Cisco to Unveil Skype Video Solution?

September 28, 2010 by Garrett Smith

cisco_skype
About a month ago, on the heels of Skype’s IPO announcement, the industry was a buzz with rumors that Cisco was in talks to purchase Skype. Birthed by the ever in tune sleuth’s at TechCrunch the rumor had some legs, getting play from all of the major tech sources and even the likes of the Wall Street.

With all of the synergies between the two companies an acquisition seemed plausible, but when news surfaced as to the valuation Skype was looking for, an acquisition seemed unlikely.

In the end most chalked it up to mere speculation. Including myself.

But then I came across this Retuers piece and it got me thinking that maybe there was something to the Cisco – Skype rumors.

In the piece it mentions that next week Cisco will be unveiling a new consumer product. The event invite (below) features smiling faces and the tagline, “Let’s get together” leading one to believe Cisco is set to announce a new video product.

Could it be one designed to work with Skype? Skype cooperation with Lifesize last year was met with much fan fare.

With both companies looking to reap the benefits from the growing interest in video calling from consumers and prosumers alike it’s not that far of a stretch.

Given Cisco’s purchases of Flip (handheld video), Scientific Atlanta (set top boxes) and Tandberg, they’ve got all the ingredients to produce one heck of a home and small office video telepresence solution.

Except for the underlying transport mechanism. Something that Skype can deliver today.

Rumors around the announcement have this soon-to-be-announced Cisco device retailing for around $500 which would make it a disruptive video/telepresence solution for the small business and still within reach of tech savvy consumers.

And to boot, an impactful partnership with Cisco could be just the type of juice Skype needs to gain additional investor confidence as they prepare for their public offering.

Making the register fring

September 21, 2010 by Garrett Smith

I’m a mobile VoIP fan boy.

I’ve been interested in the Mobile VoIP industry since the beginning.

I’m also a fan of making money.

Which has always left me amazed at fring. If you’re not familiar with fring, its a mobile communication service that gives users internet-rich communication from their mobile phones.

fring members make FREE video calls, voice calls, live chat to other fringsters and to friends on other social networks.

Over the last few years fring has amassed millions of users, but hasn’t directly charged them.

That’s great for the users. But free isn’t a business.

It appears that they’ve brought in some revenues over the last few years from licensing its software to wireless carriers. They’ve even done ads within the client.

But they’ve never done anything direct with its users. Until yesterday.

With the launch of fringout, fring users can now make international long distance phone calls (landline and mobile) to anywhere in the world for only 1c/minute.

It’s a direct shot at Skype, but also many VoIP service providers catering to the international calling crowd. Now cheap VoIP calls are nothing new, but flat rate calls to anywhere in the world from your mobile is awfully compelling.

Given the pervasiveness of the fring software, ease of use and now low rates, it looks like the cash register might start to fring.

New Flat Rate $4.99 Ground Shipping

by Garrett Smith

One of the best things about not working for a hugenormous company is that you get to stay close to the customer.

Almost every day the management team at VoIP Supply is afforded the opportunity to work directly with our customers. From hoping in a pre-sales consultation to answering technical support questions and handling customer service inquiries, staying close to the customer allows us to quickly identify issues and areas of improvements.

Over the last two quarters we’ve noticed an increasing number of customers point out their displeasure over the cost of shipping products. Thanks to the continually increasing fuel prices, carriers like FedEx and UPS have continued to raise rates causing the cost of shipping your favorite VoIP equipment to be more and more expensive.

We’ve noticed it too. Our own shipping costs have continued to increase.

But being the customer centric bunch that we are we knew we had to at least try and figure out a way to free customers from the pain of high shipping charges.

So we took a look at our operation, implemented some efficiency improvements and are now happy to announce $4.99 ground shipping on all US online orders.

No additional handling fees. No order minimums.

Just affordable shipping.

To take advantage of this offer, please visit VoIPSupply.com.

Benefits of Switchvox

September 16, 2010 by Arthur Miller

The internet has changed the way business operate, this allows a variety of companies; including small and medium sized organizations to compete with enterprise companies without having to spend huge marketing dollars to be recognized in the industry.

However all companies still rely on a phone system. Digium’s Switchvox PBX is one of the most popular phone systems in today’s IP PBX market.

The benefits of a Switchvox system include easy self administration, and feature rich choices that allow business of all size to stay connected at an affordable price point.
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Digium PCI Cards 101 – help for the rest of us…..

September 14, 2010 by Christina Smith

Are you a telephony tech geek? Well, if you are, you can stop reading this now. This post is for the REST OF US. If you run the IT dept for a small to medium sized business and spend most of your time rebooting PC’s and installing Microsoft upgrades, you may have experienced that all too familiar lump of nausea in your stomach when tasked with upgrading the ports in your PBX system. Nobody wants to stand up in a meeting and admit that they really don’t know too much about that since they don’t deal with it every day. To help relieve the nausea and add confidence to your telephony port buying experience, it helps to understand what the PCI or PCIe telephony card is comprised of so you know what you are looking for by part number.
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Uh oh…We let Tom loose.

September 9, 2010 by Garrett Smith

Who’s Tom?

Good question.

Tom loves deals. Tom loves to give you deals.

Crazy deals.

Deals so good that they should never be allowed. Except for the fact that our CFO is scared stiff by the thought of telling Tom no.

We’ve tried to tame Tom.

We gave him his own category on VoIPSupply.com. That wasn’t enough.

Success?

For now. I’m sure he’ll be hitting us up for his own website in no time.

So who’s Tom?

Just a guy who loves to give you crazy deals.

Tune in Tuesday to one of the channels above for more on Tom.

(And the first crazy deal.)

Benefits of 3CX

September 8, 2010 by Arthur Miller

3CX is an easy to install, flexible phone system that operates on a number of popular windows versions (xp, vista, 7, 2003, 2008). With the majority of businesses using Microsoft products and running windows it makes perfect sense to integrate a phone system that cooperates in that environment. The commercial editions of the product can be used in any environment ranging from 2 concurrent calls up to 512 concurrent calls, so weather you are a small start-up or large enterprise company looking to switch to VoIP, 3CX is worth your consideration.

Integrating with Exchange

Running in a windows environment allows you to take advantage of unified message capabilities most notably through Microsoft Outlook. As a user of 3CX you have access to voicemail to email functionality and click to call contact list. Click to call allows you to manage your contacts entirely through your outlook interface. Where an email won’t suffice you now have the ability to call your contact immediately, without sorting through your blackberry or CRM application. Read here for (more http://www.3cx.com/blog/docs/exchange-server-2007-2010/ advantages).

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Polycom VVX1500 Overview

September 1, 2010 by Joe Shanahan

In my last two posts I discussed the features and highlights of the Polycom video conferencing units HDX 4000 and HDX 6004.

Now it’s time to take a look at the Polycom video phone, VVX1500.

Polycom VVX1500 Multimedia Phone

While this offering from Polycom can accurately be called a video phone, as it is a phone that has video capabilities, Polycom calls it a “Business Media Phone.” Call it what you will, it measures up to Polycom’s usual high standards of excellence while combining audio and video in one desktop unit.

The VVX1500 is a SIP video phone with great audio and video quality that uses relatively low bandwidth and is becoming very popular in the small business space. It has a high resolution 7 inch wide-screen color TFT touch screen LCD display that makes set up and use a breeze.

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Upgrading your existing network for VoIP

August 31, 2010 by Darren Hartman

Many businesses are looking to upgrade their phone systems to VoIP for the added features, flexibility and cost savings on long distance.

With the added burden of VoIP on the network, companies need to guard against Packet loss, delay and jitter in their networks. As such the requirements to make sure that you have everything you need are becoming more advanced. And network technology is advancing and changing more than ever these days.

So before you make that move to VoIP you need to make sure your network is ready to handle the additional traffic.

Evaluate your network infrastructure

The first thing you need to do is take an inventory of what equipment you currently have. Hopefully you have a good amount of equipment that is solid and up to date. Here are the most important things to evaluate.

Cabling – Do you have up to date cat 5 or cat 6 cabling wired up in your office. Do you have enough network drops to handle the new ip phone handset?
Wireless – Are you looking to add wireless VoIP handsets in the office? If you are going to be using Wi-Fi handsets you will need to make sure you have some good wireless switches and ample access point coverage throughout the usage area.
Switching – Many of the new ip phones available are gigabit Ethernet ready and Poe compliant. If you are looking to take advantage of these areas then you may need to invest in some new switches. Also if you do not have at least 10/100 managed switches in the office it is probably a good time to upgrade too.
Routers – QOS or Quality of Service is a big component of an efficient VoIP System. One of the biggest issues with VoIP is understanding how QOS is specified and delivered across your network infrastructure. Voice quality is directly related to network latency and packet delays that can cause drop-outs and degrade overall audio. You also might want to segregate voice traffic on its own virtual LAN (VLAN). It’s worth doing a couple of pilot tests before you make any upgrade decisions and redraw your network architecture.

Make sure you have the right pipe

Just like you can’t be too rich or too thin, you can never have enough Internet bandwidth.

What’s your current bandwidth limits – A good place to start is a free service with TestYourVOIP.com. But you’ll also want to examine your existing ISP contracts too.
Get an SLA – You need to make sure you have a good SLA or service level agreement. Make sure your providers give you performance guarantees in their contracts. They are a lot of great service providers out there. If they are one of the good ones they will have no problem with this.
Be ready to need more bandwidth – You may be interested in upgrading your existing ISP connection because you have maxed it out. You probably need a dedicated T-1 or better if you are going to have more than a dozen VOIP users, so it might be worthwhile to investigate having a separate ISP connection just for voice. This is a very important part of the network. Do some research via the Internet or feel free to contact me directly. I can make some recommendations on service and hardware.

Ensuring that your network is ready for VoIP is an important factor determining the success of a VoIP deployment. Following the advice and steps above you should be well on your way to ensuring that your network is ready to handle your new VoIP system.

Skype Would Make Great Acquisition for Cisco

August 30, 2010 by Garrett Smith

I love rumors. At least when they’re not about me.

Earlier today TechCrunch posted that Cisco is rumored to be poking around Skype. It’s unconfirmed (as most rumors are) and with Skype pre-IPO it could simply be savvy PR work to increase the news centered around the company so that potential investors are aware of the pending offering.

But since I love rumors, I thought I add to the fire.

In thinking about the possibility of Cisco purchasing Skype it makes sense since there are a number of synergies between the two companies.

Target Growth Markets

Skype’s biggest revenue growth plays are in video and business (small business). This is where Cisco has been buying companies and strategically focusing for the last two years.

Skype would get Cisco deeper into the small business (think agencies) video conferencing space ( and give them a video conferencing offering from individual to enterprise). It also gives them a low cost and suitable unified communications product which could get integrated into WebEx (free calls into WebEx via Skype or maybe a WebEx light for very small organizations) as well as call manager all powered at the desktop by Cisco handsets (which means selling more hardware).

Technology Dependent Customers

Skype has over 500m register users. That’s a nice customer list of people using the Internet.

Since Cisco owns 85% of the worlds network, almost all of those registered users are those that “could benefit from using Cisco hardware.” This could be a Linksys wireless switch, the Cisco Valet or catalyst switches.

And let’s not forget device such as the Flip. Imagine a wireless Flip that allowed for mobile Skype video calling.

Proprietary Technology

A lot of people bitch about Skype using proprietary technology and not actually owning it. These same people probably don’t like the fact that everything Cisco does in the voice space (SCCP) is proprietary.

(Yes, I know they support SIP, but it’s cost prohibitive in most cases.)

Point is that Cisco knows the proprietary game, is comfortable with it and obviously has done a great job pushing proprietary technologies into the hands of customers in a world that “demands openness.”

Consumer Brand

Cisco desperately wants to get more consumer friendly. Skype is a world wide brand that is well known by consumers (sometimes a downfall as they try to get into more businesses).

It’s considered to be hip and cool. That’s priceless in the consumer space.

The purchase of Skype would give them their best consumer brand name since Linksys.

Your Thoughts?

You’ve heard my thoughts. Now what are yours?

(Told you I love rumors)