Irwin Lazar's "Real-Time" Blog

Microsoft buying Parlano

Persistent, or group, chat is suddenly hot now, with IBM adding persistent chat capabilities to Sametime as part of the roadmap it announced at Voicecon, and now Microsoft announcing its acquisition of Parlano.  Other players in this space include Instant Technologies, Jabber, and Reuters Messaging (as a hosted service).

Persistent chat isn't all that well known outside the financial space, but it offers some pretty significant opportunities for enterprises to improve communications via always-on chat sessions that can be monitored individually, or via rules or bots that trigger users about relevant discussions.

VoiceCon Wrap-Up

I spent part of this week at VoiceCon west in San Francisco.  The west-coast event is still considerably smaller than the March event in Orlando, but the conference organizers report considerable growth, with about 4,000 registered attendees this year. 

I didn't have much time to see any of the sessions due to meetings, but here's my take on what I heard at the show:

- Microsoft vs. IBM dominated a lot of the discussion, with IBM making significant announcements of its Sametime roadmap, including a dedicated telephony version based on code licensed from Siemens (part of the OpenScape platform).  IBM also made some news by acquiring WebDialogs to give Sametime/Notes users an integrated option for a hosted web conferencing service.  Microsoft focused its keynote on its management tools, which made sense given the audience was primarily folks "in the trenches," responsible for implementing and supporting telephony systems.  Those people need assurances that the system they deploy can be easily managed.

- Reality versus Hype - I noticed that the sessions with the largest attendance were those focusing on operational issues versus those focused on futuristic topics such as presence and unified communications.  I was told that the "Troubleshooting IP Telephony Networks" session on Wednesday was packed, while competing sessions were more sparsely attended.  I was grounded in a session I did on multimedia conferencing when in the middle of a discussion of Second Life as a conferencing platform we received a question from the audience on how best to allow those outside the firewall to access a web conference hosted on an internal server.  Again, my impression was the audience was far more focused on the tactical versus the strategic, reflecting the history of the show and its focus on telecom managers.

- Interest in UM.  Vendors such as ActiveVoice, AVST, and Adomo had significant presences at the show.  I'm seeing a growing interest in UM as a separate focus area, with companies looking at UM strategies outside of their VOIP plans. 

Overall it was a great (and busy) event, made more interesting by massive flight delays in Chicago yesterday and today.

Technorati Tags: VoiceCon

Cisco - Microsoft Thoughts

This morning Charlie Rose hosted a discussion between Cisco's John Chambers and Microsoft's Steve Ballmer.  There have been a few news stories already, but to be honest I didn't hear anything all that earth shattering.  Both men reinforced that they would continue to build integration between their products in the unified communications space, though they didn't announce any deep or formal partnerships along the lines of the Nortel-Microsoft Innovative Communications Alliance.

These sorts of events certainly help assuage enterprises who are concerned that their Cisco phone systems won't fully integrate presence and application access with their Microsoft LCS/OCS presence/collaboration systems, but again I don't think there's anything really all that new here.  Microsoft and Cisco previously announced integration for click-to-call and presence awareness functionality, but they are also increasingly competing with one another for enterprise communications and collaboration services. 

Speaking of VoiceCon

I'm doing four sessions next week:

• Wednesday, 8:00-8:45 - Morning Call discussing the impact of Web 2.0
• Wednesday, 2:45-3:45 - Conferencing and the Multimedia Web
• Wednesday, 4:00-5:00 - Merging Mobility and Unified Communications
• Thursday, 8:00-8:45 - Open Source's Role in Converged Networks

The full program is available at:

 http://www.voicecon.com/sanfrancisco/program/program.php

Microsoft & Cisco: Collaborating for the Future of Technology

This ought to be interesting:

Microsoft and Cisco: Collaborating for The Future of Technology

On Monday, Aug. 20, Cisco Systems, Inc. Chairman and CEO John Chambers and Microsoft Corporation CEO Steve Ballmer will discuss the future of the technology industry and their shared vision for addressing today’s customer requirements. This site will be updated throughout the day with video clips, images and written transcript of the event.

It looks like VoiceCon next week will be eventful.

Skype Outage

Skype appears to be suffering a major outage at the moment.  Tom Keating notes it started last night.  Andy Abramson has some additional details.

The Skype "Heartbeat" page notes:

UPDATED 14:02 GMT: Some of you may be having problems logging into Skype. Our engineering team has determined that it’s a software issue. We expect this to be resolved within 12 to 24 hours. Meanwhile, you can simply leave your Skype client running and as soon as the issue is resolved, you will be logged in. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Additionally, downloads of Skype have been temporarily disabled. We will make downloads available again as quickly as possible.

BBC America To Air Season 8 Of Top Gear!

Some fantastic news for American fans of Top Gear:

Finalgear.com: BBC America To Air Season 8 Of Top Gear!

Currently, the only way to view Top Gear over on this side of the pond is via BBC World which airs “special” 30 minute versions of the show (chopped up, no guest host, no news, little or no studio bits, etc.).

Well, starting August 20th at 8PM ET, season 8 of Top Gear will begin airing on BBC America in what will probably be full format shows. Based on the schedule listed at the official site, each episode will air for an hour each and feature the star in a reasonably priced car.

Regardless of whether it will be a chopped up version or not though, this only further the exposure of Top Gear here in the States which definitely isn’t a bad thing. Let’s hope this all leads to us getting a Top Gear of our own… 

The Jeff Pulver Blog: Second Life Launches Voice for All

Jeff Pulver writes about the launch of voice capabilities within second life:

The Jeff Pulver Blog: Second Life Launches Voice for All

I continue to be intrigued by the possibilities of Second Life as a collaboration platform.  I just wrote about some examples of products and approaches in a post on Collaboration Loop.

ARIN and IPv4 trading

My former colleague at Burton Group, Dan Golding, wrote long ago of the need to create a market around IP addresses, allowing those who got a ton of address space when address exhaustion wasn't a concern to sell their excess space on the open market to those who need it.  It seems pretty logical that such a market would ease address exhaustion concerns for a long time, and avoid a push to implement IPv6 until such time as multi-homing and NAT issues are fully addressed.

ARIN disagrees: ARIN fights IP address trading as transition to IPv6 may get new deadlines

Net neutrality? Google, go first!

My colleague here at Nemertes, Johna Till Johnson, has written a terrific and insightful column on the role of Google in the net neutrality debate, noting that while Google argues for open networks (especially with its push for open wireless services), it happens to run one of the Internet's most proprietary systems. This really is a must read:

Johna Till Johnson: Net neutrality? Google, go first!

Money quote:

The bottom line is that Google’s done a terrific job propagandizing itself — and demonizing its competitors. Imagine if Google were owned by a telco: The net neutrality folks would be marching on Washington, shrieking that no telco can be trusted to operate a search engine fairly. Google, on the other hand, should be free to do exactly what it wants — because they’re the good guys.