Webremixed Articles for tags: voip

WIPO Provides New Top-Level Domain Resources for Rights Holders

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 17:33:00 GMT

Courtesy of Brian Beckham from the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center in Geneva, here are a few important links with information that may be helpful for rights holders with ICANN's New gTLD program now launched and accepting applications:

• First, is a helpful FAQ that explains plainly the Legal Rights objection process. It's important that rights owners are very familiar with this process and are ready to respond if in the unlikely but potentially problematic situation that another entity applies for a gTLD that includes their intellectual property.

• Next, comes a summary explanation of the post gTLD delegation (beginning late 2012 or early 2013) rights protection mechanisms included in the program and provided for the defense of intellectual property rights.

• Lastly, WIPO has provided a set of links to analysis and other resources about the New gTLD dispute resolutions mechanisms.

With the May First "reveal date" — the day that ICANN will announce all of the applicants and the strings that have been applied for — approaching quickly, rights owners should be ready to respond. Reading the first article is a great place to start. Thanks to WIPO for sharing these links and this information.

Written by Frederick Felman, Chief Marketing Officer at MarkMonitor

No Big Run on IPv4 in 2011

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:44:00 GMT

2011 was an interesting year for IPv4: in February 2011, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) handed out their last free IPv4 address blocks to the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs).

In April 2011, the APNIC (the Regional Internet Registry for the Asia Pacific region) started allocating from its last /8. At the RIPE NCC we did not see a big jump in IPv4 address allocations in 2011, as anticipated by some observers.

The image below shows the total amount of IPv4 address space allocated each year (calculated as /16s on the y axis). You can see that in 2011 there was a drop in the amount of IPv4 address space from the previous year, bringing it down to the level of 2008 and 2009. There was no big run on the remaining IPv4 addresses.

Note that this does not correspond with the number of requests. Especially the number of requests for /21s increased in 2011 (you can find more on this in the background article on RIPE Labs).

IPv4 is certainly running out, but there is no great rush for the last addresses as feared by some. It was all pretty much "business as usual". As we've said in the past, predicting exactly when the RIPE NCC will run out of IPv4 address space is difficult. We cannot anticipate the size of requests we'll receive.

For more information and more statistics, please refer to IPv4 Allocation Statistics in 2011 on RIPE Labs.

Written by Daniel Karrenberg, Chief Scientist at the RIPE NCC

World Notices That Verisign Said Three Months Ago That They Had a Security Breach Two Years Ago

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 02:48:00 GMT

The trade press is abuzz today with reports about a security breach at Verisign. While a security breach at the company that runs .COM, .NET, and does the mechanical parts of managing the DNS root is interesting, this shouldn't be news, at least, not now.

Since Verisign is a public company, they file a financial report called a 10-Q with the SEC every quarter. According to the SEC's web site, Verisign filed their 10-Q for June through September 2011 on October 28th. where it's been available to the public ever since.
Like every other 10-Q, it has a Risk Factors section which lists all the reasons that the company might fail, so don't sue us. Normally those sections are pretty routine, key employees might quit, customers might desert us, key contracts might not be renewed, that sort of stuff. But this 10-Q contained this bit:

We experienced security breaches in the corporate network in 2010 which were not sufficiently reported to Management.

In 2010, the Company faced several successful attacks against its corporate network in which access was gained to information on a small portion of our computers and servers. We have investigated and do not believe these attacks breached the servers that support our Domain Name System ("DNS") network. Information stored on the compromised corporate systems was exfiltrated. The Company's information security group was aware of the attacks shortly after the time of their occurrence and the group implemented remedial measures designed to mitigate the attacks and to detect and thwart similar additional attacks. However, given the nature of such attacks, we cannot assure that our remedial actions will be sufficient to thwart future attacks or prevent the future loss of information. In addition, although the Company is unaware of any situation in which possibly exfiltrated information has been used, we are unable to assure that such information was not or could not be used in the future. The occurrences of the attacks were not sufficiently reported to the Company's management at the time they occurred for the purpose of assessing any disclosure requirements. Management was informed of the incident in September 2011 and, following the review, the Company's management concluded that our disclosure controls and procedures are effective. However, the Company has implemented reporting line and escalation organization changes, procedures and processes to strengthen the Company's disclosure controls and procedures in this area.

Apparently nobody got around to reading it until today, at least nobody who understands the business well enough to know what it means.

All the press reports I've seen just regurgitate that paragraph, adding a few quotes from people close to Verisign who all said they didn't know about it either, and security types who told us that it's an enormous big deal. (Now that you've read the paragraph, you're as qualified to pontificate as anyone.)

Personally, I don't know if it's an enormous big deal or not. Risk factor sections tend to be written as pessimistically as possible, so you can skip over the parts about they cannot assure you and so forth. One thing I do know is that it happened over a year ago, so if anything significant happened as a result, and Verisign knew about it, they'd have told us about that, too, on the principle that you release all your bad news at once. So this means that either it really was just a minor network breach, or the evil consequences are so deep and subtle that we may not know about them for years and years, if ever. I'd tend toward the former, but then, I'm not a Verisign stockholder.

Written by John Levine, Author, Consultant & Speaker

Extreme Networks: Cloud focus will keep earnings on track for year

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 23:47:31 GMT

Extreme Networks (Nasdaq: EXTR) missed its second quarter earnings mark, reporting EPS of 6 cents on revenue of $82.8 million, compared to $85.1 million a year ago; analysts had expected the company to earn 7 cents per share on revenue of $83.49 million.

But, the network infrastructure vendor stood behind its full-year guidance, and said it expects third quarter earnings to be $80 million to $85 million, or 6-8 cents a share, compared to Wall Street's expected $83.14 million and 8 cents per share. Shares were up in after hours trading.

"These results show the initial positive effect of our company transformation with product revenue up 8 percent and non-GAAP operating income up 25 percent from Q1," said Chief Executive Oscar Rodriguez. "We are now focused on driving the success of our new products for the cloud, data center and mobile markets, which will begin shipping this quarter."

Rodriguez said the company had seen strong interest in new cloud-scale products including the Black Diamond X8, and its new mobile backhaul products, the E4G cell-site routers.

Total net revenue in Americas was $36.8 million, revenue in EMEA was $32.4 million, and revenue in APAC was $13.6 million. That compares to revenue in Americas of $30.8 million, revenue in EMEA of $37.2 million, and revenue in APAC of $17.1 million for the same period last year.

Earlier this year, the company announced the general release of its newest Ethernet switch, the BlackDiamond X8, which it said was the "industry's highest density 40 GbE and 10 GbE switch for enterprise core and cloud-based data centers." The company said it expects to begin shipping the product in February.

For more:
- see this release

Acme Packet tumbles as Q4 falls short of expectations

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 23:22:14 GMT

After four straight quarters of earnings bonuses for investors, Acme Packet (Nasdaq: APKT) laid its second profit egg in a row today, reporting fourth quarter non-GAAP EPS of 26 cents, missing Wall Street expectations by 2 cents and falling 40 percent off its earnings a year ago. The market reacted quickly, dropping the company's share price by 10 percent in after hours trading.

The company said rising costs and a soft market in North America, where service providers were reining in capex, were to blame.

Those conditions are likely to persist, said CEO Andy Ory, during an earnings call in which he predicted more woe in the year ahead, growth of just 10 percent compared to Wall Street estimates of nearly double that. The company sad it expects full-year profits of 96 cents to $1 a share, below the $1.24 expected by analysts.

"This reflects a slowdown in capex in the second half of the year and delays caused by consolidation activities among various service providers," Ory said. "We don't expect the North American capex environment to improve in the first half."

Acme reported $83 million in revenue for the quarter, missing expectations of $85.2 million. Total revenue in 2011 was $307.3 million, an increase of 33 percent compared to $231.2 million in 2010.

In January, Acme Packets share price tumbled some 20 percent after the company downgraded guidance for the year, blaming a turbulent service provider market in North America then, too.

"Outside of the North American service provider market, Acme Packet continued to perform very well--particularly in our enterprise business as well as in our Europe and Latin America businesses," Ory said at the time. Unlike today, however, Ory took a positive note on the future, saying:"Looking ahead, we believe we are very well positioned to leverage the broad, multi-year, secular growth drivers associated with the global transition from TDM to IP for real time communications like voice and video."

The enterprise session border controller (SBC) market was busy earlier in 2011, seeing a 55 percent jump in the first quarter. Hosted unified communications and SIP trunking were among factors that played a role in the growth. As in the service provider SBC segment, Acme Packet is the lead dog in the enterprise market, with Cisco Systems (Nasdaq: CSCO) in second place, followed by Ingate and Sipera.

The enterprise SBC market, however, remains fragmented below that top tier, which means declining prices may loom.

For more:
- see this release
- see this Reuters article

SEC Filing Reveals Facebook Network Equipment Valued Over $1B at Close of 2011

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 19:59:00 GMT

"Facebook reported in its SEC filing that it owns 'network equipment' valued at $1.016 billion at the close of 2011," reports Rich Miller of Data Center Knowledge. "The number reflects the expense of rapidly building a massive Internet infrastructure, including Facebook's shift from buying vendor gear and leasing data centers to building its own servers, racks and custom data centers."

Facebook Constructing New Data Center - Located 62 miles south of the Arctic Cicle, Lulea. Facility consists of three 300,000 square feet server buildings; scheduled for completion by 2014.

Photo above shows Facebook's first outside the U.S. data center currently being built on the edge of the Arctic Circle. The northern Swedish city of Lulea chosen for the data center is partly because of the cold climate — crucial for keeping the servers cool — and access to renewable energy from nearby hydropower facilities, according to the company.

Image below is a visualization of Facebook's social graph of 500 million back in 2010 created by intern Paul Butler.

Facebook 'Friendship Visualisation' shows pairs of friends between the world's cities based on company's 500 million user base in 2010. Facebook's current user base at the time of its SEC filing is reported to be over 800 million.(Click to Enlarge)

DNSChanger Trojan Still Running on Half of Fortune 500s, US Govt

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 18:28:00 GMT

"More than two months after authorities shut down a massive Internet traffic hijacking scheme (link), the malicious software that powered the criminal network is still running on computers at half of the Fortune 500 companies, and on PCs at nearly 50 percent of all federal government agencies, new research shows," reports Brian Krebs. ... "Internet Identity, a Tacoma, Wash. company that sells security services, found evidence of at least one DNSChanger infection in computers at half of all Fortune 500 firms, and 27 out of 55 major government entities."

RTX launches new cordless Skype phone

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 15:54:28 GMT

RTX is rolling out a new cordless Skype phone that doesn't require a user to be physically connected to a PC to make a VoIP call.

The DUALphone 4088 simply requires a broadband connection to its base station in order to make Skype calls.

The Danish company said its DUALphone 4088 simply requires a broadband connection to its base station in order to make Skype calls free of charge to other Skype users or have the choice of conventional paid-for landline calls worldwide.

The company's CEO, Jesper Mailind, said the phone "offers consumers a unique way to use Skype."

"We believe there is a growing demand for dual phones from the existing 170 million Skype account holders," he said, adding that the phone also will provide a business opportunity for resellers.

Telecom market research firm TeleGeography recently said international use of Skype was increasing, growing 48 percent in 2011, to 145 billion minutes.

The RTX features a color TFT screen and uses of high definition audio. The phone system can switch between two separate Skype accounts and can be extended to four handsets per household. Standard features including call waiting, voicemail and a phone contact list of 200 numbers that have been enhanced by software to show the Skype status of the user and all contacts.

For more:
- see this release

LifeSize debuts 'universal' video collaboration platform

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 15:31:59 GMT

Logitech (Nasdaq: LOGI) subsidiary LifeSize this week launched its LifeSize UVC Platform, which the company says is the industry's first integrated and virtualized software solution for HD video conferencing infrastructure.

The UVC (universal visual collaboration) platform integrates the capabilities of multiple single-purpose infrastructure products and makes them instantly available from one interface with one login account.

The company said the UVC platform is scalable and customizable, and includes infrastructure applications like HD streaming and recording, firewall/NAT traversal and Gatekeepers (routing and control).

LifeSize contends that with a single integrated platform and a deployment model to fit every IT environment, administrators can buy what they need now and scale up as the organization's needs grow.

"LifeSize has consistently delivered industry firsts," said Colin Buechler, who was named LifeSize's CEO earlier this month, "We were first to HD, first with one button streaming and recording, and now we are redefining video conferencing infrastructure... LifeSize has fundamentally changed the way businesses deploy infrastructure, unlocking the door to real adoption and growth in the video conferencing industry."

LifeSize is offering a "try before you buy" feature that enables instant downloads of the platform, which is globally available now.

The platform with infrastructure applications lists at $3,999; it currently includes UVC Video Center for streaming and recording; UVC Transit Server, a firewall/NAT traversal server; the UVC Transit Client, which is a firewall/NAT traversal proxy; and UVC Access, a gatekeeper/IP communications routing and control.

For more:
- see this release

Qualcomm, Ericsson perform successful VoIP-over-LTE handover

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 15:00:18 GMT

Qualcomm and Ericsson completed the first voice call handover from an LTE mobile network to a WCDMA network using Single Radio Voice Call Continuity (SRVCC), the companies announced today.

SRVCC is a 3GPP specified feature that enables continuity of service by seamlessly switching to a WCDMA network when a consumer on a VoLTE call leaves the LTE network's coverage area; it's a technology required for voice-over-LTE (VoLTE) support.

The call was completed with an Ericsson network using a handset that incorporated Qualcomm's Snapdragon S4 MSM8960 3G/LTE multimode processor. Qualcomm is demonstrating the technology at its booth at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain later this month.

For more:
- see this release

ShoreTel tops analysts estimates in 2Q, ups revenue 22%

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 13:46:12 GMT

ShoreTel generated record revenues in its second quarter for fiscal 2012, and surprised analysts by reporting earnings that beat their expectations by 400 percent.

The IP telephony company also announced it had acquired M5 Networks, a hosted VoIP and UC provider for $160 million (see ShoreTel acquires M5 Networks for $160M as it looks to develop cloud business).

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based ShoreTel said revenue grew 22 percent year-over-year to $58 million, and up 8 percent from the previous quarter. Non-GAAP net income was $1.4 million or 3 cents per share, compared with a non-GAAP net loss of $1 million, or 2 cents per share a year ago. Analysts had expected ShoreTel to report a 1 cent loss for the quarter; the second quarter is typically a seasonally strong one for the company.

During the company's earnings call, chief executive Peter Blackmore said the U.S. Enterprise IP telephony market as well as the U.S. pure IP telephony market grew in the September 2011 quarter after three quarters of modest declines. Synergy Research, he said, estimated the U.S. Enterprise IP telephony market was up 9 percent in the quarter and worldwide Enterprise IP telephony also grew approximately 8 percent.

"ShoreTel's market share within both worldwide and the United States have grown significantly year-over-year," Blackmore said. "We expect to build these market share gains and continue to close the gap between our current number three position and the number two player in the U.S."

ShoreTel said highlights for the quarter included an expansion of its channel. The company added some 60 new partners globally, 38 via its relationship with ScanSource. Blackmore pointed to the addition of Howard Industries, which has revenues in excess of $1 billion and is the largest employer in Mississippi; it selected ShoreTel as its exclusive UC provider.

"We also added a record of nearly 1300 new customers in the quarter, a sequential increase of 24 percent over quarter one," he said, singling out First Republic Bank, which will also use ShoreTel's UC solution including ShoreTel Mobility for 3,000 employees at 65 sites.

ShoreTel forecast revenue of $53 million to $57 million in the current quarter.

For more:
- see this release
- see this SeekingAlpha transcript

Special Report: Enterprise Communications earnings in the fourth quarter 2011

ShoreTel acquires M5 Networks for $160M as it looks to develop cloud business

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 12:54:46 GMT

ShoreTel (Nasdaq: SHOR) has agreed to acquire M5 Networks in a deal valued as much as $160 million, giving it a major entrée to the booming cloud services business in the form of a strong hosted VoIP and UC operation.

M5 shareholders will receive approximately $84 million in cash and 9.5 million shares of ShoreTel stock, which equates to a total of $146.3 million in initial consideration based on a ShoreTel's average stock price over the prior 30 trading days. In addition, M5 shareholders may receive additional contingent consideration of up to $13.7 million. The contingent payments are payable over the two years after closing and are based upon the achievement of certain revenue performance milestones for the year ended Dec. 31, 2012. The deal is expected to close by the end of March.

Privately held M5, which was recently given a visionary position in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for UC as a service in North America, caters primarily to businesses of between 50 and 500 seats. It has more than 2,000 customers and more than 60,000 recurring revenue seats in the U.S.

M5 itself made a pair of major acquisitions recently, in April buying contact center software vendor Callfinity, and in November 2010 buying hosted VoIP provider Geckotech.

With forecasts pointing to continued growth in the hosted UC market, Gartner estimates the market to be $700 million today and expects it to grow at a 36 percent compounded annual growth rate to $2.2 billion in 2015; the deal could be very good to ShoreTel.

ShoreTel CEO Peter Blackmore, during the company's earnings call (see ShoreTel tops analysts estimates in 2Q, ups revenue 22%), said M5 brings a proven hosted UC solution to the company. And, he said, ShoreTel, after eight months of performing an extensive buy-versus-bill review "determined that the secret sauce in hosted UC is not just a well developed R&D solution, but more fundamentally experienced in running a very different business model."

Blackmore said M5 also was attractive because it brought with it a low churn rate, high average revenue per unit, competitive customer acquisition cost and expertise in running in 24/7 data centers.

"The management skills required to run a hosted business are in many ways different from those necessary for the on-premise business," he said. "For us to build this expertise would have taken time and investment and would certainly have involved distraction and therefore risk to our current business. We therefore determined the best way to enter this market quickly and establish a strong position is to find a company with a proven business model, a significant recurring revenue stream, a good management team and then bringing that organization into ShoreTel as a new business unit."

Blackmore also said ShoreTel plans no changes in its current distribution model.

On the nuts and bolts side:

ShoreTel is acquiring M5's entire operation including its customer base, distribution capability and proprietary network, and will be extending offers to substantially all of its 200 employees;
Following the close of the acquisition, M5 will be operated as a ShoreTel business unit;
M5 CEO Dan Hoffman will become president and general manager of the new business unit;
M5 engineering teams will remain separate, but they will cooperate and coordinate in order to leverage the innovation and best practices of both groups; and,
The current ShoreTel Champion Partner reseller program will evolve to include the ability to offer hosted services once the reseller has been qualified and certified.

For more:
- see this release
- see the earnings call transcript from SeekingAlpha

Value or Love for New gTLDs?

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 19:39:00 GMT

ICANN has started its historic and controversial program to expand the number of generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs). This essay outlines the factors needed for the program to create economic value, warns against a cognitive trap that complicates selection of a new gTLD and considers the value contribution of the registries. I will not go into relevant macro measures, but I examine the problems associated with the popular measure of simply counting the number of registrations.

The key to understanding the program's economic impact is to follow the theories of economist Paul Romer and look at how the rearrangement of resources creates value. ICANN's program increases the supply of resources that registries have for creating value. Value creation by registries can come from: (1) introducing new TLD signals for things like location, community, and social responsibility (for example, .nyc for New York City, .music to signal community, and .green to signal environmental corporate responsibility); (2) combining information, such as in the .tel model, which provides contact information for the companies using the gTLD; and (3) introducing a gTLD that competes with .com.

Given the new resources provided by ICANN, the burden now lies on the registries to innovate. But they have to be careful of cognitive biases in choosing among the gTLDs. For example, a registry that chooses the proposed .music should ask itself, "Is there value in .music?" The temptation is to ask the far easier "Do we love music?" Not the same thing, but studies show that we often answer an easier question instead of a harder and more relevant one, and that we'll do so without noticing the swap. (For details on cognitive error traps, see Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow. I have warned against cognitive biases in gTLD value estimation and in domain name appraisals.) Another trap is reliance on the popularity of key words in social media, an approach that flopped with the recent failure to predict the success of presidential candidates.

Remember, there is no easy way to measure new gTLD value creation. The domain name industry has focused on registrations, but that's because they are easily measured and the information is publicly available. Number of registrations does provide a viable measure of a registry's profits, but the registrations may be defensive by brand owners rather than value creating. (For a discussion of alternative measures, see "The Economics of Well-Being” by Justin Fox, HBR January-February 2012.)

New signals and combinations of information, á la .tel, can be value adding for established companies as well as new ones. But switching costs will probably keep most com-branded companies from making the jump. So new companies may converge on a new gTLD that competes with .com while existing companies will more than likely register their brands under a large number of the new gTLDs as a defensive measure. Put all the registrations together and there will be enough revenues for the com-alternative gTLD to be viable.

One reason for gravitating to a com-alternative gTLD is that new companies might feel constrained by the unavailability of desired .com names and thus have a motive to find reasonable alternatives. (See Why Dominant Companies Are Vulnerable by Kyle B. Murray and Gerald Häubl, Sloan Management Review December 2011.) This is especially true because emerging brand owners don't have to acquire any new skills in order to adopt a new gTLD.

Written by Alex Tajirian, CEO at DomainMart

StarHub to Acquire '.starhub' New Top-Level Domain

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 17:20:00 GMT

StarHub selects ARI Registry Services and Melbourne IT DBS to help secure '.starhub' in its latest branding strategy

StarHub, a fully integrated info-communications company in Singapore, today announced it will apply for its own branded slice of Internet real estate as part of the revolutionary new Top-Level Domain program, which is set to change the way Internet users navigate the web.

StarHub has partnered with technical registry provider ARI Registry Services and digital brand management services provider Melbourne IT Digital Brand Services (DBS) to help it apply for and operate its '.brand' domain name.

In applying for '.starhub', StarHub joins other leading brands such as Canon, Deloitte and Hitachi in announcing plans to participate in the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers' (ICANN's) new Top-Level Domain program, which opened for applications last month.

StarHub aims to create a branded, authoritative corner of the Internet devoted completely to its business interests under the '.starhub' Top-Level Domain. In future, consumers may see new website addresses such as 'mobile.starhub', 'tv.starhub' and 'broadband.starhub' introduced to the brand's marketing and advertising activity.

Mr Oliver Chong, StarHub's Assistant Vice President of Brand and Marketing Communications, explained the '.starhub' Top-Level Domain will position the brand as a leader in the region.

"Our '.starhub' new Top-Level Domain will cement the company's position as Singapore's most innovative info-communications company. We pride ourselves on being at the forefront of innovation and through this initiative StarHub is one of first companies in the region to publicly commit to the next generation of online navigation," Mr Chong said.

"We believe the '.starhub' Top-Level Domain will deliver clear marketing and advertising benefits to StarHub, such as improved online brand recall and a more intuitive consumer experience with easy to remember domain names such as 'mobile.starhub'. We also anticipate potential Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) benefits by operating a more targeted and relevant naming system that is clearly matched with our website content," he said.

"Ultimately, we believe '.starhub' will deliver increased consumer trust and loyalty in our digital brand and enable StarHub to future-proof its online presence."

Mr Adrian Kinderis, CEO of ARI Registry Services — the company chosen by StarHub to provide technical expertise and infrastructure for the initiative — said it was a bold step forward for the company and reinforces its position as a leader in online innovation.

"StarHub is an industry leader and operating a new Top-Level Domain will reinforce its position at the forefront of innovation within the online space. As a proven global registry solution provider, we are extremely excited to be chosen to help support the '.starhub' Top-Level Domain," Mr Kinderis said. "A simple, memorable and branded Internet domain name like '.starhub' will allow consumers to bypass search engines and go directly to the content they are looking for. I anticipate that this announcement by StarHub will open the floodgates for Asian brands to get on board with this exciting initiative and it will be a major boost to the local digital economy."

Mr Theo Hnarakis, CEO & Managing Director of Melbourne IT — the company chosen by StarHub to provide domain strategy and application consulting services — said the decision to apply for '.starhub' would deliver long-term benefits for the StarHub brand.

"The way consumers connect with brands online has changed dramatically in the past few years with e- Commerce booming, mobile Web browsing rising fast and social media usage expanding — all of which has provided brands with opportunities and headaches in equal measure. Vital to the future of nearly every modern company is the ability for customers to easily engage with the business online. Savvy brands like StarHub understand that fact and realise the cornerstone to their future online strategy lies in a '.brand'," Mr Hnarakis said.

The application window for new Top-Level Domains opened on 12 January and will close on 12 April 2012.

Plantronics 3Q earnings fall despite UC record revenues

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 04:44:30 GMT

Plantronics (NYSE: PLT) Tuesday reported lower profit in its third quarter than a year ago, but still beat Wall Street's expectations, setting UC revenue records along the way.

Net income for the quarter was $30.9 million, or 71 cents a share, down slightly from $31.6 million, or 64 cents a share a year ago. Adjusted net income was 75 cents per share, topping analyst's forecasts of 68 cents per share, and topping last year's adjusted income of 66 cents per share. The lower profits were primarily due to Plantronic buying back some 2.1 million shares.

Revenue, meanwhile was $183.2 million, up slightly from $181.6 million during the same period a year ago.

Plantronics said it expected a strong fourth quarter, forecasting revenue of between $175 million and $180 million for the quarter, with net income of 63-68 cents per share. Analysts expected revenue of $1877.6 million and adjusted earnings per share of 67 cents.

During yesterday's earnings call, Ken Kannappan, Plantronics' president and chief executive, said the company set a record in the quarter for UC revenue, which saw 90 percent growth due to rapid adoption of UC globally. The company also saw 8 percent growth in office and contact center revenue.

"We continue to see broad adoption of UC across all size of enterprises in all major geographies," he said. "Our investments in UC continued to yield solid results. And in the first nine months of fiscal 2012, we made good progress in differentiating our product line, as well as making huge strides in our corporate marketing and brand positioning."

For more:
- see this release
- see this earnings call transcript from Seeking Alpha

Radvision rolls out new top end for Scopia videoconferencing line

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 01:13:58 GMT

Radvision (Nasdaq: RVSN), which has been fighting an uphill battle to establish itself in the high-end videoconferencing space against Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) and Polycom (Nasdaq: PLCM), this week rolled out what could be a big win for the Israeli company.

Its Scopia XT5000 endpoint is the first room system, it says, to combine dual HD 1080p/60fps video and content, HD audio, H.264 High Profile and SVC.

"It's brand new architecture," said Bob Romano, corporate VP of global marketing. "We've redesigned it from the ground up and it's simply the most powerful endpoint in its class."

Romano said the Dual HD 1080p allows users to videoconference in HD, and to also stream a second channel in high-definition. That means users who might want to share images or video during a presentation can do so without sacrificing quality. More specifically, users who might want to use a second camera, in an education setting for example, can do so in HD.

And, with both H.264 HP and H.264 SVC, the system delivers bandwidth efficiency along with performance. The endpoint also includes three beamforming mics per unit, meaning the mics can find where a voice is coming from and reduce or eliminate superfluous surrounding noises.

Radvision offers businesses the option of using a standalone MCU or an embedded MCU. The advantage to an embedded MCU, especially for small businesses, is price, said Romano.

"A lot of our customers don't want to put in a standalone MCU," he said. "So we embed one that can be dialed into. It can mean more scale and functionality for an SMB."

Another of the useful elements included with the XT5000 is the ability to interface with it via a standard remote control, or by using an iPad app.

The iPad controller makes use of the tablet's user interface, meaning you can zoom in by pinching your fingers together on the screen or pan the camera by swiping left or right.

"A remote control can be intimidating," said Romano, adding that the iPad controller has been well received in the marketplace.

The XT5000 will be available in the first quarter of 2012 and carries a pricetag that isn't very intimidating, either. The unit lists at $10,500.

For more:
- see this release

AT&T's Randall & Stankey: Wireless Data Growth Half The FCC Prediction

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 21:36:00 GMT

John Stankey, President and CEO, AT&T: "Data consumption right now is growing 40% a year."40%, not 92%-120%. "Data consumption right now is growing 40% a year," John Stankey of AT&T told investors and his CEO Randall Stephenson confirmed on the investor call. That's far less than the 92% predicted by Cisco's VNI model or the FCC's 120% to 2012 and 90% to 2013 figure in the "spectrum crunch" analysis. AT&T is easily a third of the U.S. mobile Internet and growing market share; there's no reason to think the result will be very different when we have data from others.

With growth rates less than half of the predictions, a data-driven FCC and Congress has no reason to rush to bad policy. Wireless technology is rapidly moving to sharing spectrum, whether in-building small cells, WiFi, White Spaces, Shared RAN or tools of what the engineers are calling hetnets — heterogenous networks. The last thing policymakers should do is tie up more spectrum for exclusive use; shared spectrum often yields three to ten times as much capacity.

Bad compromises on the video spectrum are unnecessary because plenty of spectrum is unused. That includes the 20 MHz that M2Z would be building out today if Julius hadn't blocked them; the 20 MHz the cable companies are sitting on and want to sell to Verizon; and the 30 MHz or so Stankey identifies as fallow at AT&T.

40% growth is still substantial, but wireless technology is improving at a breathtaking pace. LTE has about 10x the capacity of 2.5G and 4x the capacity of 3G. LTE Advanced, deploying beginning 2013 at Verizon, is designed for 10x the capacity of LTE. Putting more spectrum to use would be great, but let's do it right.

Wireless speeds are actually going up dramatically, with AT&T delivering 2-5 megabits to most of the country and Verizon's LTE delivering 5-12 megabits to 2/3rds of the population. Verizon is ahead of schedule to bring 5 megabits+ to 92% of the country in 2013 and 96-98% in 2015-2016. AT&T and Sprint have raised capex to catch up. 80%+ of the U.S. will have a 5 megabit offering in 2013-2014, 90%+ by 2015 or sooner. That's without any additional spectrum.

Today's wireless networks are designed to be shared: towers, WiFi, White Spaces, DAS and small cells all working together. The best engineers in the world are working on RAN sharing, SON, hetnets, 8x8 MIMO and techniques I'm writing about in my next book, Gigabit Wireless. AT&T in fact is one of the world leaders in DAS, WiFi and femtos and behind the scenes a key thought leader. There's wonderfully exciting stuff I'll be doing my best to translate for non-engineers.

Takeaway: The future is sharing the airwaves so let's get the policy right.

Written by Dave Burstein, Editor, DSL Prime

Prof. Dave Farber on Where the Internet is Headed

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 20:19:00 GMT

"Internet protocols simply aren't adequate for the changes in hardware and network use that will come up in a decade or so," says Professor Dave Farber who was recently interviewed by Andy Oram.

"Dave predicts that computers will be equipped with optical connections instead of pins for networking, and the volume of data transmitted will overwhelm routers, which at best have mixed optical/electrical switching," writes Oram. "Sensor networks, smart electrical grids, and medical applications with genetic information could all increase network loads to terabits per second. When routers evolve to handle terabit-per-second rates, packet-switching protocols will become obsolete. The speed of light is constant, so we'll have to rethink the fundamentals of digital networking."

DMARC: New Email Authentication Protocol

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 20:02:00 GMT

A consortium of companies including Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Paypal have announced that they were collaborating and coming up with a new protocol known as DMARC — the Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance.

What is DMARC?

This is very much a summary of DMARC in a nutshell (I will probably write an article about this in the future), but from the website:

A DMARC policy allows a sender to indicate that their emails are protected by SPF and/or DKIM, and tells a receiver what to do if neither of those authentication methods passes — such as junk or reject the message. DMARC removes guesswork from the receiver's handling of these failed messages, limiting or eliminating the user's exposure to potentially fraudulent & harmful messages. DMARC also provides a way for the email receiver to report back to the sender about messages that pass and/or fail DMARC evaluation.

When I first heard about DMARC, I said to myself "Self, why do we need another email authentication protocol?" The answer is that DMARC is not another protocol but instead leverages existing email authentication protocols and provides feedback to the spoofed domain.

SPF already provides a way to say: "If this message fails an SPF check, discard the message." It's called a Hard Fail. However, not all hard fails are illegitimate (there are significant false positives with SPF). DKIM, in itself, doesn't provide a way to discard a message if it fails an authentication check. This makes it less useful in securing the Internet (i.e., it is a barrier to adoption).

Besides which, what happens if an SPF check asses but a DKIM check doesn't? And if one of them fails, who should you tell? DMARC provides a mechanism that says: "If one of these checks fails, discard the message." But furthermore, it also provides a way to tell the responsible party that the message failed a check. For example, if security@paypal.com fails a DMARC check (either through SPF or DKIM), the email receiver can send the message to an email address that says "Hey, this message failed an SPF check. Was it legitimate or not?" If it is a false positive (perhaps a new server brought online), Paypal can add it to its SPF check. If it's a phishing message, Paypal can investigate to have the website taken down.

The strength of DMARC is that it is a stronger way to protect a brand from being abused; receivers can discard spoofed messages and senders can figure out just who, exactly, is sending mail as them.

The weak point of DMARC is, unfortunately, the weak point of SPF and DKIM — spammers and phishers don't need to spoof a domain in order to fool users into taking action. If a spammer sends mail from security@paypal.com.yakzas.com (a fictitious domain), many users just see that first part (paypal.com) without being more aware that there is more to the message.

And if a phisher signs up for a cloud service that issues temporary credentials, they can create the account paypale.onmicrosoft.com and send spam from there to avoid IP reputation blocking (and to the spammer that is abusing our Office 365 service, we know what you're doing, you jackass) while hijacking the reputation of another brand in the From address.

The strength of DMARC is not so much that it combats phishing but that if a good domain is authenticated, mail user agents (like Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook, etc) can highlight that the sender is a trusted sender and highlight it in blue or put a little icon beside it. Since users use visual clues to make heuristic decisions, the lack of a trusted symbol can train people to be suspicious.

Anyhow, it's nice to see that the authentication/validation protocols are consolidating.

Written by Terry Zink, Program Manager

Public-Private Cooperation Policy for Cyber Security Suggested by Commissioner Kroes

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 19:11:00 GMT

Wout de Natris writes: At a speech during the Security and Defense Agenda meeting on 30 January Vice-President of the European Commission, Neelie Kroes, showed how the Commission envisions public-private cooperation on cyber security.

Remarks by Kroes:

"The Internet does not belong to any one group, but attacks on it affect every group. So let's work together, all sectors, all levels, public and private, national, international and European. So that we can safeguard the security of the systems that increasingly underpin our lives, today and in the future."

"In tomorrow's world, if the Internet is not secured, nothing will be."

Full statement published here.

DDoS Attacks Increased by 2000% in Past 3 Years, Asia Generating Over Half of Recent Attacks

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 18:44:00 GMT

In the past three years, Akamai has seen 2,000% increase in the number of DDoS attack incidents investigated on behalf of its customers. The latest State of the Internet report released today by Akamai also identifies top countries from which this observed attack traffic originates, as well as the top ports targeted by these attacks.

From the report: During the third quarter of 2011, Akamai observed attack traffic originating from 195 unique countries/regions, up from 192 in the second quarter. After making its first appearance in the top 10 list in recent memory in the second quarter, Indonesia vaulted to the top of the list this quarter, generating 14% of observed attack traffic. Myanmar, which had suddenly appeared at the top of the list in the prior two quarters, disappeared from the list just as suddenly in the third quarter, potentially indicating that the attack traffic that had been observed originating from the country has either been shut down, or is now coming from other places. With Myanmar dropping out of the top 10 list, South korea moved into it, more than tripling its observed level of attack traffic, responsible for 3.8% in the third quarter. In addition to South korea and Indonesia, Taiwan, China, India, and Egypt were all responsible for higher percentages of attack traffic as compared to the prior quarter.

Attack Traffic – Top Originating Countries

Holding Google to a Higher Standard in Search

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:01:00 GMT

Danny Sullivan has been the go-to guy for understanding the world of search for over 15 years. This week he published a really good story on Google Plus Your World. A group of engineers have launched a site called Focus on the User that shows exactly how the new Google service could be including other social media content listings besides only Google Plus, but is not.

Google Plus is of course Google's entry into the social network battle, and the service recently announced over 90 million users. Just this month Google has started inserting social media content from Google Plus listings (when available) into the search engine response pages (SERPs) on Google. However, other major sources of social media content — Facebook, Twitter — are not included.

Danny does a great job of laying out why this is overly preferential, and doesn't deliver the best search result. The engineers from Facebook, Twitter and MySpace behind Focus on the User have developed a bookmarklet called, "Don't Be Evil, get it?" that you can add to your browser to pull more comprehensive social media listings into your personalized search results.

Danny makes a strong case this improves current search results. He provides lots of screenshots like the one below. It's important to note that the bookmarklet is using Google's own algorithmic rankings for these revised SERPs.

Danny also includes the other side of the story. Sites like Facebook and Twitter do not license their content to be crawled, so why should Google include this content?

"Google, in particular its executive chairman Eric Schmidt, has argued that it doesn't have all the data it needs to include other social services in the way it does for Google Plus. The failure to reach a deal with Facebook; the failure to renew a deal with Twitter, these have prevented the social signals it needs from being used, Google has said."

What the Focus on the User group has done is clearly demonstrated that Google could have included other content if it wanted. And to my read Danny has made a convincing argument that Google SHOULD do this, because it delivers the highest quality search results back to the user.

If legal concerns are really what is holding Google back, the company should challenge Facebook and Twitter to allow them to use the same inputs Focus on the User has accessed via the bookmarklet. If those companies refuse, then publicize that decision.

I've installed the Focus on the User tool and I'm doing my own comparisons. If anyone out there is already using it, please drop a comment with your impressions.

Written by Christopher Parente, High Tech Public Relations

Reducing Unreachable ICANN Registrations

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 15:29:00 GMT

Recently ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) published a report on inaccurate registration data in her own databases. Now the question is presented to the world how can we mitigate this problem? There seems to be a very easy solution.

Why register?

The question to this answer seems simple. To know who has registered with an organisation. This makes it possible to contact the registered person or organisation, to send bills and to discuss policy with the members.

The rationale of unreachable registrations

This one completely goes by me. ICANN distributes IP resources at the highest level that are on principle scarce: domain names and IP addresses and sets policy around the distribution of these resources. So it seems to be in the utmost interest of ICANN to have an accurate database. Over the past years it has been shown over and over again, that accuracy was not a priority of ICANN, even against her existing policies.

There does not seem to be a rationale for this lapses in registration measures. ICANN in the end loses money as she provides a service, but is most likely not paid for this service. Next to that it is not good for ICANN's image, as government and LEA reactions have shown over the past years. It could even become a threat to ICANN's very existence.

Cyber crime and enforcement

With the coming of cyber crime, spam and botnets, law enforcement agencies of different back ground became interested in Whois data and were very much frustrated when they found data not to be accurate. (And vetting and revocation mechanisms not being in place.) Whois data is a primary source at the start of investigations. So if these are false this makes investigations harder, not impossible.

Inaccurate data

What can be reasons that data is inaccurate? There can be several reasons. To give a few examples. Someone forgot to change the data after a move of the office, contact person, a merger, bank account, a company stopped its activities, etc. In the meantime the IP resources are still used as they were meant to, but from an unknown address.

A second reason could be that free speech advocates want to have a chance to hide their identity behind a so called proxy registration. This way they are safe from prosecution in their home country. Usually this is supported by western governments.

A third reason can be criminal intent. A person or group of persons uses the IP resources for personal gain through illegal activities. They never intended to provide accurate data. From a society point of view this is an activity that preferably is stopped as fast as possible.

What to do about it?

We are discussing unreachable registered companies. It looks quite simple to me. ICANN has many ways to reach out to these companies and does so. Everyone concerned gets one year to alter the data. As soon as someone complies, the data is submitted to the Whois database, after being vetted by ICANN.

All that have not updated their registration on time -and one year is a very lenient time frame- are de-registered by ICANN and where possible their IP resources taken away.

Legit after claims

If ICANN makes sure there's a good procedure to follow for legit claims after the de-registration that come in anyway, I'm sure this procedure will work. Criminals usually do not show up and try to find new ways to proceed their business.

Vetting of all new registrations

When ICANN makes sure new applicants are vetted before being admitted and an ongoing checking procedure of existing members is put in place, I'm convinced that the Internet will become a safer place for all concerned. Also, she becomes an example for policy at lower level IP resource organisations by setting a standard. It makes one avenue on the Internet harder to reach for criminals.

Written by Wout de Natris, Consultant international cooperation cyber crime + trainer spam enforcement

Zeacom Contact Center now available for Lync

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 14:02:02 GMT

Contact center solutions vendor Zeacom said its Communications Center (ZCC) contact center software is now available for Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Lync following a beta program that saw ZCC deployed at Lync sites in Northern Europe and Asia-Pacific.

ZCC helps organizations build out their help desk, call center or multimedia contact center to the Lync platform, and it currently has 4,000 customer sites worldwide. Targeting up to 400 seats on Lync, ZCC allows contact centers to control the delivery of every contact--from voice calls and email to SMS and social media alerts.

Zeacom use's Microsoft's native UCMA architecture and conferencing platform, allowing it to offer additional functionality. Zeacom offers solutions for multimedia contact centers, business process automation and unified communications.

For more:
- see this release

BT Working on 300Mbps Residential Pilot Project

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 20:43:00 GMT

Openreach, the lead deployment arm of BT, has issued an announcement asking residents and landlords of apartment blocks to join a pilot project that will eventually bring broadband download speeds of up to 300Mbps to residents.

"Participants will gain access to Openreach’s Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) technology which delivers super-fast broadband speeds," says Openreach. "End users will initially have access to downstream speeds of up to 100Mb/s but these will rise to give users the option of up to 300Mb/s in the spring of this year, the fastest commercially available speeds in the UK for a residential connection. Upstream speeds will also be the fastest in the UK."

ARI Registry Services Signs 21 Contracts in the First Week of New TLD Applications

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 15:23:01 GMT

Strong demand shown for new Top-Level Domains as ARI Registry Services wins 21 new contracts in the first seven days of the application window.

ARI Registry Services today announced it signed contracts to provide technical registry services for 21 new Top-Level Domains within the first week of applications opening.

Adrian Kinderis, CEO of ARI Registry Services, said signing 21 contracts in the first week was the perfect start to the application window.

"The opening of the application window on 12 January has clearly motivated applicants to get moving on this unique, yet limited opportunity. We immediately witnessed an influx of enquiries and 21 contracts had been signed by the end of the week," Mr Kinderis said. "The majority of these contracts are .brand TLDs, representing some the largest and most recognisable brands around the world. This indicates that the time of procrastination is over. Applicants need to move now or run the risk of missing out."

According to an analysis by ARI Registry Services, brands have shown the strongest interest (60% of interest) in applying for a new Top-Level Domain, followed by entrepreneurs (30% of interest) and then governments or other groups (10% of interest) wanting to represent their city or region online. An analysis of the industries shows technology brands (20%) lead the pack, closely followed by banks and other financial service providers (11%).

Mr Kinderis said he expects to make public client announcements with major brands in the near future. He also noted there is now no doubt about the level of demand for new Top-Level Domains.

"Critics of the program have suggested there is little demand for new domains. However, from the results we have seen in the first week of applications, we can clearly see strong demand exists."

Although the first week saw a strong result, Mr Kinderis warned that many potential applicants were still sitting on the fence with a 'wait and see' mentality.

"We have clients that are still undecided about whether they should apply. They have been put off by the negativity that has been surrounding the program. There have been delays and speculation. There is also a misguided perception amongst some that they can wait until the next round to secure their brand or generic category name. My message to those clients is that there is no certainty about when there will be another round. Potential applicants need to understand that if they take a 'wait and see' approach, they may miss out all together," Mr Kinderis said.

The application window for new Top-Level Domains (TLDs) opened on 12 January. ARI Registry Services signed the 21 contracts in the seven day period between 12 and 19 January. Due to confidentiality agreements, ARI Registry Services is unable to reveal any specific details about the contracts. The names of the clients, along with all the other clients ARI Registry Services is working with, will be revealed on 1 May 2012 when ICANN publishes the list of applications it has received.

VBrick's SIP-enabled gateway enables integration of videoconferencing systems

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 15:07:27 GMT

VBrick Systems is rolling out a new Video Conference Streaming Gateway Module for its H.264 Distributed Media Engine that it claims is the first product to deliver a multi-vendor, standards-based solution to enable thousands of smartphones, tablets, PCs/MACs and TVs to display a video conference. The result? Enterprises can now easily stream their videoconferences to large audiences, record the content and offer it on-demand. VBrick has tested the module with SIP-compliant video conferencing products from Polycom, Cisco, Logitech's LifeSize, Avaya and Radvision. Release.

Selecting ICANN's Next CEO - Letter 2

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 15:03:00 GMT

In November 2011, a group of "friends of ICANN" from various countries sent a letter to the Chair of ICANN's Board, expressing concern about the process used previously, and suggesting improvements.

Towards the end of 2011, the ICANN Board set up a Search Committee, chaired by George Sadowsky, and some significant improvements have been integrated into the selection process:

• In the previous round, in 2008-09, some members of the Board had self-appointed themselves to form a Search Committee, which began consultations many weeks before a Board resolution even established it. This time, proper process has been respected.

• In its previous incarnation, the Search Committee had chosen an external consultant without any semblance of a competitive bid, which was odd at a time when the whole of ICANN was gearing up to reaffirm its commitments, including being able to escape "capture" resulting from any conflict of interest. This time, the firm was selected through a call for tenders.

• In 2008-09, responsibilities were blurred between the Search Committee and the consulting firm, each doing a bit of the other's job. This time, applications from candidates are received solely by the consulting firm, which does all the vetting, due process and pre-selection, in (we are told) an independent fashion.

• Transparency has improved; for example, the profile of the CEO job was posted, and the ICANN community invited to review it.

• Previously, the job of CEO had not been advertised other than on the ICANN website, in spite of strong demands by some Board members who remarked that a lack of adequate international publicity weakened the corporation's transparency and reputation. This time, an ad was placed in a world-class weekly, attracting much attention.

In the 2nd letter to the Chair of the Board, 2 questions were raised about the way the ad was run in The Economist:

• Why was ICANN not referred to, simply, as a "not-for-profit" organization?

• Why was the usual "multi-stakeholder organization" description dropped?

Do these two notable departures from long-standing and widely accepted definitions imply that ICANN is considering a change in its identity? In his reply, the Chair of the Board answers these points.

The 2nd letter from these "friends of ICANN", and the reply from the Chair of the Board, can be viewed in full here.

Written by Jean-Jacques Subrenat, Ambassador (ret.)

Research: Home video calling is set to boom; better technology is making it happen

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:58:51 GMT

If you own a relatively new smartphone or tablet like Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL)'s iPad, chances are you've at least noodled around with video calling through any number of apps including Facetime, Tango, Skype and more.

Ditto in the office. Videoconferencing isn't yet ubiquitous, but the gains in popularity it has seen as a cost-cutting tool and for collaboration among teams point to it becoming so.

So, if you think you're likely to avoid it at home, think again. The technology is a nascent one, and there are only a few vendors pushing it hard, but, according to new research, it's likely to grow more than tenfold by 2015.

Attribute it, in large part, to the popularity of social networks like Facebook and Google+, which, with the increasing prevalence of services like Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT)'s Skype are beginning to push living room video calling to the forefront.

In the U.S., cable provider Comcast (Nasdaq: CMCSA) is teaming with Skype to launch video calling for its customers; globally, Logitech (Nasdaq: LOGI) continues to introduce new high-end, low-cost webcams, like its 1080p C920 for $99 that it introduced earlier this month.

NPD In-Stat, in research released today, forecasts total users will increase from 1.5 million in 2011 to 16.4 million in 2015. Granted, the numbers aren't huge, put the potential is.

While video calling has been around for several years, the ease of connecting on mobile devices has helped push it to the forefront of consumer adoption.

The digital home market, however, has been slow to ripen. But, with social networking as a catalyst, expect that to change.

As NPD analyst Amy Cravens points out, "While the mobile market is experiencing the strongest growth in usage, the PC and living room calling markets are also experiencing a surge of large player activity."

She said Skype's integration with Facebook and Google+'s incorporation of Hangout has provided a new perspective.

"Introducing this capability to the living room, enabling HDTV video chat, is an additional aspect of the market that is being endorsed by industry giant Microsoft as well as leading device OEMs including Panasonic, Samsung and LG," she said.

Her forecast? A whopping increase in video calling minutes approaching 550 billion minutes in 2015, up from just 141 million minutes in 2010.

But despite increasing bandwidth to homes, Internet connection speeds have remained the weak-link in HD video calls, with average speeds of a few megabits per second (Mbps). While VGA only requires 147 Mbps of data, full 1080p HD requires nearly one gigabit per second of data.

For video calling technology to reach full acceptance by consumers, HD calls likely will be required.

Logitech's VP and GM for business Eric Kintz agreed, telling FierceEnterpriseCommunications that its own research and customer feedback shows users want simplicity of use and "sheer quality" of picture. He says the new C920 is "the best quality camera we've produced to date," both in terms of optics and technology. The C920, he said, encodes the video at the camera rather than relying on a computer, which means less processing power is needed, opening up the range of laptops, desktops and connected devices, like smart TVs, that will be able to support high-quality video calling.--Jim

Soft telecom outlook cuts Juniper Q1 guidance as Q4 profit nosedives

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 13:08:27 GMT

Juniper Networks (NYSE: JNPR) blamed tight service provider budgets for causing fourth quarter earnings to drop by nearly 50 percent and said the first quarter would likely be worse.

The company continues to lose customers to a resurgent Cisco (Nasdaq:CSCO), which is scheduled to release results Feb. 8, and has seen the value of its stock erode some 45 percent in the past year, including a 3 percent drop Friday following its earnings report.

And, those conditions don't look like they're ripe for change. A new report from Ovum today said that telecoms are likely to aggressively control capex and opex expenditures for the next several years as global economic turbulence continues to make for uncertain times. The research firm said 2011 was a bounce-back year for much of the industry, but forecast growth to slow by half through 2017. Juniper gets about 6 percent of its revenue from AT&T (NYSE: T).

Juniper's guidance for the first quarter was less than enthralling, with the company, which now has about 18 percent of the router and switching market compared to Cisco's 50 percent, saying it expects first quarter profit of between 11 and 14 cents a share, and sales of $960 million to $990 million. Analysts expected profits of 27 cents on sales of $1.1 billion.

Juniper reported net income of $96.2 million, or 18 cents a share, for the fourth quarter, about half of its year-ago results when it earned $190.2 million, or 35 cents a share. Sales fell to $1.12 billion. Analysts expected profits of 27 cents per share and sales of $1.12 billion.

Juniper, meanwhile, contends that several new products scheduled for release this year will help it grow its share of the market. Last week, it announced it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire rights to the service management layer of BitGravity's CDN technology.

For more:
- see this release
- see this Bloomberg report

Japanese operator demands Google help curtail 'signaling storm,' blames VoIP app

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 12:18:24 GMT

Japanese operator NTT DoCoMo is demanding help from Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) to help reign in what it's calling a signaling storm specifically exacerbated by an Android VoIP application that caused a major outage in its network.

The operator said the app and the way Android constantly polls the network generate massive signaling traffic.

Verizon Wireless (NYSE: VZ) suffered outages in its LTE network last year and cited similar factors.

Operators are increasingly concerned with the booming traffic demands that also are likely to accompany cloud-based services and applications like videoconferencing.

DoCoMo's outage earlier this month was the fifth outage in the past six months. It affected 2.5 million subscribers.

For more:
- see this Rethink Wireless article

Oracle helping service providers with quick data analysis

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 23:51:06 GMT

Oracle has introduced the latest iteration of Oracle Communications Data Mode, which helps communications service providers (CSPs) analyze multiple data types and garner critical business insights, such as customer network usage behavior and marketing campaign effectiveness.

The explosion of data generated by mobile device consumers is creating a growing management challenge for CSPs. Oracle's Communications Data Model Adapter helps accelerate pre-paid data analysis and improve decision making, the company said.

The solution, certified by the TM Forum, also includes Oracle Communications Network Charging and Control Adapter for Oracle Communications Data Model, which is the first prebuilt, productized extract, load and transform (ELT) adapter in the industry.

With the adapter, CSPs can process customer charging information more efficiently and cost-effectively to deliver near real-time data for predictive analytics.

A key component of the solution is a standards-based, pre-built data warehouse with a comprehensive database schema. The solution maintains sophisticated trending and data mining capabilities, as well as a wide array of dashboards, all focused specifically on communications industry business challenges.

For more:
- see this release

Study: SMBs looking closer at cloud communications solutions

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 21:53:28 GMT

Small and medium businesses are becoming more comfortable using cloud services, a new study says,

The survey, conducted by Webtorials for VoIP provider Fonality found that 14 percent more SMBs say they understand cloud-based service options but most still are focused on optimizing the total cost of operations.

Those findings, said Fonality, create a window of opportunity for cloud-savvy vendors.

"These findings suggest that SMBs are beginning to connect the cost-saving potential of (cloud) services to their overall mission of reducing expenditures and minimizing TCO," said Fonality CEO David Scult. "While controlling costs by investing in new technology seems contradictory, cloud-based communications tools, in particular, can be leveraged to drive competitive differentiation and maximize operational expenses. As a result, this technology can help spur growth through enhanced productivity and efficiency."

The survey also revealed that a quarter of respondents felt flexibility and mobility with communications solutions are important, and more than 85 percent believe they need to provide access to communications solutions for remote employees.

"It is encouraging to see that SMBs are taking the initiative to learn more about cloud-based services," said Steve Taylor, editor-in-chief and publisher for Webtorials. "This is a needed first step for SMBs to realize the tools and solutions available to achieve the goals they stated as unattainable."

Scult earlier this month was named CEO of Fonality, the third chief executive for the company in the past two years. He replaced Dean Mansfield.

For more:
- see this release

The State of Mail Database Marketing

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 00:15:01 GMT

My mail server has a lot of spamtraps. They come from various sources, but one of the most prolific is bad addresses in personal domains. Several of my users have their own domains, such as my own johnlevine.com, in which they use a handful of addresses. Those addresses tend either to be people's first names, for individual mailboxes, or else the names of companies. If I did business with Verizon (which I do not) I might give them an address like verizon@johnlevine.com. All those domains get mail to lots of other addresses, which is 100% spam.

The made up addresses are largely dictionary attacks, which is obvious when I see sequential spam to barry@, betsy@, and bruno@. Some of them are company addresses that leaked to spammers before the companies went out of business years ago. And some are just mysteries.

My friend Bob Frankston has had his own vanity domain since 1992, which gets a lot of spam to spamtrap addresses. I automatically diagnose and send off abuse reports for a lot of it. Today I got a hand written response to one of them from a database marketing company in Florida. It said, in part:

This email resolves to a master record for [a name and address of a guy in Pennsylvania].

The recorded was added to the client's file on 11/12/2002 per a trip preference card that was sent to the postal address listed above. The trip preference card asks where someone would like to travel, and for their email address to be sent notifications.

If [that address] had changed their mind about receiving emails, we diligently suppress/remove opt outs. However, I do not see that email in our suppression, opt out, or feedback loops.

That wasn't too surprising, I've gotten other mail to that spamtrap from other spammers who gave me the same guy in Pennsylvania, who has no relation to Bob, and it's barely possible that someone could have scribbled something on a postcard that might have been mistranscribed as the spamtrap address, although the name of the alleged subscriber has no visible connection to the spamtrap address either. It's certainly plausible that once someone had the bad info, they sold it to lots of other marketers.

But two things jumped out at me. The first is the date, 2002. They've been spamming this address for ten years. Since it is a spamtrap, it has never responded, never ordered anything, never "opened" a message (ESP-speak for fetching the URLs in the message.) But they keep pumping out the mail anyway. The competent ESPs I know all purge their lists of dead addresses eventually, certainly in a lot less than ten years.

The other is the inability to imagine that every address in their crummy database isn't a live potential customer. This address never "changed their mind" because it doesn't have a mind. It's a spamtrap. It sends no mail, and it won't opt out because it never opted in.

I wish this situation were atypical, but it's not. If the putatively legitimate e-mail marketing industry wanted to understand why they've earned such a poor reputation, it wouldn't be hard to figure out.

Fun fact: Bob's last name happens to be the name of a town in Australia. Someone there has misconfigured one of their systems to send status reports with personal information about their clients to yet another made up address in Bob's domain, which I expect is totally illegal under Australian privacy law. I haven't been able to stop that, either.

Written by John Levine, Author, Consultant & Speaker

Protests Erupt Over EU's Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 18:24:00 GMT

In a blog post today, Michael Geist writes: "The reverberations from the SOPA fight continue to be felt in the U.S. and elsewhere (mounting Canadian concern that Bill C-11 could be amended to adopt SOPA-like rules), but it is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement that has captured increasing attention this week. Several months after the majority of ACTA participants signed the agreement, most European Union countries formally signed the agreement yesterday (notable exclusions include Germany, the Netherlands, Estonia, Cyprus and Slovakia). This has generated a flurry of furious protest..."

Citrix reports record revenue, soft outlook for 1Q12

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 14:25:04 GMT

Citrix Systems (Nasdaq: CTXS) reported strong earnings this week, but the company plans to increase acquisitions in the coming year and to reorganize its sales force, which prompted the company to issue a lackluster forecast for the coming year.

Revenue across the board saw a steep increase, with the company reporting net revenues of $619.4 million in the quarter, a 17 percent increase from the $530 million it reported a year ago. GAAP net income was $108.7 million, 58 cent per share, up from $94.4 million, 49 cents per share, a year ago. The 66 cents quarterly adjusted EPS beat Wall Street estimated of 65 cents.

"Greater diversity in our products and channel, combined with a compelling vision, is driving more C-level engagement as well as more up-sell and cross-sell opportunities," said Mark Templeton, president and chief executive officer for Citrix. "As a result, we are seeing more strategic deals, more use of our products as an end-to-end system, and deeper engagement with our customers through services."

Citrix has worked to roll out more robust mobile, cloud and desktop solutions, and it has begun to pay off.

For the year, Citrix reported record revenue of $2.2 billion. Its desktop solution revenue accounted for $1.3 billion of that, 12.5 percent higher than a year ago, and included 14 percent y-o-y growth in the fourth quarter, with revenue of $369 million. Data center and cloud solutions revenue increased 29.1 percent to $385.5 million, online services revenue rose 18.6 percent to $427.7 million and revenue from other products increase 46.4 percent to $114.3 million.

Citrix said revenue increased in the America's region by 16 percent, rose in the EMEA region by 12 percent and increased in the Pacific region by 37 percent.

For 2012, Citrix said revenue should be in the range of $2.49 billion to $2.51 billion; GAAP diluted earnings per share is targeted to be in the range of $1.88 to $1.97.

For the first quarter, expect revenue to be in the range of $555 million to $565 million with GAAP diluted earnings per share in the range of 30-31 cents.

The thin first quarter results, said CFO David Henshall, come from the company's plans to look to make acquisitions, but those deals should become accretive later in the year.

For more:
- see this release
- see this Motley Fool article

Special Report: Enterprise Communications earnings in the fourth quarter 2011

IP Address Reputation Primer

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 01:24:00 GMT

There has been a lot of recent discussions and questions about reputation, content and delivery of email. I started to answer some of them, and then realized there weren't any basic reference documents I could refer to when explaining the interaction. So I decided to write some.

This post is about IP address reputation with some background on why IPs are so important and why ISPs focus so heavily on the sending IP.

Why IP addresses?

ISPs built reputation around IP addresses because it was one bit of data that malicious senders / spammers couldn't forge. The connecting IP is a fundamental part of the network transaction and if you forge an IP then SMTP can't work. Because that was the reliable data they had to work with, that's what they used. Even now, when there are other kinds of data, the IP address is still the first thing the receiving MTA sees.

What is IP reputation?

IP reputation can best be summed up as "past performance is an indicator of future results." In other words if recipients responded well to mail from an IP address in the past, then they're likely to respond well to new mail from that IP address.

How is IP reputation measured?

While each spam filtering company and ISP have their own ways of calculating the reputation of an IP address, there are some similarities in what they measure.

How many non-existent email addresses is this IP attempting to deliver to?
How many abandoned email addresses is this IP attempting to deliver to?
How many "known bad" email addresses (spamtraps) is this IP attempting to deliver to?
How many recipients complain about receiving this mail?
How many recipients complain about not receiving this mail?
How respectful of my resources is this IP?
Does this IP keep connections open for long periods of time?
Does this IP retry deliveries too aggressively?
Does this IP stop mailing addresses after receiving a "user unknown" message?
Is this IP address configured as if the associated machine was infected by a virus?
Is this IP address listed on blocklists we use?
That is by no means an exhaustive list of what ISPs measure. If they can measure it they've tried. If the measurement helps them separate spam mail from not-spam mail then they're using it.

How fast does IP reputation change?

IP reputation is often measured over multiple time periods. ISPs can look at a 1 day, 7 day, 30 day and 90 day reputation. A good analogy is stock prices. Prices can be very volatile in the short term, but more consistent over the long term. A single bad day, where one or more reputation measurements go bad, may affect delivery that day or the next day but won't damage an overall good reputation. Likewise, a few days of improved mail may not be sufficient to counter months of poor reputation.

How is IP reputation used?

Mail from IPs with a high reputation is accepted faster and at a higher rate than mail from IPs with a lower or unknown reputation. IP reputation can also influence whether mail is delivered to the inbox or the bulk folder.

Key IP Reputation takeaways

IP reputation is about how recipients react to mail from that IP. Happy, content recipients turn into good delivery.
Brief changes (for good or bad) don't necessarily ruin delivery over the long term.
Steady improvements will result in improved reputation.
It may takes as much time to change a reputation in one direction or another as it took to establish the reputation in the first place.

Written by Laura Atkins, Founding partner of anti-spam consultancy & software firm Word to the Wise

NORDUnet's Brilliant Internet Peering Strategy

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 23:52:00 GMT

Map Showing NORDUnet's 2011 completion of network expansion by taking a third connection to the US in production.
(Click to Enlarge)NORDUnet, the R&E network connecting the Nordic countries has recently undertaken a brilliant Internet peering strategy that will have global significant ramifications for supporting research and education around the world.

NORDUnet is now emerging as one of the world's first "GREN"s — Global Research and Education Network. NORDUnet is extending their network infrastructure to multiple points of presence throughout the USA and Europe to interconnect to major Internet Exchange Points (IXPs). This will allow them to negotiate as a Tier 1 Internet service provider and exchange traffic with other global commercial Tier 1 Internet transit providers. NORDUnet is also playing a global leadership role by extending this service offering, on a shared cost basis, to NRENs such as SURFnet (Netherlands), PIONIER (Poland) and perhaps others.

Many network operators ask why they should build an extensive peering network when transit prices are only marginally more expensive than peering (and still dropping)? The NORDUnet engineering team are one of the first to understand that Internet peering is not about cost comparison between peering and transit pricing.

Most universities (as well as consumers and business) have a fixed budget for Internet connectivity. So regardless of traffic volumes they can only spend so much money for Internet transit. As result many institutions cap traffic volumes to commercial transit providers. But peering traffic is done on a settlement free basis and therefore traffic volumes are not linearly related to cost. Many NRENs have discovered that content peering traffic has a huge benefit for their connected institutions in stabilizing costs without restricting use of the network. On some NRENs, content peering traffic is now 90% of their overall traffic volume. By connecting to the major IXPs in the USA, NORDUnet can eliminate purchase of virtually all transit traffic. Traffic volumes are expected to immediately jump because now institutions will not have to cap formerly transit traffic.

This arrangement will have a huge benefit for the research community as more and more computational research is done on commercial clouds in the US. NORDUnet realizes, that despite concerns about US Patriot Act, researchers are voting with their wallets and using commercial cloud providers and value added cloud providers in the US. Many research disciplines, especially genomics and bio-informatics are being increasingly dependent on commercial application providers, because they have the necessary tools critical to their research. Numerous bioinformatics companies, like SoftGenetics, DNAStar, DNAnexus and NextBio, have sprung up to as they have found life sciences a fertile market for products that handle large amounts of information. Access to these commercial organizations through the commercial Internet or Open Lightpath Exchanges is essential for the future of research.

This initiative by NORDUNet will have profound implications for the future of the Internet and data intensive science. The obvious next step after exchanging peering traffic is also to use this links for dynamic lightpaths and virtual networks for large data flows. It is no surprise that networks like NORDUNet and SURFnet are also leading the developments of dynamic optical networking through GLIF. The other important development is for other NRENs to build similar global links and exchange peering routes so collectively they can represent themselves as a global Tier 1 and finally eliminate the archaic telco business models that currently dominate the Internet. This will significant benefits for those NRENs who are deploying community IXPs and can extend the benefits of content peering to community anchors and support community broadband developments.

Peering traffic also goes hand in hand with dynamic optical networks and GOLEs. Some NRENs are under pressure by some large institutions threatening to leave. Some institutions think that by directly connecting to a GOLE and purchasing commercial Internet for the balance of their traffic is all they need for R&E connectivity But peering dramatically changes the balance as it is a service and business model that is not available from commercial providers. The cost savings are dramatic for the connected institution and it does not cripple researchers accessing commercial research services such as clouds because of traffic caps.

Once again, NRENs and GRENs are demonstrating their important role in redefining the critical role of the Internet and creating new opportunities for the global informational economy. Kudos to NORDUnet.

Written by Bill St. Arnaud , Green IT Networking Consultant

Making the Web Faster: Google Working on Enhancing Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 23:47:00 GMT

As part of its efforts to speed up the delivery of web content, Google has proposed changes to Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), "the workhorse of the Internet." Yuchung Cheng who works on the transport layer at Google writes:

"To deliver content effectively, Web browsers typically open several dozen parallel TCP connections ahead of making actual requests. This strategy overcomes inherent TCP limitations but results in high latency in many situations and is not scalable. Our research shows that the key to reducing latency is saving round trips. We’re experimenting with several improvements to TCP."

Cheng believes the current transport layer badly needs an overhaul to catch up with other (networking) technologies. Read more.

Nixu DDI Awarded Gold Medal for Its IPv6 Support

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 22:36:00 GMT

Nixu DDI Software Appliance Platform Awarded Gold Medal for Its IPv6 Support on 21st December 2011Nixu Software has been awarded the IPv6 Ready Gold Certificate by the IPv6 Ready Forum for its DDI Software Appliance platform on 21st December 2011. The tests, which were carried out by an independent third party approved by the IPv6 Ready Forum, validated the interoperability between Nixu DDI Software Appliance platform and other networking products with IPv6 Ready Gold Certificate. Other manufacturers with IPv6 Ready Gold Certificate include Cisco Systems, Juniper Networks, RedHat, VMware, Hewlett-Packard and IBM.

The exhaustion of IPv4 address space in 2011 made IPv6 connectivity an unavoidable reality. While most organizations are yet to face an urgent need for introducing IPv6 support in their networks, they should nonetheless, plan ahead to ensure a smooth transition to a dual-stack environment. The increased complexity of the IPv6 address syntax and the vast size of the available address space mean that DDI services (DNS, DHCP, IPAM) play an even more pivotal role in managing these dual-stack networks.

Having introduced full dual-stack support already in 2004, Nixu Software has been a pioneer in the wide-scale adoption of IPv6 network connectivity. Juha Holkkola, the Managing Director of Nixu Software, said in this regard: "When we started out working with dual-stack environments, there was no strict standard, let alone any certification available. Now that IPv6 is going mainstream, we decided that it was a good time to have Nixu DDI platform's world-class IPv6 support formally acknowledged. Our products sailed through the testing phase in a matter of weeks, which is pretty impressive considering that for some of our competitors it has taken over a year, while for others it seems completely impossible."

To celebrate this achievement, Nixu Software has released a new version of howismydns.com, a free online test tool used to validate the configurations of public DNS servers. This latest version provides complete support for dual-stack networks, allowing fully transparent testing process for IPv4, IPv6 and dual-stack DNS deployments. In addition to IPv6 support, the new toolset also comes with a number of DNSSEC validation tests. To try out the latest IPv6 DNS and DNSSEC testing tools, please visit howismydns.com.

We Are All Internet Exceptionalists Now

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 16:27:00 GMT

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its defeat call attention to a delicious irony in public discourse on Internet governance. Even those who don't want the Internet to be an exception from traditional forms of regulation and law are forced to admit that something new and exceptional must be done to bring it under control, such as massive departures from traditional concepts of territorially bounded sovereignty through the use of in rem jurisdiction. Reinforcing the irony, these attempts by the anti-exceptionalists to subordinate the Internet to established institutions immediately locks them into conflict with a highly mobilized, highly transnational community of Internet users and service providers who vow to resist those controls. The resistance comes precisely because the mobilized community believes that the controls cannot be applied to the Internet without threatening to fundamentally alter its status as an open, innovative and — dare we say it — exceptional space. In other words, we are all Internet exceptionalists now.

You know that the anti-exceptionalists have raised the white flag of surrender when they are forced to whine that the thousands of web publishers who went dark are "abusing their power” — thus admitting that a critical mass of Western society's eyes are turned toward the Internet and that the people who occupy and publish and interact in that globalized space constitute enough of a cohesive community to collectively turn against those who threaten them.

It doesn't matter whether one is on the pro-control or anti-control side of the spectrum; governing the internet forces a choice upon one: either go for new and unprecedented forms of technical intervention and transnational political cooperation, or go for some kind of ratification and institutionalization of the Internet's special status as a zone for the free flow of information and a diminished role for territorial government and traditional informational property rights.

Mind you, one needn't be a cyber-utopian to be an Internet exceptionalist. In other words, you don't have to believe that the Internet will by its very nature make politics fair and democratic and that the good guys will always win. SOPA or some equivalent could rise again, in some other form. Some key actors could be bought off with some concessions in the new legislation. The mobilized community's resolve could weaken over time, as it grows accustomed to things. We need to be heedful of Benkler's warning that as the networked environment resists control, there will be strong pressures to suck ever more of it into the law enforcement vortex. But surely, after 15 years of these battles (starting, roughly, with the CDA mobilization of 1996) we can dismiss these jaded admonitions that Internet regulation is just business as usual. If the Internet stops being an exception, we will have no one but ourselves to blame.

Written by Milton Mueller, Professor, Syracuse University School of Information Studies

Cablevision's Optimum Lightpath targets SMBs with new conferencing lineup

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 16:11:25 GMT

Cablevision (NYSE: CVC)'s Optimum Lightpath, which sells VoIP and other Ethernet-based communication solutions in the New York metropolitan area businesses, is rolling out conferencing services that it says will deliver enterprise-class audio and web conferencing.

The initiative is aimed at the increasingly UC-savvy mid-market business segment and is part of Optimum Lightpath's Collaboration Suite.

The Optimum Lightpath Conference Bundle includes support for up to 300 audio only or 125 Web and audio participants, allows an unlimited ability to add audio conference moderators and includes a "Connect Me" feature that will automatically call participants logging into a meeting via the Web.

The offering also gives users a personal digital library for storing and quickly sharing frequently used files, enables real-time administrative controls and a Web portal to manage the service, and one-click conference recording.

The bundle is is available to existing Optimum Lightpath customers and is based on flat-rate pricing for packages of minutes and licenses. Live tech support is available 24/7.

"Cost savings remains a difficult-to-quantify benefit, therefore IT managers are increasingly looking at bundled services that reduce costs while improving user access," said Irwin Lazar, vice president of Nemertes Research.

For more:
- see this release

Kerio's new Asterisk-based Operator 1.2 adds support for analog lines

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:08:55 GMT

UC vendor Kerio Technologies, looking to push deeper into the SMB market, this week rolled out its latest iteration of its IP PBX phone system, Kerio Operator 1.2, which now is based on Asterisk 1.8. Kerio also added support for analog phone lines through a Digium TDM410 card, enabling organizations that have limited SIP connectivity to take advantage of Kerio Operator's VoIP features.

The San Jose,Calif.-based company said the upgrade is aimed at making the system secure and simple for its partners, the IT department and employees making and receiving calls.

Kerio said the new platform, which uses industry-standard SIP VoIP protocol, allows small and midsized organizations to trim telephony costs and stay connected anywhere.

Kerio Operator 1.2 is available as a software appliance,with its own security-hardened operating system, a VMware virtual appliance allowing for rapid deployment in production or evaluation environments on standard PC hardware and in two hardware appliance configurations available in some markets.

For more:
- see this release

LiveSize sales up 6% in otherwise dismal Logitech 3Q; firm again lowers 2012 guidance

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 13:39:59 GMT

Citing weak demand and an eroding Euro, Logitech (Nasdaq: LOGI) today lowered its full-year outlook, saying it would likely earn $60 million on revenue of $2.3 billion for the fiscal year ending March 31.

Reporting financials for the quartet that ended Dec. 31, Logitech said profits were down 15 percent to $55 million in the quarter on sales that eroded 5 percent to $715 million. Analysts had expected the company to report earnings of $61.2 million on sales of $749 million.

One of the lone bright spots for the company was in its videoconferencing business. The company said revenue at LifeSize Communication was up 6 percent for the quarter. Logitech bought LifeSize in 2009 and has steadily been improving its position in the market, rolling out apps for Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL)'s iPhone and iPad as it looked to expand its mobile footprint.

But the surge in tablet sales in the fourth quarter hit Logitech hard, cutting into its traditionally strong market for mice and webcams.

"The euro has weakened considerably during the last three months," said chairman and interim chief executive Guerrino DeLuca. "In addition, webcams and remotes continue to be impacted more than expected by product portfolio and market weakness."

The downward revision for the year was the third for the company in recent months, and it prompted its biggest share price tumble in nine months, about 14 percent. Most recently, Logitech in September said it expected earnings of $90 million on sales of $2.4 billion for the year.

"The biggest disappointment is the guidance revision," Michael Foeth, an analyst at Vontobel Holding AG, said in a note today. "With that we fear confidence in management is eroding further."

Last quarter, DeLuca crowed about the company's solid performance, saying: "People are happy to see we're back on track. We're showing that we can do what we said we would do, and we've somewhat re-established confidence in the company."

Logitech stock has fallen 64 percent in the past 12 months.

For more:
- see this Bloomberg article

Special Report: Enterprise Communications earnings in the fourth quarter 2011

Polycom adds 5 execs from Cisco, HP, Intel, Juniper, as it readies enterprise push

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 23:36:26 GMT

Polycom (Nasdaq: PLCM), coming off strong earnings for the fourth quarter, is reshuffling its executive ranks, adding five North America based sales execs to help it push its video collaboration solutions to an increasingly competitive-- and crowded-- market.

Four of the five will be designated area vice presidents, including Greg Prindle, AVP of the Enterprise East region; Peter Elmgren, AVP of Enterprise West; Joe Vranicar, AVP of Enterprise Central; and Dean Ash, AVP of Enterprise South. They'll work to develop go-to-market plans and work with Polycom's alliance, service provider, and VAR partners, focusing on growing Polycom's enterprise presence.

The fifth exec, Ashan Willy, was named VP of Worldwide Systems Engineering. Willy will lead the System Engineering team globally and will report to Tracey Newell, Polycom's executive vice president of Global Sales.

"With today's appointments, we are refining the alignment of our organization, expertise, and sales motion around the needs of enterprises, to capture more opportunities and drive the network effect of video through traditional on-premises delivery, as well as new delivery platforms such as mobile and social," said Newell.

Prindle comes to Polycom from Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO), where he headed the TRI-State Commercial Operation. He joined Cisco as an account manager in 1998.

Elmgren joined Polycom late in 2011 after spending the previous five years with Intel, where he held several executive sales and general management positions, most recently as the managing director of worldwide sales and operations within Intel's Software and Services Group. He's also been at AT&T (NYSE: T), Alcatel-Lucent and Avaya.

Vranicar last was at Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) , where he was director of Sales for HP Networking in the central region. He's also been at Juniper Networks (NYSE: JNPR) and EMC, along with seven years at Cisco.

Ash also is a Cisco alum, and he also has been at Amdahl and IBM. Ash most recently was director of Sales in Cisco's Service Provider segment.

Willy was vice president of Systems Engineering for the worldwide commercial business at Juniper, where he was responsible for building the commercial market for Juniper worldwide, including go-to-market enterprise strategies. Prior to Juniper, he was at Cisco, Bell Sygma and ACC.

For more:
- see this release

Polycom's Q4 leads analysts to up targets for earnings, share price

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 23:01:51 GMT

A strong fourth quarter by Polycom (Nasdaq: PLCM) has resulted in Citygroup increasing its earnings forecast for the company, and several other companies bumping the stock's target price. Citygroup upped its target to $24. FBN Securities earlier this week moved to $25, and analysts at Stifel Nicolaus raised their price target from $25 to $29.

The company this week reported a 50 percent increase in its fourth quarter profit to $49.6 million, or 28 cents a share, up from $33.1 million, or 19 cents a share, a year earlier. Analysts had expected earnings of 29 cents a share. Revenue was $407 million, up 20 percent from $340 million a year ago.

The company saw sales in the Americas, its biggest market, grow by a modest 7 percent; in Europe, Middle East, and Africa, sales were up 28 percent year-over-year; and the company saw a big bump, 42 percent, in APAC.

CEO Andrew Miller cited the company's software-based RealPresence Platform and "broad geographic growth" as drivers for the quarter.

"We experienced unprecedented demand for our secure, interoperable, unified collaboration solutions by both enterprise and service provider customers," he said. "Polycom's cloud, mobility, and software-driven infrastructure strategy is beginning to yield and we look forward to another year of solid growth in 2012."

Polycom has been gearing up for battle with its top competitor, Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO), expanding its push into the mobile video conferencing space, campaigning for better interoperability, and hiring Cisco executives. It also bought Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ)'s videoconferencing business last year, adding more depth to its pricier telepresence offerings.

For more:
- see this release
- see this article

Special Report: Enterprise Communications earnings in the fourth quarter 2011