In life it’s often the small stuff that makes the biggest difference. Virtual Hold Technology has taken on a gripe we all have – waiting on hold. While the company’s eponymous system can’t eliminate the wait, it makes it easier by holding your place in line while you hang up and get on with your life. When you’re at the head of the list, the system calls you up. The company sells the technology to contact centers, promoting its ability to increase customer satisfaction and reducing costs.

Working on the theory that all of us together are smarter than each of us alone, yesterday Polycom announced the Polycom ARENA “ecosystem,” a collaboration platform that will let partners develop, test and certify interoperability between their solutions and the Polycom voice, video and content collaborative solutions.

AT&T is getting into the mobile video game with AT&T Video Share, which lets users to share live video concurrently with voice calls. The service sounds like a true Age of IP service. But the billing is strictly Ma Bell. AT&T is offering Video Share for $4.99 per month for 25 minutes of usage, or $9.99 for 60 minutes. Not so bad, you say. Well every minute after that is 35 cents.

Unlike baseball, in IPTV the three strikes rule doesn’t hold apparently, with Microsoft debuting its fourth — or is it sixth? — IPTV brand, Mediaroom. Scott Fulton of BetaNews offers an analysis.

Be afraid, be very afraid is the message of Sipera VIPER Lab’s threat advisory for SIP-based soft phones from AOL(R), Avaya, MSN(R) and Nortel(TM), and Avaya SIP-based hard phones.

Sun Microsystems and Mitel are getting cozy with an agreement to integrate Mitel’s call management software into Sun servers. One objective is to make it easier to converge voice and data applications.

Digium advanced its make-it-easy-for-the-customer strategy with a SMB VoIP provider Bandwidth.com partnership announced today. Bottom line is that Bandwidth.com will be rolled into in the AsteriskGUI graphical user interface as a service provider option, making implementation even more turnkey. The two also plan to cooperate in developing new services.

AGIS’ new mobile Location Based Services (LBS) software lets cell phone, PDA and PC users locate and track each other, talk, and exchange text and photos. The service works across cell phone carriers and can channel information to specific users. Sign up for a free 90 day trial here. What do you bet that folks suspicious of straying spouses will be among the first adopters? Now, if I could get one for my wandering cat…

Another entry in the How Not to Write a Press Release department: Over-sugared PR prose renders you near-senseless before you get to the actual news in Revolabs’ press release today. To wit, the company launched a plug-and-play wireless USB microphone system, xTag, priced around $250. The company was apparently so busy larding the press release with superlatives they forgot to post it on the website as of this writing. You can find it here.

The United Arab Emirates likes to promote itself as an global economic powerhouse. But when it comes to real western-style innovation, like they say in New York, fugeddaboutit. As reported by ITP.net, no VoIP except from government sanctioned providers and “initiatives to more tightly regulate internet functions.” Think about it the next time you fill up your car. These people do not share our values.

Today Polycom announced the Video Media Center 1000 appliance for centrally managing video content from creation to broadcast. The device works with all Polycom video endpoints as well as other “standards-based H.323 endpoints.” Availability is planned for Q3 2007.

RemoTV has launched the beta of a new service that allows users to access and share video, audio and image files on a cell phone. The service — consisting of RemoTV Channels! desktop application and the RemoTV Mobile! — follows the kyte.tv model, letting you broadcast and download any content you want as well as messaging and emailing about it.

Students in the 21st century aren’t just looking at academics — or hot party spots — when they apply to college. Technology is also factors in, according to a new study by Belgian research firm Telindus. Campus-wide WiFi access was a requirement for 36 percent of respondants.

Voxilla.com: Why is the Avaya merger such a big deal?
Abramson: First of all, I don’t think it is that big a deal. Who bought Avaya? Two private equity groups — Silver Lake and TPG Capital — bought Avaya out because because they believe that there’s hidden value in the intellectual property Avaya has, the market share Avaya has and their ability to use that so they can go out and buy up other companies and that they can make a stronger company which Avaya couldn’t do as a public company because it’d have to reveal everything it’s doing.

As a private company than Avaya can do more than as a public company because it won’t have to report things that are material, like buying up other intellectual property or making transactions. As a private company, it can avoid the scrutiny of the public markets and of its competition. There are good market advantages if all of your moves on the chessboard can’t be watched from an outsiders’ perspective and predicted. Public companies behave very predictably.

This kind of consolidation is a change affecting the whole telecommunications industry.

Voxilla.com: What specific opportunities will this create for Avaya?
Abramson: They’ll be able to not have to report earnings which takes a lot of pressure off. They’ll be able to not have to focus on pleasing Wall Street. They’ll be able to do some more things with carriers than they could before. They’ll be able to work with greater fortitude in the enterprise market they were after. It will possibly allow them to acquire other companies more easily. They’ll be able to enter into agreements that won’t have to become public by nature — things like that.

Just so you know, I think the Avaya merger is just one more example of the private equity market looking for value in companies that are underperforming because of management neglect and poor management. You’ve got a lot of companies that are poorly run that have very high paid executives who have lost touch with where the market is going.

As a result, the large money institutions, whether private or public since a lot of your investment banks now play on both sides of the fence are manifesting a growing dissatisfaction with the leadership and the direction that companies are taking. So there’s more and more efforts in the financial world to take a stronger degree of input and control at the management level through private investment. Then they put their own people in and they put the ship on the right course and they navigate along. It’s a very happening- all-the-time story in every sector.

Avaya is a failure.

Voxilla.com: So can this merger save Avaya?
Abramson: Avaya was a failure. They continue to see their market share erode, despite what they may have claimed. Companies like Cisco have a much clearer easier to understand business model — you know what they’re about.

From the late 90s, early 2000s, Avaya was seen as this whoop-de-do great company, spawned from the lineage of Bell Labs. But Cisco cleaned its clock across the board.
Avaya’s acquisition strategy was faulty. Its sales strategy was questionable. Its technology was not necessarily always the best. Its pricing model could be questioned. Most recently, they had to go out and buy Ubiquity to keep up with the Cisco dynamic software.

It’s just like Lucent having to merge with Alcatel in order to save itself because other than its patents, it hadn’t done anything. This is just companies being fat and lazy. Meanwhile you see Wah Wei coming out of China to clean everyone’s clock for them.

The only real return on investment was for private equity to come in and take them out of the public eye and put some real management in and hopefully right the ship and get them going in the right direction.

So the merger is probably the best thing that could have happened to Avaya. Avaya was a company that was going nowhere fast. This is potentially the best thing that could happen for them. It could save them, but we won’t know until we see the direction the company will take over the next nine months. It will hopefully change.

Voxilla.com: How does this change the market?
Abramson: In the PBX enterprise telephone equipment market, it gives Avaya some room to reemerge as a different player. It gives them six to nine months of breathing room and runway. It takes them out of the scrutiny of the Wall Street sell-side analysts. It leaves Cisco, Mitel and Nortel in the public sector of companies but at the end of the day, it doesn’t change anything yet. We won’t know what those changes will be until the new Avaya management announces its going-forward strategy.

This is a tough one because Avaya’s such a blob. I never viewed Avaya as a player, as a force, and you also have Microsoft looming in that office telephone system space in a lot of different ways. It’s a good time for a company to figure out what it wants to be when it grows up.

http://andyabramson.blogs.com/
http://www.avaya.com

The biggest threat to IT security isn’t the hacker on the outside. It’s the employees on the inside that are, in increasing numbers, bringing consumer technologies like Skype, social networking, IM and “unsecured” mobile devices to work with them. So says a new Gartner report. The press release includes details on how to protect the corporate network. A while back, I looked at the use of Skype in business and some of the issues the Gartner study raises.

Satellite TV providers DirecTV and Echostar are getting into the IP communications game with distribution deals with WiMax provider Clearwire. The goal is to be more competitive with cable companies. It will be interesting to see how it rolls out because right now Clearwire’s coverage area is pretty limited and doesn’t include and major U.S. metro areas.

No one’s talking about how VoIP saves money any more. Instead the buzz is around how VoIP can change the way you do business. ComputerWeekly.com has a case study on VoIP as the cornerstone for the virtual office and remote employees.