More Business Disruption: Telecom’s Move to IP

In the late Nineties, the Telecom business was dominated by big companies who had built their phone network over many years using switching technology. But a massive storm was on the horizon as the same IP technology which helped revolutionize commerce on the world wide web started to be applied to phone-based voice communications. Early…

Business Disruption in Document Communications – What Happened?

In the late 1990s, the Internet and the World Wide Web created massive technical disruption for the worlds of document communications and messaging. Now, nearly twenty years later, business communications looks much different than it did going into the Millennium and once major businesses such as the marketing of enterprise fax machines are deep into…

Paradigm Shift: Virtual to the Cloud

We live in a world where communication solutions can be hardware-based, run in a virtual machine on a local server or be situated in the Cloud. The paradigm for communications solutions has been shifting from hardware to software to virtualization as I’ve discussed in my recent posts. Once a solution is virtual, in principle, customers…

Reshaping Enterprise Communications: A Tale of Two Companies

In my last few posts, I’ve described several factors which have encouraged communications solution providers to transition away from hardware and focus on software-based application solutions. Let’s consider two companies and how they adjusted the path of their technical and business models to address these directions. Avaya is an example of a company whose solutions…

How IP Media Changed the Voice Business

This post is about a critical technical development in the history of Voice over IP which had a wide-reaching impact on the development of voice and related communications solutions. I’m referring to IP media, which was introduced early in the 2000s and has been ramping up every since. In my last two posts, we discussed…

Impact of Media Gateways on Voice Solutions

This is the latest in a series of posts on how voice development has been moving from hardware to software centered models. In my last post, we reviewed the classic approach to developing voice-centered solutions, which typically utilized voice boards. In this post, I’ll review how media gateways helped change the model. In the classic…

Refining the Product Vision

One advantage I gained when I went independent for over a year was to consider how to be an effective Product Management leader with a fresh perspective. As a Product Line Manager, it’s very easy to get caught up in the product, the enhancement of various features and dig deep into the technical aspects. All…

Secure IP Fax – Now Standard

Last fall, I blogged about a pending standard for securing facsimile communications over IP networks here and I spoke about this progress at the SIPNOC conference. Since that time, the standard, known as RFC 7345 has been approved by the Internet Engineering Task Force. The availability of a standard is very good news. There’s a common…

Securing Fax over IP for Business Communications

The recent controversy regarding NSA tracking of phone conversations has elevated concerns about security and privacy for business communications. Enterprises generally want to keep their communications private. Use of techniques such as private networks, firewalls and secured tunnels can help to protect internal communication from eavesdroppers, but there are also many exchanges which entail communication…