Irwin Lazar's "Real-Time" Blog

Challenges ahead for collaborative convergence

SearchDomino.com covered my presentation on collaborative convergence (e.g. collapsing of voice/im/video/presence into a single interface) at our recent Catalyst Conference in San Diego.

Telepocalypse Wickedpedia

Martin Geddes at Telepocalypse has created what he calls a "Wickedpedia", defined as "As an educational aid."

Martin creates a list of real-world definitions for popular IP telephony acronyms, offering more truthful explanations of what the acronym means than any RFC. Check it out!

Phil Zimmerman to encrypt VoIP

Numerous blogs and news sites are reporting that PGP inventor Phil Zimmerman will unveil a new scheme for encryption of VoIP calls today at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas.

Currently VoIP can be encrypted using TLS/SSL for the signaling, and SRTP for the media, but that approach typically requires the use of digital certificates on all end points.

According to IP Inferno, Zimmerman's solution will not use public keys. Stay tuned!

And Now For Something Completely Different

For those of you who have a passing interest in cars, Discovery Channel here in America is now showing what is arguably the best car show in the world, Top Gear. It's on Wednesday nights at 10:00 eastern and is rebroadcasted on Saturdays. Previously the show was only available in the UK.

Think of it as Monty Python tests cars. Last night's show included among other things, zapping a car with lightning to see if the driver could survive, racing a Lamborghini Murcielago vs. a Mitsubishi EVO (The EVO won) , and doing everything they could to see if they could destroy a Toyota truck, including throwing it in the sea, hitting it with a wrecking ball, crashing it through a shed, and setting it on fire (it survived and kept running).

Avaya and IBM Lotus Team Up

Per CNET News.com, Avaya and IBM Lotus have entered into an agreement to enable Avaya's telephony features to be directly accessible from within IBM Lotus software including Notes, Domino, and Sametime. This essentially provides IBM Lotus users with the same sort of real-time communication and collaboration capabilities delivered in Microsoft's Live Communications Server 2005 through partnerships with Siemens, Mitel, Alcatel, BroadSoft and others.

With real-time communications capabilities rapidly being integrated into desktop applications, the era of the stand-alone phone system seems to be nearing an end. The question of course is what direction Cisco and Nortel will take now that most of the other competitors have cast their lot with either Microsoft or IBM Lotus.

Russell Shaw: Here's a hosted Vs. premises ROI Number-Crunch Tool

Russell Shaw at zdnet.com has a post in his blog about a new tool from InfoTech designed to allow organizations to calculate the ROI for implementation of a Hosted IP-PBX service (often referred to as IP Centrex) in which the PBX and PSTN gateways are hosted by a service provider rather than owned and operated by the enterprise.

Hosted IP-PBX services make a great deal of sense for small/medium enterprises, and as the services grow in geographic scope and feature sets, will increasingly be attractive to larger enterprises. However enterprises evaluating such services must understand that moving to a hosted model isn't a panacea for VoIP service and support woes. There is still that tricky issue of determining a line of demarcation for support, and how issues on the enterprise local network will be troubleshooted. Users of hosted services will still have to deal with issues such as how to power phones and how to guarantee voice quality within their networks.

Still, as hosted IP-PBX services evolve, it becomes increasingly difficult to build a case as to why an enterprise ought to buy and manage its own phone system when the cost savings of a hosted solution may be difficult to argue against. The growth of the hosted IP-PBX market will certainly put competitive pressure on the vendors of enterprise IP-PBX solutions.

VON Magazine Interviews Dr. Henning Schulzrinne

The latest issue of VON Magazine has an interview that Jeff Pulver conducted with Dr. Henning Schulzrinne of Columbia University, one of the authors of the initial SIP Internet draft.

Dr. Schulzrinne is currently chair of the Dept. of Computer Science at Columbia University where in addition to teaching, he leads numerous research efforts into Internet communications, he also contributes to much of the SIP/SIMPLE work currently being done within the IETF.

I had the opportunity to meet Dr. Schulzrinne in person at Collaborative Technologies Conference where he participated in a session I moderated on SIP/SIMPLE and Jabber XMPP.

The interview is a "must read" for anyone interested in SIP, and development of SIP-based services. I found Dr. Schulzrinne's comments on Skype and IAX to be extremely insightful, especially his concerns with the limitations of IAX as an alternative to SIP for scalable, multimedia trunking and his thoughts on what the success of Skype means to SIP.

The Gizmo Project, Skype Killer?? Not Yet!

SIPPhone has recently introduced the "Gizmo Project", which they are billing as a potential Skype Killer.

As a phone client, Gizmo offers a richer set of featuers including voice mail, conferencing, and voice-mail to e-mail forwarding. As a system, it's fully SIP based and supports any SIP client or phone, as well as interconnectivity with multiple SIP-based services such as Pulver's "free world dialup" and others. It offers a fee-based service for calling to/from the PSTN.

I've installed it on my Mac and it looks pretty nice, the user interface is about as functional as Skype, but there is one missing element - NO INSTANT MESSAGING!!

The beauty of Skype is its built-in IM functionality, allowing me to first ping someone via IM before I call them, or in many cases, conduct the business I need via IM without ever having to make a voice call. Until Gizmo builds in IM functionality, I don't see it is a viable alternative to Skype.

Catalyst: Conquering the keys to convergence

SearchNetworking.com writes about several of the themes discussed during the opening day of the Networks & Telecom Strategies Track at Catalyst.

During the keynote address at this week's 2005 Burton Group Catalyst Conference, Burton Group research director David Passmore highlighted not only the growing significance of network and application convergence, but also challenges that both network service providers and corporate IT departments need to overcome.

It has become quite obvious that convergence now goes way beyond simply putting voice on the data network. Within IP communications, convergence increasingly means the integration of voice, IM, video, and presence into a single enterprise-wide communications infrastructure capable of connecting all employees no matter the location or the device, and delivering the ability to provide communications in context, allowing individuals and groups to communicate within collaborative workplaces.

During our "End of Telephony" round-table discussion with Cisco, Microsoft, Siemens and Avaya on Day 2, there was broad agreement that the future was about enabling collaborative communications integrated among systems and devices. Enterprises must consider all forms of communication, not just voice or IM, as they put together their long-term strategy plans.

We also had some great talks on Day 2 from Jay Batson, who covered the role of the SIP Forum (and received considerable audience feedback requesting a SIP-interoperability certification program), Bill Rich from Pingtel who covered the convergence (there's that word again!) of Open Source and Open Standards, and Scott Wharton of Broadsoft who presented the economic benefits of hosted IP-PBX services for enterprises (and who did his best to bury the term "Centrex" forever).

Rich Shockey of Neustar closed the day with a great discussion of regulatory trends and the looming battle over control of phone numbers.

Overall it was a great day, the audience feedback has been incredible and the topics discussed thus far have generated a large amount of discussion outside the actual sessions themselves. Even though this is my sixth Catalyst, I'm still amazed at the number and size of the companies represented at this event, it is always a tremendous learning experience to have the opportunity to meet with, and hear from, some of the world's largest enterprise organizations.

Afternoon in San Diego

Here's my first attempt at photo blogging, the following picture is from the 18th floor of the Manchester Hyatt overlooking Coronado Bay, taken with a Treo 650.

Catalyst North America 2005 is just getting underway, it looks like we have a full house - there are over 200 people expected for the Network & Telecom track alone.