After the success of the Spaceship One mission (which was documented here in May), some wondered which other contestants could contend for the coveted Ansari X Prize.  Well, one of these contenders is an entry from Canada: the Canadian Arrow project.

Yesterday, the Arrow team completed a successful test run of part of their spaceship.  From a height of 2.4 kilometers, the Canadian Arrow dropped an unmanned crew cabin from a helicopter.  Then, about five minutes later, the cabin floated safely into the waters of Lake Ontario - just a bit South of the Toronto Island Airport (a smaller airport used only for some domestic flights).

No launch date for the full spaceship (measuring 17 meters) has been set as of yet, but it will probably happen sometime in the fall.  Canada also has another entry in the X Prize contest: the Toronto-based da Vinci project.  The da Vinci team expects to launch its Wild Fire craft on October 2nd, from Kindersley, Saskatchewan.

In other Ansari X Prize news, the Washington State team private unmanned 23-foot-long Rubicon 1 subscale test rocket exploded 200 feet after take off during a flight last week.  No injuries were reported in that test, conducted in an unpopulated area of the Olympic peninsula.

Despite the drop in its stock price and the cautious mood set by its CEO, Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) actually had a good quarter.  Also noteworthy, but not much commented was the company's performance in the enterprise IP voice segment, which is an important emerging source of revenues.  The Cisco IP PBX (Call Manager), along with its suite of applications, represents a unique opportunity for the company to grab a share of the lucrative enterprise voice market, which has been historically been the turf of companies such as Avaya, Nortel, Mitel, Siemens, NEC, Alcatel and others.

Cisco and 3Com (Nasdaq:COMS) both got into the enterprise voice market via acquisitions (3Com buying Andover-MA startup NBX and Cisco opting to purchase Intecom's IP PBX division, Selsius).  Arguably, both companies pushed the innovation envelope of enterprise IP telephony, forcing the traditional vendors to catch up and introduce similar offerings or risk losing their installed bases.  Some of these original incumbents, such as Mitel, got started developing their IP PBX product lines sooner than others, such as Ericsson.  But two factors ultimately helped the TDM-based vendors: the massive migration that took place prior to Y2K (when enterprises chose to buy new PBXs instead of paying Y2K upgrade fees) and the economic slump.

That said, Cisco still is enjoying quite a lot of success in this space, remaining one of the players to beat.  In the 2nd calendar quarter of 2004, Cisco shipped 437k IP phones, a jump of roughly 11% over Q1.  Some industry observers say that Cisco will face an uphill battle as the current installed base begins to age, since enterprises will go back to the VARs servicing them and request a new system from the original TDM vendor.  Regardless, Cisco still has a commanding lead in the enterprise data market, and can use that position to try to influence some decision makers (particularly if they come from the data rather than the voice side of the house).

Another point that puts Cisco in quite an enviable spot is that regardless of which company wins the voice portion of an IP PBX RFP, chances are Cisco will still make some good money on that deal.  For every dollar of voice equipment (in an upgrade from a TDM to an IP PBX), there is a pull-through effect of roughly three dollars on the data side, as the existing enterprise data network typically needs to be refurbished, in order for it to carry both the voice and data traffic.  And Cisco is very likely to gain those three dollars, due to the company's leadership in enterprise data.