Conversationware

This is one of those ‘prediction’ posts for comms solution companies.

Talking to a couple of integrator partners today about the change of IPT solutions from hardware to software, and about software upgrade renewal plans, it became clear there are issues bubbling away for the unwary.

These maintenance and support plans are designed to give the customer a better deal on continuous upgrades, and encourage a well supported customer base - presumably to higher levels of customer satisfaction over the period.

As a customer you get to know your upgrade costs in advance, and don’t suddenly have to ‘find’ money you didn’t know you needed for an upgrade. Manufacturers get more revenue to fund further research ….so all well and good all round.

There’s a seemingly small issue though, one that can bite you

• The customer only wants to start their support contract from the completion of install, which can be months after original kit order
• The manufacturers start the 12 month clock when they ship

Renewals are sent from the kit manufacturer three months before you’re likely to see the revenue from your customer - and paying out months before you even know if you’re going to get your contract renewed isn’t much fun. 

This is compounded when lots of suppliers on the same install are going live at different times.

So, if your suppliers aren’t flexible about go live days for your orders - as opposed to ship dates - there will be trouble about 9 months later. Sounds about right when dealing with some manufacturers.

Our company supplies workflow solutions, so we can manage the lead times for solving the issues (saving a personal headache). But I bet there will be more than a fair few accounts in the industry on stop this time next year.

Merry Christmas. We have some innovation in the telco world.

I haven’t seen too many PSTN organisations saying, ‘here’s an API, do what you want”. It could and should be interesting.

RIBBIT, is a hosted telephony developer environment API, enabling flex developers to make use of a Class 5 switch.  

A fuller description of what they are doing is available in the linked PDF.

They have just launched, but have been encouraging some initial development in the past few months on their beta developer site.

In the future, when conversations are managed electronically through software, will this sort of voice handling component help deliver the killer app?

I’m not 100% convinced it’s this one yet, but something like it. I’ll put a fiver on it.

High Availability and Disaster Recovery are different you know.

And I found out recently that there is also a third term - Continuous Availability.

Or at least, I now understand better what it means.

The ability to fail over an application server to a backup, so seamlessly that users don’t notice, between servers on different sites is pretty amazing. And, if you have over 99.3% uptime, you can claim Continuous Availability (Gartner’s term), as well as the other two.

It’s important I know this, because Avanquest now have distribution of Neverfail (such a brave name) - which provides Continuous Availability for the following

• Exchange
• Lotus Notes
• SQL
• File Server
• IIS
• Blackberry BES
• Rightfax

It can also run on VM Ware, leading to some very nice supplementary capabilities.

An excellent independent endorsement is here at it-director.com, a review

This is a Massive subject, even worthy of a capital ‘M’, and extremely topical with all my VOIP friends.

A few even go as far to say that failover is the only reason that their voip systems are selling so well.

With more and more communications capability becoming software applications, delivering Continuous Availability without those massive SAN and clustering costs will give a Competitive Advantage.

Backup servers are useless without knowing what the application is doing.

We are now availing our channel partners with these capabilities, with all the normal value added services wrap around of course.

Here’s a Neverfail customer video illustrating the point