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!!!
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Sunday, July 29, 2007
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.
Friday, July 27, 2007
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)
Sunday, July 22, 2007
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.
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?
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
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.
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.
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.
Saturday, July 14, 2007
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.
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.
Thursday, July 5, 2007
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
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.
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.
Wednesday, July 4, 2007
Telecom Professionals Group Website
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
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.
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.
Monday, July 2, 2007
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) :)
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) :)
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