Irwin Lazar's "Real-Time" Blog

Digium changes

Tom Keating blogs on and podcasts the changes in Digium's management structure announced today.

I'm doing a couple of sessions on open source VOIP at VoiceCon in March, it looks like we'll have plenty to discuss.

Windows Vista is here

If Vista fell in the forest, would anyone hear it? The reaction thus far has been pretty negative. Here are a couple of good articles from folks who've gotten to try it out:

• Windows Vista Arrives With A Thud - Hardcop Consumer
• Windows XP vs. Vista - Tom's Hardware (some interesting results)

I ran a Vista evaluation tool on my two-year old Lenovo T42, the results were that I could only run the basic version of Vista, I'd need a video card upgrade to run any of the higher versions (Premium or Ultimate). I have no idea if one CAN even upgrade a video on this laptop, but I suspect not. If one needs a new machine to run Vista, I suspect Mac sales are in for quite a boom.

(Strange but true, as I was typing this FireFox on my XP machine went to 99% processor utilization, forcing me to hit ctrl-alt-del about six times before the task manager finally came up and allowed me to kill the process. Fortunately I didn't have to do a cold reboot.)

Skype Means Business

Skype today announced an expanded "Skype for Business" offering. My quick take is that these are mostly improvements to administer installation of Skype, and they do include some new controls to limit the features that users can access (such as file transfer), but I don't see any mention of being able to create centralized call data records nor the ability to do something such as redirect incoming call requests to other Skype accounts (e.g. if an employee leaves the organization). So it looks like these tools will be useful to smaller businesses, but they are still lacking the controls that are required by larger, and regulated organizations.

Skype

Some random thoughts from Lotusphere

My overall take on the show should be posted to Collaboration Loop shortly, but I wanted to share a few thoughts here as well.

Walking the partner pavilion yesterday I was struck by the prominent presence of telephony vendors such as Avaya, Cisco, Nortel, Siemens, and others. I can imagine that the Notes/Domino crowd looked at these VOIP vendors much in the same way as the PBX managers looked at Microsoft and IBM on the show floor at VoiceCon a few years ago - e.g. "What the heck are these guys doing here?"

But the reality is that the worlds of telephony, video, IM, and collaboration are rapidly converging. Of the three major announcements made by Lotus this week, two of them tied directly into unified communications, these included enhancements to Sametime, and the new Quickr application which enables integration of Sametime with document management applications. IBM even extended the term "Unified Communications" to include Collaboration, coining the new term UC^2. During the opening general session they even demonstrated the capabilities that telephony partners such as Avaya, Siemens, and Cisco are bringing to the Sametime environment. Mike Gotta of Burton, Brent Kelly of Wainhouse, and myself seemed to be in violent agreement about these trends during our appearance as part of the unified communications keynote yesterday morning.

It was also pretty clear that IBM Lotus is positioning itself against Microsoft on the basis of multi-platform support (including Mac and Linux clients), as well as more openness in the Sametime platform, including XMPP federation, and the Eclipse open source development platform. IBM stated that unlike Microsoft, they weren't going after the telephony market, which should come as good news to their partners. I got the sense that Cisco and IBM are increasingly moving closer together, arguably in response to the Nortel/Microsoft alliance.

So the event was a worthwhile one to attend. It gave me a pretty good feeling about the evolution of sametime, and it further reinforced the convergence around communications and collaboration that I've been writing about for the last two and a half years.

lotusphere2007

Live from Lotusphere

I'm at Lotusphere this week in Orlando. Unified Communications, as to be expected, is a major theme in both Sametime and Notes 8 presentations. So far they've demonstrated integration with Cisco VOIP and RADVISION video conferencing.

To join the fun, visit http://www.lotuspherelive.com/ and follow the live blogging. Or, attend the conference virtually in Second Life.

lotusphere2007

Why Cisco Sued Apple

The Street & CNBC's Jim Cramer on Why Cisco Sued Apple.

Worth a read.  Jim's argument is that Cisco wants a pathway to AppleTV and couldn't care less about the iPhone.

At what point will Apple realize that partnership with Cisco represents a pathway into the enterprise market?

iPhone: Enterprise Impact

We released our Nemertes Impact Analysis on the new Apple iPhone tonight.  You can read it here. 

In it, we discuss the potential issues of enterprise usage of iPhones, including such missing pieces as support for Exchange or Notes calendar and contact synchronization, tools for enterprise security and management policy enforcement such as encryption of data on the device, and ability to remote wipe it, and the lack of enterprise-grade support services.

In my opinion, there is a considerable opportunity for Apple to attack the enterprise space, but they continue to put their resources into consumer products (with the exception of niche software focused on media developers, and of course the MacBook Pro), and who can blame them given the relative market sizes.

But I'm still awaiting the day when a large services provider or vendor such as IBM or maybe even Dell steps up to the plate and begins to offer enterprise support services for Apple products such that Apple becomes a serious alternative to the Windows desktop, as well as Windows, RIM, and Palm mobile devices.

Technorati tags: apple, iphone, irwin lazar

Deploying Skype in a Windows domain

Kurt over at the Skype Security Blog put up an interesting post discussing Skype's efforts thus far to give enterprise managers policy and security tools to control Skype usage on their networks. He's also asking for feedback on what else needs to be done.

Here's what I'm hearing:

• Centralized call detail records so that enterprises can track Skype usage
• Policy enforcement for Skype calls to control who can call who
• Centralized account management that would enable not only creation/deletion of accounts, but also routing of calls to accounts. For example, if jsmith leaves the company, I should be able to route their incoming Skype calls to another user.
• Support for security proxies to accomplish the above, and also to protect internal Skype users from external attack (think: FaceTime, IM Logic, Akonix style products for Skype.

Check out the full post via the above link and add your own.

Technorati Tags: irwin lazar, skype

Here's the iPhone

If you aren't following the live coverage of Steve Jobs' keynote at MacWorld via MacRumors.com : MacWorld San Francisco 2007 Keynote Live Coverage, you ought to be.

Apple just leapfrogged the entire existing smartphone industry.  My blackberry looks like an Atari 400 compared to what they introduced today.

UPDATE: The official iPhone site is up

I want one.

Collaboration Loop - Net Neutrality and the Virtual Worker

My latest post for Collaboration Loop is now available:

Link to Collaboration Loop - Net Neutrality and the Virtual Worker

It addresses the Net Neutrality issues raised as a result of the recent FCC approval of the AT&T and BellSouth merger, and covers some issues that enterprises ought to be aware of as they plan their virtual worker strategies.