And the Winner is…

I guess iLocus has been bitten by the Oscar bug. Close on the heels of the Academy Awards, iLocus has released the VoIP market leaders in various segments for the year 2006.

No surprises here. One thing of interest is that Avaya is the leader when it comes to enterprise PBX and I believe that is not going to change for some time thanks to its partnership with Google on the business front and acquisition of Ubiquity on the technology front.

Is the Indian Government Stifling Entrepreneurship?

To be very honest, I am not exactly the smartest guy to be commenting on Government policies ( financial or otherwise), yet I feel compelled to blog about the latest taxation policy by the Government of India.

As many would know, the Finance Minister of India presented the budget yesterday for the year 2007-2008. There are a lot of policies that were brought into effect ( which I shall not delve into;partly because I am not interested and mostly because I have no frigging clue as to what he was talking about). One thing that caught my attention was the new rule under which ESOPs (Employee Stock options) would come under Fringe Benefit Taxation. I will let the experts tell you what FBT means. But to put it in very lay man terms, it is a Tax the government imposes on an employer everytime the employer gives fringe benefits to its employees (eg. Transportation/accomodation). This tax was first brought into effect in 2005, and the fallout of that was all employee benefits were slowly phased out by the corporations ( Though, the employees were compensated through increase in their pay package)

ESOPs are arguably the most potent carrot sticks that are dangled by startups (or pre IPO companies. Public traded companies give out ESOPs as well, but they don’t give the same amount of returns as the former) in front of prospective employees. Imposing a tax on that would mean every time the employer gives out ESOPs to its employees, it needs to pay tax on that, which in turn would dissuade the company to give out ESOPs which would lead to fewer people joining these startups. Where is the incentive for an employee to join/stick around in a startup?

This is definitely a huge burden on startups that slog to make ends meet. It would have made more sense if this Tax was only for companies having a total revenue in excess of a certain value. That way only the Googles, Infosys’s and Wipros of the world come under this taxation bracket and the startups are left alone. To be honest, there probably is a lower limit that I am not aware of. Correct me if I am wrong on this one!

The finance minister has surely put entrepreneurship on the back-foot and it sure is not helping this already stuttering community.

QoS based Routing in Virtual Call Center

As you guys might remember, I had blogged earlier about how QoS based routing would be very useful in a Call Center environment and I had ended the post by saying that I was going to check out Unleash Networks' Unsniff product.

After couple of discussions over phone and a fruitful meeting at Barista, Vivek and I have agreed upon a common framework on which we will get this working. Vivek has been kind enough to tweak Unsniff for this purpose and it is great that he has decided to accommodate us in his busy schedule ( There were a couple of important software releases from Unleash last week).

Vivek also pointed me to Cisco's Unified Service Manager solution that essentially calculates MoS on a per call basis( kind of what we would need to do a QoS based routing). But from what I read from the specification, it looks like these details are passed to Cisco's 'Monitor' application through proprietary messaging and these details cannot be obtained by a third party application through open APIs. I believe this solution is used more for reporting rather than for quality assurance. So unsniff as of now looks like the best bet to seemlessly work with our application.

Vivek and I hope to get some kind of integration/testing ( of my application and unsniff) done in our labs pretty soon and I will update you guys as it happens. These are exciting times!!!!

How important is a business plan?

Web Worker daily has an interesting piece which talks about the importance(or not) of writing a business plan.

Personally, if I were to form my own company, I would a have a business plan, if not for anything else, just to write down what I feel. I have an habit of writing down all the stuff I need to do ( personal/official) and I would use my business plan more as a reminder than as a bible that I would strictly adhere to. And hey, that is the first thing what the VCs want to see even though they probably never take a look at that

Security Compliance

TechRepublic has published different tools that help an IT/ITES company become security compliant. As part of this article it has given links to a few products from Symantec, McAfee and Sophos. I got a chance to take a look at the offerings and my initial reaction was that Cisco’s suite of products were better. The reason being, even though individually the products of the above mentioned companies are good, they don’t have the whole solution and this is where Cisco has the advantage.

I have blogged about the different security compliant solutions from Cisco before and you can check them out here.

Taking on Cisco

Avaya has become cozy with Google in what I see as a major blow to Cisco. The announcement talks about combining Google Apps with Avaya’s IP telephony. This combo would affect Cisco’s share in the SMB market.

Cisco is getting hit on all sides when it comes to the enterprise market. First Nortel-Microsoft partnership and now this. If the trend continues, the big enterprises would go with Nortel telephony and the smaller ones would go with Avaya’s IPT and Cisco would be left to service nobody. Cisco, I assume, would have to strike up some impacting alliances or would be terribly disadvantaged.

Even at the time of Microsoft-Nortel partnership, I had thought that Cisco would probably team up with Google, but that looks out of question as of now. My hunch is Cisco would go with IBM. That would be kind of ironical. Apple on one side and IBM on the other. But hey, if Apple could get cozy with Microsoft, why not with IBM? What about Adobe? They are doing some neat stuff in IPT stuff and it might not be a bad thing to team up with them as well?

What do you think? Who do you think Cisco will go with?

Simultaneous Posting

I have been blogging at http://tggokul.wordpress.com/ for the last four months and since I heard so much about blogger and its cool features I wanted to create a blogger account as well and so went ahead and created this blog. Both blogspot and wordpress have their advantages and disadvantages. For example you can’t add adsense code in a wordpress blog whereas it is so easy in a blogger account.The statistics in wordpress is awesome whereas it is not so great in blogger ( We need to add extra widgets to get it working)

My other blog will remain the primary technology blog whereas this one will be a combination of technology and other lighter stuff as well. So all the posts in the wordpress blog will be simultaneously posted in this one as well.

As for the older posts, I can' transfer them here. So please check that out in my wordpress blog.

I hope this blog gets the same response as the other one as well and I hope to see a lot of activities on this blog in the coming days.