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  • Research Identifies IP Media Phone as $7bn Opportunity by 2013


    The evolution of the media phone product segment may just be beginning but it has the potential to become the 4th screen in the home.

    That’s according to a report by In-Stat, which said the device could also become a next generation business IP phone.

    The researchers say service providers and IP phone manufacturers are introducing media phones to add value to traditional voice telephones and enable IP-based services.

    Already devices such as the Verizon Hub and AT&T HomeManager, which support both IP communications and the delivery of Internet information and multimedia content, have been launched on the market.

    The free report, The Media Phone Has Arrived, can be downloaded from the In-stat website.

    Other findings include:

    • Consumer media phones will generate between $4-$8 billion in annual revenue, worldwide, by 2013.
    • Business media phones will generate $3.3 billion in annual revenue, worldwide, in 2013.
    • The US market will open up in 2009, with Europe coming on line in 2010.

  • Mirial's Softphone Video Conferencing Software Upgraded to Full-HD


    Mirial has released version 6.2 of its video conferencing software that steps the Softphone up from 720p to 1080p.

    Cristoforo Mione, business development director at Mirial, said that with Full-HD resolution up to 1080p for both decoding and encoding, the upgraded version set the pace of the evolution in video and VoIP technology.

    He said that whatever the PC settings and available bandwidth, the Softphone automatically optimizes configurations to provide the best user experience and video quality, even in case of floating call conditions such as bandwidth drops/peaks.

    "Video resolution was upgraded from 720p to 1080p, 3-party video calling and H.239 collaboration features are embedded and ready just with a few-clicks installation," he said.

    Mione described the Softphone as "nearly like having a top-class HD camera, an enterprise-fit MCU and a shared meeting room, all in one single piece of software to be launched everyday, anytime, from any desktop".

    Some of the Mirial Softphone’s other features include:

    • Call Management (2 lines: call hold, call transfer)
    • Concurrent support for SIP and H.323, field-proven interoperability
    • Video call recording, playback and export to a Windows Media Player file
    • Natural, full-motion video up to 2Mbps @ 30fps @ H.264 @ 1080p
    • Cristal clear audio with full duplex echo canceller
    • Web integration (single click call)
    • Remote Update

  • Cypress Communication's Frank Grillo Wins voip-biz.news' Person of the Year Award


    Frank Grillo, Cypress Communication’s executive vice president of marketing, is the winner of the voip-biz.news’ Person of the Year award.

    In nominating him for the title, the telecoms professional was described as a "visionary executive" and "innovative thinker" with "technical acumen".

    Grillo joined Cypress Communications in August of 2005 and was responsible for taking C4 IP, Cypress’ hosted VoIP and hosted unified communications solution, from inception to launch.

    Praising Grillo’s handling of the process, a voter said: "C4 IP is a technically challenging configuration and took Frank Grillo’s visionary leadership, technical acumen and foresight to launch.

    "It is the only integration of two traditionally disparate platforms: the carrier class softswitch, Nortel CS 2000, with the powerful multimedia server, MCS 5200.

    "With the successful integration of these platforms, Cypress became the only company in the USA, and only one of three in the world, to accomplish this feat.

    "To date, the C4 IP solution has won 10 awards for product innovation, and under Grillo’s leadership, C4 IP now has over 6,000 installed seats and is credited with the largest hosted VoIP/unified communications installation in the US."

    Prior to joining Cypress, Grillo was senior vice president of business services for Z-Tel and senior vice president of global business markets for MCI WorldCom.

    From 1995 to 2000 he was vice-president of marketing for LDDS.

    Voip-biz.news would like to thank everyone who took the effort to nominate a product and to cast a vote.

  • MyGlobalTalk and IPsmarx's SIP-based Calling Card Platform Share voip-biz.news Product of the Year Award


    Two innovative products dominated voting to share the honours in voip-biz.news’ Product of the Year 2008 competition.

    With 33 per cent of the nominations, MyGlobalTalk’s VoIP calling solution earned praise for its sound quality and call rates, as well as features such as no contract being required, no connection fees and no minimums.

    Launched as a BETA version in June 2008, MyGlobalTalk now works on any cell phone, land line or computer.

    The company, which is part of i2Telecom, is preparing a widgets launch which will enable MyGlobalTalk to be used from Outlook, iGoogle or Facebook.

    In the many comments of recommendation, voters also highlighted customer service and ease of use as reasons for their satisfaction with MyGlobalTalk.

    Sharing this year’s award is IPsmarx’s SIP-based calling card platform, which eliminates the need for a VoIP gateway and PSTN lines using DID technology.

    Fully over IP, the calling card solution offers a range of advanced features.

    So much so that the product was described by voters as "the platform of the future", "user friendly" and having a "great technical support team".

    One reader said: "I am extremely impressed with IPsmarx’s ability to think outside the box and eliminate common problems that exist in the calling card space."

    To take this year’s award, the joint winners saw off a large field which included well-known names including Mobivox, Ifbyphone, XConnect, Skype, Fring, ShoreTel, Cypress communications and HelloSoft.

    Voip-biz.news would like to thank everyone who took the effort to nominate a product and to cast a vote.

  • Vonage Confident of Growth Despite Subscriber Loss


    VoIP provider Vonage had a revenue increase of 9 per cent to USD $900 million in 2008.

    However, reporting on its fourth-quarter and full-year 2008 earnings report, the company said it had lost a net of 14,700 subscribers in Q4.

    Net loss excluding debt extinguishment costs narrowed to USD $34 million from USD $93 million excluding certain charges.

    GAAP net loss was USD $65 million or $0.41 per share in 2008.

    Marc Lefar, Vonage’s CEO, said the company had improved its financial position throughout 2008 – to the extent that it delivered adjusted operating profit and positive cash from operations for a full year for the first time.

    Noting the loss of subscribers, he was optimistic about Vonage’s business model, which he said was solid and the market opportunity for digital voice remains robust.

    "While our financial performance was sound, we fell short in our ability to substantially grow our subscriber base," he said.

    "However, we are confident Vonage has significant opportunities to create future value for shareholders."

    Lefar said a range of initiatives were being lined up for launch, including:

    • improving the customer experience
    • enhancing distribution and marketing
    • improving quality and reliability
    • initiating new products and features
    • optimizing our cost structure
    • improving talent management

    Lefar said he was confident these will drive Vonage forward as a business model poised to achieve significant new growth.

  • ZTE Announces EV-DO Rev B on CDMA2000 System


    ZTE Corp has achieved what it claims is the world’s first EV-DO Revision B (Rev B) VoIP call on its CDMA2000 system.

    It is the first time in the industry that a CDMA vendor has achieved a 9.3Mbps download rate and 5.4Mbps upload rate.

    EV-DO Rev B allocates flexible bandwidth and offers better Quality of Service (QoS) so improving user experience.

    It is a telecommunications standard for the wireless transmission of data through radio signals, typically for broadband Internet access.

    It was designed as an evolution of the CDMA2000 (IS-2000) standard that would support high data rates and could be deployed alongside a wireless carrier’s voice services.

    ZTE has completed the first stage of achieving EV-DO Rev B and adopted 3-carrier bundling technology, with each carrier having a bandwidth of 1.25MHz.

    Effectively, ZTE’s EV-DO Rev B upgrade’s EV-DO Rev A’s software with no additional hardware equipment required.

    Both ZTE’s EV-DO Rev A and Rev B adopt an identical baseband chipset.

    The company plans to commercialize its EV-DO Rev B system in Q3 2009.

    In future, EV-DO Rev B can bundle up to a maximum of 15 carriers, with a download (forward) rate of 73.5Mbps and an upload (reverse) rate of 27Mbps.

    Li Jian, general manager of CDMA Products for ZTE, said it had launched the world’s first EV-DO Rev.B technology several months ahead of its rivals.

    "We are committed to the industry and continue to invest and speed up large-scale commercial use of EV-DO Rev.B to leverage telecom operators’ investment in EV-DO Rev A networks," he said.

  • Nexsan Launches iSCSI SAN Aimed at Standalone or Virtualised IT Environments


    Nexsan has introduced its first iSCSI SAN, which has been specifically designed and priced to give SMBs and SMEs a new value-alternative in implementing the protocol.

    The Nexsan iSeries is intended as a complete, easy-to-implement, enterprise-class SAN that is ideal for use in standalone or fully virtualised IT environments.

    It is available in two configurations which include additional storage expansion to meet customers growing data storage requirements.

    Bob Woolery, Nexsan’s senior vice president of marketing, said the iSeries gives customers flexibility and value.

    "We’ve designed the iSeries to give customers a solution with all the storage services, data protection and scalability they need at a price they can afford," he said.

    "And, we’re giving our channel partners a new value alternative in this growing market segment. We’ve truly changed the game with value."

    The iSeries offers iSCSI, Fibre Channel and NAS configurations from the same system and provides up to 1PB of storage.

    It also includes a complete suite of easy-to-use enterprise storage services, including virtualisation.

    Woolery said the iSeries was being sold for a single up-front price to affordably accommodate a company’s increasing storage needs.

    "This holistic approach simplifies pricing, removes hidden costs and licensing fees associated with competitive products and smoothly accommodates an organisation’s IT requirements as they change," he said.

    Other benefits offered by the Nexsan iSeries include:

    • Virtualised storage for flexibility and intelligent automation of routine tasks
    • High performance for running multiple demanding applications from a single high-density system
    • Simultaneous use of SAS and/or SATA disk drives in the same storage chassis for application flexibility and low-cost scalability
    • VMware-certified, ensuring high performance in both physical and virtual environments
    • Easy to deploy and manage with wizard-based setup, administration and central management of volumes, snapshots, HA/data replication, mirroring and data migration
    • High-performance with up to four RAID engines per storage system
    • Nexsan’s AutoMAID™ energy-saving technology reduces energy costs by up to 60% without compromising application performance
    • Key application support: storage pooling, virtual servers, archiving
    • High-speed, highly responsive – hyper transport bus, real-time OS, enterprise-class network chip set
    • Fully redundant and designed for 99.999% availability
    • Available immediately through Nexsan’s global network of authorized value-added resellers.

  • Seagate Targeting Datacenter Power Consumption


    Seagate is working on solving the issue of power consumption in the datacenter, according to the company’s CEO Steve Luczo.

    While not going into detail, he told InfoWorld that the disk drive maker has a competitive advantage in that field.

    Steve Luczo, CEO Seagate

    Luczo also said the storage market will bounce back from the global economic downturn sooner than other sectors because of the growing requirement for storage at both the business and consumer levels.

    He said that while IT departments could make storage efficiencies in the short-term they would eventually run out of options and have to look at new solutions.

    This could be within the next two to three quarters.

  • Hyperstone Launches New F4 Flash Memory Controller


    Hyperstone has introduced a new F4 Flash Memory Controller for high performance CompactFlash Cards(CFC) and Solid State Disks(SSD), writes Vanitha Vaidialingam for storage-biz.news.

    The memory controllers are intended for embedding into firmware to provide high reliability, endurance and rigorous fail safe features for Single Level Cell(SLC) and Multi Level Cell(MLC) based Flash Memory Solutions.

    The design is based on Hyperstone 32 bit RISC core including instruction set extensions optimized for Flash handling.

    Hyperstone’s core architecture provides both fast RISC processors for data and control functions along with powerful DSP unit for efficient algorithm execution.

    The designs use less silicon and are more power efficient with minimum software complexity.

    The Flash Memory controllers are fully compliant with CompactFlash 3.0 and compatible to 4.1 specifications.

    The controllers also offer Fast ATA supporting PIO mode 6, MDMA mode 4, UDMA mode 4 in True-IDE mode and UDMA 5 possible in fixed board implementations.

    They are designed to sustained read up to 50 MB/s and random read up to 40 MB/s; sustained write exceeding 40 MB/s with interleaving and random write up to 9 MB/s.

    The controllers have two Direct Flash Access(DFA) channels including Sector Buffers and interleaving capabilities. They support connections of up to 16 flash memory chip enables at the rate of eight per channel.

    The Error Correcting code is capable of correcting 4 symbols in a 512 bytes sector with additional CRC.

    The rate of data transfer is up to 80 MB sector.

    Host data transfer rate in UDMA mode 4 is 66 MB sector; in PIO mode 6, it is 512 bytes sector with additional CRC. Data transfer in the MDMA mode 4 is 25 MB sector.

  • How Is The Economy Affecting the US Storage Sector?


    Despite the global economic downturn it appears the US storage sector will continue to remain as busy as ever.

    The need to store increasing volumes of digital files – and to provide continuous access to them – seems to be keeping the industry buzzing with activity, writes Vanitha Vaidialingam for storage-biz.news.

    Most organizations are poor editors of digital information.

    The tendency is to retain everything and add to storage rather than spend the time and effort in weeding out and disposing of digital information that is irrelevant or redundant.

    Moreover, finding time and human resources for such second tier jobs is difficult.

    There is also the latent conviction that the new US federal court rules and other state and national regulations may require a business to produce the data at some future date.

    So, enterprises are more likely to retain the data for legal reasons than they were in the past.

    Benjamin Woo, of IDC Storage, takes an optimistic view of the outlook for the storage industry.

    "Despite the downturn in the macroeconomic conditions, our consensus is that in the short to medium-term, storage is the most resistant to macroeconomic changes," he said.

    "While there is no doubt that there will be some form of pull-back on storage investment, many of the large financial institutions, especially JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America – but also Wells Fargo and Barclays – will need to commit, or in the case of Chase, maintain, substantial IT and storage investment in the next six to 12 months, for integration of their acquired banks."

    Woo said that, while most companies will go into a capital conservation mode in the long term, they too must consider subscription storage models that are offered by online storage providers.

    The indications are that the slowing down of the economy will have its impact on the storage market initially but it will rally over time.

    The optimistic assessment in the industry is that IT organizations will move from building infrastructure to modifying infrastructure and efficiency improvement.

    This, in turn, will revitalize the storage market.

    Moreover, as companies struggle to survive, the cross currents of legal actions will tend to increase, and storage products that cater to legal discovery will drive the growth in the storage market.

    Greg Schulz, founder and Senior analyst of the StorageIO Group, said the focus will be on storage technologies "that can do more in a smaller footprint – that footprint being power, cooling, floor-space, and time in a given density.

    "This means servers [will be needed] that can do more work in a smaller space, storage for active data that can do more IOPS or bandwidth or files or e-mails or videos streamed per watt in a given footprint.

    "Or, for inactive and idle data, more capacity in a given footprint and cost point [will be desirable]."

    What will really happen, will be decided in the womb of time.

    However, there appears to be a general conviction that the storage industry’s optimism is not misplaced.