About this blog

News and analysis of developments in the enterprise communication industry and market with primary focus on Europe.

The author aims to tap into ideas, insights and thoughts of the readers to get varied perspectives.

Views expressed in this blog are solely the author's opinion and in no way reflect those of his employer.

Sunday, August 06, 2006

Nortel is trimming

Nortel executives are in advanced stages of discussion to sell of its UMTS assets to Alcatel. Nortel has a strong and comprehensive portfolio of access solutions that can compliment Alcatel's. This transaction will position Lucent-Alcatel closer to Ericsson who continues to impress the market with solid growth.

Mobile Hosted Solution- An opportunity!

During my latest industry briefing (August 2nd) I was asked to comment on "mobile hosted solution" by a mobile messaging and billing vendor who has recently invested in acquiring a platform vendor. Until a fortnight ago I could confidently say that mobile operators are only concerned over the strong anti-FMS (fixed-mobile substitution trend) and that they are looking at various options to mitigate the threat. However recently I have been involved in discussions towards creating a business model for one of the leading mobile operator in Europe. The operator plans to roll-out hosted business telephony services to enterprises. This is interesting from several points.

1. Entry of mobile operators in the enterprise telephony market will spice it up.
2. Ability to communicate business applications wireless with give credibity to the hosted proposition and in turn put immense pressure on customer premise equipment vendors.
3. Fixed-Mobile convergence and in turn triple convergence (data-voice, wireline-wireless, and IT-telecom) will move another important step closer to reality.
4. A new entity called "Managed Service Provider" will gain lot of traction.

Friday, August 04, 2006

The Zultys saga

Last week, the large scale lay-offs to reduce operating costs in wake of a funding crisis has crippled the operation and adversely affected the name of the vendor. Coming at a time when Zultys announced the launch of new products and a release that boasted of new capabilities in collaboration and messaging , Zultys failure to secure funding has devalued its branding significantly. Spotting the opportunity another innovative software based PBX vendor, Swyx invested with Google to divert eyeballs from Zultys to their website by exercising a cute marketing campaign.

There are a few takeaways from this episode. For one, the entry barriers have reduced significantly. However the importance of PBX hasn't dimished with the customers. This I believe is going to put significant pressure on the channel to constantly monitor their supplier's health to the effect to get contractual commitments from them to be in business.

Second is the intense competition in this market. The campaign launched by Swyx is indicative of the margins that can be gained when a software solution replaces a hardware product.