| This week's sponsor is CommScope. |  | Webinar: Backhaul Capacity Planning Solutions
Tuesday, October 23rd, 2 pm ET / 11 am PT Today's wireless market is enjoying explosive growth. As a result, CommScope® has introduced a variety of solutions for expanding backhaul capabilities like Fiber-to-the-Cell (FTTCell) and Microwave Systems. Find out more and register today! |
Today's Top Stories
1. Verizon's new SMB UC offering: Cloudy, with a chance of VoIP
2. U.S. firms flood House panel with calls about suspicious network activity
3. Videoconferencing market moves away from telepresence, toward mobile
4. IM fueling expansion of UCaaS services, says Wainhouse Research
5. Data center numbers decline, but capacity increasing, IDC finds Editor's Corner: IT Expo recap: Small providers could cast a big shadow in UC markets  | Source: iStock | SIP trunking migration: Enterprise opportunities and challenges Responding to developments in the enterprise communications market, more and more companies are migrating to SIP trunking services. In addition to reduced costs, SIP trunking offers enterprises benefits such as centralization of lines, rapid disaster recovery and a resilient unified communications (UC) platform. However, there are a number of challenges, not the least of which is compatibility with legacy systems. Read more  Follow @FierceEntComm on Twitter!
| This week's sponsor is Akamai. |  | Webinar: Mobile Acceleration for the Mobile Revolution
Tuesday, November 13th, 2pm ET / 11am PT A revolution is underway in how companies interact with audiences online. Join us to learn the recent results from Compuware research on mobile performance expectations, unique challenges presented by delivery over cellular networks, and what to consider when balancing mobile performance and usability. Register Today! |
IT Expo recap: Small providers could cast a big shadow in UC markets
 If there was an unofficial theme to last week's ITEXPO in Austin, it was probably "better, faster, cheaper." The phrase was repeated often enough in keynotes and panel sessions that attendees were probably mumbling it in their sleep. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, particularly for the mid-sized providers and small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) on which the conference focused.
Exhibitors at TMCNet's tightly scheduled show focused on optimization techniques across the IP spectrum. Workshops like MPLS University focused on broadband and managed services options for SMBs. And the Expo capped off with its sixth StartupCamp showcase, in which four entrepreneurs "sold" their products in 1-minute pitches to a panel of judges. Continue...  More
Read more about: Unified Communications
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Sponsor: Qualcomm FierceLive! Webinars > Mobile Acceleration for the Mobile Revolution - Tuesday, November 13th, 2pm ET / 11am PT
> The 1000x challenge; Small cells everywhere! - Wednesday, October 17, 12pm ET / 9am PT Marketplace > Research: LTE: a real disruptive technology and business opportunity?
> Whitepaper: Save 30-50% on Telecom Costs ? Free IntelePeer White Paper Shows How
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> EBook: Finding New Gold in Copper
> Whitepaper: Kabel Deutschland Uses Lavastorm Analytics' Flexibility to Optimize Revenue Assurance and Fraud Management Processes
> Whitepaper: Whitepaper: 7 Key Customer Trends Driving Convergent Charging
> The Benefits of Moving from Open Source to WebSphere Application Server: Forrester Research Discusses its New Total Economic Im
> EBook: Looking Beyong 100G
> Shifting Performance Strategies and Solutions for Mobile and Web Experience Jobs > Public Safety DAS Engineer - Houston, TX - Connectivity Wireless Solutions
> Project Manager Job - Middletown, NJ, USA – Yoh
> IT (Telecom) Project Manager Job - Raleigh, NC, USA – Yoh
> Telecom Field Technician Job - Bellevue, WA, USA - Yoh
> Project Administrator II Job - Overland Park, KS, USA – Yoh
> Need a job? Need to hire? Visit FierceWirelessJobs * Post a classified ad: Click here.
* General ad info: Click here | Today's Top News 1. Verizon's new SMB UC offering: Cloudy, with a chance of VoIP
Verizon (NYSE:VZ) is targeting the small and medium-sized business (SMB) communications market with the launch of its cloud-based Virtual Communications Express offering. The platform is designed to provide unified communications (UC) functions to SMBs without the expense of on-site PBX equipment and licensing upgrades. It includes VoIP services integrated with Google Apps, videoconferencing, simultaneous ringing at multiple locations and call forwarding, visual voice mail and traditional PBX features such as enhanced hunt group and call queuing. Verizon explained that companies using Google Apps for Business can download the Virtual Communications Express application from the Google marketplace, which will enable users to make calls from Gmail, GChat and Google Calendar. According to Tom Dalrymple, product management director at Verizon, deployment of Virtual Communications Express takes seven days. Pricing will range between $20 and $35 per user depending on the numbers of users and configuration, not including the phones or the Google Apps subscription, he told InformationWeek. Montage Clothing in Farmingdale, N.Y., participated in a trial deployment of the Virtual Communications Express product. Company owner Nick Graziosi said the platform "has allowed us to deliver a more professional experience to our customers when they call, and has also made it easier to communicate within our office." The Verizon product "appears to include the kind of simplicity for setup and usage that our research shows the market demands in order to embrace hosted voice solutions," commented Matt Davis, director of SMB Telecom Services with IDC in a Verizon release. "Verizon's long-standing experience in engineering telephony services and going to market with them should play an important role in growing this market in the SMB segment," he added. According to IDC research, the worldwide IP PBX and desktop hardware IP phone market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 2.7 percent through 2016. IDC predicts the PBX market will evolve from a hardware-based model to a software-based model. Cloud-based UC offerings, which include VoIP and other UC features only previously available to larger firms, are becoming more attractive for SMBs on a tight IT budget. For more:
- see the Verizon release
- check out IDC's data Related articles:
Verizon's Higgins discusses LTE module pricing, M2M innovations and working with OTT players
Verizon establishes cloud resale agreement with Princeton Hosted Solutions Read more about: Google, Verizon
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| This week's sponsor is Qualcomm. |  | Webinar: The 1000x challenge; Small cells everywhere!
Wednesday, October 17th, 12pm ET / 9am PT To solve the 1000x mobile data challenge, we need more small cells, actually, much more, and everywhere - But, isn't interference a limiting factor? How dense can we deploy them? What are the future enhancements that takes HetNets to the next level? Find out the answers at this Qualcomm webinar. Register Today! |
2. U.S. firms flood House panel with calls about suspicious network activity
U.S. companies that bought telecom equipment from Chinese firms Huawei and ZTE have been flooding the House Intelligence Committee with calls about suspicious network activity following the panel's report criticizing the firms for posing a national security threat. The panel is considering beginning a second phase to its investigation into questionable practices by the Chinese firms, according to an article by Reuters. In a report issued Monday, the House panel accused the firms of inserting backdoors into their network equipment so the Chinese government could steal military and industrial secrets from the West. The report, prepared after a year-long investigation, warned that these companies pose a threat to U.S. critical infrastructure systems and engage in cyber espionage and "predatory disruption" of U.S. networks. The committee urged U.S. network providers and IT systems developers to "seek other vendors" for their projects. "Based on available classified and unclassified information, Huawei and ZTE cannot be trusted to be free of foreign state influence and thus pose a security threat to the United States and to our systems," the report warned. The committee criticized executives from the companies for giving incomplete, contradictory and evasive responses to the committee's questions during a hearing last month. Both companies, which are actively seeking to expand in the U.S. market, deny the committee's charges. The Chinese government weighed in, saying that the committee's recommendations, if implemented, would jeopardize U.S.-Chinese economic relations. The state-run Xinhua News Agency accused the House panel members of suffering from a "Cold War mentality as well as protectionism." Shen Danyang, an official with China's Commerce Department, said the report is "based on subjective speculation and false foundations," the Washington Post reported. Some Chinese telecom analysts are accusing Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO), the main U.S. competitor in network equipment to Huawei and ZTE, of being behind the congressional probe. "Given that Cisco as a U.S. company may benefit most from the exclusion of Huawei and ZTE equipment from the U.S. market, it is very likely that Cisco has motives to play a role in advancing the investigation," telecom analyst Xiang Ligang was quoted by China.org.cn as saying. For its part, Cisco has decided to end its sales partnership with ZTE over allegations that the Chinese firm sold Cisco networking gear to Iran, Reuters is reporting. Given the limited number of competitors in the networking space, preventing the Chinese firms from playing in the U.S. market could force prices for enterprise communications equipment up in the United States. The remaining major competitors--Cisco, Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU), Nortel and Siemens (NYSE: SI)--would likely benefit. For more:
- read the House panel's report
- check out the Chinese responses Related articles:
Clearwire, Leap downplay Huawei's role in their networks following security report
Will the U.S. House Intelligence Committee report on Huawei and ZTE make it impossible for them to do business in the U.S.?
China's Huawei throws down telepresence gear gauntlet to Cisco Read more about: Cisco, Huawei
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3. Videoconferencing market moves away from telepresence, toward mobile
The videoconferencing market is moving away from expensive telepresence systems and toward mobile applications, judged Andrew Davis, senior partner of Wainhouse Research, at the firm's CSP Summit in Boston on Tuesday. Davis told an audience that mobile applications would soon outpace other videoconferencing offerings such as telepresence and room-based systems. In fact, demand for telepresence systems is expected to decline sharply in the coming years as the market for these systems becomes saturated with options. Davis noted that information workers are only in their office on average less than one-quarter of the time. Enterprise will need to support anywhere, anytime connectivity, including videoconferencing capabilities, to meet the requirements of those workers. "Videoconferencing is entering the mainstream of enterprise use at the personal [mobile] level, not at the telepresence or room-based system level," he said. Davis stressed that the younger workers are demanding these types of mobile applications, so enterprises need to offer them in order to attract and retain tech-savvy younger workers. Reflecting the growing enterprise mobility trend, videoconferencing leader Polycom (NASDAQ: PLCM) this week launched a mobile videoconferencing application that runs on iPads and Android tablets. Polycom's RealPresence Mobile enables videoconferencing on tablets, allowing mobile workers to participate in videoconferencing no matter where they are. Polycom is offering the application, which can connect up to 16 calls at once, for free in the Apple App Store and the Google Play app market. A number of videoconferencing competitors, such as Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) and Vidyo, already offer mobile videoconferencing applications. Davis observed that the videoconferencing industry faces a number of challenges, with interoperability topping that list. "It is a great disappointment to me that the standards we have are five, 10, even 15 years old, and we still have interoperability problems," he told the summit participants. Perhaps sensing the market's frustration, Polycom also launched this week its RealPresence CloudAXIS Suite, which enables interoperability among different videoconferencing vendors' systems. The videoconferencing firm said the suite enables enterprises to extend videoconferencing to users of Skype, Facebook, Google Talk and other vendors' applications through a browser. Polycom also announced it was adopting an open video protocol called scalable video coding (SVC), which is mainly associated with videoconferencing startup Vidyo. This is expected to lower the costs of meetings that involve a large number of users, according to Ira Weinstein, a senior analyst and partner with Wainhouse Research. He estimated that SVC could push costs down from as high as $15,000 per connection to below $1,000 per connection. Not to be outdone on the video coding front, Vidyo announced that it is teaming with Samsung to submit a proposal for scalable extensions of the next-generation code, known as the high efficiency video coding (HEVC) protocol. The HEVC protocol is expected to cut in half the bit-rate required to deliver video of the same quality as the SVC protocol, according to the Vidyo announcement. This should should improve the protocol's performance of video communication over the Internet and wireless networks. For more:
- see the CNET story about Polycom's mobile application
- check out the Polycom RealPresence CloudAxis announcement and SVC release
- read the Vidyo HEVC protocol release Related Articles
Videoconferencing and telepresence markets take revenue it, finds firm
Firms turn to desktop videoconferencing to improve virtual meetings Read more about: vidyo, Cisco
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4. IM fueling expansion of UCaaS services, says Wainhouse Research
Demand for instant messaging (IM) is fueling the expansion of the unified communications as a service (UCaaS) market, also known as cloud-based UC, according to Bill Haskins, senior analyst at Wainhouse Research. Haskins noted that the types of services being offered through UCaaS include instant messaging, video-, audio- and webconferencing, unified messaging, VoIP, mobile client and contact center. The UCaaS market has been pushed by the demand for IM, which is now used by 82 percent of enterprises, according to Wainhouse data. "This is important in the UC discussion because it gives providers a foundation, a client to access other UC services. It starts there," Haskins told an audience at the firm's CSP Summit in Boston on Tuesday. Haskins said the 2011 UCaaS market generated $820 million in revenue through 6.1 million licenses. He predicted there would be 34 percent growth in licenses and 47 percent growth in revenue by 2015. Frost & Sullivan has a higher projection, estimating the UCaaS market will total $1.9 billion this year. "There is a palatable swing in the enterprise conversation today with mid-sized to large enterprises beginning to embrace these cloud services, to really put their money in the cloud. There is a war being waged between the CIO [chief information officer] and CFO [chief financial officer], with the CFO winning out more often than not," Haskins told the audience. In its 2012 Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications report, Gartner identified Avaya, Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO), Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and Siemens Enterprise Communications (NYSE: SI) as market leaders. In the UCaaS market, Haskins predicts Cisco and Microsoft will become the dominant players. For more:
- see Wainhouse Research site Related articles:
Gartner names Avaya, Cisco, Microsoft and Siemens as 2012 UC market leaders
Spotlight: UCaaS market to reach $1.9 billion in 2012 Read more about: Cisco, IM
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5. Data center numbers decline, but capacity increasing, IDC finds
As a result of recent technological developments, a major shift is taking place in the enterprise communications industry around data centers and IT asset deployment--the number of data centers its declining, but their size is increasing. These developments include the explosion in the number of applications and devices used to communicate in the enterprise, the digitization of large amounts of unstructured data and the enterprise's need to collect, store and analyze this information in detail, according to IDC's U.S. Datacenter 2012-2016 report. IDC predicts the total number of U.S. data centers will drop from 2.94 million this year to 2.89 million by 2016. This decline will be concentrated in internal server rooms and closets, with a small decline in mid-sized local datacenters. At the same time, total data center space will increase significantly, growing from 611.4 million square feet this year to more than 700 million square feet in 2016. IDC expects service providers will account for more than a quarter of all large U.S. data center capacity by 2016. Data center consolidation began in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis, explained IDC. In 2009, the total number of data centers declined for the first time as a result of the closing of many remote locations with server closets and rooms. At the same time, data center capacity grew by more than 1 percent, reflecting the enterprise's need to handle more data with fewer data centers. To consolidate server assets, companies turned to virtualization, the IDC report observed. Virtualization and server consolidation drove declines in physical data center size and eliminated the need for numerous smaller data centers as applications were moved to larger central data centers. While virtualization has reduced the growth rate in server deployments, the creation, organization and distribution of files and rich content have fueled an increase in storage deployments, according to IDC. One of the key characteristics of the content explosion is data centralization, driven by performance, compliance and scale requirements. As a result, midsize and large data centers are the main segments where the content explosion is having a major impact. Another factor shaping the datacenter dynamic has been the shift toward a cloud model for application, platform and infrastructure delivery. Here, the focus is on extending the value and scale of virtualization by boosting operational efficiency and improving IT agility, IDC noted. IDC predicts all of these forces will drive a slow but steady decline in the number and size of smaller internal datacenters, while large internal data centers will grow at a slower rate than very large data centers operated by service providers. For more:
- check out IDC's data Related articles:
Server market doldrums could lessen for vendors targeting growing segments
VMware buys Nicira, aims for software-defined datacenter Read more about: IDC, cloud computing
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> Mobile Acceleration for the Mobile Revolution - Tuesday, November 13th, 2pm ET / 11am PT A revolution is underway in how companies interact with audiences online. Join us to learn the recent results from Compuware research on mobile performance expectations, unique challenges presented by delivery over cellular networks, and what to consider when balancing mobile performance and usability. Register Today! > The 1000x challenge; Small cells everywhere! - Wednesday, October 17, 12pm ET / 9am PT To solve the 1000x mobile data challenge, we need more small cells, actually, much more, and everywhere - But, isn't interference a limiting factor? How dense can we deploy them? What are the future enhancements that takes HetNets to the next level? Find out the answers at this Qualcomm webinar. Register Today!
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