OIGAA Blog

November 15, 2007.

Following my experience in Capacity Europe, I’ve seen only one sign of the new role of carriers, and it comes not from a carrier but from XCONNECT (www.xconnect.net), the leader in voice peering, which is entering the carrier business with a new service/concept called ‘Direct Route’.

Of course it’s a good interconnect business based on the power of the internet and the assets and user bases of local operators, but does it really change the carrier’s rules for long-term strategy?  I suggest XConnect and local operators take a step ahead and see voice termination (on VoIP) as like any other service packed into the IP trunk. If you are a carrier in IP transit charging a fixed fee based on capacity, why not charge a little more for this capacity and include all VoIP termination to your connected local operator routes? In this case, XConnect should, for a monthly IP capacity fee (10Mb for €1000, for example) provide its customers with any VoIP traffic volume to be delivered to their direct routes to local carriers. I know local carriers are protecting their business, but as soon as end users run voice through their public internet access (outside the voice operator network) they could potentially lose all current revenue in the form of kick-backs. However, by joining XConnect they will still get some revenue in the long run by terminating calls to their users whether or not they are in the PSTN. This way they can protect their asset: the user and number. 

And now you’ll ask me, where are the unified communications concepts? Unfortunately at the Capacity meeting nobody on the panel but me was talking about how communication applications are changing the way people communicate. Carriers in the wholesale business haven’t seen this yet because they’re still moving minutes around, from PSTN or any VoIP originating service. This is the case for Skype.  They should look beyond their network monitoring system and margins. They need to understand what’s happening on the origination side and how local operators manage their assets, and they should get their end users connected though PSTN or VoIP into their networks. Good luck!! 

xavi@oigaa.com

November 13, 2007. I’m on my way back home from Amsterdam. I was invited by Capacity Media to speak at Capacity Europe 2007 on a panel debate entitled “Analyzing the drivers and business case for carrier outsourcing” (see www.capacitymedia.com for more details). 

Capacity events are classics in the telecom industry, and a referral for contact set-up and networking between carriers and service providers around the world, like GTM but focusing on regions and continents. If you plan to set up your carrier business in any region or need to buy termination, transit or capacity, the best place to start is at one of the Capacity events in the area. But is there anybody developing a new wholesale or carrier business these days? Definitely not, only in emerging markets in Africa, some in Latin America, and a few in Asia. New entrants are beating the ground, but all of them are well-known carriers in other countries, like Telenor, a well-known Nordic carrier with successful operations in emerging Asian markets in mobile. Like many others, Telenor (www.telenor.com)  is developing its portfolio of services in underserved markets where competitive advantage is always defined by time to market, operational experience, in-country risk management (economic and political) and a bit of luck. 

Well-established carriers and operators have been developing their growth strategy in recent years, expanding their market footprint, but not services. We still see the same service offering at Capacity as five years ago: voice termination, fiber networks capacity, internet IP transit and VPN/MPLS. The result is a familiar ecosystem of companies that do a lot of business with each other but do not offer clear differentiation values or advantages. If these are present, they still come from regulated or monopolistic markets.  

There is widespread concern about the future of carriers in light of the continuous decline in margins on voice and data services and the difficulty of reaching new customers. With operational costs at the minimum level to provide required SLAs, where will future earnings come from? Consolidation will definitely be driven by specialization and volume. The only survivors will be companies with enough critical business mass to generate profits on squeezed-margin services and those with near-unique services or network coverage in some region. With this in mind (which everybody in the industry knows), my question is why is there is not yet any clear sign of service innovation, business reaction or re-conversion in the world of carriers? How long will their strategies remain anchored in the past? 

As soon as the Internet carries all voice traffic between countries (today many analysts say over 50% already is) and consumer voice moves from POT lines to internet communication applications (like Skype or IP-Centrex bundles), most of the players in the voice wholesale industry will see how their main line of revenue dies, given that Internet will reduce the need to intermediate between a local carrier that can reach the local telephony network and external ones that need to set up routes worldwide for their customers. Bilateral agreements will be undertaken directly through the internet, between local operators and demand, as in the past monopolistic carriers developed bilateral agreements to exchange traffic.  Voice termination will drop to zero. As a result capacity deals will drive business models making pay-per-minute revenues obsolete. Service providers will buy “local capacity” from local operators to place voice calls over the local telephony network on a flat-rate basis. Some switching platforms today can handle more routes and capacity than number of countries exists. Thus those carriers will control their routes and capacity without any intermediate agent. The Internet disintermediates the carrier business as it has done in many other industries, enabling customers and suppliers to trade directly. 

I’ve seen only one sign of innovation there … go to next entry to learn more …

xavi@oigaa.com

November 8, 2007. This week Google’s mobile application development initiative was announced. It was a long-awaited announcement after some early but not very relevant incursions into the mobile industry. Android is an ambitious application development program supported by at least 34 companies in the mobile industry, including not only handset manufacturers like HTC and Motorola, but also service providers like T-Mobile. Android provides an alternative to Windows Mobile and Symbian, and is the third entry into the arena as a multi-vendor concept (other proprietary platform vendors are Nokia, RIM and Palm OS). Nevertheless, it will not be available till the second half of 2008. Its license model will be open source via Apache V2, so it’s expected to be widely adopted in the development community and in industry. But what’s Google’s business model for the initiative? This is not yet clear but a number of analysts are waiting to find out. 

The Android development platform, which will include both the operating system and APIs, will be the glue enabling third-party software providers to offer apps for the Google phone. Considering that today many business processes are mobile and countless communications also pass through mobile handsets, it’s easy to see that many business processes currently supported by “fix” applications will go into mobiles more easily and economically based on a new industry standard, or at least a de facto open source standard if it’s widely adopted. 

Development of unified communication applications in mobiles will be a widespread reality very soon too as Android becomes available and handsets are deployed to stores. Imagine having any of your ERP indicators, transactions or reports completely integrated into your mobile device after a few lines of code have been written. This is what we expect from Android. Imagine accessing any on-demand web-based application from your favorite mobile handset. Why not your on-demand telephony system? 

OIGAAME is now available in beta mode for Windows Mobile handsets, mobilizing its UC features and call control, and Android will enable us to make OIGAA available on any Google phone too. 

We put our trust in open source, SaaS, on-demand communications and Google development paradigms. For example, OIGAAME (OIGAA web-based desktop application) was developed using the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), so for us Android is a natural evolution in line with our development strategy.  

I’m excited just thinking about running OIGAA on Google’s new mobile phones a.s.a.p.… In the mean time, OIGAA is on your desktop and SIP-compliant IP phones, used by 3,000 active users each day.  

We’re making this figure public for the first time today—over 3,000 users connected—and we want to share the size of the OIGAA user base with you through the homepage figure. Thanks for communicating through OIGAA!!! 

xavi@oigaa.com 

November 3, 2007, Barcelona. I’m back and safe from Boston, and during flight back some ideas about Microsoft UC and PBX vendors arise into my mind, and it’s time to share with you. 

Several partners are working with Microsoft in support of its UC strategy, from telecom providers to PBX vendors, as well as other third-party software companies. Nevertheless, in the long term, whether PBX vendors will survive with Microsoft depends on whether the PBX model is killed off by the Microsoft software solution, as Asterisk is trying to do in the Open Source industry. This is the same trade-off telecom operators have made today with PBX vendors when considering offering hosted services in the market. There isn’t a single answer for understanding these kinds of unnatural alliances; it’s that short term reasoning prevails. Sooner or later, PBX vendors have to completely recreate their business due to these short term “deals with the devil”. Such kinds of alliances are not creating long term value for both. 

At VON, into UC Congress, I had the opportunity to present OIGAA at the “New Age of Communications” panel, where we talked about the new kind of communications services which are being deployed nowadays after ‘VoIP first round’ (I will go into detail on this concept in further entries). Definitely OIGAA is one of these, and the audience addressed several questions about the FREE Telephony concept and values for users, as well as business models. They were really excited by the OIGAA value proposal and service. Again, just we were a few years ago, VozTelecom is ahead of their competitors, but now in a global market and focused on providing as much value as we can to businesspeople for their communications through on-demand applications and services. We can say now, after VON, that OIGAA is the first on-demand Unified Communications service that provides just as many large platforms to enterprises, for FREE, over the Internet. The VON FOCUS Newsletter headline this week was: ‘VozTelecom Revolutionizes Business Communications with OIGAA”. Well, at least we try… 

The main concern for initial OIGAA users this week has been Safari (MAC) and Firefox compatibility. Today, soft-phone capability for OIGAAME has been developed using ActiveX technology, and for this reason it is only available in Explorer. You can run OIGAAME in other browsers without voice & video capability using a standard IP phone for calling and use OIGAAME on the desktop as your communication panel. We are now planning an OIGAA roadmap for next year and we will surely take Safari and Firefox into consideration. 

This week SIMO (main TIC industry event in Spain) will happen in Madrid and OIGAA will be there …. 

xavi@oigaa.com

November 1, 2007, Boston. I’m on my way back home. Here at Logan Boston Airport, it’s time to write my second blog entry. To be honest, I’ve been thinking around the content since yesterday, and finally decided to share my VON event experience with the OIGAA community. If you are new to VON, please visit Pulvermedia at www.von.com or Jeff’s Pulver blog at www.pulver.com. Now I’m a blogger too after first two posts ….

After several years promoting the VoIP industry (VON means Voice On The Net), nowadays VoIP is an outdated concept. The fact is, applications are surpassing the VoIP concept. The VoIP industry is gone. Video on the net, Unified Communications or Social Communications are only a few examples of how VoIP technology applies and new industries arise. Before the event, my perspective on VoIP was that it would remain in the telecom industry, but today it’s gone completely beyond telecom. For the first time, VON hosted the Unified Communications (UC) summit. This great idea was an initiative coming from Pulvermedia. VON hosted this with an extensive panel of speakers and topics, where a small pavilion for the participating companies was set-up in the exhibition area of the arena. The UC summit was a great success. If you take a look at the global VON congress schedule, nearly half of the panels and sessions were about unified communications, and attendees showed up en masse. I took part in a couple of interesting panels concerning this, and as soon as I get confirmation from the speakers, I will post their presentations to share with you, with their valuable ideas, concepts and experiences. 

Unified Communications is not a new concept. Take a look, for example, at www.ucstrategies.com, a well-known and recognized site about this. The thing is, until now UC was oriented only at large enterprises owned by large vendors and integrators; it started as CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) applications and gradually evolved into expensive platforms supporting more efficient business communications processes. What has happened now is that Microsoft has entered into the arena. Recently, Microsoft launched its Unified Communications Initiative, with a range of software and solutions for business customers and service providers. Microsoft’s view is very simple for UC, and that is to provide communications just as any other productivity software, such as Word, Excel or Power Point, addressing not only large enterprises but also mid-sized business with Office Communications Server (OCS), for example. I will go in detail about Microsoft UC in following days. 

I want to sincerely thank all new OIGAA customers (a few dozen) who have signed up this week, and my apologies to all those who experienced technical problems or who lacked information on how to use the service. Ignacio, Juanjo and Campus Telecom, we appreciate your patience! We will take your problems and suggestions seriously into consideration. Give us a bit of time; we are just in ‘beta’ mode and there is a lot of work to do before the 1.0 release, and we want to learn from all of you in order to make OIGAA a bestseller. 

Just boarding now, I will come back soon …. 

xavi@oigaa.com

On-demand Business Telephony Revolution Starts Today with OIGAA launch

We have done it. It’s here!! Oigaa (www.oigaa.com) is the first FREE on-demand telephony service for business. It’s FREE as long as communications go through the Internet or between affiliate VoIP providers, and any number of extensions can be supported without charge. Only the software-based Asterisk solution has provided this kind of value in the industry up until now, but OIGAA is on-demand. As it is web-based, no software installation or hardware is needed.

A few days ago, Bill Gates announced that ‘PBX is over’, promoting the new Microsoft OCS for business. What Gates forgot to mention was that companies today do not want to pay for software licenses to be installed. They pay for services, and software as a service (SaS) is what drives customer demands and market growth today; just ask Google.

For the last four years, businesses of all sizes have been studying how to migrate to VoIP, as IP-PBX and software-based solutions are so complex to install and manage, while offering uncertain savings and even hidden costs. Only Skype has penetrated the professional business realm, and claim that 35% of its customer base is comprised of businesspeople. There is no doubt that professionals want to communicate cheaply, more efficiently, easily and of course, with any one, any network and any device.

OIGAA is here to provide business customers with a complete communication service for a group or to completely replace a business telephony system, providing everything a business needs for real-time communications. Not only is telephony offered, but unified communication facilities like availability and instant messaging services, which make an enormous difference.

We at VozTelecom have been in the market since 2003, providing Hosted VoIP applications to service providers of any size around the world. Just in 2006 did we begin to address SMB customers, leading the Spanish market with an IP-Centrex service offer. As innovators in the industry, we have developed key technology and market experience for the last four years, and the result is here today: OIGAA for FREE!

Perhaps the million-dollar question in your mind is: “But how many companies in the world will trust an internet-based service to replace their key business telephony system?”  If you can answer that, you can become a millionaire!

I want to finish my first OIGAA post with a heartfelt acknowledgement of all the VozTelecom people who have made this moment possible; for their energy, passion and commitment to our customers and product innovation.

In this blog, I would like to discuss with other OIGAA users and share thoughts about business telephony, Voice 2.0, Business 2.0, VoIP, unified communications, software as a service, and of course, about their OIGAA experiences in their companies.

October, 30th 2007
Xavier Casajoana
CEO – VozTelecom
xavi@voztele.com