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Dan York has the scoop over on his Disruptive Telephony blog. The goal of the purchase is to enable Digium to build out SMB-focused solutions supporting presence, application integration, and web-based services aimed at the SMB market.
Technorati Tags: Asterisk
The SIP Forum just announced the "SIPconnect Compliant" program to certify SIP-based products as being compliant with the forum's SIPconnect standards. According to the press release, several vendors have already been certified including Acme Packet, BroadSoft, Cbeyond, Digium, Ingate, and McLeodUSA.
The goal of the program is to make adoption of SIP trunking services easier by certifying that both enterprise VOIP products and carrier SIP trunking platforms will easily interoperate. I've already heard some concerns about interoperability challenges from several enterprises and service provider.
SIP trunking is growing in interest as it presents enterprises with the ability to virutalize in-bound calls as well as reduce costly PSTN trunks. It's an area we'll be looking at closely in our conversations with enterprises over the next several months.
Technorati Tags: SIP
My colleague Andreas Antonopoulos has spent a considerable amount of time looking at the growing identity theft market. He recently described some of his findings in his Network World column: The black market for identity theft
The key finding: Iif you looked at the value of the identity theft market, it's set to exceed the value of the market fighting identity theft, meaning that the thieves have more resources than those fighting them. It's an eye-opening read.
I had gotten to the point where I was embarrassed to be a PC owner. The thought of someone calling me and asking me to go to my computer to find something was paralyzing (ok, not that bad, but it sounded cool writing it).
This wasn't just a problem on my Desktop, it was a problem on my laptop with Vista as well.
So a few months ago I made the executive decision to buy a MacBook to replace my laptop.
I haven't looked back.
I recently was interviewed for SC Magazine's podcast, the topic was Skype security in light of the latest Trojan.
Here's the link:
SC Magazine Podcast: Businesses face a new threat from employee Skype use (mp3)
I just posted a few more thoughts on IBM Lotus Symphony over at Collaboration Loop:
See: IBM Lotus Symphony - The iPod of Collaboration? In the post I argue that IBM hopes to create a "halo" effect by giving away Symphony, hoping that once people use it, they will be more open to looking at the rest of IBM's UC&C suite.
My earlier post on this blog was picked up by IBM's Ed Brill on his blog. In the comments on his site several folks wondered why I would argue that Symphony represents an inflection point when people can already use OpenOffice as a free alternative to Microsoft Office. The response I posted on Ed's blog is that in our research we've seen reluctance among most enterprises we've interviewed to rely on open source collaboration and communication applications, primarily because of lack of enterprise-class support/management/maintenance options. Having IBM behind Symphony changes the game by bringing enterprise support options to a package of free software.
Now, we just have to wait on Symphony for Mac (currently there are only downloads available for Windows and Linux).
Technorati Tags: Lotus
IBM announced this morning the return of Symphony, a suite of office applications including spreadsheet, presentation, and word processing. Symphony bundles the OpenOffice-based document editors that are currently a part of Notes 8.
Perhaps most importantly IBM is making Symphony available as a free download. IBM has also set up a community support site (fee-based support options will be offered as well). IBM announced that it is joining the OpenOffice project and will contribute code to the project.
I've yet to see a feature comparison between Symphony and Microsoft Office, but assuming there is a roughly equal set of features, it will be very difficult to get enterprises to pay of Office when they can use Symphony for free. We may have just seen a major inflection point for office desktop suites.
IBM also made a few other announcements this morning, including a hosted offering for Lotus Notes 8, and a mobile client. They also announced new features in Notes 8.0.1, as well as enhancements to Portal and Quickr.
Technorati Tags: Lotus
Via Computerworld: Cisco launches Second Life-like site for resellers, developers
Cisco launched a virtual world that it hopes will encourage resellers to meet with application developers to exchange information that helps provide products to Cisco customers.
Another example of investment in the Second Life environment.
Hat tip to Richard Monson-Haefel for the find.
Technorati Tags: Web 2.0
As Stowe notes, we've heard this refrain countless times pretty much since business computers started connecting to the Internet.
As far as the Facebook threat to business, it will be interesting to see if the hundreds of thousands of special interest sites largely funded by ads and sponsorships simply become groups on Facebook. For example, how do forums dedicated to things like Disney parks, audio-visual equipment, or fantasy football compete with their subject areas becoming a Facebook group.
At this point though, I think the Facebook phenomena is wildly over-hyped, outside of the college crowd most people that I talk to have never heard of Facebook or aren't comfortable with sharing so much information about themselves on-line. But it will be interesting to see what happens over time as demographics change.
Technorati Tags: Facebook
