Microsoft's Gurdeep Singh Pall's top ten UC predictions for 2009

I read a very interesting article on No Jitter about Microsoft's Gurdeep's top ten UC prediction for 2009. Although, I do agree with most of the elements that were mentioned, nothing was new to me and I am assuming that anybody who ready about UC around times in 2008 would know this. What would have been nice from somebody of his position would have been some more insights of where the UC segment is today (as it developed in the last three years) and then what were the drivers for those factors that would be mostly acted upon in the year 2009.
We all know that businesses small and large need unification of he communication model with collaboration being more intensely desired within the businesses. It is also inevitable that consumers have also started desiring some of these capabilities especially when related to mobile phones, IM and emails. But the problem for the businesses is to figure out a way to create a solution that customers are willing to pay for. Companies like Microsoft will focus on how Exchange is why this planet revolves around the Sun (no pun intended). It will also make a strong case of how OCS and HMC is a dire need for everybody. Some parts of it may be applicable but they have completely missed the whole aspect of unification where businesses are looking to unify what they have rather than a whole new set of tools and applications altogether. Needless to say some other leagacies have also being chompping on the bits like NEC, Alcatel-Lucent, Oracle, etc but the angle is the same.
What businesses really needs is something that works with the most common solutions out their, should work with their emails (Gmail and its derivaties, Exchange, Zimbra, etc), theit phones whether it is through AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, Vonage, Comcast, etc and some of he applications which are mostly vertical domain specific.
Next when we get into collaboration we are in a different game. Now we starting picking apart the business productivity tools whether they are open source ones or from entreprise businesses and have them harmoniously interact with each other, happily understanding what each of them emit as output.
That is it.

SG

Nortel files for Bankruptcy

Nortel files for backruptcy yesterday. This was long over due. The way the company was struggling with serious lack of focus and trying to a little of everything and gained leadership and expertise in nothing did harm them in a big way. They were trying to the Jack of all trades. In the networking world it was a giant with a lot of products under its umbrella and frankly speaking it has a decent customer base. The important thing that indicated its decline was th alack of any type of growth in any segment or vertical whatsoever. They could not capitalize on their legacy customer base. Most of these customers who upgraded went Cisco route and then the ones that did not went Alcatel-Lucent, Juniper, Extreme, Foundry, etc.
Nortel was becoming a services company more than ever over the last five to seven years. They are trying to cling on to Microsoft (With a lot of their Unified Communication division being "ex-Norteliets", atleast on the operations, infrastructure and services side). They presented to the world that they could be a serious software only players in the telecomm (soft-telecomm) world.
Come on people, this is Nortel we are talking about. Everything needs to huge, monolithic and legacy oriented from them. Anybody who has worked close to them would know that.
They need a financial architect to come out of this pickle. The current guys are not going to cut it. This company will need to divest its business units intelligently as in this case the sum of parts is definitely greater than the whole.
Time will tell, but do mark my words. If I had the opportunity I could create several small but successful businesses out of Nortel, which would grow well on its own. They also need to lose these executive team and the mid-management (the barrage of VP's and SVPs) as they have not done much over the last five years or so.
Ciao

Ended up creating a new hybrid IM client

Quite interesting. With all so many IM clients out their one would have thought that for me test my hybrid Unified Comm. server I could use on these IM clients to test my stuff. but a rude awakening, couldn't find anything that really fit the bill and hence after some deliberation ended up developing a IM client in Python to do stuff that I needed to do. The plethora of these open source tools start out being lean and then end up becoming a monolithic piece of software that can't be used. I have had the same experience with the existing open source SIP servers as well as Ejabberd.
So made up my mind that I will continue on my path of developing a light weight gateway for SIP and XMPP that I can use for my stuff.
Comments!
SG

IM the glue to next generation Unified Communication systems....

I have been working on IM (XMPP) quite a bit over the last year and half. It has been quite exciting and a bit of a learning process for me. The real time aspect adds quite a bit of a excitement and creates new avenues of building interesting solutions. I also find it quite intriguing that it can be used as the under-pinnings of Unified Communication. The concepts of presence that exists both in the VoIP (SIP) world and the IM world can be homogenized and extend it to some other communication paths.
Interesting enough their are not too many XMPP servers out their that scale and operate in a multi-protocol fashion. I had started writing something in C++ a few months ago and then got entangled in other stuff. I think I would go back to finishing what I started. I have looked at Ejabberd, Jabber2, etc and all of them are quite big and cumbersome to extend. The most important thing that I find is that most of them are quite big and very difficult to be stripped down to the bare minimum to start building exciting applications out of.
Need sometime to work on it. Wish had more time in the day to do so, especially for the Unified Communication solution. I love it.

SG

Hype around UC

This was a very interesting posting that I found on MarketWatch about the hype around Unified Communication. To be honest after reading the article I did not get what was the article suggesting, seemed like a few surveys being dumped in a few paragraphs.
Usage of Unified Communication and UC itself is so confusing and then the half-baked analysis presented by the analyst firms on the Internet creates more diffusion on the terms.
First, Unified Communication is a method to channelized and different streams of communications to be unified or synchronized. This implies that we could have a single channel of origination and termination of the channel of communication of somewhere in the path the different channels of communication unite.
The question one needs to ask is why would we envision doing this and what benefits, if any would be brought by this act. Some applications have demonstrated that unifying outputs and in-transit flow of information between the communication modes help make smarter choices in conclusion and reduce errors (reduce complexity and confusion in layman terms). Not to forget the aspect of latency reduction in certain aspects.
Beyond that we have not seen innovation that addresses other benefits which are not first order derivation of the error-proofing and latency reduction yet. Their certainly have been many, many big companies who have come up with acronyms and exciting phrases that get the industry intrigued (yours truly has also committed this act in the not so long ago, past). But we have not proved real benefits yet.
But hey, this is not a blog to finger-point and dog each other, but to bring the collaborative intelligence to work. Lets get busy and bring out cool stuff that is valuable.
SG

Games on this site now

My kids were bugging me to make the site interesting for them. Given that they are nine and four, the exciting opportunities of VoIP and Unified Communication is not exciting to them. Although my nine year old is coaxing me to start thinking about an interesting online gaming business. She has promised me that she will be my first customer and has negotiated that part of her allowance (she does not have one but thinks she will have one soon) will be used in lieu of monthly service charges for usage.
Business starts at home.
I hope others visiting my site also enjoy the games.
As always, lemme know.
SG

Broadsoft buys Sylantro

Broadsoft announced that they have purchased Sylantro. Sylantro has been in business for longer than anybody can remember. North of $150 M invested and quite positive the investors are going to forget this investment sooner than later. Broadsoft is quite well positioned and Sylantro was struggling for a long time with three revs of management and the current management performance was lack luster to say the least. Old product, medicore offering but deeply invested by the likes of Accel. The old IP PBX business is become a commodity and Sylantro had one which was older than what one could imagine.
The interesting question is why did Broadsoft do this? Definitely not the technology and not for the executive or technical team. Maybe the investors called in a favor? Interesting things happen int he market.

Microsoft' statement to shutdown CSF

Microsoft has publicly come out and announced its interest in shutting down CSF, which is a blow to the Voice 2.0 (supposedly a new market was emerging according to the VoIP guru's). Given this impact and the lack of focus of the SDP platform for the telecomm clients. Did the telecomm guys actually need Microsoft to teach them how this whole telephony business works out? Hardly! The direction of getting telephony over the IP networks makes sense and having some innovative applications integrated with the VoIP based platform also makes sense, but having every application being integrated is a far out-cry.
Your truely was involved in the efforts of building out components of VoIP that could integrate with Microsoft's CSF and HMC 4.0 (I was not a Microsoft employee and worked for a VoIP software startup a year ago.). The business had some needs and market requirements but needed to be architected and addressed properly. Things do fall apart when people start policies of selling ice to eskimos.
That being said the NGN and IMS will work within enterprises but they need a serious hair cut. The efforts of NGN is a good one, but having studied it well and looking at the potentials, we do need to trim it down and bring it to the applications of the enterprise. Also, the market for NGN needs to add applications and software players involved in a bigger way. Businesses are not going to but from the telco's. So companies like Microsoft will play a role, although in moderation.

NEC Unified leads the SMB telephony market for 2007

NEC Unified has been named 2007 overall telephony leader beating Cisco, Avaya, Mitel and Nortel. The Univerge360 is supposedly a Unified telephony product for the SMB market. I guess calling any telephony product a unified communication product is becoming a market fashion. The technology is glorified PBX at best. NEC is a very big company with a lot of legacy and technology that is very old and based on old-school telephony. Unified communication is an interesting idea that has many applications and if done and delievered properly, can have a huge impact on business. From what I see, not many good Unified Communication solutions have been developed yet. Everybody tries that same old trick of taking a telephony product, somehow patching it to understant SIP and then call it a Unified Communication product.
A true unified communication product would have native understanding of multiple channels of communicaition and they truely need to have multiple channels of communications. The well known communication modules are telephony, IM, email and Video. Some players try to applying gateways to present a unified approach.
Pentatonic Networks is working on introducing a very interesting catagory of products addressing some great applications within the Unified Communication space. Businesses will truely see the benefits from Pentatonic Networks offering.

Voice over IP in India

Now here is a real opportunity that can be very big, I mean very big. This is a country with a billion plus in population and tons and tons of businesses, mostly small to medium sized businesses but many of them nonetheless. This is a country that developed more cell phone users than the whole population of United States in less that five years. Now that is some growth. The local economy is growing aggressively.
Here is an interesting article by another respected blogger from India, about India being in ones roadmap. I am very excited. What I am thinking about building will have some great value outside U.S as well. The opportunity that Tata Communications and BSNL is discussing can be huge. Lots os $$$ waiting to happen.

SG

Presence Proliferation

Exciting times for me as I am working on some cool stuff related to presence proliferation across multiple channels of communication. Would their be a way of routing communication traffic based on presence of the target node (super geeky, but I mean the presence of the recipient). The IP routing is done on routes that determine the end points, very mathematical but how real is it that we stay with the static end points all the time. User based routing of application traffic seems like a very good idea as now we determine where to send the traffic destined for the recipient and where he/she is currently based or can be actually reached. Presence and cross-domain presence can make this a reality.
"You mean my email would be send to my cell phone via a cell native communication mode since the network knows that I am not logged into by email now but am live on my cell?" How surreal? Is that really possible?
From where I am sitting in my techno-thought, yes it is! So these communication silos that exists like the cell phones, emails, SMS, IM, etc become transports only and means to an end. The network layer that can solve this problem will be leading the next generation. When talk to people about this, even very smart people, they don't get it. They think I am halucinating and I am on a SciFi mission. Here is the irony, I know how real I am and how fast I can get their. Definitely not a three month project that most of these Web 2.0 businesses try to achieve and what most investors want to see, but a long term game-changing play.
SG

Last MacWorld in 2009

It is a amazing that in this day and age Steve Jobs in the only man people follow for Apple's existence. No doubt Steve has done great things for the company multiple times, but their must be hundreds of hard working and dedicated people who have been very closely involved in delivering Apple's offering to the market over these many years and nobody else seems to get any recognition from the industry. I read the following post on MarketWatch along side others where Steve's health question is probed and many are predicting Apple's demise due to Steve becoming inactive and slowly parting ways with the company. Microsoft was said to have the same situation with Bill leaving a few years ago, but Bill had Steve Balmer and with some turbulence in the beginning Balmer has controlled the show quite well and now they have a good growth path ahead of them. What about Apple? Who after Jobs will have the job (no pun intended)? An outsider will be a bad idea but is their an insider who can come up and demand industry respect fast enough for company not to go through the potential turmoil. Apple has been a bell weather company and over the last few years have shown some great growth with good products. Yours truely has been converted into an avid Mac user as of six months ago when I walk into Apple store off of University Ave. in Palo Alto for the first time in my life and after using the MacBook Pro for he ten minutes was convinced that this is the laptop that I will use for my user work. The only other Apple product that I had before was the iPod which I pruchased for my eight year old for her birthday from Tokyo, Japan.
With all the rigidity that Apple has with its business like to the iPhone app store control (which is a very bad move form Apple and Google is working hard on capitalizing on this via its open forum app-developer for Android and Microsoft's Mobile open development model) the company still have some good offerings and should continue to do so. I hope for the sake of everybody the board of Apple and Steve put a succession plan soon.
What do you guys think?

SG

Gizmo launching a broswer based phone

Wow! Just read this topic on Techcrunch and here is the link to the posting http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/16/gizmo-finally-introduces-a-browser-based-phone-and-links-that-ring/

People still think allowing people to make phone calls facing their browser is a business opportunity. One would think that reality has set in for these types of business opportunities. I do get excited about these new techno-pedia's but don't see much business linked to them. I guess the market will provide proof of whether these business will grow or not
SG

Erlang as a development platform for Unified Communication software system

Of lately I have been playing around with Erlang quite a bit. It came out Ericson's telecomm scalability and more importantly availability effort. Dr. Joe Armstrong has been the master-mind behind this programming platform. Having a deep interest in Unified Communication and applications of Voice and Presence related platform, I have seriously been thinking about Erlang rather that C++ (which has been my dev-language for a long time). It needs a very different thinking process to work/develop in Erlang. Concurrency and availability has been my primary attention points for the telecomm environment. Would love to hear what people with first-hand experience have to say about it.
I am thinking and learning more and more so please comment on ;-)

SG

VoIP Applications

Voice over IP and the convergence for business continuance is a very big concept. Some applications have proven to be big with the likes of Cisco, Microsoft, etc developing some great applications target business continuance. Utilization of Web services and Web 2.0 has changed what could be done within this environment. Amazing!

Unified Communication and its utilities

Pretty excited about the way Unified Communication has grown in the last couple of years. Some very good applications have come up and it is only scratching th surface of what more can be done. I have come up with a very exciting one that will be of great utility for businesses. Though I call it a utility it will have tremendous impact. Moreover with the slow-down in the economy, the noise in the industry with the million "me-too's" have and more wither off giving room for big opportunities to come up.
Can't talk much about it but wait and more will be uncovered in this blog.
Happy Holidays!

Great day in my life

12th wedding anniversary. What a day! My wife wakes me up early in this morning wishing me happy wedding anniversary and then my four year old wishes me "happy persary" (she means happy anniversary). She does not know why shes wished me, just that her mom told her to do so. Anyway, it was just too sweet to hear it from her mouth.
Boy we had a great BBQ lunch at Armadillo Willey's in Cupertino!
What a fantastic day and I loved the great situation in life I am with a fantastic wife and a great two little kids.

Unified Communications

Early in the morning, I was thinking about what Unified Communication could do to our lives? Seems quite interesting as I am building portions of it already without really paying attention to the point of view of consumption of these services as a user! It can be really make things a lot more easier and interesting for us! The fact that these things are focusing on solving the issue that is born due to the innovations of new techno-research and the outcomes of these research. Formalizing a single channel of communication for voice, video, data and presence of a person at any point in time via one mechanism or the other is truely huge.
I started in this unified information channel path almost nine years ago with my first startup which was addressing triple-play. I was too early and too ambitous and ya'll know what happened to the late nineties broadband market. Smart people cashed out and the ones that wanted to deliver a real product died.
I am actually proud and happy about what I do., I help people in making their lives simpler. That's it!