Mr. Fun,
To add to what you've stated, CSCO and most other other vendors of enterprise LAN devices face some grueling problems in the VoIP LAN space. This is an area where they'd like to think they hold an edge which could be leveraged for penetration deeper into the core, thuse supplanting the rule of the legacist incumbents. Sounds good, but it's not all peaches and cream, we're finding out.
Their own devices in that space, however, namely their hubs and switches, are unable to uniformly address and cope with prioritization and QoS issues. On a single segment, fine. But not in cascading situations, where most voice calls go. And this doesn't even begin to address the issues in the WAN portion of IP Tel links.
The latter [LAN and WAN] issues are crucial in order to assure commercial grade quality voice in the face of normal data (read: large file extensions, and other forms of bandwidth consuming payload-) activity. This is the first issues I'll address in this post.
This does not portend well for CSCO's Selsius IP PBX switch rollouts, to say the least. The best short description of this problem that I have come across recently, concerning what "all" VoIP-in-the-LAN vendors will face, is highlighted by David Passmore in an article in the June issue of BCR, in case you are interested. [BTW, this article isn't posted on their web site - bcr.com - yet. Give it a couple more weeks. BCR still does business that way.]
This is important from a strategic standpoint because it demonstrates some of the hurdles that face CSCO if they were depending on infiltrating the voice space from their position of of power. And that is, namely, that of the Enterprise TCP/IP LAN/WAN. The second issue I'd like to address follows.
Working the other way (in the opposite direction)we see LU backtracking their softswitch vehicle into the loading dock named LVLT. Minimum $250MM, potential of >$1B.
This occurrence, I will have to admit, is not something that I would have predicted. It was, I believe, more significant than most observers have come to realize or appreciate yet. The agreement between LU and LVLT, I believe, will only detract further from CSCO's erstwhile gains in the IP telephony realm, going forward.
As I see it, CSCO will need to regroup around these two issues with a heightened sense of urgency if they truly intend to capture cross-domain share, as they've been boasting they would, for the past two years.
Regards, Frank Coluccio |
