Metaswitch Makes a Smart Move

With the recent news around making Kevin DeNuccio their CEO, Metaswitch is starting to execute on their global marketing push. If any of this is news, my last post about Metaswitch will get you up to speed. Have a look at that, and then read the rest of this post.

Today they've announced their first acquisition since then, and it's exactly what you'd expect given their big picture plans. In short, Metaswitch has acquired Richardson, TX-based App Trigger, an established vendor in the service broker space. I wasn't familiar with this company before, but I followed this space fairly closely when there were more players.

As with other IP comms sectors, service brokers have gone through their share of consolidation, and companies I was close to for some time - such as Personeta and Leapstone - are long gone. However, App Trigger remains - until now - and this looks like a good exit for them, and a smart move for Metaswitch.

If you thought the SBC space was misunderstood, it's even more so for service brokers. This is complex network technology for telcos, and being so engineering-heavy, it's no surprise that market adoption has struggled and that these companies have remained small. Bad for them, but good for Metaswitch.

As I understand things, service broker platforms bring value by enabling carriers to bridge the worlds of legacy and IP for both service creation and service delivery. A lot of legacy apps are still widely used and profitable for carriers, but they also need to move into IP, and that's where service broker platforms come into play.

Being a small company, this was a manageable acquisition for Metaswitch, and adds another layer of value right away. As noted in my last post, they're in a great spot to make acquisitions, and this seems to be the right kind of move. There aren't that many service broker players left, and it makes Metaswitch a more complete solution. First, App Trigger has a global footprint, and several Tier 1 customers, giving Metaswitch a new base to sell into.

Even better, though, is the capability this gives them to better service the global market, which is a key part of their growth plan. One of the challenges for global carriers is the wide variance of protocols used to hand off traffic to each other. This applies equally across different types of protocols, as well as addressing varying flavors within one, especially SIP. Perhaps equally important is wireless, which is a key growth area for Metaswitch, and as carriers adopt IMS and migrate to 4G and LTE, wireless service broker capabilities could become a key differentiator.

That's as far as I can take the technical discussion, but I see enough here to conclude that it's a good deal for both parties. Terms were not disclosed, but I can't imagine the cost was all that much, and certainly within Metaswitch's means. So, it's another step forward for the company, and am sure this will put some pressure on the competition to keep pace.

Thomas Howe Shout-Out - CEBP Report Published and Other Vital Updates!

Thomas Howe is definitely one of the good guys in our space, and he's been a good friend and supporter of mine over the years. If you follow either of us, you'll know he's had a few gear changes the past year or so, and I've got a new one for you.

He recently followed my Smart Grid lead and partnered with TMC to run the Cloud/Mashup Summit at the last ITExpo in January. My event duties kept me from seeing his, but I know enough to say it was great, and he's still Mr. Mashup to me. Building on that, I've got two news items for you from this week - well, actually three.

First is the launch of his CEBP Report, which was announced on his blog on Wednesday. It's been produced in partnership with UK-based STL Partners, and it looks you have to have their Subscription Service to get the full report. If you want to get beyond the front page summary, you really should drop Thomas a line or sign up with STL.

Second is the refresh of Thomas' webpage. Y'know, I don't know what to call these things any more - it's website, it's a blog, it's a Twitter feed, it's a news portal. Whatever you want to call it, I like it, and it's what I'd expect from a such a sharp guy who is comfortable trying new things. I need to take a page that book, and am on that path now myself. Stay tuned folks. I have a few new initiatives in the oven, and am planning a blog refresh as well. And yes, I'm starting to tweet, and am all ears for finding the best way to have 100,000 followers in 5 days or less! :-)

Finally, going back to Thomas' Cloud Summit, part of his planning included putting an ebook together, which will be made freely available once ready. I love the idea - he invited a variety of thought leaders to prepare short essays about cloud communications. I'm happy to say I was invited, and really enjoyed putting my thoughts together. The contributors are all reviewing the rough draft now, which means it's getting close to being published. It's going to be a must-read for this space, so kudos to Thomas for the brainwave and the wherewithal (along with Pam Shapiro!) to put it all together. Am sure you'll be hearing about this big-time soon enough, and I'll do my part to spread the word.

With that, you now you have the latest on Thomas Howe. I think he's going to have a happy St. Patty's Day - but I doubt we'll be in the same place to enjoy a green brew together. Back to work and thinking about Spring Training...

Aastra MX-ONE's Canadian Push Continues

Last month, I attended a briefing for Aastra's launch of MX-ONE in Canada. I know it seems strange that a Canadian vendor is just now bringing this solution to the home market, but things are a bit different up here. We don't get a lot of firsts, but we're still #1 in hockey, and hey, Canada won more gold medals than anybody in Vancouver - nothing wrong with that.

Anyhow, I don't have much news for you, but earlier this week I came back to visit Aastra for part 2. This time I got a full demo of MX-ONE, which is their enterprise class offering. As with all the telecom vendors, MX-ONE is much more than an IP PBX. It's full of all the requisite features to support Unified Communications and contact center applications. They showed me lots of multimedia examples, including wireless handoffs, calendaring integration and presence.

Not being an IT guy, this was nice to see, but I found the go-to-market, value proposition conversations more interesting. Probably the most important takeaway here builds on what we heard at the analyst briefing. Namely, their close working relationship with HP, and how MX-ONE offers a versatile and complete alternative to Cisco, as well as Avaya/Nortel. Those are really the major players that Aastra is up against, especially in terms of building their channels. Of course, there is Mitel, Shoretel, etc., but for MX-ONE in particular, they're aiming pretty high.

While the technology appears to be solid, and I'm sure the pricing is attractive, Aastra's biggest challenge will likely be brand recognition. I've long contended Aastra is the best kept secret in this space, and seems typical in so many ways of successful Canadian companies that don't get much attention elsewhere. This is especially strange for Aastra considering they are a profitable public company, rapidly closing in on $1 billion in sales. I don't know how you keep this under the radar much longer, but I don't need that external validation to know that Aastra has a good thing going here.

Just a couple of photos from my visit...

How Bloggers and Analysts use Social Media

This week's UC Strategies podcast was about how we're using social media. The "we" in this case pertains to the UC Strategies group, of which I'm a part. For the most part, we're independent analysts/consultants with a focus on Unified Communications, and to varying degrees, we all make use of these tools.

We touched on a few themes here, starting with the tools themselves, especially how some are using Twitter on a regular basis. Since we more or less work on our own, we found these tools quite helpful for staying in touch, doing research and keeping on top of breaking news. I'm still new to Twitter - so call me a laggard on this one - but I am starting to see its value, so look to see more tweets from me soon.

Another theme was about where social media fits in the Unified Communications schema, and how it's becoming part of the business communications landscape. I'm not sure there's a way to monetize this, but we talked about some examples where social media is becoming integrated into the fabric of UC. Pretty interesting topic, and I hope you'll give us a listen. You can access the podcast here, and while you're at it, please spend some time exploring the portal.

Mitel Mobile - Shape of Things to Come?

This posting seems fitting in the wake of Canada'a post-Olympic glow. Ottawa-based Mitel recently added an interesting twist to their expanding portfolio of advanced communications offerings.

Just when you thought the UC umbrella was wide enough, they launched Mitel Mobile in late January. I've written about this before, and when vendors start competing with carriers, you know the status quo is a thing of the past.

I'm just adding another perspective in the form of my latest Service Provider Views column on TMCnet. It's based on an interview with Laith Zalzalah of Mitel NetSolutions, and you can read about it here. I'm sure I won't be alone in tracking their progress, and it will be interesting to see if this is a one-off variation, or a new model for other vendors to emulate.

Skype/Verizon News - My Take

Tuesday's news about Skype and Verizon Wireless was a pretty big deal. I wasn't at MWC to see the press conference, and other things kept me from blogging about it until now, but I wanted to share my thoughts in some form. The uber bloggers have covered all the news angles by now, so let's not go there.

The next best thing is to write about the bigger picture, and I've done that in my latest Service Provider Views column, which is running now on TMCnet. So, if this story is still of interest to you - and it should be - you can read my take here, and by all means, you're welcome to keep the conversation going.

Cisco - Q2 Collaboration Review

Today was the first time I've attended one of Cisco's Collaboration Reviews via telepresence. Telephone or WebEx sessions are the norm, and while they're usually pretty good, TP is the next best thing to being there. Before getting your hopes up too high, this wasn't a full-blown TP session (and I've been on plenty of those). It was just me and their AR liaision, Andrea Berry at Cisco Canada's HQ in downtown Toronto. While this was a global event, with 22 analysts participating, it looks like I was the lone Canadian analyst - lucky me. So, I can say with pretty good confidence that this may well be the first news you've heard about today.

There wasn't anything really groundbreaking, and the session was just an hour - and I mean that literally. Cisco makes extensive use of TP internally, and apparently their TP rooms are booked months in advance. So, when your time slot is up, it's up. The screen abruptly went blank on the host in mid-sentence at 1pm on the dot. Gotta keep the train moving I guess.

Most of the talking was done by two key drivers of their collaboration initiatives - Barry O'Sullivan - SVP Voice Technology Group, and Carl Wiese - SVP Global Collaboration Sales. They had a lot to recap from the recent quarter, and here are the main points that I can share:

- they posted 17% year-over-year growth across their collaboration portfolio - UC, contact center, telepresence, IP telephony, WebEx, etc.

- like any vendor in this space, they have been aggressively going after competitors who have struggled, namely Nortel, Siemens and ALU

- while revenues were not disclosed, they cited early successes in their various spaces - 12 customers now using WebEx Mail (all are U.S. and primarily SMB), 450+ are using cloud-based IM, over 3,600 locations using telepresence, and 75 customers using Show and Share

- perhaps the strongest message overall was their move into hosted services - this will now give their customers a choice between premise-based and carrier-based solutions

- highlights were given about 4 recent customer wins - each one showcasing a particular strength of Cisco or attractive market opportunity

- their objective of providing "pervasive video" - both big and small - was briefly discussed, but no updates on the Tandberg deal were given

A couple of these points warrant a bit more detail, so here goes...

Regarding WebEx Mail, that was a highlight for me at their Collaboration Summit last November. They shared one lesson learned with us today, which I found interesting. Their early deployments did not support BlackBerry, and it looks like they underestimated how important this was, even for SMBs. As such, they've had to accelerate BlackBerry integration to keep these deployments moving forward. I asked if they had any indication yet as to whether their email platform has led to faster adoption of other collaboration tools. They liked the question, but didn't have much to say - am guessing it's early days, but I have to think that's the end game here.

The move to hosted has huge implications, and the analysts had lots of questions about this one. I wanted to better understand the role they seek to play, especially in terms of owning the customer and sharing revenues with service providers. They talked about their intent being to get the carrier set up to offer hosted, and then let them run with it. The acronym they used is BOT - "Build, Operate and Transfer". That's the process, and we'll just have to see how it actually unfolds. It's clear they want to have it both ways - deploy on-prem, as well as partner with carriers - with the customer choosing the best path. They wouldn't quantify the market opportunity, but did go so far to say that it "appears real". They're in talks with 10 carriers now, and BT is the one they point to as an announced partner for hosted. There is a lot of potential here for channel conflict, and Cisco is not afraid to tread on new ground. However, I got the sense they are approaching hosted cautiously, and it looked to me like they were choosing their words carefully. Regardless, they're not going to ignore the hosted market, so get used to it, folks.

Two customer wins were of particular interest to me. One was Duke University, where they talked about how they're using telepresence to help extend the classroom experience off campus. I've long felt that distance learning is a huge opportunity, and that IP technologies will play a big role in re-defining higher education.

The other customer win was Molina Healthcare. Aside from this being another great vertical market for collaboration, they cited an interesting outcome from deploying telepresence there. They're finding that people are meeting twice as often, but for half as long. That's a pretty good result, and a great way to validate the value of telepresence.

Finally, I just had to comment on the actual experience of using TP today. Since the topic was collaboration, one would expect the tools for the meeting would properly reflect that. For the most part they did. Even though the screen we used was fairly small - see photos below - both the audio and video quality were very good. However, there was no use of split screens, which would have been effective at times, since Barry and Carl were in different locations. As such, the visuals were very much in a serial manner. One speaker at a time - cut to the next speaker - cut back to the first speaker, etc. I found it a bit like watching a newscast - it's ok, but not that engaging.

Two other small things. I suspect other locations had multiple screens, whereas we only had one. When the host was addressing me, she was looking to the right, which must have been the screen she was seeing me on. This would look perfectly normal from her end, but Andrea and I only saw her looking right, and not at us. This takes some getting used to, as it wasn't clear that she was talking to me. To us, it looked like she was talking to someone else. Live and learn.

The other small thing was the use of a slide deck during the session. They were really just used in passing reference, and most of our attention was centered on the speakers. That was probably for the best, since the slides were only displayed in the bottom right corner of the screen. Since we had a small TP unit, the slides were really small, and almost impossible to read. I'm sure this would be less of a problem on a full-size system, so I guess this comes with the territory. On the other hand, I would have been just as happy to have no slides, which would give us an unobstructed view of the speaker (see photos below). For any speaker sitting on that side of the screen, the slides block out a good portion of their body. While Anderson Cooper would probably roll with that, Ted Baxter would be freaking out - so, as long as the egos are in check, it's probably not a problem. :-)


Barry O'Sullivan


Carl Wiese