Thursday, May 17, 2007

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.

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

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 :)

Tuesday, May 8, 2007

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.

Saturday, May 5, 2007

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.

Thursday, May 3, 2007

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?

Wednesday, May 2, 2007

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.