Inside DiVitas

FMC Travel Recap: Interop New York

By Vivek Khuller

I traveled recently for several months, solidly. I expect to be on the road a lot this year as well, but in the meantime, I’m giving a recap of my recent journeys to London, Lisbon and New York.

Jenni and I went to New York to spend some time at Interop. Although we did not have a booth at this show (we had one in Las Vegas 2007), we attended the show because, in part, I was invited to sit on an FMC panel. While on this panel, the key message I put forth was how carriers can benefit from our solution.

There is a major incentive for carriers to embrace mobile convergence. What is the first thing an enterprise will do once it adopts mobile convergence? It will buy data plans for all of its end users. This translates to a lot of money going straight into carrier pockets. It also gives carriers the opportunity to lock in their customers for a longer period of time, with no threat of losing their business when plans expire. Who wants to go back to a more expensive solution? Deploying a mobile unified convergence system takes the burden off of renewing cell phone plans and enables more architectural wins. What’s not to love about that?

Mobile-convergence technology has arrived. What we need now is for dual-mode phones to catch up and let us finish the job. Dual-mode phone users expect an experience equal to what they get with their personal cell phones today. Given the upside to being a mobile-convergence proponent, carriers should encourage handset manufacturers to innovate in technology areas such as improving battery life and WiFi performance.

Mobile convergence is a win-win for DiVitas and carriers. Hopefully carriers will see the light very soon.

Stay tuned for my next travels and my reflections on DiVitas and our market.

DiVitas reveals Mobile Unified Communications (Mobile UC) on InteropNet 2007

High-Tech Zoo, Interop Las Vegas ‘07

by DiVitas Chief Blogger

Have you ever been to the zoo and observed one of those “native habitats”? The kind where animals casually go about their business, like this is really the Kalaharai Desert and yah, we lions just downed this piece of sirloin steak we’re devouring. Roar.

Interop has an exhibit like that, except there’re techies, not lions, on display. And they’re ripping into code, not flesh. It’s called InteropNet.

Shoved neatly into the far left corner of this year’s Interop tradeshow floor was the usual inconspicuous cluster of equipment, cables, tables and hunched-over techies working on laptops. This is the InteropNet NOC. All of the action was behind a glass ‘look-but-don’t-touch’ barrier -- the equipment as well as the volunteers and vendors who keep the multi-vendor network humming.

InteropNet has been around for about 20 years and is comprised of equipment offered by about 25 different vendors. Everything is cobbled together with great care and expertise for what Interop refers to as “the ultimate networking challenge" – creating the InteropNet.

Eager, hand-selected volunteers and vendors appear each year (note: there is an application process) with a goal of demonstrating leading-edge, unprecedented interoperability.

Participating vendors each supply InteropNet with a key component required to craft the demo network. Among this year’s vendors were WLAN vendor Xirrus providing the network’s WiFi, Network General and cPacket providing network monitoring and management, Juniper providing security, Extreme providing core switching/routing and Gigamon providing the data access switch for aggregating and distributing traffic. Each piece of equipment used in this year’s Las Vegas InteropNet can be viewed via the InteropNet tour link.

For our part, the DiVitas MMC solution provided the mobility component for the VoIP/SIP-based Voice Services Group, which also included Avaya, Qwest and Spectralink.

Unified Communications needs a mobility component to have meaning

by Vivek Khuller

I recently participated in a panel at Interop Las Vegas ’07, Unified Communications: What’s Available Now? For my fellow panelists, the topic must have, at first blush, appeared pretty straight-forward. Just put together some slides about your company’s plans for delivering new UC opportunities, and go!  For me, the panel experience would be different. It was an opportunity to highlight the fact that any Unified Communications story has little meaning if it lacks a mobility component. 

With the sale of laptops exceeding that of desktops, mobile phone penetration exceeding 100% in some countries, and more than 50% of companies adopting WLAN technology, there is increasing probability that a worker is away from his/her desk.

UC has been top of mind for at least a year now, ever since vendors began making a big deal about it at Spring VoiceCon ‘06. The idea behind UC is to increase collaboration, and thus your productivity, by broadcasting your availability and best methods of reachability (deskphone, softphone, cell phone, IM, email, etc.) at any given moment, on any given business day.

But to really work, UC needs to incorporate a mobile solution that allows people to use it wherever they are.

The issues then become: Where are people likely to roam, what devices are they likely to be carrying, and would the mobile solution be worth the cost or the incremental burden on corporate IT? To address these issues properly, any UC solution must work seamlessly in WiFi and cellular networks. This means working with as many different types of handsets possible, supporting the various applications people need while on-the-go and providing IT with maximum control of the mobile-communications infrastructure. Last, but not least, the UC solution must be economical.

DiVitas Mobile Unified Communications (Mobile UC) solution is one of the best options available to date to meet the above requirements. The solution facilitates total unified communications given DiVitas Mobile UC's flexibility (supports multiple networks), agility (able to roam seamlessly among disparate networks) and support for a wide range of enterprise applications (email, IM, PBX deskphone functions, CRM, etc.).

Also, Mobile UC takes control of a company’s mobile-communications infrastructure away from carriers. This solution puts management of mobile security, policy, and compliance in the hands of IT administrators. In contrast, a carrier-centric FMC solution keeps that control in the hands of service providers.

Unified Communications without a mobile component begs the question, “If your desktop phone rings, but you’re not in your office to answer it, did it really ring?”

Seamless roaming has finally moved from legend to reality

by Rich Watson

One of the most prestigious testing magazines, InfoWorld, recently ran a review of our solution. By most accounts, the best part of the write-up would be the glowing praises. But secretly, my favorite part was being compared to Sasquatch – the mysterious, gigantic, furry, forest-dwelling creature that has yet to be confirmed as truth or legend.

As a writer, I found this reference to be a clever metaphor for describing a product like ours – one part elusive, one part shockingly real. The DiVitas MMC solution delivers something that, like Sasquatch, has been talked about as a possibility ever since cell phones became something that everyone owns, even my grandmother.

Cellular addiction has led to a lot of greedy, wishful thinking like, “I love my cell phone, but it’s really expensive. Wouldn’t it be cool to roam between WiFi and cellular?” Thoughts like that evolved into, “So, do you think anybody will ever make a dual-mode solution?” And those thoughts eventually led to Sasquatch-esque questions like, “I hear dual-mode is out there, is it true? Does it work?”

Now, this InfoWorld article came out just before Interop and needless to say, piqued a lot of interest. And of course being an actual end user, my thoughts were, “Ha, the sighting has been confirmed and now the world knows we’re real!” The point being that tens of thousands of people read InfoWorld, and that’s a few too many to fit into the demo room all at once! Yes, that was very satisfying and it was a nice way to start Interop.

So this is where it gets more interesting. People don’t always believe what they see or read. No big surprise, considering the countless fake Sasquatch sightings, and the fake videos that have circulated over the years. Therefore, what was really entertaining was the parade of competitors that stopped by our booth to see a demo of our solution. One competitor actually insisted that our solution was all promise (is that an assumption based on the fact that his solution is still in development and isn’t yet real?), and then visibly dropped his jaw open when he saw the seamless roaming in action.

Honestly, from the look on his face, you’d think he’d just had his first Sasquatch sighting.