third party is doing it. This would be the reason why I am looking for ways to do third party Voice control.

You don't need things like Skypeout minutes and you don't have to be with the phone to make/receive calls. Say, I forgot to carry my phone. No worries, all I need is an internet connection and I can still use my phone. Something like a pc-anywhere on my mobile phone, only simpler and easier.

Cisco Microsoft Collaboration

I was talking with one of the thought leaders/industry observer in the Unified Communication space and he came up with an interesting theory as to what areas Cisco and Microsoft can collaborate.

As you might already know, last week Steve Balmer and John Chambers decided to set aside differences, as they call it, "for the better good" ( Read "destroy Asterisk") and work more closely so that they can offer meaningful solutions to the end customer. Based on the discussion I had with the gentleman mentioned above, it became pretty evident that Speech recognition is one such area where they most probably would work together.

Microsoft had a pretty vibrant Speech Recognition development team until one of the senior guys Kai-Fu Lee defected to the other side (Google). People who had been following that story would know of the legal battle that took place between Google and Microsoft when Lee left Microsoft. What is not commonly known though is that Lee was the chief evangelist of the Speech Recognition practice in Microsoft and most of the innovations in MS-Speech was his brain-children.So Microsoft kind of lost steam when he quit. They were already way behind market leader Nuance and this did not help their case. But it looks like they have started to become an active force in this domain. From what I hear, some releases are on the way.

Now about Cisco. Cisco has been way behind in the contact center business and even way behind when it comes to self service technologies ( IVR). Their product suite that includes IP IVR and CVP largely depend on Nuance for the speech recognition platform and licenses. So let's say a customer wants Cisco CVP with speech recognition. He ends up paying a lot for Nuance licenses and since there is nobody really to challenge Nuance's position, they have been having a free ride so far.

This is where Cisco and Microsoft could get together. Cisco, like a lot of other Microsoft products, could OEM MS speech and include it as part of its platform. What MS speech lacks today is credibility/customer base and if Cisco can OEM it, it would be a good start for Microsoft. It would help Cisco because the cost to the customer is less and a better value proposition. If Steve and John are going to put their money where their money is, Speech technology would be a good place to start!!!

Most Companies Don't Understand Call Center Business.

It has become the norm these days that if you are a player in the IP communication space, you think it is just a natural progression to cater to the Call Center needs. And looks like Skype is no exception. Let me get this out on the onset. IP Telephony is NOT the same as IP Contact Center. If you have agents on IP phones (be it Skype/Cisco phones) it does NOT mean you have a contact center solution on IP.

I don't blame companies that think "Hey, I have a softphone that can do voice/chat. I think I have a call center solution". Why, because I used to think that too in my previous assignments. Now that I am with a predominantly focussed Call Center solutions provider I understand that there is a vast difference between me making a VoIP call and an agent doing the same.

This is how the progression should be. Companies that have vast expertise in Call Center technolgies ( be it the traditional TDM ACDs/IVRs) must lead the way and adopt IP as their underlying platform not the other way around, where IP companies start providing contact center solutions. The problem with the latter is that, they are just "emulating" the older solutions and as far as I can see there is no real innovation.

Yes, Presence based ACD ( i.e an agent transfers the call to the subject matter expert based on the expert's availability) is something only an IP solution can offer and I am sure this was based on the presence model that IMs used to offer, but still these applications are the exceptions rather than the norms. For example lets take Cisco's ICM ( Cisco's ACD). What does it do that an Avaya AES or AIC does not do from a feature set point of view? Answer is nothing. So where is the innovation?

Now coming to what triggered me to write this post. In the news-item mentioned above, Skype is offering live-chat to customers. OK, so what is so great about that? Who does not give that? What is so "intelligent' about that? The customer gets to speak to the subject matter expert. Again, so what? It also says that Skype will provide configurations to switch between Audio/Chat windows. That shows how primitive the thinking is. Have Skype's people ever gone into a Call Center and had a chat with the floor managers? The first thing they want is an unified screen. Any novice will tell you that. What are the integration touch points that Skype provides? Do they have connectors to MS CRM, Siebel CRM? Or are they going to provide even more "configurations" to switch between three windows!!!!

Enterprise Telephony will soon merge into Contact Center Telephony. I envision that happening in the future. But not today and the people who would need to drive it are the experts and not the novices.

Buzzworks & SearchtoPhone : Same Apps in two different parts of the world

I know what Buzzworks are trying to do, since they demoed their product in Proto.in. I have been intending to write more on their product but never got around to it. Today GigaOm has a piece on a company called SearchtoPhone and once I read what they are upto, I thought it was time I wrote about Buzzworks.

Basically, this is Buzzwork's premise. You want to reach one of your neighbourhood services but you don't know whom to call. So you call up a number and do a voice search ( through open source speech recognition) and the centralized software searches for the most likely candidate and calls them up for you and you get to talk to the guy whose service you want to use. But from what I see, SearchtoPhone is more or less similar except for one bit that the author neatly summarizes

Using voice recognition and knowledge of your location, Search-To-Phone determines merchants or service providers who might be able to help. These businesses receive calls from Search-To-Phone and listen to your recorded job request, decide if they want to talk to you further, and place a call to you via Search-To-Phone. Your phone number remains private.

Interesting to see two companies in entirely different parts of the world coming up with similar ideas at the same time. Had they been big companies, this is when the litigation would start :) Of the two, SearchtoPhone has a slighter edge because the caller maintains his privacy. Having said that, it shouldn't be too long for Buzzworks to incorporate this feature as well.

I don't know about what powers SearchToPhone's software. But in case of Buzzworks it is open source all the way ( Asterisk, openSER and oopen source Voice recognition software). So I am going to take an educated guess that Buzzworks would be the cheaper solution.

The problems I see either of them facing is that they have to work with the service providers and that requires lot of time and patience. On the technology front, I am not a big fan of Voice recognition software ( yes, that includes leader Nuance as well) and the accuracy is not something I would bet my life on. Buzzworks would have more problems because they are powered by open source ( not sure how stable that would be) and secondly, the dialects/languages in India are so much and I would be surprised if accuracy is more than 20%.

Two companies that I surely will be following for the next few months.

Irony : India fights China using the Chinese Model

Rumours have been flying around on this for sometime now but has just been made official. DoT ( The Department of Telecom) is planning to setup a Testing and Certification wing which will monitor security compliances to which all telecom operators in India have to comply by. The first rollout of these compliances will be setup as early as early 2009. Whether you are a private or a public operator you would need to pass these security tests to operate in India. This recommendation closely resembles the Chinese model where operators/equipment vendors have to adhere to strict norms. China's Information Technology Certification Centre enforces these norms.

The government can say this is to prevent "all" hardware/network vendors from accessing their systems through back door channels. But the bottom-line is, it is to prevent the Chinese vendors from doing this. They are not concerned about Alcatels or Cisco's of the world. They are more worried about the Huaweis of the world which has the Chinese government's backing. China, a rising power, has a lot of countries nervous ( including India) and they believe China might use the back-door channels to cripple Communications in case of conflict. The release says

DoT is concerned about the advent of 'new names' in the equipment vendor space which are of 'suspect origin', but extremely competitive in cost with regard to Telecom tenders.

This is specifically targetted at Huawei. What Huawei typically does is, off loads the network/communication gears to the Telecom provider for literally no cost and has an agreement that the Telecom provider can pay in say 10/20 years. This obviously has caught the attention of the Indian government and the security compliance is just a beginning. I foresee more stringent laws coming.

The compliance would include removing any inbuilt remote diagnostic facility in the equipment. This would be a major blow for Product companies that are planning to build NOCs ( Network Operating Centres) to monitor their products across locations. This would increase the cost of support, since resources have to be 'on-site' throughout.

These extra tests and support would mean more money spent and it remains to be seen who is going to take the brunt. It is very unlikely that the equipment vendors are going to take the hit, and I say this because the equipments are already given to these Telecom vendors at throw away prices. I know of a case where one major networking giant had to give an eighty percent discount on its products to convince one major Telecom provider in India to buy it. So they will not bear the brunt. And we know the Telcos never take the hit ( Is it just me, or are they turning to be the next-gen Oil Companies?). So it might be the end consumer who might be forced to shell out more.

It needs to be seen how badly the consumer will be hit. On the brighter side though, if you are in the Telecom testing space, this is bonanza time :) Interesting times ahead!!!

In-Flight VoIP

Russell Shaw reports that maverick Sir Richard Branson might not be too averse to having VoIP in Virgin Atlantic/American flights.

And the considerate man also said, if it is introduced, it is quite likely it would be restricted to the last couple of rows to preserve other people's privacy. While we are it, can we restrict children to the last couple of rows as well :)

TPG Meeting

As mentioned before the Telecom Professionals Group met yesterday in Cream Center ( a nice little place on Chamiers road,Chennai). This was more of a goal setting meeting than a technology meeting ( Yup, Techies can try their hand at something other than nerd talk as well :) ).

The meeting revolved around what we as a group are trying to achieve out here and how do we get there. As the first step, we are opening up our group to include more people interested in Telecom. You could be a student, you could be a professional in any other field. But if you feel you want to know more about Telecom and you want to discuss things with like-minded people, you are welcome to join. There is no membership fee as of now and all you need to come with is an inquisitive mind.

It was decided that some of us are going to blog at our TPG site on a more regular basis. People from various walks of Telecom are going to be blogging there and that is one site you would need to bookmark. Ram is in the process of creating accounts for some of us, and you can expect feverish activity on the site from early next week.

Also, we are planning to have one of us ( or somebody from outside) give a tech talk on Telecom in the next meeting and we are planning to make this a regular feature in our meets. This is something I am looking forward too and I will keep you all informed as to who the speaker in the next meeting is going to be.

These are some of initial goals we have set for ourselves and if this interests you can register to this group here.

iLocus Top 10.

As most of you would be aware, iLocus is running a series on the Top 10 that established VoIP. In the recent issue they have asked the readers to post their comments on who would you think be the 10th on the list. Go ahead and leave your comments there.

For me it has to be one from the list I compiled few months ago. Anybody else, I wouldn't be too pleased. It is time these people/organization get their dues

2G spectrum for Sale?

Economic Times reports that Ministry of Finance ( hopefully with the consent of Ministry of Telecom) is pushing for the sale of 2G spectrum. What they are recommending is having a fixed fee model or an auction system through which the operators can bid for the spectrum.

The finance ministry hopes that this would enable effective utilization of resources. The operators, since they are paying for this, would pursue new technologies or improve existing ones since they have to get an RoI. This is the thinking of the ministry of finance. As of today, the operators pay an entry fee for 2G, but subsequent allotment of resources is free. A committee has been set to price the spectrum and the result of this will be out soon.

The CDMA guys are the major proponents of this because they feel cheated since the licensing model entitles GSM operators 6.25 MHz of free 2G whereas the CDMA guys get only 5 Mhz. The next few weeks ( till the committe comes out with its recommendation) are going to be quite interesting and it remains to be seen whether Reliance ( CDMA provider) can uses its political clout to get this done.

Have you Registered for the DNC campaign?

Though there are a whole lot of issues where CDMA and GSM operators in India don't see eye to eye, one thing they plan to colloborate on is to run a campaign to educate their subscribers on the DNC ( Do Not Call) registry. Am I the only one to see the irony here? They are calling people to let them know they won't be called if they register for DNC :)

This registry is supposed to become active in September ( I am a little skeptical of the date because I first heard that it was going to be active as early as April). Call Centers that use Outbound Dialers need to start looking at this database. I know for a fact that Cisco's Outbound solution caters to this. As a matter of fact, I think any Dialer company that has sold its product in North America would already have this. The companies that might be affected are the ones that cater to just the Indian market ( like for eg. Drishti Solutions)

Anyway I still don't have information as to how to register for this online. I need to register for this asap. I am done with people offering me great personal loans and credit cards.

Telco to offer Insurance?

The things Telcos do these days to retain their subscriber base!!! BSNL, one of the leading Telco in India is offering a non-life insurance cover to all its 40 million landline subscribers for an extra 1 Re a month.

BSNL has been losing subscribers at an alarming rate ( mainly to Bharti Airtel) and this scheme they hope will stop the outflux. I assume BSNL will bear the rest of the premium. The second stage involves them extending this offer to its mobile subscribers.

Let me do some Math here. In general for an insurance cover of Rs.50000 a year ( 1200$), you would need to pay a premium of Rs.200 ( $5) a year. Now Rs.1 a month translates to Rs.12 a year, the rest Rs.188 has to be shelled out by BSNL per year per customer. This makes no business sense to me. Yes, I appreciate the noble cause where everybody including the poor in rural India get a chance to be covered. But how does BSNL plan to make profit?

Having said that, Insurance premium is a volume game ( more people you have, lesser the premium) and if anybody can play the volume game, it is the Telcos in India. With nearly 70 million subscribers ( landline + mobile), I am sure they can twist the insurance partner ( in this case State Bank of India, though BSNL retains the right to have multiple partners if need be) to reduce the premium rates.

Let me throw out an interesting thought. If this is the precursor of things to come, would Telcos enter retail as well? Bharti-Airtel ( taking a leaf out of Walmart's book) is almost there with it ELP ( Everyday Low prices) scheme. Reliance has a very strong retail/telecom business. So what if they come and tell me ( Bharti is my landline/Broadband/mobile service provider) that I get better deals in their retail stores because I am a subscriber. Now THAT would make me stick to them for ever!!!

Are we going to see a Telecom M & A spree in India?

I am hearing from various sources that TRAI ( Telecom Regulator of India) is seriously thinking of relaxing some rules to make Telecom M & A easier. There is a peculiar law ( which I never failed to understand) that prevents a telecom company from holding more than 10% stake in two operators in the same circle.

TRAI is looking to remove this ceiling which I think would be a major step in enabling consolidation in India. At the same time TRAI is keen that we don't see monopolies taking over. There is yet another law that states if two players are looking at M & A, then their combined market share should not exceed 67%. TRAI is not only looking at relaxing the 10% ceiling but also looking at reducing this 67% to 50%. These would counter balance each other.Also I believe there are plans to ensure that the number of operators at any given circle is minimum three.

It is very refreshing to see TRAI being proactive. They understand that Telecom needs more consolidation in these parts of the world and are acting accordingly. It is just going to be a matter of time before my predictions of large M & As starts to become true.

Solid Quarter for Cisco

Cisco has reported its fourth quarter earnings and it is good news all the way. Profit increased by 25% which also meant that they raised their forecast for 2008. That is an investor's delight.

And I don't know see their momentum decreasing anytime soon. Their data network business is booming and they are achieving phenomenol gains in the Unified Communication space. They seemed to be romping over the likes of Avaya and Juniper in this space and they just seem to be getting better with their key acquisitions and partnerships.

Good times for Cisco employees and share holders :)

A grin on Vivek's Face

So why is Vivek of Unleash Networks grinning? Because he has got what most people in the Networking industry dream about. Having Cisco as a customer.

Great news buddy. Vivek has been keeping us informed about some of the stuff he has been upto these days and let me put it this way, you ain't heard nothing yet!! This I believe is going to be the launching pad for better things and I soon hope to see Vivek 'unleashing' some great products.

If I were a VC, I would pick up the phone and be talking to Vivek right away :)

Put on Mute : The Next person

I just figured out what is the most important application I need in my day today life. Putting another person on mute.

Check this out. You are on a conference call ( through a conference bridge). It is a very important call. This is a make or break deal. You and your subordinates are in the bridge taking the call from different locations. You have just about sealed the deal when your subordinate/colleague starts ranting about stuff that you know for a certain fact is going to make things go south. You want to yell at him to stop. But there is no way. He goes ahead and completes saying what he had to say and you are screwed.

How many of you face these problems on a day today basis? I know I do. Unwanted information being divulged out in conference calls. Wouldn't it be great that by a press of a DTMF you can mute the guy? There are a few challenges here. First thing would be how do you know which caller in the entire bridge to mute, as in what is the identification of each of these people in the conversation.

Now, this surely can't be done in a TDM world and SHOULD be possible in an IP environment. Is there any mechanism in any of the signalling protocols ( could be SIP/SCCP or anything) to make an endpoint be just in the 'recv' mode and not in the 'send-recv' mode. Can 3pcc have this kind of control?

As said before, if at all this can be done, it has to be IP. But trust me, I will buy the solution just to have this feature :) Too many goons saying too many things in conference calls is getting on my nerves!!!

Number Portability

Aswath's take on number portability is a definite read. As he has rightly pointed out, the question is who should own the number. The subscriber or the telephone company. The latter owning the number would lead to problems as in the typical case of SunRocket.

But the problem is no service provider in his right mind would give it to the subscriber. That is against the very nature of the Telco company we have come to see. It is quite a long way for that to happen and even then I don't think the Telcos that exist today would take a step in this direction. Upstarts like 'Google Telecom' ( yup, I am one of those who believe sooner or later they will enter the Service provider market in a big way) would probably be the first to do this and force the hands of the other telcos.

Speaking from a Technology perspective, I still have not seen the ENUM movement garnering enough support for this to happen. There needs to be a lot of traction and collaboration in this regards for this to become mainstream.

Pulver's challenge

I am late to this news, but Pulver's challenge to companies to innovate has been making circles for sometime now. His essential question was where are the innovative Voice Services?

And to be honest from all the VAS companies that are cropping up dime a dozen in India, I don't see even one of them providing an answer to his question. Buzzworks who presented in Proto.in came a little close to it. Not a great innovation but a great utility. I have been meaning to write about them, but have been really caught up in other work

Hopefully I should get some time to write about it this weekend. I plan to evaluate their business model, where they can possibly make revenues and importantly the legality in India. ( It was Buzzworks that made me raise a question before on 3pcc legality)

Proto : Day 2 , A summary

Whew, what a day. It was so refreshing to see so many people trying to innovate ( and not exactly just in web 2.0 and mobile) and it kind of inspires you and make you hopeful that an entrepreneurial India is really not too far away.

Now for the summaries of these companies presentation. This time around I don't plan to review each of the companies, since some of them were completely outside the realm of my interest and expertise.

The company that got my attention in the Development Plaform group was BriteSoft Solutions. They are based out of Malaysia and they talked about their rapid Application development tool that cuts doen development time by a huge margin and also enables anybody to develop applications. Now to be fair to them, I am a cynic when it comes to Rapid Application environment since I have seen a whole lot of these who over-sell but under-achieve. It is likely that BriteSoft might be different, but then I got to see it to believe it. I honestly feel Rapid Application development software gets you only so much. Would be more than happy to be proved wrong. It wouldn't hurt if I can be helped to reduce development work :)

Enterprise segment in Proto had some few interesting companies like TISS,AuthMe, Multimedia Display Technologies. Both TISS and Authme had a security play in their own ways. TISS provides a USB based security cover for the transactions carried out on your laptop whereas Authme provides a session based security solution. For me, the latter is a huge challenge because most of these solutions fail when it comes to scalability and heavy load. And I probably might be wrong on this one. But Authme has a very close resemblance to openID. Did anybody else sense that?

Multimedia Display Technologies deal with RFIDs and they have patented technology that reduces the cost of the solution by nearly one hundredth of a cost. If it is for real, I think it is just a matter of time before RFID becomes mainstream. Actually to be honest I thought it was going to get mainstream even earlier when Microsoft decided to venture into it. Cost was a major deterrent and if Multimedia Display Technologies can address that, it is the best of times for RFID.

Next were the Internet.Web 2.0 companies. To be honest, I attended this session with a pre-conceived notion that it was just going to be the cliched social networking stuff but was pleasantly surprised. The theme of Proto this time around revolved a lot around search and more search ( either using web or in the mobile space). Be in Inasra Technologies which 'searches' and gives you the best accomodation or Pennywise Solutions that "searches" and acts as your neighbourhood guide ( through their product Tolmolbol) or Routeguru which in its own way acts as a direction provider. Routeguru solves a very real problem. Something I faced last week. I was in Delhi and had to get somewhere. Now I am not fluent in Hindi and it was a big pain trying to explain to the Taxi driver whom I engaged in the airport to get me to the place I wanted to. He did not know the place, and he had to stop every so often to get further directions. Had I used Routeguru's guide I probably would have known the well known landmarks and I could have told the driver. I am surely going to sign up for the Beta release and see how it goes.

Another company in the internet splace was Minekey. Their product is supposed to make content discovery on blogs and websites way easier and I plan to play around with their widget and see how it works. Now this blog does not allow me to place custom widgets so I probably would need to use my other blog. Genie Interactive Pvt Ltd presented their Voice Mail as an email solution. With the risk of being judgmental, I goto say there was nothing innovative here. Voice Mail has evolved so much in the last two or three years. Enterprise solutions like Cisco Unity addresses more problems and companies like spinvox have been offering this for ages ( And from what I have heard Spinvox was not doing too well on this either?)

Next was the mobile space. Rarefind Engineering Innovations promises to deliver content across mobile phones in such a way that the end user mobile phone does not have to worry too much about the content format, size etc. Now this is where I kind of got confused. In the demo, one guy sent a document to another. When he did this all he specified was the phone number he was sending the document too. Who does the decision making that the user has a specific phone make and so he would have to receive the content in that specific format. Hopefully the guys would read this and clear this.

And then there was BuzzWorks. I am going to discuss this in a later post because I have lot of thoughts on this one. ( Incidentally it was this company that was the reason behind by earlier post).

There were presentations from companies belonging to entirely disparate verticals clubbed under 'New Frontiers'. Thinkworks with their creative Clay Animated movies, Lucid Software with expertise in Non Destructive Testing and Hyper Analytix whose focus area being Semiconductor Design Automation kind of made us realize that there were other areas were innovation was alive and kicking.

That kind of broadly summarizes most of the presentations. As for the actual event itself, it was way better than the previous edition. The presentations were crisp, more professional and to the point. Good job presenters and the mentors who help keep it that way. Other than a couple of presentations that did not have a demo, most of them flaunted their wares and thus kept the powerpoints to the minimal.

The real heroes though were the organizers. Awesome stuff dudes. It was nothing short of spectacular. Hoping for more of these events across the country. Vijay, Kiruba , Amit and team, take a bow.

Question on legality of 3pcc VoIP call in India

I have a question which hopefully somebody can answer.

Terminating a VoIP call in TDM is illegal in India ( if you don't have the license to do it). Question is does this hold good for a 3pcc? ( Third party call control) as well. I will discuss sometime later this day ( when I write the summary for Proto Day 2) the reason why this cropped up.

Basically, let's say that I have a Soft PBX making calls to two mobile endpoints and then connecting them ( A typical 3pcc call). Is this legal in India? The reasoning behind banning the VoIP termination on TDM was that the existing licensed vendors were loosing out which would make sense in this case as well. So is there a legal section that bans this as well?

Anybody with views on this?

Vodafone Germany goes for Ericsson

Proving yet again that Europe is Ericsson's stronghold ( atleast in the IMS domain), Vodafone Germany has opted to go with Ericsson for the entire IMS solution.

As part of this contact Ericsson would be offering Professional services as well which would include installation, integration, consultancy, testing and support. As the report points out Ericsson is the leader in the IMS market with 37 contracts and lot more trial installation.

Cisco's FMC Game

Even as infrastructure companies like Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson are flaunting their FMC capabilities in Europe and elsewhere, Cisco in its usual low profile way has gone ahead and has done certain things which only Cisco would do. It has partnered with different mobile phone manufacturers to interop with their latest Call Manager version to enable presence/mobility. I had blogged about Orative acquisition nearly eight months ago and the latest CCM ( now called Unified Communication Manager 6.0) has tightly integrated Orative's mobility solution to its existing telephony suite.

Cisco has partnered with Nokia to offer a SCCP client on Nokia E-61 models which lets it talk to the Cisco Call Manager. Nokia calls it Intellisync Call Connect ( which is basically a SCCP client on symbian environment) and this makes Nokia behave like any other endpoint which can utilize the IP-PBX/Mobility capabilities that Cisco Communication Manager uses. And better still, if you are a SIP buff, you can turn on the SIP stack inbuilt by default in the Nokia stack and register it as SIP endpoint. The only issue with that is not all features that are in SCCP are exploited with the native SIP stack.

So based on whom you are calling, you can either make a 'On-net' call ( through IP) or offload it to the MSCs. Incidentally I just came from a Cisco roadshow where E61 with the stack( the proto type) was on display and we played around with it to make cheap/free calls :)

I believe Cisco has a proto type available on Blackberry,Motorola phones. What they are pretty much saying is that if you have a dual-mode phone, you can plug into the enterprise and avail the features of the enterprise. Pretty neat stuff. I did ask the question whether they were working with Apple on getting the iphone to support this as well and the answer was a mischievous "we will have to wait and see". Whatever that might mean!!!

Incidentally,I had a chance to meet with Laurent Philonenko ( the CCBU head of Cisco) five months ago. It was just a day or two after Cisco and Apple had patched up on the patent row. I asked him that time whether the agreement between Apple and Cisco was something in the Unified Communications front and he answered with the diplomatic 'too early to say'.

My gut feeling is that something is brewing on that front and if it does turn out to be true, you know you guessed it first:). There are quite a few of us who believe the phone is your network and we are glad that Cisco is taking a similar stand as well.

Its' Proto Time!!!

Proto.in is back and is bigger. Another six more days for the second edition and though I am disappointed that not a whole lot of Telecom companies are presenting ( check out the chart in Kiruba's post), it is still always a good place to meet people.

Last Proto was a major sucess for me personally since I happened to get acquainted with India's finest brains like Vivek of Unleash Networks and Sachin of Drishti. It is because of people like Vivek the Telecom Professionals Group is taking up some kind of a shape and hopefully I will get to meet more like minded people this time around as well.

The event this time is going to be across two days Saturday and Sunday with top notch professionals in their domain presenting their experiences ( on Saturday). Every slot has got two presentations and am kind of disappointed because in atleast two of the cases, I see interesting presentations at the same time. Could have been better had there been no overlap. But then I am sure the organizers had their reasons for that.

This time around, I don't plan to blog live. It was very difficult and I couldn't network with guys. I hope the organizers are going to have video covergae anyways and I hope to post a link to that.

So this is it guys! For all you might know, this might be the last Proto in Chennai for sometime ( The organizers are planning it in other locations for the next editions.). So I am planning to make the best use of it. Hopefully most of you will as well.

Cisco's Win is Avaya's loss

Just came across a news item which showcases a call center that moved from Avaya's platform over to Cisco's IPCC system.

Vcare Call Centers was using Avaya based solutions and now has moved over to Cisco IPCC ( the entire suite inclusive of Call Manager/EPBX/IVR). Talking about this move Sandeep Mehra, CEO of Vcare Call Center says

"We found Cisco's IP-based offering superior than the traditional Time Division Multiplexing (TDM based offering). We started using Cisco's Voice over IP Solution for about 2 years. We moved from a leased facility to our own facility and found that the voice quality of the Cisco's IPCC was far superior to any of its competitors." Mehra adds, "This solution helps large enterprises that need to centralize their contact center operations to gain more control over their resources."

Now what intrigues me is the statement Cisco's IPCC solution had a voice quality far more superior than any of its competitors. Did they to Avaya's/Nortel's systems before coming up with this comparison? In most of these implementations, QoS is ensured at the network layer and since I see the whole "Contact Center Suite" ( Cisco/Avaya/Nortel solution) in the application layer, I believe had the underlying network been implemented properly, any of these solutions would have been fine.

It is possible Cisco built the network for vCare as well as part of their solution which the other solutions can't even think about. I have said that this one reason is the most compelling reason why Cisco would succeed in the Contact Center space. They own the network and it is a one stop solution for a Contact center wanting to be 'IP' enabled.

Good win for Cisco, not so good for Avaya.

Telecom Professionals Group Website

The TPGI website has been created and launched thanks to Ram and Vivek. Hopefully we will start posting relevant content and our vision is to make that site the one stop place for all things Telecom coming out of India.

High aspirations; but something we think is possible.

Voice over VoIP. Secure or Pain?

Dan York in his blog talks about a new project by a Georgia Institute student which promotes embedding conversation in the voice data stream. Very interesting. .

As Dan nicely puts it they are using the available bandwidth in a G711 audio stream and embedding the G729 stream in it. Looks good for security purposes. But this is what I percieve would be the problem in real case scenarios. There are valid applications that need these details. For example Legal Intercept, Loggers etc.

The current IP Loggers ( voice recorders used to record RTP packets) would need to have knowledge about this and for this to happen the underlying signalling protocol has to have knowledge about this ( maybe through SDP). If that information is passed, your security issues starts all over again.

My verdict is that it is a very smart research paper, but to actually implement it would throw the existing systems into a spin.

Don't you wish you were an Apple employee!!!

Steve 'God' Jobs has promised each of Apple's 20,000 employees an iPhone. Now, that is one way to get a $12 million sales.

One of the companies here in India Cognizant Technologies (CTS) gave out ipods to all its employees couple of years ago. Would other companies follow suit and give out iphones to their employees? There has a been a new tax that has been introduced by the Indian government from this year onwards callled FBT ( Fringe Benefit Tax). Not sure whether iphone would be part of 'Fringe Benefits'. If not, expect a lot of companies to hand out iPhones.

Now, how do I get my boss to gift me one? ( once it is available) :)

iPhone in India : An update

I had wondered yesterday as to when would iPhone be available in India. This article in ibnlive kind of answers all my questions including the one as to whether I can use the iPhone bought in US. Looks like it might available sometime end of this year. This might happen after all considering Blackberry was available in India months after its release.

Thanks to Vijay and Ram for answering some of my questions.

Two more Days to Go...

Just another couple for days for the famed iPhone release. I think the anticipation is much more than any other Summer blockbuster. Got to give it to Apple and Jobs for raising the bar on this one.

I am hearing rumours that some of the Indian cell phone stores ( like Univercell) is going to sell the iphone. This news is still unconfirmed. Anybody have news on this? Which leads me to the next question. Can a locked phone like iphone ( locked with AT & T) be used in India? Can I just buy the iphone in US and use it here by using the local SIM? Any ideas on that guys?

Guess I have to wait for Airtel to partner with Apple to use iphone . I would never switch a service provider for iphone. Even though there are no penalties for switching over unlike some western countries, I would never leave Airtel because even though I have had issues in the past with their service, they still are way better compared to others.

Telecom Professionals Group Meeting : Second Edition

The second edition of the TPG meet went off fine and some major decisions were taken from an administrative point of view. It is getting more serious and structured and I see lot of exciting times ahead. The next meeting will happen soon ( I don't think there will be any more long hiatus from now onwards) to decide the focus of our group and somehow I get the feeling that this is going to be the start of something big.

VoIP as usual was the center of attraction and Ram ( as he has mentioned in his blog remarked we were VoIP heavy :) With more people from diversified backgrounds joining us, I think that will change soon. Ram has posted our group photo in his blog. I am not even going to try to capture what we discussed (on technology). Our discussions travelled through so many domains and you would need to be there to enjoy it.

Hope to see you guys soon for the next meeting.

Update* : Some more pics ( courtesy Vivek)

Vivek (left) and Chandra

Mahesh (left), Ram and Sharma

Venkat(left) and me.

What is Silicon Graphics Doing in Database space?

This is the first question that I asked myself when I heard that Silicon Graphics is organizing an evening event on High Performance Database.Silicon Graphice is hosting this event partnering with Oracle ( That answers my question :) ) at Park Hotel, this Friday at 7.00p.m. You can register for the event here

The release says

You are invited to join us for an exclusive event on high performance database, as SGI, in association with Oracle - the undisputed leader in database technology, comes to your city. You can interact with experts from both organizations, and learn how we can together take database performance to the next level!

ItineraryMumbai 26th JuneITC Grand Maratha
Chennai 29th JuneThe Park

Agenda 7:00 - 7:30 pm Registration 7:30 - 7:45 pm Welcome Note 7:45 - 8:15 pm Presentation by Oracle 8:15 - 8:45 pm Presentation by SGI 8:45 pm onwards Q&A followed by cocktail & dinner




FAX: Mumbai: 022 - 2852 6000, Chennai: 044 - 2473 4247 Email: hpd@endtoend.in

D'Sean Sumwashe : An Eulogy

My close friend of nearly seven years, D'Sean Sumwashe passed away last Friday. He had some kind of an infection in his brain which affected his entire system. He had undergone surgeries for the last one month, but doctors were never optimistic and the result was inevitable.

D'Sean started of as a colleague but soon we became Brothers in Arms. We were in a startup and long hours mixed with common interests meant more time together and though we got on each other's nerves quite a few times, there was always the sense of camarederie. We wrote our first SIP stack ( at that time it was 2543 and rewrote it for 3261) together.

I was thinking about D'Sean's influence while I was driving to work, and he has left quite an impact. Indians in the US, generally tend to stay together as a flock and as a result are not exposed to the American culture as much as you would expect. I was like that for the first couple of years till I met D'Sean. He was an African American and introduced me to the world of David Chappelle and Bernie Mac. The two of us watched 'Undercover Brother' atleast five times and discussed the effects of the 'Man'. D'Sean was mostly drunk during these conversations :)

D'Sean was a Techno addict and you could sense his arrival to work almost a mile away. His blaring music would make our office glass vibrate and you knew D'Sean had arrived. He was my foosball team-mate and our goal everytime would be to shutout an opponent but ended up trying to avoid a shut-out. We actually improved as days went by; I always played offense and he played 'D'. I used to call myself the Kansas City offense and he was the Tampa Bay 'D'.

Though he did his college in Florida, Gainesville, his heart was with the Seminoles ( Florida State). And everytime FSU played Miami, it was heartbreak time for D'Sean. The wide lefts and wide rights (you need to have followed Seminoles-Hurricanes college football games to know what I am talking about) used to leave him furious at the end of these games. We all knew not to talk football after the FSU-Miami weekend.

Talking about football, it was D'Sean who roped me first into Fantasy Football. Till that time, Football was just another game. After that it became a religion. It was so addictive that even after I came back to india, I still followed the games online all night long.

Though I returned to India, four years ago we were in touch regularly and this is a big personal loss. Buddy, we will all miss you, but be rest assured, you will be in our memories. So long pal..

Bharti Airtel leads the FMC way in India

This has been promised for quite sometime now. But finally there is an official announcement that Airtel is going to launch FMC for its subscribers.

Time for me to start looking at dual-use handsets :). Wireless is still not as pervasive in India as much as in other countries and that might be one major reason why FMC might not be a huge hit with the majority. This might be restricted to people working in IT companies, but then again security compliances like BS 7799 might prevent an allout acceptance.

They are promising a rollout by end of the year and hopefully I am looking forward to be one of the early users. ( Airtel is my landline, mobile and broadband provider, So my transition should be pretty seamless). The news item says that Airtel is looking at various initiatives like giving out wireless routers etc. Hey, Airtel people, if any one of you is reading this post let me know how to be part of your early adapters program.

An IP Contact Center : In every sense of the Word

Cisco's IPCC Solution ( now called Unified Contact Center) naming ( or should I call it misnomer) used to get me curious. What makes a solution 'IP' enabled? Does any solution become IP compliant if the endpoints are IP devices ( in this case Cisco IP phones/ communicator)? If the communication between the switch ( Call manager) and the end devices are on IP backbone, does it entitle it to be a IP solution?

Personally, I don't accept this naming convention. I will say a solution is really an IP solution when the customer who dials into the contact center ( this can be through any of the multimedia channels, voice,video,email or web) is also on IP. What we have today is an hybrid solution with the customers dialing into a contact center via TDM and then using a Voice Gateway to convert it into packets. I had briefly touched upon this last month when I wrote about NMS solutions in IP contact centers.

This according to me is not IPCC. Customers have to be on IP and they reach the contact center agents through IP. I had not seen this kind of a contact center till couple of weeks ago when I went to Malaysia. As part of official business, I had to interact with one of the leading ISPs in Malaysia and when they walked through their contact center architecture, I finally got to see an 'IPCC' solution in every sense of the word.

It is not surprising that an Internet Service Provider is the one offering this kind of a solution. Thinking about it, who else has a better backbone to do this? So how this works is , as part of their broadband offering, this ISP provides a SIP based softphone ( I think it is X-lite but am not 100% sure) to its consumers and provides IP centrex features as well using Netcentrex.

Now their contact center uses Cisco IPCC and a specific number has been configured on the Call Manager for the IVR route point. This route point is translated as a 1800 number in netcentrex and if the SIP softphone user dials in this numner it directly hits the IP IVR for self-servicing and transfers to the IPCC agents if need be. As you can see, there is no TDM involved here at all. IPCC in its purest form :) I believe they have NICE for their call logger functionalities. This ISP is going to have issues when they move for mobile agents ( Read this post as to why they would face problems).

It is quite possible that there are much more of these setups around the world ( and I am going to go on a limb and say that these are mostly ISPs controlled contact centers). But it was kind of exciting to see one in person. Malaysia certaintly seems to be leading the way here atleast in the APAC ( Asia-Pacific) region.

An 'Out of the Office" message... For my phone

As most of you are aware I have been travelling for the last three weeks and have been to Singapore and Malaysia. Though I have international roaming enabled for my Indian mobile number, I would rather not use it because of the high tariffs.

So I went ahead and bought local SIMs in Singapore and in Malaysia. This way my phone charges were cheap. One problem though. I have just one phone with me and so if I were using my Singapore SIM ( which has mostly been the case the last three weeks, other than the two days I was in Malaysia), my Indian number is not reachable. I have no problems with that. I don't think I am losing million dollar deals because I am unreachable on my mobile :)

At the same time it would be nice if there was a service by which I could leave 'Out of the office' voice messages to people who call in. Just like I would do with my email. This way if somebody were trying to reach me in my Indian mobile number, it would just play a message that I was out of the country and cannot be reached for so many days. They can alternatively email me at abc@xyz.com for immediate attention.

I don't think any service provider offers such a service. Hopefully the presence based relevance models that companies like iotum are offering would one day lead to applications like these. I am sure there a quite a few of us facing this problem.

Don't Blame VoIP

Garrett Smith has a great post on how bad deployments screw up VoIP and how it could have easily been avoided had the customer ( in this case Scott Pinkerton) just done a few things before the actual deployment.

Seriously people, it is not Nuclear Physics ( or is it? The Scott Pinkerton dude actually works with the Nuclear scientists!!!!). Get a UAT system. You most probably are spending quite achunk on this deployment anyways and a few UAT systems will definitely not hurt. It will help you in future installations as well. The sad thing in all this is that when things do not work because of the inadequacies of the customer, they quickly point out that VoIP is not reliable!!!.

Just like Java. People are quick to point out that Java is slow without even understanding that it is not Java's mistake that one jackass decided to put a certain thread to sleep for 1s inadvertently. Trust me the technologies are all fine. It is usually the implementors who get it wrong!!!

Nortel joins the cast of Sopranos???

A must read by Tom Keating as to how Nortel strong-armed one of their former subsidiary (Blade Network Technologies) into returning Fonality's open-source Asterisk Based PBX solution.

Has all the intrigue of a Robert Ludlum novel. And you all thought technologists were boring.Didn't you?

VoIP Supply provides Network Assessment

Garrett Smith gave me a heads up on the latest professional services coming out of VoIP Supply. It involves assessment and evaluation of VoIP networks.

Trust me, this is a definite blessing for small businesses who struggle to find out why their network is not as good as others. There are a lot of these tools, but am certain that VoIP supply's service would be more accurate based on their track record. They have been offering expertise in almost all areas in VoIP and am positive that it will pay huge dividends to companies that use them.

Jon Arnold expresses similar sentiments on this service.

Alcatel Buys NetDevices

Alcatel has decided to buy out Netdevices,a developer of services gateway products for enterprise branch networks ,based out of Sunnyvale, California.

NetDevices delivers a market recognized, innovative and flexible enterprise networking platform known as a Unified Service Gateway which is designed to reduce the cost and complexity of managing branch office networks. NetDevices was founded in 2003 and has 45 employees located in Sunnyvale and Bangalore, India. The press release is attached below.

Paris, May 14, 2007 - Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) today announced a definitive agreement to acquire privately held NetDevices, a developer of services gateway products for enterprise branch networks, based in Sunnyvale, California. NetDevices delivers a market recognized, innovative and flexible enterprise networking platform known as a Unified Service Gateway which is designed to reduce the cost and complexity of managing branch office networks. NetDevices was founded in 2003 and has 45 employees located in Sunnyvale and Bangalore, India.

“Today’s enterprises are looking for ways to transform their businesses through the deployment of networks and services that enable their employees to work more efficiently, and their customers to receive a higher level of satisfaction,” said Hubert de Pesquidoux, President of Alcatel-Lucent’s enterprise activities. "Enterprises are quickly evolving to a converged communications infrastructure of data, voice, and security services running with high reliability and serviceability. Traditional architectures lack the flexibility and programmability to deploy these new converged infrastructures in a cost-effective way. A fresh approach based on the innovative enterprise platform from NetDevices combined with our core strengths of voice and switching helps to deliver best in class enterprise networks.”

“NetDevices’ services gateways bring all required services for a branch office in a unified package, dramatically reducing the network complexity for enterprise customers and small medium business. I am very excited that by joining forces with Alcatel-Lucent, we can enhance the benefits of NetDevices’ solutions to our customers and create new opportunities for our partners,” said Seenu Banda, founder and CEO of NetDevices. "Alcatel-Lucent provides an ideal partnership with its global sales, service, and the development capabilities. With this agreement,
NetDevices joins Alcatel-Lucent to complement its end to end solutions, and to pursue our goal of delivering innovative products to a large set of customers worldwide.”

Upon close of the transaction, the NetDevices team and products will be integrated into Alcatel-Lucent’s Enterprise Business Group, reporting into Tom Burns, president of Alcatel-Lucent’s Enterprise Solutions activities.

The acquisition is subject to various standard closing conditions, including applicable regulatory approvals, and is expected to close in the second quarter of Alcatel-Lucent’s fiscal year 2007. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Talk About Irony!!

As most of you are aware a lot of sniffing tools, NMS ( Network Management Solutions) tools, Legal Intercept/Barge Solutions use the concept of SPAN port. For people who are unfamiliar with this, let us say there is a device connected to a switch. You configure another port in that switch to replicate all the packets going through the other port. So any packets going to that device will also go to this spanned port. If you connect any of your sniffer programs into the other port, you will see all the details going to device 1.

You probably would know that most of the calls you make to a call-center are recorded (I am sure most of you would have heard the 'This call is being monitored for Quality/Training purposes). In a IP based contact center the above mentioned SPAN port mechanism is used to record the calls. So lets say, that one agent sitting with an ip phone is talking to you. The conversations you are having with him is sent as packets to the Recorder application that is connected to this SPAN port.

In a conventional contact center, agents will all reside in a single location and their ip phones will be in the LAN connected to a switch. So it is very easy to SPAN these ip phones and get the conversation. But then with the advent of IP contact centers you get the flexibility of mobility. So for all you might care, the agent can take a call sitting in his house with broadband connection. In that event he would not be in the same switch as the Recording application. So what do you do in that case?

If you know the architecture of a typical IPT ( IP telephony) or IPCC setup, Voice Gateways (Media Gateways) provide the link between the TDM and the IP world. So as a customer you would be dialing from a normal PSTN/mobile phone and the packet conversion happens at the Media Gateway level. So in the above case where a customer is talking to an agent who is sitting at home, irrespective of where he is located, the packets have to traverse through the Voice Gateway which always resides at the central location. So these contact centers span the Voice Gateway port and record the conversations from that port.

This solution is not too accurate for the following reason. The RTP packets flow from the Media Gateway to the agent phone through WAN and the packets that are recorded at the central site need not have have been delivered to the agent phone. Needless to say, this solution is at best ,passable. So the agent/customer might actually think that the call's quality is miserable, whereas the recording solution would not give any indication to that (QoS is another issue. There is forward/reverse MoS which will address the issue I am talking about, but that is a conversation for another day, another time).

Though the solution is not accurate, you get atleast some kind of data. And how is that possible? Because you have a voice gateway. And why do you have a voice gateway? Because you have TDM integration. What if the world that we are all envisioning, the land of IP actually becomes true? There won't be Voice Gateways. Most recording solutions will fail. In fact any application using the concept of SPAN ports shall fail. Most NMS solutions will fail, CALEA would die!!! That is the irony I am talking about. If not for TDM being in existence today, most of the IP solutions would be a goner!!!

Forget next generation networks where everything is in IP. Think of today's world where a customer reaches a contact center through IP rather than through TDM. For example he clicks on the web page link that lets him call into a IP contact center which has mobile agents. In this call flow, there is no way the RTP packets can be traced in today's solutions.

There are a couple of workarounds for these. Use of a Media Proxy ( i.e any call goes through the Media Proxy). Not very efficient. The only real way to fix this would be to have the intelligence on the agent phone and then ftp the data from the endpoints to the central server. This was actually how the initial logger solutions worked but were phased out because the TDM guys did not like to have the control at the agent desktop level. Talk about irony again.

Anyway, my point is a lot of solutions that exist today cater to a hybrid model ( who expect the TDM world to survive for sometime). Fact of the matter is ,the world is not yet ready for pure IP!!!

Hacking Citibank's Virtual Keyboard

I have been using Citibank's virtual keyboard for sometime now and have always been skeptical that this would actually make my transactions secure. A security researcher in India has vindicated my beliefs. I am by no standards a smart hacker, but even I knew that if you can run any of the 'N' number of applications that can decode the string in the textbox, you can get the password for that account.

Let me explain how the virtual keyboard works. Every time you type in your account number, a virtual keyboard is presented that lets you click the digits of your password. These digits go in an encrypted form to the textbox that is present in that screen. And when you press enter you are allowed to login.

My friend and I have actually tried out an application which just essentially requires you to just point your mouse to that textbox and voila you get the actual password. So trust me, we knew this was pretty insecure, but we didn't care since I knew the hackers wouldn't be too interested in my bank account considering I don't own a whole lot :)

Investors spooked by Cisco's Third Quarter Results

Though Cisco's fiscal third-quarter profit surged by 34 percent, its stock fell down in after hours trading because of weakness in Cisco's core areas of business.

The fear among investors stems from the fact that there is a slowdown in orders from US businesses, even though the sales in the other regions grew at a double digit rate. The fear is understandable considering that the first three months, US enterprise business grew at a rapid pace at 20%, but hence after has dwindled down to single digit growth. Obviously, the investors are at a loss to categorize this downturn as a temporary one or as a start of a huge deceleration.

It usually takes three quarters to predict a behaviour and since only the last two quarters have been bad in this segment for Cisco, we have to wait for another quarter before passing judgements. Also, I personally don't think it is a big deal, because Cisco is making huge inroads in the other markets and they would more than comfortably make up for the lost ground.

But then, it is always good to be strong in your home turf before winning over foreign lands :)

It's finally Through

The acquisition of Hutch by Vodafone finally got the approval of the Indian government thus putting an end to all the gossip going around that this deal would be nulled due to some irregularities. Quoting from the report

Ending a torturous period of regulatory review, Chidambaram signed off on the deal Friday, sources told Forbes.com. The approval came a week after India’s foreign investment regulatory body cleared the $11.1 billion acquisition by Vodafone(nyse: VOD - news - people ) of a controlling stake in the fourth-largest Indian cellular service provider. It is the largest foreign investment in the country, which is the fastest growing cellular market in the world.

The questions that were raised was whether this acquisition violated India’s cap on foreign control of telecom companies, but this approval vindicates the Vodafone stand that everything was legal. I heard from some sources that Airtel was looking for some stakes in this venture and it is possible that this delay in approval might have been the result of political wranglings in the background.

But hey, all I care about is whether the service going to be better and will it match Vodafone's international standards? Will Vodafone drive in the next gen technologies? Hope to get the answers for these soon.

Telecom Meeting in Chennai

Twelve of us met together Friday evening for the first Telecom meet in Chennai. It was a blast. Needless to say, there was lot of talk on SIP, IMS et al.

I still can hear the reverberations of some of the conversations. I hope to write a detailed summary sometime this weekend. Vivek of Unleash Networks took some pictures and hopefully he can send it across he has them posted in his blog. ( And, thanks for calling me the VoIP Blogger :) )

What went wrong with Veraz IPO?

Mercator Capital has once again come up with a brilliant analysis (I might have to move them up on my "Most Under-rated' list) as to why Veraz's IPO went bust and Acme's IPO was a huge success even though they are in a similar space and the difference in months between the two IPOs was just months.

Mercator talks about three main reasons,
1) They were running at a loss at the time of IPO.
2) They are against the big names like Cisco, Nortel etc.
3) Most of their revenues are from the Legacy TDM solutions rather than from IP.

The third one is arguably, the most important reason why the IPO failed. The first two, though they are challenges, can be addressed and if the company has future-proof solutions, investors tend to overlook the fact that they are not profitable or against the big names. Being niche and being next-gen is definitely the way to go.

The above are the reasons why I think the likes of Nextone, Soundbite will have great IPOs.

Truphone thinking of striking back

As most you would be aware, Vodafone and Orange have disabled VoIP functionality in their N95 handsets in an attempt to protect their precious minutes. (In a related story, check out the post on VoIP Providers missing the point). Looks like Truphone has decided to fight back.

According to this report, they are planning to bring a lawsuit against the above mentioned operators. This report includes the statement issued by Truphone

The move by Orange and Vodafone is tantamount to blocking its service and also suggested that it was a “threat to mobile net neutrality” – the concept that all network operators, wireless or otherwise, should be prohibited from blocking or degrading web-based services, including VoIP, or denying access to websites on their networks.

The removal by two of the UK’s mobile network operators of VoIP functionality from Nokia’s flagship handset, the Nokia N95, constitutes a major threat to mobile net neutrality that should concern all mobile phone users,” the company said in the statement. “Net neutrality (News - Alert) has been critical to innovation on the web to date. In particular, the way people shop, learn, communicate and work would be very different if Internet access wasn’t neutral.

Net neutrality means that - for example - broadband providers do not lock customers into specific products, services or content controlled by that provider,” the statement reads. “It’s because of net neutrality that businesses such as Ebay, MySpace, or Amazon have thrived when, if their exposure had been confined to small uncompetitive ‘walled gardens,’ available only to a proportion of Internet users, they may never have achieved their global popularity and current success.

Now the question really is, do the mobile carriers "own" the network they run? If so, they are legally entitled to block Truphone kind of services. But think about this, if Microsoft tomorrow goes and says it will disallow Firefox to run on Windows because it "owns" the OS, what would the anti-trust lobby do? Isn't this the same? Aren't they killing competition unfairly? What do you think?

BT developing Motion Control Laptop

Just saw an interesting post that BT was developing a motion control laptop/tablet pcs. The user can move the device back and forth and control the cursor. The release says

This revolutionary piece of technology is in the development stages, but is already being tested by engineers who are trying to find situations where this sort of control would be invaluable, this would include engineers, etc.

Am still trying to figure out where this would be useful. It is targeted for people who have so many things to do, they can use only one hand. Not very commonplace. Will keep an eye on this to see how it evolves.

Indian Telcos post Record Earnings

The number one Telecom Service provider in India Bharti Airtel and number two telecom Reliance Communications have released their quarterly statements and the results have been mind boggling.

Reliance reported an increased quarterly profit of 34% and has promised further growth riding on DTH and IPTV solutions. Airtel has reported 58% increase in profits for this quarter and have indicated further growth for the next few quarters. These are phenomenal numbers and now Vodafone's acquisition of Hutch makes more sense. India, China seem to have the maximum growth potential for the coming years and we can see more international players ( I already hear that Verizon is trying to get some stake in an already existing service provide).

Good times ahead!!!

Is 2007 the year of Resignation?

Atleast that is what Thomas F. Anglero thinks. To prove his case he takes the recent departures of the respective CEOs of Orange and Siemens. And I believe he must have some inside information, since he is pretty confident that Telenor's CEO will join the bandwagon as well. Add Vonage's recent CEO departure to this as well, and Thomas kind of has a point here.

I have a strong feeling ( and I am sure lot of critics are going to be on my back for this) about another major CEO quitting by the end of this year. None other than Steve Jobs. The backdated stock option is going to get back to bite him and he would be forced to quit.

This might be a good time for him to quit voluntarily (rather than being pushed out)considering that Apple has announced phenomenal quarterly earnings and I am sure he would like to be remembered as a person who brought glory back to Apple, rather than as a person who lead them through a scandal. Now is the right time for him to quit. Though I think he would wait for iPhone's release and then quit to avoid the zing being taken off from the much awaited iPhone release.

Rendezvous in Chennai

Thanks to Vijay's initiative, some of us who are in the Telecom domain (VoIP, Wimax,IMS name it all) are going to meet to exchange and bounce off some ideas. We have planned it for next weekend (the 4th May weekend) but have not zeroed in on that.

The idea behind this meeting is to delve on the different perspectives each one of us bring to the table. It would be a good start to discuss how the Telecom industry is going to shape up in the future and where the opportunities lie.Hope is, that this will turn out to be a regular thing, and a good foundation for a strong telecom professionals group in Chennai. And trust me, some of the people who have confirmed their presence are quite remarkable people.

If you are passionate about Telecom and you are in Chennai ( or will be in Chennai next week) drop in a note here and we will exchange information as to when and where we plan to meet.

Cisco's Achilees heel

I have meaning to write about this for sometime now, but have been caught up in my day job.

After I had blogged about Nortel winning the Telmex deal, one of my regular visitors to this blog (whom I respect a lot for his insightful thoughts) was telling me that Cisco tried hard to get this account, but failed eventually because of the huge overhead that came with their proposed solution. The many servers approach (Call manager, Hosted Unified contact Center) is just one of the reasons killing Cisco in this space.

Cisco's hosted solutions have quite a few chinks in their armour. Most hosted services look at browser based agent desktops and though CAD ( Cisco Agent Desktop) is available in a browser based edition, there are a few shortcomings. It does not have support for call control, very limited integration touch points with external applications, agent state is not available, supervisory monitoring is not available and outbound ( Dialer) is not supported. It can easily be argued that these can be built using Cisco's CTIOS Toolkit, but the fact remains that the existing out of the Box CAD don't have the needed features. Add to this the fact that Supervisor Desktop (CSD) is not web based ( it's a thick client) and CAD cannot work with the traditional TDM ACDs, it pretty much closes a lot of doors for Cisco.

Now as I mentioned earlier, there is a whole lot of overhead cost that comes with this. There is no inhouse Voice Recording product and this feature has to bought from a certified third party. SQL Server licensing is high. IPCC Hosted requires 3 machines with processor licenses, 6 machines with Server and client licenses and Informix license is further needed for a CVP reporting server. Add to this, the huge number of servers that needs to be managed.

These will make any CIO nervous and that is what is happening. Cisco's hosted solution is little too complex and they need to build a single server solution ( say IPCC Hosted Express?) if they are going to have any kind of an impact. One thing is for sure. Any company which could help Cisco in this domain is a sure target for acquisition :) ( Will Webex fit this bill?)

HP's Enterprise Server and Storage Bootcamp

HP is organizing a two day Bootcamp to showcase their enterprise server and storage capabilities. It is going to be held on the 26th and 27th of this month in Neemrana Fort Palace in Rajasthan ( close to Delhi).

You can register for this event here. The agenda for the bootcamp is as follows.

Day 1: 26th
April 04:30 pm : Assemble at HP Gurgaonoffice - 6th Floor, Tower D, Global Business Park, Gurgaon**
05:00 pm : Departure from Delhito Neemrana via coaches (3 hours drive)
08:30 pm : Dinner at DARBAR MAHAL

Day 2: 27th April (Session at DARBAR MAHAL)
09:00 - 09:30 am : Key Note by Pankaj Mathur, Country Sales Manager, CME
09:30 - 11:15 am : ISS Track - Proliant & Blade Servers, Proliant essentials, Demo
11:15 - 11:30 am : Tea Break
11:30 - 01:00 pm : Software Session - HP OpenCall Voice Signaling and Video , HPBTO/BIO Products
01:00 - 02:00 pm : Lunch at DARBAR MAHAL
02:00 - 03:15 pm : BCS Track : Itanium 9000 dual core CPU based HPIntegrity Server Family, Architecture, Product Roadmap & Features, HP-UX Version 3 Features, AOTP Blade Servers
03:15 - 03:30 pm : Tea
03:30 - 04:45 pm : Storage track : Storage Product positioning , Architecture,Why HP ? Product Roadmap, Key Features
04:45 - 06:00 pm : Break away Sessions - 3 tracks to explore GTM initiatives
07:00 pm onwards : Entertainment followed by Cocktail & Dinner at DARBAR MAHAL

Day 3: 28th April'07
08:00 - 08:45 am : Breakfast at DARBAR MAHAL
08:45 - 09:00 am : Assemble at lobby for departure to Delhi via coaches

Soundbite files for IPO

One of my acquaintances pointed me to Soundbites's official filing for IPO. Soundbite is a very interesting company and I have been following them for sometime now. They have been innovating in a big way in the call center space and have come out with some very cool products.

Soundbite has an extensive suite of products when it comes to automated customer contact solutions and can enable automated voice messaging campaigns. Some of the features of SoundBite’s automated voice messages includes one-way messaging, alert-based messaging or even better; direct interaction to a contact center or an IVR for agentless transactions. Soundbite's solutions enables notifications, reminders and alerts to help customers better manage their time and prepare for unexpected events.

Needless to say, Soundbite is SIP enabled ( you can't survive otherwise these days :) ) which in turn helps in quick turn around time for developing multi-modal applications. They provide solutions for hosted contact center, hosted presence management, best-time to call, best debt to collect, best alert to send etc.

They have a very impressive clientele in almost every vertical boasting of names like Wall Street Journal, Nationwide Credit etc. From what I hear, they will be going IPO sometime this summer and this would be a good yard-stick for companies in the VoIP/Call Center space who are looking to go IPO later this year or early next year.

Content rights is a two way street

Some parts of the recent Virginia Technology massacre was captured by a student on his cell phone and posted on Youtube. I am not giving a link to this video since I think it is deplorable that a person actually videoed this to get his 15 minutes of fame.

What was curious is some of the news channels showed this (Disclaimer* : I did not see it, but heard this from a friend of mine) video from Youtube. My question is, if Youtube is reprimanded for having videos whose content is owned by the traditional broadcasters, can Youtube get back at these guys for using their videos on their channels. Right to content is a two way street and Youtube should get back at these guys.

But if Youtube wants to be more dignified, it needs to remove the video that has been posted. Now that would be a class act.

Attack of the 's'

I was having a light conversation with some people during the weekend and one of them had a very interesting observation. The last names of leading top executives end with an 'S'. Example: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, John Chambers. So I might be changing my name to Gokuls :)

Btw, if this trend continues our good friend Alec Saunders will make it to the top pretty soon :)

Cisco - For the Cool Dudes.

Red Herring's article on Cisco and its ambition to take over from Google as the innovative leader got me thinking as to why are they doing what they are doing.

Cisco was always at a disadvantage compared to Microsoft and Google when it came to interacting with the everyday Joes and Johns. That is one of the bane of being an infrastructure company. You don't interact with the masses and the 'word of mouth' marketing is not that relevant. So Microsoft/Google are known to more people than Cisco even though the irony is that there is no Google without Cisco's technology.

I assume Cisco got annoyed with this obscurity tag. So they made a conscious decision to invest in 'Human Networking'. Their whole Unified Communication solution revolves around it. Throw in some 'Wow' factor through Telepresence and they become the 'cool' company.

I guess in today's world you need that tag to attract smart talent in all parts of the world. 'I work for Google' has such a zing to it and Cisco is looking for something similar. And trust me, they are almost there. People associated with Cisco these days have a swag that probably was not there, say couple of years ago. Cisco will soon be THE place for the cool dudes.

Next-Gen Applications- My foot

I am sure by now you would have guessed that I am not in a great mood. Thanks to the awful customer experience I had at India's premier Telecommunications provider Airtel's showroom.

Airtel is my service provider for landline, mobile and broadband services. Now that is 'triple-play' :) I have been Airtel's most loyal customer for the last four years and so far I have never had any major complaints against them. Their services have been pretty good and even when any of the services had gone down in the past, they have always been quick to respond and resolve the matter within hours.

So, I went today to one of their outlets close to my house to pay my mobile and broadband bills. I don't do it online because I had an harrowing experience once when they charged me for a wrong amount and I ended up talking to their people atleast once a day for one month before it got resolved. So I always pay by a credit card in person so that I get a receipt that can be used in case of any issues.

The place was not too crowded, maybe three-four people before me in the line. But then it took the guy in the billing counter a lot of time to service even one customer. After an half hour wait by which time he had serviced like two people, he started to get the details from the guy before me in the line.

Only at that point were we made aware that there was some systems error and they could not connect to the central servers to get the customer records!!! So much for their capability to cater to the needs of one billion people!!! Anyway at this point, I was kind of furious that they had not informed the people in the line about this. I would have gladly walked away had I known about this earlier. The due date was at-least couple of weeks away. But since I had already waited in the line for so long, I decided to get done with this today and not go through a similar experience at a later time.

The guy before me had some kind of a speech defect and was having difficulty letting the guy in the counter know his phone number. Got to give it to the Airtel employee He was very considerate and was trying to help the person. Since the systems were down, as a stop-gap arrangement, they were actually giving out handwritten receipts. The employee relaized that he had ran out of such sheets and went to look for another book.

This is where it got really annoying. The guy was searching frantically for atleast fifteen minutes and could not find a single book. By that time another guy came to that counter and got the Landline systems up. So effectively they could cater the landline customers but not the mobile ones ( Oh god, please make IMS a reality so that our records will be in HSS). The new guy asked the guy before me again for the details and got impatient when the latter was not saying it coherently. He bluntly brushed him aside saying that his connection was disconnected and he had to go another showroom to get that fixed.

The speech-impaired dude obviously was pissed but just walked out since he didn't want to create a scene right there. So I was next in line and my landline bill was about to be settled. Exactly at that time, the previous Airtel employee finally found his 'book' and started to service customers behind me. The minute he opened up another counter, total pandemonium broke out and there was a mini-stampede with people rushing to the other counter.

Obviously the outlet's air-conditioning was not working. It got so hot and suffocating that a few of us just walked out of the place right then hoping never to set foot there again. But I wanted somebody to be held accountable for what happened. I called up Airtel's customer care to lodge a complaint. And guess what, the guy who talked to me patiently listened to my outbursts and then said, 'Sorry sir, we can't register your complaint since our systems our down!!!!'.

That is when I realized forget Next-gen applications. Just make right the present. Anyway, I am just going to pay my mobile bill online and hope they don't screw up.