A recent study said that while SIP trunking has seen steady adoption over the past five years, interoperability issues and a lack of standardization have limited its overall adoption and hamstrung service providers from gaining deeper market penetration.
But a new technical initiative from the SIP Forum--SIPconnect-IT--aims to speed up vendor and service provider interoperability with the SIPconnect 1.1 Technical Specification, ratified by the SIP Forum earlier this year.
A series of testing events will help provide application developers, equipment vendors and operators with a platform from which to demonstrate and test implementations of the specification in real-world scenarios.
The first SIPconnect-IT testing event is planned for mid-2012 in Louisville, Colo., and will be hosted by CableLabs.
The ratification of the SIPconnect 1.1 technical recommendation earlier this year was seen as a significant step toward the adoption of a common interoperability specification between SIP-enabled IP-PBXs and service provider networks. It provides a framework for direct IP peering between SIP-enabled enterprises and service provider networks, ensuring the interoperability of network elements across the IP environment and providing best-practices guidelines for vendors and service providers as they develop new equipment and IP applications for deployment.
"SIPconnect-IT represents the next step and is designed to transform these specs into action and to ensure IP applications and infrastructure utilizing the SIPconnect 1.1 guidelines can be implemented in live telecom environments," said Marc Robins, SIP Forum president and managing director.
For more:
- see this release
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Despite sluggish capex spending globally by service providers, Cisco is expected to report strong results Wednesday after the bell when it unveils its second fiscal quarter numbers; that could be more bad news for rivals like Juniper Networks, which last month reported a weak fourth quarter and came up short of analyst expectations for the future, causing its stock to slide. Cisco, on the other hand, is likely to continue the rebound CEO John Chambers has engineered over the past two quarters, with gains in both sales and profit. The bigger issue, of course, will be: Can the networking giant continue to grow as telcos pull back on their spending? Article
Nicira, a network virtualization startup with more than $50 million in venture funding from the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners and NEA, as well as VMware founder Diane Greene and venture capitalist Andy Rachleff, emerged from stealth mode today with an A-list of customers including AT&T (NYSE: T), eBay, Fidelity Investments, Rackspace and NTT.
The company said its Network Virtualization Platform technology was task-built for cloud networking. It allows owners of multiple networks, like AT&T, to get extra capacity when it's needed without having to make huge capex investments. The software-based system creates a distributed virtual network infrastructure in cloud data centers that is completely decoupled and independent from physical network hardware, essentially expanding the pipe through which data travels.
Nicira said NVP is a scalable software system implemented at the network edge and managed by distributed clustered controller architecture. It forms a thin software layer that treats the physical network as an IP backplane, allowing the creation of virtual networks that have the same properties and services as physical networks.
"All of the intelligence, all of the control, all of the services now get done in the virtual space," chief executive Stephen Mullaney told AllThingsDigital.
The technology potentially alters the network landscape, landscape currently occupied by companies like Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) and Juniper Networks (NYSE: JNPR), dramatically, specifically because it eliminates the need for service providers and companies like eBay and Rackspace, to continually build out their own networks. Less build out means more troubles for companies selling hardware.
Commercially available since July, NVP is built on a usage-based, subscription-pricing model.
For more:
- see this release
- see this AllThingsDigital article
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Bloomberg this morning reported that experts expect 2012 merger and acquisition activity in the tech industry to likely surpass that of 2011, which saw nearly $200 million in deals, the most since 2007.
Last year's big deals, led by HP (NYSE: HPQ) acquiring Autonomy for $10.3 billion, Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) buying Motorola Mobility (NYSE: MMI) for $12.5 billion and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) purchasing Skype for $8.5 billion generated a lot of headlines, but Bloomberg says this year, for a coupe of reasons, shapes up as even more interesting.
First, expect the creation of a flood of data-enough to fill Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL)'s 2.7 billion iMacs to capacity, about 8 zetabytes, by 2015, based on Cisco's (Nasdaq: CSCO) Global Cloud whitepaper and another report from research firm IDC.
Cisco in November said it expects that some 57 percent of all workloads will be processed in the cloud by 2014, and expects total data center data flow will be close to 5 zetabytes by 2015, and that data center IP traffic will reach 402 exabytes per month. Global data center IP traffic, it wrote, will increase fourfold over the next five years, with data center IP traffic will growing at a compound annual growth rate of 33 percent from 2010 to 2015.
How to manage that data, access and use it and store it, is going to get M&A activity popping. While companies will continue to do in-house research and product develiopment, the reality is that they can move forward more aggressively by acquiring the technology that fits their needs, saving them time and money in the long run.
ShoreTel's acquisition last week of M5 Networks (see ShoreTel acquires M5 Networks for $160M as it looks to develop cloud business) is an example of exactly that. The $160 million price tag brings ShoreTel the near-instant ability to add cloud solutions to its repertoire, bringing in new customers--M5 has some 2,000 clients of its own at the time of the deal--and new markets.
"For us to build this expertise would have taken time and investment and would certainly have involved distraction and therefore risk to our current business," said ShoreTel CEO Peter Blackmore. "We therefore determined the best way to enter this market quickly and establish a strong position is to find a company with a proven business model, a significant recurring revenue stream, a good management team and then bringing that organization into ShoreTel as a new business unit."
Privately held M5 itself made a pair of major acquisitions recently, in April buying contact center software vendor Callfinity, and in November 2010 buying hosted VoIP provider Geckotech.
"The speed at which technology innovation moves is such that you can't miss a step," Jon Woodruff, the San Francisco-based co-head of technology investment banking at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., the industry's top adviser on deals last year, told Bloomberg. "Every tool has to be used for speed and nimbleness sake, and M&A is one of those significant tools."
The second major factor in M&A, obviously, is credit availability and cash on hand. Both seem to be in adequate supply, with many companies now looking at the hoard of cash they stockpiled during the past couple of year's uncertain economic conditions.
Bloomberg estimated corporate cash levels are up 21 percent to $513 billion this year, according to the Morgan Stanley Technology Index.
Cisco, for example, has some $44.4 billion in cash on hand and has been actively buying companies for their technology (some 150 so far) in recent years. HP has just over $8 billion, although chief executive Meg Whitman said that while it's not looking for any major deals, it's open to acquisition.
Google, with $44.6 billion on hand, is likely to continue the dozen-plus-a year acquisitions it makes, while cash-hoarding Microsoft, with $51 billion, also is expected to play more aggressively in the cloud.
Apple traditionally hasn't been a big player in corporate sales, so expecting it to dabble in M&A with an eye toward a bigger piece of the cloud might be counterintuitive. But with its iPad making huge inroads in business, and its already substantial investment in the consumer cloud with its iCloud play, perhaps it's not such a stretch any more. And, it's got a whopping $97.6 billion on hand.
As more cash has been accumulated, the values of a number of potential acquisition targets have declined.
Acme Packet;s (Nasdaq: APKT) slide in the market last week (see Acme Packet tumbles as Q4 falls short of expectations), exacerbated its woes; it has lost a third of its market value since October... and it's the leading enterprise SBC vendor in the space. You can add companies like F5 Networks, Juniper Networks (NYSE: JNPR) and several others to the list of firms that have seen huge chunks of valuation fall away, making them appealing targets.
Cisco releases its earnings Wednesday. If it has a strong enough showing, as it's expected to, perhaps we'll see the company kick off some new M&A activity.--Jim
With worker mobility becoming a mushrooming problem to deal with for more companies, IP desktop phone provider snom technology is looking to make it easier to provision a business' cell phone fleet.
The company has launched One IP PBX, adding mobility capabilities that extend standard IP PBX calling features to employee's mobile devices, and introducing new management and security features. One IP PBX enables users to integrate mobile phones into an organization's internal telephony platform, which, snom said, should help make the mobile workforce more producticve.
Snom One IP PBX allows cell phones to act as integrated extensions, incorporating call transfers, conferencing, internal extension dialing and other features. It also now supports mobile SIP clients and has had its web-based interface enhanced to make administering the system easier.
The snom One is optimized for all snom phones and provides WAN-based authentication for plug and play with snom 7xx and snom 8xx series phones. It's available as virtual appliances for VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V via a .vhd file, and can be updated via the web interface.
The snom One is compatible with Windows, Linux and Mac environments and is equipped with web security through HTTPS and call security through TLS and SRTP. snom ONE supports mixed IPv4/IPv6 LAN and WAN environments and comes with an automatic blacklisting feature that makes it possible to expose public IP addresses.
For more:
- see this release
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Snom launches its first IP PBX: snom ONE
