What’s IT all about?

Most people nowadays have a mobile phone (cellular if you’re the wrong side of the pond), and whilst many stump up the full whack for their handset and then stick a pay-as-you-go SIM in, a sizeable percentage (in the UK at least) have the cost of their handset heavily subsidised by opting for a 12 or 18 month contract. If you’re a reasonably heavy user, then contracts make sense, particularly since they give you the option to upgrade to another handset at the end of the contract.

Zonbu have borrowed from this business model to sell their Linux-based PC’s and Laptops. You can purchase their products as you can from any other PC manufacturer. However, they also give you the option of entering into what is, in effect, a hire-purchase agreement. Pay your money up front (for their laptop, $279), pay a monthly fee for a couple of years ($14.95) and you get an entry-level laptop with unlimited maintenance and support, online backup and a free replacement should anything untoward happen.

Will it work ? I can see it being attractive in the home or small business where IT knowledge is limited. Would I buy one? Nope, not when I can carry out my own support and maintenance, and organise online backup if I so desire (in fact I have an old PC running Bacula to protect my data). Most importantly, though, when I buy a PC or laptop I want to be able to control the spec.

Still, it’s something relatively new in the marketplace, and I applaud them for giving it a good shot and wish it every success.

From VentureVoIP comes news that Dell are going to supply SME’s with Fonality’s Asterisk-based VoIP system - PBXtra. Details of the arrangement are sketchy at the moment, but already there are murmerings of doubt amidst the obvious conclusion that this is a strong deal for Fonality and potentially for the SME market worldwide, 35 million of whom are expected to dip their toe in the VoIP waters over the next three years.

I must admit to wondering about the wisdom of the arrangement myself. Fonality have certainly got a pretty mature product with, in Asterisk terms at least, good market penetration. This deal will drive that through the roof, and one has to wonder just where the support for a huge increase in the installed base will come from ? If it’s Dell, then they have to train up a lot of people in a subject where they currently have little or no knowledge. Then there’s the mixed bag of customer experience with Dell support, which is bad enough if you’re dealing with an important server, but unacceptable if your phone system has just crashed and customers can’t call you.

That’s fixable, though, and I suspect that Fonality will provide 3rd-level support in a classic support scenario so that the easy stuff can be handled by Dell and the tough stuff goes where the knowledge lies.

My biggest concern is that I don’t think there’s a good fit between the way VoIP should be sold to SME’s (or any business) and the way in which Dell normally does business in this market.  Let me explain. If you have a look on my website you will see that I, in common with Fonality, offer a number of VoIP system ‘packages’. I suspect that Fonality view this in the same way I do…as a means of illustrating the ball-park cost of a VoIP system and of initiating a conversation about a particular customer’s specific and unique needs. I have no intention or experience of a customer phoning up to say “I want to buy package no. 2, can you send it tomorrow”. It just doesn’t happen that way, and so it shouldn’t as getting the phone system right is crucial to each and every business, big or small.

You can see where this is going, I’m sure. Dell’s business model, the one that has made them into the massive company they are now, is geared on the assumption that the customer knows exactly what they want, and Dell can provide it quicker and cheaper then anyone else. You start doing that with phone systems and businesses are going to suffer. The MD of a small company will not be an expert in VoIP-enabled telephony, and he probably won’t employ anyone who is an expert either. They will be focused on selling their widgets or whatever it is that makes them successfiul. And whilst they may be interested in buying a phone system that has the potential to save them money and provide more functionality, if it starts taking a lot of their time to install, maintain and support then that advantage is lost.

Putting a PBX into an SME is not just about selling them the server and a few phones. Crucial to the success of an install are factors such as how to minimise disruption, which codec to use, the efficient use of the existing network or installation of a separate VoIP network, the means of hooking up branch offices and homes to the VoIP system (another PBX, use a VPN, etc ?), and many other questions. These all need someone with knowledge and experience to assess before coming up with the best solution for that particular customer. Will Dell be doing all that…I have my doubts.

This could be a great thing, or it could set VoIP for SME’s back 5 years. I have my fingers crossed that it’s not the latter.

The Four Lakes Consulting website has been updated and is now much more flexible and packed with content, constructed as it is using the wonderful open source content management system, Joomla.

Currently the extra content is a bit limited, but expect to see more articles and offers over the coming weeks and months. In addition, the website pulls in content from this blog too, making it the best place to keep abreast of all our news and information.

No sooner does one appear, than another follows close behind. Tomato 1.11 has appeared. All usual disclaimers apply.

Tomato v1.10 is out….use wisely

Some time ago the Skype network suffered a 48-hour outage, rather embarrassing for a company offering a service to individuals, an absolute catastrophe for a company hoping to break into the business VoIP market. The one over-riding need every business has from its phone system is that when you go to place a call, it just works. Not most of the time, or 99.9% of the time, every single time you pick up the phone you get a dial tone.

But 99.9% is amazing, I hear you say. Well, have you ever considered just how bad only achieving 99.9% uptime for your phone system is ? Lets look at the maths. There are 31,536,000 seconds in a non-leap year (60 seconds x 60 minutes x 24 hours x 365 days). So 0.1% downtime equates to 31,536 seconds, or 525.6 minutes or just over 8 hours and 45 minutes. That’s a whole working day without your phone ! And you have absolutely no idea when that outage will happen…it might be in the wee hours of a Sunday morning if you’re lucky, or it might be in the middle of the call that was going to close the most important deal you’ve ever made ! Now that 99.9% doesn’t look quite so good, eh?

One of the major plus points to Skype’s architecture was supposed to be the fact that, with a peer-to-peer network, you inoculate yourself against server issues. The bigger the network, the more ’servers’ (supernodes in Skype-speak) you have sitting on people’s desks, tables, laps, wherever. What could possibly happen that would cause a significant percentage of these disparate machines to fail ? Well, now we know at least one answer to that question…windows update ! The outage was caused by a significant number of Skype supernodes (read your PC) automatically re-booting as a result of windows update. (Click here for the word directly from Skype). Not a worm attack, not a flood in a data centre somewhere, nope, a standard update process. And the scary thing is, because this is a direct result of the peer-to-peer architecture (i.e. a design flaw), there’s not much Skype can do about it, despite their protestations to the contrary. Are you going to re-boot your PC a couple of days late, possibly exposing it to the security hole the patch has updated, just because Skype would rather you waited ? Nah, didn’t think so.

Personally, I prefer to have a bit more control over my critical business services.

An interesting news item on the Teleappliant site here.

Of course, Teleappliant aren’t the only company to offer an Asterisk-based PBX

OK, it was some time ago….but I have been moving house with all the disruption that entails, so I feel excused (however valid it is to excuse yourself ?). Anyway, if you run Tomato on your Buffalo or Linksys router and you want to try the latest version, then you can find it here. The usual disclaimers apply, although I found the update process painless and all appears to be working as before.

Virtual Strategy magazine is a decent read for those interested in virtualisation in the workplace. A couple of recent articles caught my eye:

Solving Real-World IT Issues Through Client Virtualization
Dave Buchholz - Intel

Common Misconceptions of Server Consolidation
By Scott Feuless, Senior Consultant, Compass Americ

The Client virtualisation article is a little light on detail, but does set the scene for effective use of virtualisation technologies for testing new client applications, and also for enabling applications with different client requirements to co-exist.

The server consolidation article can read a little like a list of reasons not to consider virtualisation, however it is intendedto be read more as a checklist of considerations for when you are contemplating virtualisation in your environment. If you can answer all the hard questions then you know it’s right for you.

I would imagine many people are considering mating a HD TV with a Vista-powered Media Centre PC ? Maybe they should read this article before splashing the cash. Scary stuff !