Just had a surprise visit from the folks at Tortel USA, LLC, whom have a local office in the Buffalo, NY area. I was surprised to learn that they have recently acquired Citel.

If you are not familiar with Citel, they make some unique products that allow businesses with hefty investments in legacy telecommunications gear from Nortel, Avaya and other tier1 vendors to gain the benefits of IP communications without scrapping their digital handsets. Citel’s Portico TVA products facilitate the redeployment of existing digital handsets from 85% of manufacturers, Nortel, NEC and Avaya included. No need to throw the baby out with the bathwater any longer, and your existing phones can enjoy a second life in service to a new IP PBX core or IP centrex hosted service such as Broadsoft.

The cost savings incurred by not having to purchase new IP phones when migrating to an IP PBX are huge. In my experience, handsets can often represent the majority portion of the overall expenditure when implementing VoIP.

Another benefit here is not having to retrain all of your employees on the functions of a new IP handset. They gain the UC benefits of a new IP communications platform, but the overall user experience is much more seamless and certainly less traumatic for users.

Tortel has deep roots in the traditional Nortel pbx channel, and this acquisition makes a ton of sense from a standpoint of being able to “hit the ground running”. I spoke with them at length, and came away with a sense that Citel was in the great hands, and likely has a bright future.

The folks at Linksys were nice enough to come visit our offices and teach us more about the features Linksys IP Camera systems have to offer. Ed Draper and Dave Hornstein (filling in for Andrew Lissitz) showed us the importance of IP Camera bundles, Power over Ethernet switches and Network Attached Storage (NAS). The guys displayed a PVC2300 camera and all of the free applications included with the camera.

These included:

• a choice to disable LED lights
• the ability to chose your stream type
• detachable lenses
• creating a recording schedule
• image settings
• stream speed
• full audio
• motion detection settings
• mobile phone streaming

and many others.

Hi everyone,

Just letting you know that we are still having our promotion on free shipping for all Axis IP Cameras and Geovision DVR cards.

Don’t miss out, and as always, let us know if you have any questions at http://www.ipcamerasupply.com.

FierceVoIP recently covered a story concerning the deployment of Cisco’s Unified Communications platform and 10,000+ IP handsets by solution provider EDS for Bank of America.

EDS acquired by HP for $13.9 Billion

With EDS recently acquired by HP, this would seemingly make HP an instant player in the UC/VoIP space…and is an interesting development in a market where battle lines are being drawn between Cisco and Microsoft.

Cisco has been on a tear of late and is amassing a nice list of large customers, including Boise State University and University of Cambridge.

Many would argue that this is good news for the VoIP systems industry as a whole…but if you are a proponent of standards-based telephony, where SIP has emerged as the de facto protocol, you may have mixed emotions. Cisco has been somewhat reticent in opening up their proprietary SCCP platforms to allow for seamless interoperability with SIP.

Although Cisco does have a Third-party inter-op mechanism allowing the use of SIP endpoints with Cisco UC infrastructure, (i.e Callmanager) from a cost impact standpoint, Cisco’s “support” of third party SIP phones is somewhat misleading for the uninformed.

For most users, the appeal of using a Third-party SIP phone would likely be to escape the cost of license fees associated with Cisco’s IP phones. Cisco tacks on anywhere from $50 to several hundred dollars, per phone, in licensing when you purchase a “CH1” licensed Cisco phone, which is the appropriate licensing to be in compliance when using Callmanager.

If you refer to this link, look at table C-2, step 5 –

“Note Third-party SIP Device (Basic) supports one line and consumes three license units, and Third-party SIP Device (Advanced) supports up to eight lines and video, and consumes six license units.”

Even using a Third-party phone, the user must purchase Third-party licensing keys in order to register their phone with Callmanager, and the licensing is required in order to complete the SIP registration for the Third- party handset.

When I last checked, the licensing cost to implement a Grandstream GXP-2000 (an $80 phone) with a Callmanager deployment was an additional $300, which would bring the total cost of the handset to roughly $380.

Cisco defines a “Basic” Third-party VoIP phone as a phone supporting one line, and user must purchase (three) license units at $50/ea ($150 total) to deploy a “basic” phone. Since the GXP-2000 supports multiple lines, it would be considered an “Advanced” Third-party SIP phone, and requires (six) license units be purchased, at a total cost of $300.

A detailed overview of Third-party SIP licensing fees is here.

It is actually less attractive in the majority of cases, from a cost standpoint, to implement 3rd party SIP phones on Callmanager than it is to simply use proprietary Cisco phones when you factor in their extremely expensive licensing fees. I am sure this is completely by design. Just wanted to clarify this for your readers who are running Callmanager and are looking at using Third-party SIP phones.