Another nice finding that I made at Supercomm (albeit unfortunately one hour from the close of the show on Thursday) was that the Ontario Government was helping out some Canadian startups by getting a big booth for them (a total of 8 companies were present).  It turns out that the Government of Ontario (through Ontario Exports Inc.) sponsored a Trade Mission at Supercomm 2005, featuring a total of 8 high-tech companies in the telecom space.  The initiative allowed these startups to hold meetings and presentations at the Canadian Consulate, Supercomm and the Chicago area IT Association.  It was nice to run into an exec from Nimcat Networks (the peer-to-peer telephony czars), to get another Dexit demo (the pre-paid fob or sticker innovators) - this time in US soil - or to visit the Plaintree booth (experts in broadband optical wireless).  But even better to see the provincial government step up to the plate in supporting our own startup companies get even more notoriety at one of the biggest telco shows in the world.

Note: I also included a few photos on my album.

Rodrigo Sepúlveda Schulz wrote about a new cool blogging editor/tool: BlogJet. Actually, it is more than just an editor: it is a full blog management tool. BlogJet is compatible with most weblog services, including Blogware (which is used here), Blogger, TypePad, MovableType, .Text, etc.  Its editors features a spell checker, 20 high-quality smileys, the "Now Playing" feature (that detects the song title and artist name for the song being currently played on an MP3 player in the computer), and voice attachments (no monthly fees or external plug-ins required).  There is a free 30-day trial, and I will be experimenting BlogJet shortly...

Blogging was light over the past two days, as I cope with my office move (it is unbelievable the amount of junk that one can accumulate over a four year span). As I took refuge at a local Starbucks, I bumped into a famous National Post columnist who I enjoy reading (Andrew Coyne).  In order to preserve his sanctuary intact (from other avid fans such as myself), I shall keep the Starbucks location incognito. But I do admire him - being able to work in such a prolific fashion, while I was bothered by any single noise being made, from a dog barking outside to a toilet being flushed in the washroom inside.  I wish I could move to another spot which is less noisy - and more importantly having fewer distractions.

But the Starbucks Wi-Fi hotspot got me thinking about the lack of availability of public WLAN access here in Toronto.  After all, we live in one of the most technologically advanced cities in the world (supposedly), and yet, I can get better access in downtown São Paulo than I can in Toronto (and down in Brazil, it is even free of charge!).  For instance, there are many "dead" areas without any wireless broadband connectivity in the downtown core (e.g. downstairs in the BCE Place cafeteria area).  It would be nice if our city did more for the cause (taking an example from Philly, as reported in this forum before).

So Supercomm wound down on Thursday, and here are a few takeaways from this year's edition of the show:

1- IPTV: will be an important driver in the routing market, since the deployment of IPTV will entail a substantial upgrade of the existing routing network infrastructure.  But I doubt that the time frame will be 2 years, as often mentioned by players such as Microsoft and Alcatel.  The resolution of issues such as scalability, maturity of silicon, Microsoft software support, and regulation will take time.  So it might be more a five to eight year horizon for the deployment and actual full blown mass adoption of these services.

2- Chinese are here to stay: vendors such as UT Starcom, ZTE and Huawei had big booths there and there was even a Chinese telecom market mini-show.  Although they are still seeking a greater market penetration on this side of the ocean, they are a force to be reckoned with in wireline (NGN, DSL, triple play) and wireless (CDMA, W-CDMA, CDMA 450, TD-SCDMA). 

3- Blades are also becoming a mainstay - both Intel (ATCA) and IBM (BladeCenter) showcased their blade platforms.  The notion of reusing the chassis and having modules that can be incrementally added for a variety of different applications is gaining popularity.  Intel and IBM are both vying to have their products become the standard platform for carrier-grade applications.

4- IMS was again one of the buzzwords most often heard at the show.  Service providers such as Bell Canada, SBC, Bell South and Comcast are all investigating this framework and evaluating future deployment strategies.  While there were no specific plans / milestones mentioned, there certainly was some optimism vis-a-vis IMS, also tempered with a good dose of realism.

Last night, the Ditech dinner revealed a bit more about its acquisition of Jasomi Networks, yet another SBC (Session Border Controller) company to be acquired recently (following Kagoor, which got snapped up by Juniper).  The final price tag was $20 million ($13 million in cash and $7 million in convertible notes), which might seem a bit underpriced compared to Kagoor (which fetched $67.5 million).  On the Wednesday analyst/press dinner event, the answer given to me about this difference in valuation was pretty much the same as what was quoted on a LightReading article, namely, that Kagoor was funded by VCs, whereas Jasomi got most of its capital from angel investors.  The transaction is expected to close by the end of the month.

The rationale behind the acquisition is to complement the PVP Packet Voice Processor product (an offering that was talked about at the Spring VON show).  The PVP is expected to begin generating revenues in calendar Q1 of 2006.  One idea is to develop the PVP into an SBC, or even perhaps as a media gateway.  In order to shorten the time-to-market, the company chose to purchase rather than to develop such an offering in-house.  Jasomi's 23 employees are mainly based in Canada (the HQ for product development is in Calgary), with a few others working out of Mountain View, CA. 

Another possibility is parlaying Jasomi's SBC competency in the IMS space, albeit thus far Jasomi's biggest customers have been in the enterprise market (versus carriers) - can that be scaled up or is more development needed?  There were rumors from my Wall Street connections that sometime ago, Cisco had tested Jasomi gear in Singapore and passed up on the opportunity, but a good chunk of time has passed since then.  Jasomi's current partners include the likes of Microsoft, Broadsoft, Sylantro, RADVision, and General Bandwidth, among others.

The million dollar question now is: which will be the next SBC vendor to be bought?  I will be willing to make a couple of bets: one is Nextone (since au contraire of vendors such as Acme Packet or Netrake, Nextone's solution can be put on a blade - and hence be a part of the IBM Blade Center / IMS ecosystem).  The other one?  Ditech itself - since the company could be positioning itself to be bought at some point in the future by an even bigger player.

Note: Jeff Pulver was a guest speaker at the Ditech dinner and gave a great keynote.  I have posted a couple of photos of the event in my photo album.

Nortel execs take note: Siemens joins other vendors in exiting markets in which the company underperforms (other recent examples: Lucent, exiting the GSM business, or Ericsson, which left the CDMA market for the most part, except for emerging opportunities such as CDMA450).  In Siemens' example, the Munich-based multi-national finally unloaded its wireless handset unit to Taiwanese vendor BenQ.  As reported here before, Siemens' quest to unload its underperforming mobile phone division has been going on for a long time.  The transaction, expected to close in September 2005, calls for Siemens to purchase $61.4 million (€ 50 million) of BenQ stock, in addition to taking a $429.5 million (€ 350 million) charge.  The division's workforce (totaling roughly 6,000) will remain in Munich.  Siemens and BenQ combined in 2004 to amass about 10% of the overall global market (4th in the world, behind Samsung).  Geographically speaking, the deal makes sense, with BenQ being strong in APAC and Siemens showing strength in Europe and Latin America (including Brazil). 

The two IEC IMS events were pretty interesting (the first one, a full day IMS session on Monday - where I gave a talk - and the second one, an hour-and-a-half long wireless IMS perspective on Tuesday). 

The first day featured the perspectives of SBC (David Deas) and Comcast (Jason Livingood).  David's presentation focused on wireline/wireless convergence and brought up a few key points, including cellular/WiFi integration, and the big divide between wireline and wireless service providers. David mentioned that wireline carriers overwhelmingly believe in FMC (Fixed Mobile Convergence), whereas wireless operators are quite skeptical.  The latter part of his talk was also interesting, as he considered implementation issues (such as Parlay/OSA integration options).  Jason offered a very insightful perspective on the MSO view of IMS, including the ongoing standardization efforts and the issues faced by most cable companies in considering their strategies.  He also mentioned a few IMS applications that could be of interest to MSOs, and the ongoing Cable Labs activities.

 The second day featured the perspectives of Bell Canada (Philippe Jetté) and Bell South (Bill Smith).  Phillipe's presentation emphasized the evolution towards the seamless access in the world of IP (wireline/wireless and nomadic/fixed). IMS will play a key enabling role in the transformation from a single bill to a single network and to a single (user-centric) seamless application space, according to Philippe. Bill's presentation highlighted the IMS view not only from Bell South's, but also from Cingular's perspective.  He emphasized some of the consumer IMS apps, including managing a family's communications, seamless roaming, etc.

Overall, the consensus throughout the two days was that while IMS still is very much a work in progress, it will play a key role in the transformation towards a user-centric world in which applications can be delivered quicker and more efficiently to certain segments in the subscriber bases.  All in all, the IEC put together a couple of great sessions that provided a good current perspective in the world of IMS.

Note: I posted a few photos from my day on Monday (including the IEC session and an evening at Wrigley Field). 

The Supercomm Nortel update included the revelation that the MPE9000 switch/router that was announced last year will finally hit GA by the end of June.  The MPE is expected to be a "big product" (according to VP of Carrier Marketing Jim Dondero) for Nortel within six months, as wireline and wireless operators will begin to rely on it to aggregate ATM, Ethernet, Frame Relay and IP at the edge of their networks.  Nortel has been quoting some pretty impressive VoIP numbers: 55 carrier VoIP customers and 20 out of 35 MSOs that have made VoIP decisions up to now.

Blogging has been a bit light the past few days, as I have been caught up in a lot of work, office move, and a trip to Supercomm.  Speaking of which, a lot of announcements were made during the first day of the show, including, among others:

• Cisco, announcing its DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) protection offering, which is now a part of the company's NGN IP architecture.
• Juniper giving demos of its newest software upgrade (5.0) to its Secure/Remote Access SSL VPN appliances; the company also unveiled its new E320 broadband services router, the industry's largest capacity broadband router.  The E320 is a pretty good platform for delivery of services such as IPT, VOD, and IPTV.
• ADC, Lucent, Nortel and Tellabs all revealed their new products targeting the emerging FTTX / "triple play" markets.  Lucent announced a collaboration with Polycom geared towards delivering IP voice, video and collaboration solutions.  Nortel introduced next-gen features for its optical network solutions.  These features will allow service providers to deliver high bandwidth content and application-based services in a much faster fashion.
• Sonus unveiled its GSX4000 compact gateway which caters to the lower end of the VoIP market.
• On the M&A front, Ditech announced it was acquiring Jasomi, in a marriage of SBCs and voice processing technologies (I will attend Ditech's dinner on Wednesday evening and learn more about synergies, and the rationale behind the purchase).

IPTV has been getting quite a lot of bandwidth lately, and there have been a lot of stories such as the ongoing SBC effort and the Alcatel/Microsoft alliance, among others.  However, despite all the hype, here's a reality check on the current status of the technology: last week, it was announced that Swisscom delayed its own IPTV launch.  IPTV is turning out to be quite more complex than previously thought; one of the technological challenges is scalability, and it still remains to be proven that IPTV networks can scale.  Another potential headache is regulation, as there are some regulatory risks that can potentially impede the ILEC rollout of TV services.  So in the next two years, expect there to be a lot of access network buildouts, with initial deployments (in small scale) only really beginning to ramp up in 2007.  Therefore, a wider consumer adoption of IPTV services probably will not happen before 2008-2009.