Seppo,
You shorted a stock just before it split? You're crazy. I am allowed to say that because I shorted AND (Andrea Electronics) just before it split and I'm happy to say I came away with my pants still on me (I did lose my shirt and some of my hair). Of course, AND has been a good short since the split . . . patience, patience . . .
From what I have read about FTEL and know about Inter-Tel, their gateways are similar. Inter-Tel adds other things like actual phone sets that plug into the wall with an ethernet type jack etc. The idea is that Inter-Tel provides an in-house PBX system that uses the corporate intranet to share the same fiber that the other datacom stuff does.
In general, the two gateways are very similar. FTEL isn't providing the other stuff to hang off the gateway because they're going after a slightly different market than Inter-Tel. FTEL is going after the long-distance market, where a normal phone connected to the PSTN would be calling the ISP that has the Tempest, the call would get routed to another Tempest in the remote city, and then another call would be made to the PSTN to get to the final destination.
Inter-Tel is going after the corporate internal PBX system market. Here the PSTN call will come into the Inter-Tel/NMSS Fusion gateway box, get routed through the corporate intranet and get to the phone at the callee's desk.
Slightly different markets, but the gateways are similar. This means that Inter-Tel can try to get into the long-distance market and they probably are. And FTEL could try to get into the corporate PBX market. There are a lot of others who are doing similar things. Check out Mitel's server gateway, or Lucent's server gateway.
We shall see how this plays out, I'm rooting for the little guys but it is going to get tougher. The key things for the little guys are going to be technology that is ahead of the competition and marketing. FTEL's technology on the telephony side looks identical to the NMSS technology (all the way down to how they hook up the vocoded data to the datacom card). But they may be vocoding faster and may have a faster datacom card that can use the speed. I don't know yet.
Regardless, FTEL isn't directly competing with Inter-Tel yet. In fact, FTEL isn't competing with anyone yet, they're only just entering the market - most people don't know about them. This is a good thing, I love surprises in the technology arena. Those are always the best wins.
-Atin |
