Conversationware

I thought I’d do an experiment and see if anyone could either recommend, or perhaps works for a telecoms hosting company. An interesting use for a blog if this works out.

We’re…now what is the right phrase….’putting the business case together’ for a hosted service to complement an on premise solution. The applications already exist, with tenancy, billing and failover facilities, everything we need in fact apart from the hosting space and interconnects, which may or may not include the following

E1 or SIP connection for voice application, but also bandwidth for web based user interface. There will be break out to the PSTN, and also dial in requirement. There’s also a fair amount of VOIP being mentioned in corridors.

Because we’ve not done hosted service like this before, we’re starting somewhat a position of being very open to advice. I have an idea of how these things work from some time back, but it was quite a while.

Anyhow, if you would care to leave a note, or email me at matt dot lambert at converstionware, I’ll be picking up on this in the next few days. I’ll stand the cost of a round for anyone who points me in the eventual right direction. Many thanks.

This time next year Rodney……..(for Only Fools and Horses fans)

This linked article from Red Herring shows Jajah has linked up with eHarmony dating site - I wonder who made the first move?

Whoever, it’s a great idea, and the service will presumably hide your number from people you’re not sure you want to know! I picked this snippet up from Alec of Iotum who also looks to treat voice only as a component part of a wider application.

The article, and Jajah’s website shows their burgeoning integrations list, and I feel this will be absolutely key to winning mindshare in the voice application market…even the hosted one.

In fact, voice right now is very reminiscent of the early fax market.

The market in the early 90’s seemed to be dominated by Unix based proprietary systems - check out this quote from Network Computing in the 90’s

Fax servers today are more or less tied to the software delivered with them, at least on the server side. Some fax servers support the Communications Applications Specification (CAS) and can therefore work with a desktop application that supports CAS. So to an extent, you can plug in the desktop client of choice, but you may end up losing some of the unique abilities of the server (such as sharing common phone books or accounting).

(more…)

My wife uses a Virgin Media mobile phone and was having trouble with the voicemail

Because I work at something vaguely to do with telecoms and communications, my wife, along with the rest of my family and friends, postman and milkman, assume I know everything about everything with a plug or a battery, including mobile phones.

I spent the same amount of time that she did reading the manual and then called the helpline. Two days later, I discovered what had been going wrong and it was fixed.

So, Hero status wasn’t attained, but I noted that all that was required to log into my wifes voicemail was by the device calling its own number. (more…)

Now I don’t know if Mitel have proof that Shoretel ’stole’ their ideas, but from the comment in this post, it would seem that the recent patent claims are so broad as to be laughable. I await the details with interest.
More than that, to file a complaint such as this on the morning of the Shoretel IPO, no less, even if it turned out the infringements were justified, is going to inflict maximum cost and negative publicity. In the wrong light, it could be viewed as a form sabotage, and it has to make you wonder just how desperate Mitel are starting to look, in an industry in turmoil (once more)
The patent system itself would seem to have just managed to achieve precisely the opposite of what it was designed to do. The little guy was supposed to be protected, and instead you can see innovators becoming dead meat. Incidentally, some people don’t deserve to own an idea - particularly those who are terrible at executing them.
Because of the timing, I’m sure Mitel have shot themselves in the foot. I for one am not sure their motives will escape the inevitable scrutiny.

According to Michael Arrington at Techcrunch, Google is to acquire GrandCentral shortly. Thanks for the point Alec, are you next ? Google acquisitions are at a frantic pace right now.

This is remarkably quick work, as I only asked them for Unified Communications in my post on Saturday.

I believe this is a great move for Google, and I’m sure they’ll be pleased I think so. Nevertheless, I’m pretty sure this puts them closer to Unified Communications than most any other provider.

Google have email, voice mail..sort of, instant messaging and video conferencing and now they ‘have’ telephony - the inbound flavour at any rate.

This may be considered a consumer move, but actually, not having to integrate with a company’s existing infrastructure to deliver functionality, and get users, is a key point. Integration is one of the harder aspects of on premises Unified Communications platform integration. It certainly confuses customers at any rate - the first question is usually “is it voip or not?”, and the answer is usually, “well, it could be”. Not a great start.

Inbound call handling is one of those items that is difficult to solve with on premise equipment because callers can choose to ring through different networks (mobile or landline) before the call even gets to the PBX, and if somehow manage to persuade callers to route all inbound calls through the company’s PBX first, there are extra call charges to consider when diverting off net, plus you don’t easily get telephony status, or ‘presence’ from the switch for trunk to trunk calls to mobiles - this is achievable, but in some (not all) cases can be extremely expensive.

Google (Grand Central) don’t need to bother with all that, and will appeal to individual consumers, but don’t forget that all consumers usually work for someone too! If this news is true, people could use Google Inbound services immediately without involving internal IT, by overlaying the service onto existing numbers.

It reminds me a little of when Rim and Blackberry started with marketing mobile email to high value individuals, and then steamrollered into the Comms room later on, once hearts and minds had been won.

One of my first posts on this blog was that Hosted Unified Communications was unlikely (ok, I said no chance), mainly because companies were unlikely to trust hosting companies. BUT, I hadn’t taken into account the Google factor. Google has so much invested in being trustworthy with companies’ and individual’s data already, that one might trust them - despite all of the rumblings from those technically savvy commentators.

Another post was about Google disrupting corporate email, because the reduction in costs could be colossal if only corporations would trust a hosting company with their email. The potential reduction in costs is massively increased if replacing Unified Communications as well.

I have been asking some VOIP experts why companies should bother with VOIP at all, given the complexities, cost and security concerns (you don’t need voip for unified communications). Martyn Davies at Dialogic bothered to answer

Here’s his view. Telco Innovation is the answer. So, I’m still not sure about VOIP for business.

The picture quality isn’t great, but I was walking along at the time with my qtek PDA. I was suprised to see today that British Telecom are still training people to climb telephone poles.

They even have a cordoned off section so that up to 50 people can be up their own pole at once. I missed the best picture by an hour, so I must presume the trainees left up there in my picture were having to do it all over again (poling laggards?)

Why wouldn’t they be training people, but I was working with one of the most advanced VOIP solutions company in the UK onsite today. Myself and a colleague were extolling the advantages of a truly remarkable combined Unified Communications solution set - it was a nice counterpoint.