Frank: Look at this one and tell us what you think! >FROM THE ETHER - Vertical Networks' new InstantOffice remembers the Forgotten 5,000,000
November 10, 1998
The big problem with product ideas you get from
"out-of-the-box" thinking is that to succeed
in the market you have to get them back
into the box.
One such box has arrived from Vertical
Networks, a Silicon Valley start-up just out
of stealth mode. Vertical's exciting box
promises to greatly accelerate
Internet-telephone convergence.
Vertical's box is an all-in-one communications
server, InstantOffice, announced suddenly
on Sept. 28 and now shipping. The Boston
Globe received the first InstantOffice server
on Oct. 5.
I've not yet arranged to get a Vertical
network in my office, so I can't critique it
feature by feature, but the idea of
InstantOffice is so strong -- obvious, really
-- and the company so formidable, I must tell
you about it, just in case you missed it. (See
last week's news article, "Start-up licenses
Cisco IOS," Oct. 26, page 42.)
Vertical was founded in 1996 and now has
some 90 employees, more than 60 of whom
are software engineers working in Sunnyvale,
Calif. Their focus is what they call integrated
communications platforms.
Vertical kept its product plans secret -- in
stealth mode -- until it could ship its first
product. It did not want to tip its hand to
potential competitors before being ready to
race out ahead of them. This is not the usual
vaporware product launch strategy. It's a
launch strategy that should be emulated by
more start-ups, and for that matter by much
larger companies, especially those whose big
new operating system is not there (NT) yet,
but promised for sometime during 1999 (if
they're lucky).
What's especially cool about InstantOffice is
that it's not a server for your average large
enterprises, which have servers coming out
of their ears. Vertical's target customers are
not the Fortune 500, but the Forgotten
5,000,000.
According to Vertical CEO Alan Fraser, in the
United States there are 1.5 million branch
offices with between six and 75 employees,
and there are 3.5 million small businesses
with between five and 100 employees. It is
these Forgotten 5,000,000 that Vertical is
ready to network.
Fraser and chief technology officer Scott
Pickett are not college drop-outs who
whipped up InstantOffice in their garage.
They come to Vertical with long resumes.
Fraser spent many years at Northern
Telecom (now Nortel Networks), selling
PBXes. Pickett arrived from multimedia
development in the LAN division of National
Semiconductor. And they're amply backed by
big-name venture capitalists in Silicon Valley.
Vertical's InstantOffice is a modular box that
combines PBX, voice mail, LAN (Ethernet)
hub, Internet multiprotocol router, trunk
services, computer telephony applications,
and Web-based monitoring and
administration. InstantOffice can use a single
digital trunk for all Internet and telephone
wide-area networking services. It has backup
power, disks, and communications for
24-by-7 operation.
It is designed for offices with five to 100
people. For larger configurations,
InstantOffice can cost as little as $250 per
user and fully featured as much as $475 per
user.
InstantOffice has plain old telephone service
(POTS) PBX features if you want them. It
connects through existing wires to analog
phones and then switches their circuits
through trunk lines into the telephone
network. But as Internet-telephone
convergence proceeds, Fraser says modules
developed for InstantOffice servers will
convert POTS to voice over IP, and
eventually even voice over Ethernet to the
desktop.
InstantOffice has to be very reliable, and
although it operates with embedded Windows
NT, Vertical does not plan to encourage
customers to add peripherals and computer
telephony applications as one might to an
open PC server. Selected applications will be
qualified by Vertical to run in InstantOffice
servers.
This must be Vertical's trick for getting
24-by-7 operation from a 23-by-6 operating
system. See www.vertical.com.
Internet pundit Bob Metcalfe invented
Ethernet in 1973 and founded 3Com in 1979.
Send e-mail to metcalfe@idg.net or visit
www.idg.net/metcalfe.
[Copyright 1998, InfoWorld] |
