I have just returned from an Analyst Event hosted by Alcatel-Lucent’s (ALU) Application Software Group – now comprising its enterprise applications development and sales team and the Genesys portfolio and organization. Besides being a highly entertaining event at a fabulous locale (Rosewood Sand Hill Hotel in Menlo Park), this gathering also provided analysts with a good perspective on ALU’s strategy for the UC and contact center spaces. ALU demonstrated its determination and ability to continue to lead in the communications markets with innovation, openness and strong financials.
The following are some of the takeaways from the event.
Transformation: For some time now, ALU has been sharing its vision for a necessary transformation in the enterprise, involving various technology and organizational changes. One of the aspects of this transformation process is the merger of enterprise and contact center technologies and business processes. With the merger of its enterprise and contact center teams into the ASG structure ALU is setting itself up for more targeted transformational product development and marketing. This organizational structure is unique (to my knowledge) and could enable ALU to more effectively develop and promote innovative capabilities creating new opportunities and expanding its addressable market.
For a long time, ALU has sought to leverage Genesys’ contact center success into the more general enterprise space, but has not been able to implement a powerful and coherent strategy to complement its vision. With the merger of the two teams and the prospects of cross-selling and up-selling customers across the enterprise and contact center markets, ALU may be on a path to finally bring its vision to fruition. Moreover, it may be able to set a trend in the communications market that will drive a transformation of vendor organizations leading to an accelerated convergence of enterprise and contact center infrastructures and decision making processes among customer organizations.
Some of the specific objectives pursued through its Transformation strategy include:
- Delivering expanded solution offerings
- Presenting one face to the customer
- Leveraging a wider choice of models
Some of the specific steps in the merging of the two silos involve the extension of presence and UC into the contact center and the ability for customer service interactions to extend into the enterprise pool of experts. This notion is not entirely unique to ALU, but all vendors are at the initial stages of developing the technologies and strategies to implement this vision. If ALU is successful in leveraging its new organizational structure to more efficiently market these new capabilities, it may be able to develop a sustainable competitive advantage as “the walls of the contact center start coming down” (as prophesied by ALU’s executives).
Application Enablement: Another message that ALU has consistently tried to convey to its customers and partners over the past couple of years is that of its application enablement efforts and capabilities. Application enablement has become a key element in communications vendor strategies as they look to integrate with other vendors’ applications in order to deliver greater value to their end users.
I need to take a step back before I discuss ALU’s application enablement strategy further. One of ALU’s perceived competitive advantages is the combination of carrier and enterprise product and service organizations. Since FMC has demonstrated little success to date and these continue to be two very distinct silos, I have wondered whether there were any true synergies between the two groups within ALU. As ALU revealed its vision for application enablement, it started to become more apparent about how the carrier and enterprise/contact center groups could leverage each other’s capabilities for greater success.
Here is how ALU defined its vision for application enablement bringing the carrier and enterprise application worlds together: “Consistent, Controlled, Open Access to Network Enablers in the Cloud”. For example, ALU’s idea of application enablement involves the integration of carrier applications with enterprise/contact center ones to enable capabilities such as enhanced caller profile (with presence, location, preferences from subscriber data, etc.) that can prompt an appropriate action by the respective business or organization – e.g. marketing and customer assistance at the right time and place. It also brings the mobile and enterprise experiences together by enabling mobile users to collaborate using multi-media capabilities on mobile devices. Overall, application enablement allows business users to participate in contextually rich, presence- and location-enhanced communications and collaboration.
ALU is working with partners to develop new applications and capabilities. It claims over 200 applications and about 10,000 developers in its Alliance and Application Partner Program.
Further, ALU’s vision for the convergence of the carrier and enterprise worlds is based on the anticipated growth in demand for hosted/cloud-based communications. It is readying its portfolio and service resources for a variety of scenarios – from fully premises-based to hybrid to fully hosted ones.
Main Technological and Strategic Tenets and Success Factors
ALU is looking to leverage a set of capabilities that can set it apart from other communications vendors. What end users and partners should take into consideration when evaluating ALU as a potential vendor or partner, include the following:
- It boasts some of the most open technologies in the marketplace, both on the enterprise and Genesys sides. It can deliver advanced communications and collaboration capabilities in a multi-vendor telephony environment. It is set on a technological evolution path leading to increasingly more open, software-centric solutions based on SIP. These capabilities make ALU a viable option for existing Nortel customers wishing to avoid a drastic rip-and-replace scenario, but looking to overlay some advanced capabilities on top of existing platforms or to prepare themselves for a transition to a new infrastructure in the future. Further, the openness and modularity of ALU’s technologies counter-position it against Cisco and its over-arching strategy of locking customers into an end-to-end Cisco architecture.
- In the UC market, Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) has positioned itself for competition both as a one-stop shop for a broad range of UC applications and a voice communication partner to the IM/presence vendors such as Microsoft and IBM. It provides the My Instant Communicator (MyIC) application (supported on its My Teamwork multimedia platform) that integrates telephony and online presence and can perform multiple functions. It can act as an IM client and a softphone interface to ALU’s voice communication and conferencing platforms; it can also invoke other IM clients such as IBM’s Sametime or Microsoft’s Office Communicator. ALU’s UC solution is modular and flexible allowing customers to deploy only the capabilities and respective servers (telephony, presence, conferencing, etc.) that they require with the ability to add applications and integrate them into the UC environment in the future. This architecture makes ALU a viable option for businesses with multi-vendor communication environments looking to deploy advanced conferencing and UC capabilities without replacing existing call control platforms.
- Further, ALU’s application enablement strategy and respective capabilities are likely to provide it with a competitive edge going forward as businesses look to integrate UC with mobile applications, contact center technologies, business processes and various Web 2.0 applications. Business decision makers will need to start evaluating communication technologies as a strategic investment in improving business processes and will, therefore, need to require their vendors to demonstrate an ability to integrate with other, existing or planned platforms and applications. ALU’s application enablement capabilities should be taken into consideration when selecting a communications vendor.
- With its carrier technologies and existing relationships, ALU is well positioned to drive carrier and enterprise convergence delivering similar or coherent applications across the two silos. In some scenarios, businesses may be able to derive significant benefits from hybrid cloud and premises-based communications infrastructure solutions. ALU will be well positioned to deliver both capabilities in a tightly integrated fashion.
- ALU executives stated that they intend to create new market opportunities and expand ALU’s addressable market. I believe they have a powerful vision and their success will depend entirely on their ability to execute. For that purpose, organizational structure and business practices related to the convergence of enterprise and contact center, carrier and enterprise groups, will need to be tightened. Greater focus on solution selling and customized transformational engagements with business customers will be key to success. Last, but not least, financial performance will need to improve in order to provide the company with greater resources to fulfill its vision.
Avaya-Nortel: SIP Architecture Becomes Foundation for New Product Roadmap
As I listened to Avaya’s new roadmap announcement on January 19th and wondered if they made all the right decisions, I couldn’t help thinking about the complexity of an M&A process and its implications for everyone involved. This article is not about the specific product choices Avaya made, although I thought they did a good job taking multiple factors into consideration including product features and capabilities, customer and partner investment protection concerns, and vision for the evolution of the total portfolio and architecture. Extending the life of most Nortel products for another 18 to 30 months and continued support for Nortel’s more advanced and unique products such as Nortel’s AS5300 were good calls. I was surprised to see so many end users inquire about the fate of the Call Pilot and I am glad Avaya had some good news for these customers. I also thought Avaya’s decision to keep and evolve ACE was the right one as I believe ACE and application enablement will be key for its competitive positioning going forward.
It is only natural that Avaya intends to eventually merge and integrate all products and solutions into the Aura architecture. Aura is a technological framework (and not just packaging or a marketing term) based on SIP and SOA, and it makes sense for Avaya to look to integrate its now extended product line into the same vision or framework. It will be critical for Avaya to continue evolving this framework with an eye on new technological developments and customer and partner needs.
Application Enablement and Openness Drive New Competitive Dynamics
I think we should, however, look at the Avaya-Nortel acquisition from another angle as well. It provides an example of portfolio integration challenges and possibilities in the context of current technology trends towards greater openness and interoperability.
The shift to open standards, SIP and SOA is now making such acquisitions less painful than they used to be in the past – for the merging vendors, the channel partners, and their business customers. It will take Avaya less time and effort to integrate the best-of-breed applications of both vendors into its Aura framework because of the greater openness and interoperability of both vendors’ advanced communications solutions. Customers can more cost-efficiently mix and match platforms and aplications, not only from these two vendors, but from other vendors as well, since communications are becoming more software-centric and standards-based. Overall, today, customer investments are better protected and less vulnerable in case of abrupt changes in competitive dynamics.
In Avaya’s case, SIP, Aura and ACE will play key roles in delivering a more flexible and cost-effective migration path to its customers. Other vendors have their own next-generation architectures and application enablement environments that allow them to integrate with competitors’ platforms and applications. The capabilities of each vendor’s application enablement technologies vary from a more limited set designed to integrate communications with messaging and presence platforms (e.g. Avaya’s AES) to a broad range of capabilities including integrations with messaging, presence, business process, Web 2.0, mobile, and contact center applications, TV and video broadcasting, etc (e.g. Nortel’s ACE).
As unified communications become further integrated with digital content, business process applications and other, non-communication technologies enabling “contextually-rich communications” and “communications-enabled business processes (CEBP)”, vendors will need to open their solutions and create tools for customers, partners or their professional services arms to develop custom solutions addressing specific customer needs. Such tools and application enablement environments can be made available to large communities in the cloud so that multiple parties can contribute to the process of creating new applications and mashups. Some of these new mashed-up applications that can be deployed out of the box can eventually become productized to provide a more cost-efficient alternative to SMBs and a new revenue stream for vendors.
Application enablement capabilities will be key for all communications vendors going forward, but they will be even more critical for vendors providing best-of-breed solutions designed to operate in multi-vendor environments.
Of course, vendors have a long way to go before standards become truly open and customers can seamlessly, quickly and easily integrate multi-vendor applications. SIP, though touted as the communications standard of the future, in its pure form offers only a limited set of features. Entirely or partially proprietary solutions still offer better features and capabilities than most open-standard ones. Therefore, although most vendors claim SIP support, the different versions of SIP used along with the proprietary enhancements are not entirely interoperable.
Most likely, the cloud and cloud-based communications will help push further the frontiers of openness and interoperability. Instead of connecting multi-vendor applications and platforms individually at each customer’s premises, vendors can integrate more economically and on a larger scale in the cloud, delivering choice and flexibility to their customers unmatched in the premises-based world. In the beginning, many of these cloud-based services will be simple and will only offer some lowest common-denominator capabilities, but will enable some integrations out of the box, sparing customers the hassle and the cost of complex integration processes taking place in premises-based installations.
Partnerships, Alliances and M&A in a More Open Communications World
Customer demand for application integration will drive vendor efforts towards greater interoperability and co-opetition. Improving standardization and openness in communications technologies, in turn, will enable vendors to more easily engage in partnerships and alliances in order to deliver greater value to their customers.
There are multiple reasons why companies wish to merge. Most often, they are looking for new revenues streams, but also – for opportunities to more tightly integrate their technologies and deliver a one-stop shop value proposition to customers. Will more open architectures reduce the appeal of complex M&A processes in favor of partnerships and alliances? Should we expect further market concentration or the proliferation of more innovative and nimble market participants providing business customers with a wide array of options?
Power in the top tier has become concentrated, but the SMB market remains quite fragmented. While it will become less appealing to go through an M&A for the purposes of ensuring technology integration, it will also become less challenging to integrate portfolios in case of an M&A. M&A will likely take place for the purposes of acquiring installed bases, skill sets and business models (e.g. professional/managed services), simply eliminating a competitor, or for geographic expansion. I believe both trends (consolidation and fragmentation) will persist, but the drivers behind vendors’ business model decisions will change. What do you think?
Written by Elka Popova - Visit Website
Most small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), of 500 employees or less, are just emerging from the turbulent waters of the 2008-2009 recession. Many of them have never been able to afford advanced communication solutions, but over the past year, they put all IT and communications spending on hold. With the first signs of economic recovery, these SMBs will start evaluating growth opportunities and looking for tools, including communications infrastructure and applications that can help them enhance their competitive advantage. Most likely, many SMB executives have heard about Unified Communications by now, but more likely than not, are still confused about what exactly it means and are even at a greater loss when it comes to figuring out whether they need it and how it can help them accomplish their goals.
That is why I decided to put some thoughts together hoping to help these SMB decision makers in the process of evaluating UC solutions going forward. By no means is this a comprehensive analysis of the UC market and all the solutions available today; rather, it is a brief overview of most feasible options.
1. Defining UC and Identifying its Benefits to the SMB
What is UC and does it offer any value to SMBs? Though definitions vary, UC is defined by most (including myself) as an integrated set of voice, data and video applications such as: telephony, instant messaging, voice/unified messaging, audio, web and videoconferencing, email, collaboration, mobility, etc. The key components, however, are the integrated (telephony and PC/online) presence and a unified client that allows users to click to communicate in various modes.
Application integration with presence capabilities and a unified client helps users communicate and collaborate more effectively. For a small business, however, the benefits are somewhat different from those UC presents to large, geographically dispersed organizations. The benefits to the latter have been widely discussed, so I will just reiterate a few: more cost-efficient conferencing (i.e. premises-based apps vs hosted services) helps virtual teams stay in touch, while reducing travel costs; video adds a new dimension to business communications; mobile and laptop soft clients reduce mobile communication costs and improve employee accessibility and efficiency.
The same benefits certainly apply to SMBs as well, however, the greatest value of UC for this segment lies in its ability to help users multi-task more efficiently. In a small business, most employees wear multiple hats (e.g. HR+accounting; business development+marketing+PR, etc.) and they need access to their business communications capabilities anywhere, anytime. The same UC features – mobility, presence, ability to switch communication modes (e.g. from IM to voice calls, etc.) – allow SMB employees to more easily move from one task to another, and from one role to another.
Another key benefit of UC for SMBs lies in its ability to improve customer service and brand reputation. Integrated auto attendant, IVR or basic ACD capabilities could enable a very small business that cannot afford an extensive contact center infrastructure to provide better customer service and also appear much more professional in its interactions with clients. Similarly, presence, mobility and various integrated collaboration tools can extend this business’s customer reach and improve lead generation as well as closing rates.
2. Needs Assessment
A key consideration for a small business, or any organization for that matter, is whether it truly requires all of the capabilities in a UC suite or it would derive significant value from just a couple of advanced communications applications. Depending on what the business’ current infrastructure is and what specific benefits executives are looking to accomplish, there may not be a need for a full-fledged UC environment. Maybe a simple IP telephony platform with a soft client and mobile extensions can help reduce communication costs and improve productivity at the same time. Alternatively, one of the more advanced IM/presence platforms with audio and web conferencing (maybe also video) capabilities can improve internal collaboration as well as external communications.
The first step in this process is, therefore, a careful evaluation of existing assets – age and residual value of the telephony platform and endpoints or remaining duration of a hosted services contract; availability of any IM capabilities, current use of conferencing solutions (applications or services), etc. Then pain points and areas of potential improvement need to be identified – e.g. high mobile costs due to frequent travel, high PBX maintenance costs, etc. Based on the findings from this process, decision makers can move onto evaluating specific UC solutions or individual communications applications.
3. Evaluating Options
While it is common knowledge that most vendors typically go after larger businesses for a higher return on their investment, there has been a major shift in vendor attention toward the SMB segment. As competition intensifies and most large businesses become saturated with advanced communications technologies, the SMB market becomes the next battleground for communications vendors and service providers as they seek new growth opportunities.
It would be logical and completely justified for an SMB looking to upgrade its communications infrastructure to first approach its existing vendor(s) or service provider(s). Most likely, such a business is running a platform by an SMB-focused vendor such as (in alphabetical order) Aastra, Interactive Intelligence, Mitel, NEC, Panasonic, ShoreTel or Toshiba. All these vendors have significantly enhanced their platforms over the past couple of years and most can offer an end-to-end UC solution with telephony, conferencing, IM/presence, mobility etc. Their solutions are typically very cost-effective by virtue of delivering all UC applications on a single appliance or in a single software stack and are also easy to implement and manage as they were developed with the SMB in mind.
Businesses should, however, look at some new entrants as well. Open-source telephony vendors such as Digium and Fonality do not only promote free code for those capable of putting together their own solutions, but have some turn-key UC platforms that offer advanced features and capabilities comparable to those of the incumbent vendors.
Microsoft’s OCS architecture is not (yet) suitable for very small businesses, but can provide significant benefits to a medium-sized business. It could represent a cost-effective alternative to existing disparate communications capabilities such as telephony, conferencing and IM as it offers all these capabilities in a single, tightly integrated, entirely software-based solution.
IBM, on the other hand, has chosen to partner with telephony vendors to be able to deliver an end-to-end UC solution to SMBs. Its Lotus Foundations platform enhanced with telephony capabilities from NEC, Mitel and ShoreTel is a viable UC solution for businesses looking to deploy a complete UC stack in a cost-effective manner.
Large vendors such as (in alphabetical order) Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Cisco and Siemens have recently invested a significant amount of effort in enhancing their SMB solutions. They have developed appliances and/or software solutions that combine various UC capabilities and are designed specifically for SMBs, eliminating the complexity and cost of large-business platforms.
Last, but not least, small businesses in search of new communication alternatives should consider hosted/SaaS/cloud UC services. There aren’t many complete network-based UC offerings (yet), but many service providers are considering the possibility of becoming one-stop shops for the entire UC stack. A handful of service providers including Apptix, CallTower, Cypress Communications, LightEdge, Verizon and USA.Net currently offer integrated IM/presence, telephony and some conferencing to their customers. The value of such services is primarily in eliminating all the hassles related to implementing and integrating advanced applications and then managing the entire solution on behalf of customers so they can focus on their core business. Such services also provide better business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities.
SMBs may also wish to keep a close eye on Skype and Google. They are mostly known for their consumer applications, but both are intent on penetrating the business space with bundles of UC applications. It is most likely that these two providers will offer some of the most compelling pricing and will also seek to leverage the cloud for delivering a completely new value proposition to their business customers – extending and federating communication and collaboration capabilities across organizations, integrating more freely and extensively with applications delivered by other service providers, etc.
Concluding Thoughts
UC options for SMB have increased over the past year and continue to proliferate. With vendors and service providers struggling for revenues and new competitive advantages, customers currently have the upper hand. In a UC procurement process, SMBs should first require as much information as possible from an extended set of vendors, encourage competitive bids, and boldly negotiate for large-enterprise features at affordable prices. Vendor or partner customer service throughout the process could be a good indicator of that party’s commitment to customer success. SMBs should also consider vendor/provider viability as a major criterion in selecting a new communications solution. However, since a vendor’s financial health is not always obvious, SMBs can ensure investment protection by looking to deploy solutions and applications based on open standards, SIP and SOA so that they can eventually integrate with or switch to other UC solutions.
UPDATE: It’s looking good folks!
No more Jail breaking iPhones for VoiP over 3G
In the agreement…
3.3. 23 Because some mobile network operators may prohibit or restrict the use of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) functionality over their network, such as the use of VoIP telephony over a cellular network, and may also impose additional fees, or other charges in connection with VoIP, You agree to inform end-users, prior to purchase, to check the terms of agreement with their operator, for example, by providing such notice in the marketing text that You provide accompanying Your Application on the App Store.
9. Third Party Terms of Agreement: You must state in the EULA that the end-user must comply with applicable third party terms of agreement when using Your Application, e.g., if You have a VoIP application, then the end-user must not be in violation of their wireless data service agreement when using Your Application.
Now that we know VoIP over the cellular data network is allowed, and ATT has said they will support it, and ATT has a cheap unlimited data plan (Listen up Rogers, Telus, Bell!), the iPad and iPhone has just become something I think we should be excited about.
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Apparently the new iPhone dev agreement has officially been modified allowing for VoIP over the cellular data networks. Trying to confirm that myself.
If this is the case, the iPad and iPhone just got a whole lot more interesting.
Written by Erik Lagerway - Visit WebsiteLooks like the new iPad will come with unlocked GSM + WiFi but no actual phone.
Apparently all iPhone apps from the app store will work and the device also supports Bluetooth. This begs the question, will the VoIP apps from the app store function on this device? Sounds like they should.
The device will sell for $499 for WiFi and $629 for WiFi + GSM.
Written by Erik Lagerway - Visit Website
Jazinga and Freetalk have combined efforts and the result is a Skype enabled SMB phone system called Freetalk Connect.
The press release:
FREETALK Partners With Jazinga To Create FREETALK® Connect
Companies Collaborate On Skype-enabled Small Business Communication System
Featuring Set Up In Less Than 15 MinutesMIAMI, January 20, 2010 — As the result of a new partnership announced today at ITEXPO East 2010, FREETALK and Jazinga have created the FREETALK® Connect, a full-featured unified communications system that is the first to feature Skype for SIP and Skype for Asterisk functionality.
FREETALK and Jazinga collaborated in designing the FREETALK Connect, featuring a do-it-yourself (DIY) technology approach that can be configured in less than 15 minutes, enabling users who are not tech savvy to use it without formal training. This new class of DIY communications system allows anyone with basic knowledge of computers to install and maintain the office phone system. SIP, Skype and traditional PSTN phones can be plugged into the network, and the FREETALK Connect auto-detects and configures them. An onscreen wizard guides the user through setup. Adding users and administering the system after install is equally simple.
Further distinguishing the FREETALK Connect is its intelligent routing capabilities. Incoming Skype calls, as well as SIP, PSTN and IAX2 calls, can be routed to any local or remote Skype user, SIP, analog or mobile phone. Additionally, the FREETALK Connect enables users to set up “Find Me, Follow Me” features, and provides a unified mail box that consolidates messages from voice mail and email into one mailbox.
Some of the key features from the Jazinga platform found in the FREETALK Connect include:
Callback / Dial-around
Access to Skype Buddy lists
Auto Attendant / IVR
Paging
Call Parking
Remote Extensions
Music on Hold
ConferencingThe FREETALK Connect also has an easily configured and updated:
Managing routes to users, telephone services, and applications
Providing SIP/Skype telephone service management
Router management (networking, port forwarding, DNS, DHCP)“Jazinga’s products consistently ensure call integrity by integrating quality of service and prioritizing voice traffic on the network into an affordable, simple product,” said In Store Solutions COO Craig Smith. “There was no question that FREETALK wanted to partner with Jazinga to develop the FREETALK Connect, because it continues our goal of working with the best providers to distribute outstanding products around the world.”
“FREETALK Connect is designed for small businesses with between 2 and 49 users, an undersold market that desperately needs UC functionality,” said Randy Busch, CEO of Jazinga Inc. “As a result of our partnership with In Store Solutions, the telecom technology playing field is much more level between larger enterprises and their smaller competitors.”The the FREETALK Connect is marketed through Skype Shop, which is operated by In Store Solutions. The unit initially will be available to registered U.S. Skype users beginning in March.
For more information about FREETALK Connect PBX or to order a unit, visit
http://freetalkconnect.com.
About FREETALK
FREETALK is a product innovation catalyst – identifying market gaps and working with its global partners to design, manufacture and quickly bring to market products that disrupt traditional categories. Leveraging untapped market opportunities, FREETALK products are designed to be environmentally friendly, sold online and delivered globally at aggressive price-points. Always at the forefront of innovation, FREETALK is known for creating synergistic products that add unique value to its partners’ branded points-of-sale.
About Jazinga
Jazinga Inc. develops communications products for small businesses and homes. The Jazinga system provides enterprise telephony and data functionality for this market, but at a fraction of the cost and without the setup complexity of an enterprise-class IP PBX. Jazinga Inc. is privately held and headquartered in Toronto, Canada. Additional information is available at www.jazinga.com.
Contact:
Sue Huss, for In Store Solutions
sue.huss@comunicano.com
+1 619-379-4396
Jazinga came to market a while back with a Asterisk appliance that is not much different than other you would find in the Asterisk market today. Skype recently announced their Skype SIP Trunking capability which is helping Skype become more open standards compliant, paving the way for deals like this one.
Since I have not tested the system myself I can only speculate that it is not huge departure from other Asterisk systems, which are not trivial to set up. Let’s hope they did their homework and come to market (March) with something that is much less technical and more end-user friendly, like Response Point.. was.
One thing that I find interesting is that it will be sold via the Skype store to US registered Skype users. If you were wondering what the connection is between Freetalk and Skype; the creators of Freetalk are also the curators of the Skype store. Ya, you heard me right. The company that created Freetalk (In Store Solutions) operates the Skype store. Which makes one wonder if there is overlapping ownership between Skype and In Store Solutions.
Something else that I find interesting, and not just because I am one of the founders of Xten/Counterpath, is how this announcement relates the recent announcement of the Asterisk/Digium softphone from Counterpath. Which may be why In Store Solutions decided not to leverage the Digium or Asterisk brand in this release, maybe they see the new Asterisk Bria softphone as a competitor in this instance?
I expect this will not be the last Asterisk-based phone system to incorporate Skype functionality this year, but it would seem as though they are the first, congrats to fellow Canadians at Jazinga.
Written by Erik Lagerway - Visit WebsiteSubscribe
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