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…

Voice Development Models: A Journey Begins

During the past three years, I had product management responsibilities for products which covered the spectrum from hardware-centered to software-centered development.  In telecom, there’s been an evolution in development models as solution providers have taken a series of steps to gradually move away from hardware.  However, like many technical trends, there is a long tail…

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…

Faxed: A Book Review – Ruminations

In my last post, I talked about the book written by historian and professor Jonathan Coopersmith entitled Faxed – The Rise and Fall of the Fax Machine.  I left off as fax entered the late Eighties and became wildly popular.  As Coopersmith recounts, this confounded the experts, who were expecting electronic messaging, videotext or a…

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…

WebRTC – New Communications Paradigm?

About two years ago, Google brought a new communications initiative called WebRTC to the two best known Internet standards organizations.  WebRTC is short for Web Real Time Communications and the intent is to enable complex real time communications of voice, video and data using web clients, web servers and related applications.  Google has been advancing the work…