Who is going to buyout Avaya?

By now, the storm of Lou stepping down as CEO has passed over. Yet the question still remains. What is going to happen to Avaya that was bought over by SilverLake partners just over a year ago.

I have been hearing from different sources that top guys ( one was even close to Lou) are being let go and this would only mean that Avaya is going to be sold to the topmost bidder. Either as a whole entity or after splitting them into different entities.

Interestingly though, there are two names that are being floated as possible buyers. One is Cisco ( is there any deal in the world, where their name is not flouted?) and the other is very surprisingly Nuance. I can understand why Cisco’s name is prominent. The interim CEO who is taking over from Lou is none other than Charles Giancarlo, a prominent ex-Ciscoian. 

Nuance is trying to enter the PBX/ACD world to further stabilize their speech market and this would be a logical step. Microsoft and upto some extent IBM are developing Speech engines and the only way for Nuance to continue their stranglehold would be to enter the PBX sector as well.Nortel seemed a little interested a year ago, but with their current state of affairs would not be brave enough to venture in this.

One thing is sure. The face of Avaya would change in the next couple of months.

VoIP termination may just about become legal in India

There was a very important announcement from TRAI where they are abolishing ADC ( Access Deficit charge) from April 1st. This was one of the main reasons why the existing Telecom providers were saying that Enterprises/Users should not terminate VoIP calls on PSTN ( because they were loosing out on this revenue).

Now with this being abolished, it could pave way for VoIP termination to become legal. There was a unique problem where we were architecting an Outbound call center over IP for a BPO in India and we had to architect it such a way that termination of each of the outbound calls had to happen in the same STD region ( i.e have a Media/Voice Gateway) in each of the locations. We could not have agents sitting in Chennai making calls out of Mumbai VG to customers in Chennai. The law as of today states that the Chennai agents HAVE to call the Chennai customers through the local gateways.

This news might be a blessing since cost of having Media Gateways in each location is phenomenol and rules out a centralized architecture. Maybe this abolition of ADC might help us architect solutions better. Most of the times, things are possible using Technology but it is the process/business needs that are the impediments

United They Stand

Kind of old news. But it is great to see three top Telecom guys come together and build an unified infrastructure. Now if only BSNL plays ball with them, 99% of India would be covered and would enable further reduction of prices.

The biggest losers would be the infrastructure providers like the Alcatels and Ericssons since instead of having three customers they probably will have only one. Deals are going to be more fair since the vendor has to be flexible across the management of Bharti, Vodafone, Hutch.

What I would like to see though is unified customer service, billing etc. There should be one outlet where I can pay my bills whoever the service provider is, I should be able to reach one contact center etc etc. With number portability almost a certainity now, it is a good move by these three Telecom guys to usurp some market share from BSNL and probably even Reliance.

Yup, I am still alive

It has been almost ten days I have blogged and this is the longest period I haven’t blogged in my short blogging stint.

You can attribute this to some very high pressure tasks at work ( Btw, I still don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel). There have been some interesting developments in my professional career which I shall post once it becomes official. Needless to say, I am going to be tied down a bit in the next couple of months.

I still try to keep track of some of the major events ( Microsoft’s big PR exercise on Unified Communication with little substance) ,Vonage’s recent patent woes, Aswath’s EnThinnai ( which I believe is the best application as of today that has the potential to leverage presence to the fullest) and Mobivox’s rise. I did try their free service but was not too convinced. It did not work for me One of my regular reader has sent me an email about some interesting thoughts on them. If he does mail and if it ain’t too confidential, I might let the world know about it.

I do miss the joy of blogging on a daily basis and I really hope that things get better for me to do that. One wise friend of mine used to say “If you can’t blog, atleast change the appearance so that people think that you are doing somwthing.” Good piece of advice, but I am going to wait a little longer to try that trick.

How do I want to be known?

There is a humorous ad ( by IDEA Telecom) going around recently which in essence says that all communal fights and other racial discrimination can be averted by giving phone numbers as names to everybody and everybody would be known by their numbers.

Pretty hilarious, but at the same time got me thinking. If I wanted to be known other than by my name, which of my modes of communication best represents me?  I have to say it is still yahoo/gmail id. Yes, there is spam; yes there is trouble sorting through the entire list but I still feel the best way to reach me is email. Not any of the IMs, not any of the social networking ids, not the Skypes/Gtalks of the world.

I still get most of my meaningful communications done through mail. So the best way to know me is through my email id. What is yours?

Innovation from Infosys

Somehow the general feeling around the world is that the Indian software giants like Infosys, Wipro, HCL are cheap labour camps and not a whole lot of innovation can be seen in these companies.

Infosys has broken that image by winning the the Telephony Mashup Challenge which was sponsored by Sylantro Systems and The Thomas Howe Company. Their CallPal application seems quite interesting and no wonder seemed to be the toast at the Global Summit in Las Vegas. For people who long for innovation from Indian companies, this is quite a refreshing piece of news and hopefully we can see more of this in the days to come.

News Across the World

I have not got the time to write posts, so shall limit myself to linking to those posts which I thought were interesting.

Iotum Does Group Calls
The Future is Video
Vodafone Double Crossed In India?
Desktop Sharing: The Skype Ecosystem Expands

Subscribers are Over-rated

All these years, I have heard a lot about how India is an awesome destination place for mobile application/product vendors because of the huge subscription base. The 50 million, 80 million subscriber base per service provider makes all vendors lick their lips thinking that if they can even take a 10-20% of that pie, they would make it big.In fact I have had the chance to review quite a few business plans which goes on the above surmise.

I have always been convinced, subscriber base means nothing in India. And the reason for that is because even though there are so many existing consumers and likelihood for even more in the future years, the problem is that the revenue per consumer is so less that even huge volumes do not mean a whole lot of profits. And I have been harping about this for a long time. Service providers DON’T pay upfront and the model widely used is managed services/revenue sharing, which means the cut that goes to each of the vendors involved in the overall solution is so less that sometimes it is even negligible.

This is the reason why you don’t see a whole lot of Telecom product companies in India enroute to success. Yes there are the Jatayu Networks/Saskens of the world, but they are more the exception than the norm and I am making an educated guess that they survived because of their international orders and not because of local sales.

Today, Sunil Mittal, the chairman of Bharti Airtel has issued an interview where he says

The Indian Telecom sector has reached a stage where prices could not decline further and would only firm up in the future.

I am one of the better users of Airtel ( I pay a huge monthly fee, make international calls, roam around a bit), yet my bill is still close to 40-50$. So think of the millions that have a cell-phone only for incoming calls (incoming calls are free in India) and pay a very nominal monthly fee. Bottom-line is when analysts take about the subscriber base in India, they would need to consider two kinds of bases. The one which gives a decent ARPU (Average revenue per user) and one which is dismal. That would give a more truthful picture.

At the same time,the only people who will benefit because of the huge volumes are those companies that are looking to load-test and benchmark their products.Nothing is as good as testing your product in live scenarios and if yours has withstood 80 million subscribers, it HAS to be good. India, sadly, as of today is more a testing ground than a viable market.

I believe the subscription rates are going to rise and that is good for the Telecom vendors/service providers. Not so good if you are merely a consumer.

Third Party Voice Control

There are enough mechanisms and more ( like JTAPI, TAPI) etc which allow you to write applications that can do third party call control. My question is, are there mechanisms to do third party voice control?

Let’s say that there are two ip phones which are controlled by your centralized IP PBX. Now I can write applications that can do a makecall(), answercall() etc on these two phones. But media will be to/from these phones. What I want to do is makecall() from one phone, but have the media terminated somewhere else.

I don’t want to connect and then do a transfer, that would be a round-about way. But having said that, if there are no other ways to do it, then this would be the way to take. Let’s come to the scenario where this would be useful ( would this be the next killer app?)

Let’s say I have a dual-mode mobile phone with wifi and let’s say that termination to a TDM line ( mobile/landline) is cheaper or has better quality through the GSM network. Or it could be as simple as I have way too much free minutes available during the weekend. Now, it is obvious I would be carrying the phone all the time. What if my wife is sitting somewhere else and wants to call somebody through my mobile GSM connection? Assuming she is connected on the Net, she should be able to reach the wifi enabled side of my phone and should be able to make a call out through the GSM world. But the media coming in should go to the softphone she has in her desktop/laptop rather than to the mobile I have.

The media will take the following route. Laptop->wifi side of mobile->GSM network->end user and vice-versa. This is more like a three party conferencing, only thing me sitting in the middle am not doing it, rather the third party is doing it. This would be the reason why I am looking for ways to do third party Voice control.  

You don’t need things like Skypeout minutes and you don’t have to be with the phone to make/receive calls. Say, I forgot to carry my phone. No worries, all I need is an internet connection and I can still use my phone. Something like a pc-anywhere on my mobile phone, only simpler and easier.

Is Skype a Web Application or a Telecom Innovation?

The last two days has seen considerable discussions on the Internet thanks to some hard-talk by Mark Cuban ( Btw, I am an ardent fan of MC. How can you not like a guy who fights with NBA officials?).

Vijay toes a similar lines when comparing Telecom Innovation v/s  Internet Revolution. A very interesting read. My contention though is that there is so little to separate between the two. I say Skype is a telecom innovation. Skype is a Telco, so will be every other web companies ( like Google) soon. So where do we differentiate? Am very interested to know what all of you think about this.