Inside DiVitas

No Blackberry-like outages for DiVitas users

By DiVitas Chief Blogger

One key benefit with the DiVitas solution is that the mobile-communications infrastructure is under enterprise control. This doesn’t just mean companies maintain their own control over phone usage (call costs) and policy compliance. It means DiVitas users need not worry about getting hit by a major outage caused by, and fixed by, a third-party. This was the case earlier this month when RIM’s Blackberry users lost service for three hours.

According to a NetworkWorld article, RIM blamed upgrades to its security infrastructure as the cause of a service outage for its BlackBerry devices. About a week later, Blackberry users were out of luck (and service) again when another outage occurred.

This type of outage happened because RIM has a single point of failure, and it failed. Enterprises have BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) resident in their networks and it hot-links back to the RIM Network Operations Center (NOC). When RIM’s NOC failed, Blackberry users found themselves without email service.

This kind of outage won’t happen to DiVitas users because the DiVitas architecture puts control in the hands of the enterprise. The risk of outage is on company-by-company basis, and therefore it is much lower.

Also, if there is an outage, it’s not an all-or-nothing scenario. Let’s say a DiVitas user’s network center goes down and the company loses DiVitas server functionality or WiFi access. Users still have the cellular component of their phones to rely on. Of course all of the DiVitas features, such as Caller ID, presence, and IM won’t be available. But then again users won’t be instantly and totally cut off from all communication. They can still make calls and use email via the cellular network. In such scenarios, inbound calls from the PBX will be routed to voicemail and can be picked up over the cellular network.

For a DiVitas user to lose email access, the company’s email server would have to go down. The email server is a second point of failure, and the chances that the network center and the email server will simultaneously fail are pretty low.

From a reliability standpoint, having control over your own communications infrastructure is a far better choice than depending on a third-party.

Carriers Need to Wake up and Smell the FMC Money

By DiVitas Chief Blogger

A few weeks ago I was surfing the Web and came across an amazingly bizarre article about how a Sprint customer passed away right around Christmas. This guy’s Sprint phone was bought at a subsidized price, and thus came with the typical two-year service contract, which Sprint insisted was still current and refused to terminate.

Given the man’s unexpected death came a just few days before Christmas, you can imagine how devastated his family must have been over his sudden death (he had adult children handling the debacle with Sprint).

Now imagine how his family reacted to the response from Sprint: sorry dude, a contract is a contract and you can’t get out of it, even if you’ve permanently stop breathing.

Reading about this family’s struggle with Sprint over the staggeringly petty issue of canceling a single consumer’s contract really struck home to me – The carriers just don’t get it. Instead of embracing the mobile-convergence market, the carriers are actually ignoring a huge opportunity in this fast-growing space. They are showing how rigid they are by sticking their heads in the sand, ignoring not only customer service but the opportunity to grow with this emerging market.

Carriers today view mobile-convergence as a threat, as something that will cause their customers to spend less money on cell minutes. What they fail to realize is that while the consumer segment is near saturation, the pool of potential business-cell minutes are practically untouched.

Even if a mobile-convergence user replaces some cell minutes with free WiFi minutes, carriers also – really – need to realize there is a large emerging business opportunity. An enterprise will buy data plans for its mobile workers once it adopts a mobile Unified Communications solution that includes a Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) component;a data plan is required for email, Instant Messaging and Presence.

Cha-ching! See? Mobile-convergence users will actually spend more money on carrier services in the long run.

Ironically, for all of the fuss, there’s really no great sacrifice or effort for carriers when it comes to getting behind the mobile-convergence movement. It basically means they need to encourage handset manufacturers to offer a wider variety of dual-mode handsets models. And they need to encourage manufacturers to innovate in technology areas such as improving battery life and WiFi performance, on devices that have been built so far.

It also means unlocking phones so that they are not tied to your proprietary cellular network.

On this matter, it seems that Verizon is one carrier that started to see the light. In November, the company announced this year it would open its network to “any apps, any device.” I say bully for you!

According to The New York Times, which printed an article on the Verizon announcement, “…Verizon will offer two flavors of service: its traditional bundle, which typically includes a subsidy for phone purchase and various other features, and a “bring your own” device service, which will be open to any device that meets “minimum technical standards.”

Verizon has not yet 100 percent crystallized details of these plans for public consumption, and there may be a downside for using a non-Verizon certified phone. Nonetheless, it’s a step that should help spur a very positive trend among carriers. If this is the beginning of a trend, this is good news for companies like DiVitas and, moreover, our users. This is because we should see more innovation in the area of dual-mode handsets.

And under this unlocked scenario, a family of Verizon users wouldn’t necessarily get stuck paying for a 2-year contract in the event of sudden personal catastrophe.

Frankly speaking, carries should just stop haggling for one minute over a few measly bucks, and instead put their energy into the mobile-convergence movement for business. They just might find themselves with some great money-making opportunities.

I think it’s called keeping “your eye on the enterprise prize.”

So when did being proprietary become cool?

By DiVitas Chief Blogger

I just read an interesting NetworkWorld article by Joanie Wexler that talked about Avaya’s new software solution for enabling mobile convergence. In explaining the technology and Avaya’s product positioning, the article quoted an Avaya official as saying, “… the system is not intended to be PBX-agnostic.”

That quote made me chuckle a little bit and definitely gave me cause-for-pause. After all, I work for a mobile-convergence company (and we often get lumped into the same market space as Avaya) with a mantra of being agnostic to every-and-all components of the mobile communications infrastructure: PBX, handset, WLAN, carrier network, channel partners and strategic partners, etc.

In fact, when you think about it, boasting about not being PBX-agnostic these days seems as politically incorrect as say, “Hey, check out the great deal I just got on a cool pair of Siberian-Tiger pants.”

While I understand that for Avaya, mobile-convergence is only a single component of a larger mobile solution, and selling the entire solution is the end-goal, somehow its product’s “non-agnostic-icity” just doesn’t seem to be the coolest thing to be showcasing. Not in today’s “down with proprietary” world.

Also worth mentioning was NetworkWorld’s laundry list of like-vendors playing in the same space. It’s amazing how grown up the mobile-convergence market has become in such the short space of time since DiVitas began shipping our product (one year ago).

But while these product solutions may appear similar in their mobile-convergence technology, there are a lot of ways to slice-and-dice this group, and in particular, it should be noted that there’s still a whole lot vaporware disguised as shipping product out there.

The list of mobile-convergence vendors who can today invite you to “kick the tires” is, in fact, a much more elite group.