Because the package of software uses the same core logic as full-blown Aura implementations, Communications Manager is the call handling resource and all of the other Avaya-branded resources support presence management, system management and reporting, resiliency and fail-over. Sales people and channel partners require no special training to sell it and, by Avaya’s calculation, solutions carry a retail price that is 15%-22% less than competing products.

This is a low-cost, starter package designed to run on a single HP server, or to be virtualized and put on a shared server. That means it automatically ships with Avaya Aura® Session Manager, Avaya Aura® System Manager, Avaya Aura® Presence Services, Avaya Aura® Session Border Controller (in April), Avaya Aura® Application Enablement Services, Communication Manager Utility Services, Avaya Aura® Communication Manager and Communication Manager Messaging. It also fits with Avaya’s Agile Communications Environment (ACE) to enable quick and easy integration through “connectors to “connectors” for Cisco, Avaya (including the vestiges of the Nortel CMS line), Tandberg (video endpoints), IBM SameTime, and Microsoft Lync.

In an analyst pre-briefing, Avaya cited a few beta customers (under NDA) who are deploying configurations that include multiple contact centers, video and the “FLARE Experience,” referring to the AJAX-dependent, dynamic desktop (if not Avaya’s own enterprise tablet).

The branch or retail gateway is a cost-effective way to extend Aura functionality to sites with no more than 384 users. This architecture provides for centralization of system management and applications while supporting popular local functions, like auto-attendant, voice mail or clients for Aura-based apps. This gateway is set to ship “in March.”

Avaya is starting its marketing push for Aura Midsized Edition (Aura ME) today, with general availability for “greenfield” implementations (as well as “bolt on” for selected versions of Communications Manager and Communications Server 1000) in April. Programs to support “easy migration to SIP” from Aura ME 5.2.1 and older CS implementations scheduled for “the first half” of 2011. The same for implementation of the Contact Center package in “greenfield” envirnoments.

A: Both have made acquisitions of companies that specialize in E9-1-1 (Emergency 911) service providers. As reported here, Bandwidth.com has acquired dash Carrier Services for an undisclosed sum of money. It puts the VoIP provider on track to reach $100 million in revenues in 2011. West bought Intrado back in 2006, which was early in its acquisitive path toward becoming a $2 billion company.

Today West Corp. is organized into two major areas of operations. Unified Communications is made up primarily of conferencing services, “hosted collaboration” facilities and outbound alerts and notification. Its Communications services division includes operation of contact centers (with live agents) and “Automated Services,” an umbrella term that lumps Intrado’s E911 services with the speech-enabled IVR offerings of West Interactive (which now includes HollyConnects and Tuvox).

Bandwidth.com is, admittedly, another kind of animal in the Recombinant Communications Genome. Its core operations are “lower in the stack” of communications solutions. Where West might be thought of as an ASP (Application Service Provider) 2.0, Bandwidth.com is primarily an ISP (Internet Service Provider) 2.0, that distinguished itself by being an early entrant into the VoIP (Voice over IP) marketplace. Its Phonebooth.com service was one of the first self-service VoIP products targeting small businesses and bringing low-price enhanced telephony features to any business with Internet access.

The dash acquisition could be transformational to bandwidth.com. It brings an advanced form of location-awareness into Bandwidth.com’s fabric. At one point dash was characterized as a “reseller” of Intrado services, but a company spokesperson tells me that dash has its own, proprietary software, systems and infrastructure for E911. The key components include “address validation” utilities that show 98% accuracy even for calls from “nomadic” (i.e. “mobile”) phones. Its ability to locate callers is not dependent on the static data from the “Master Street Address Guide” (MSAG) that traditional 911 has always depended on. dash also tells me that dash maintains its own files of geographic boundaries for the areas served by individual Public Service Access Points (PSAPS), which are the contact centers where 911 dispatchers work.

With the acquisition, Bandwidth.com strengthens its position as a carriers’ carrier and a key enabler as VoIP carriers continue to compete for a growing share of business, residential and “nomadic” conversations. Incumbent carriers used to shoot down competitive threats from Vonage and its cohort of competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) based on their inability to provide E911 services. Now it is becoming routine for VoIP carriers to have access to emergency services that are qualitatively better than those offered by the incumbents.

dash also offers a full suite of wholesale carrier products and services, such as domestic
and Canadian SIP origination and termination, CNAM (which is Calling Name delivery that supports CallerID), N11, and directory listing services. Bandwidth.com’s customers and go-to-market partners can build some formidable service offerings from these building blocks. That’s what Recombinant Communications (RC) is all about.

Romin Irini in Programmable Web attributes Netflix’s growth to “moving its API to the cloud.” He’s referring to the fact that Netflix, which was operating data centers with IBM server farms running Oracle software, has stopped all that and moved its distribution system onto Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Cloud2. The “Inside Baseball” banter attributes the move to a new “instance” on EC2 to support massive graphics processing. At the same time it contracted with IP-telephony specialist Level3 to serve as the primary distribution network for its movies.

The ripple effect has been dramatic. By some accounts, like this one by David Goldman in CNNMoney.com, self-service downloads of movies and video entertainment on Netflix regularly accounts for about one-fifth of the “download traffic” on the Internet. Media giant Comcast, which has morphed from a “cable TV” service provider into one of the largest providers of “triple play” (TV, Telephony and Internet) in the country, replied by imposing a fee on Level3 to compensate for a “traffic imbalance” in its normal “peering arrangement.”

Netflix subscribers who have Comcast as their ISP (like me), have not seen any change in their service, yet. The two peers are likely to sort things out and strike a deal (probably in secret) without any impact on quality. There’s a precedent for such a back-room dealings. In 2005, Level3 struck a deal with an IP-based carrier called Cogent Communications when the move to higher speed enterprise networks led to an “imbalance” in traffic among peers.

For movie viewers, Netflix is offering new pricing which gives them incentive to move to a download-only service. The new service is “unlimited” and is priced at $7.99 per month. When compared to the snail mail based plans – which range from a low of $9.99 and top out at over $40 based on the number of DVDs that a subscriber “rents” each month. With “clients” or media players that span smartphones, tablets, PCs and laptops, many of which can be hooked up to HDTV monitors for display, we’re witnessing the dawn of affordable, self-service RC-TV.

After the holiday buying season, we’ll take measure of the competition forming among Google, Apple, Amazon and TiVo for share of the video content delivery business.

Under various code names (including “PineMango” and “Project Hydra”) Digium collected a wish list of features and functions for the next generation of distributed, fault-tolerant and “open” IP-based call processing features and functions and began generating and compiling code to provide the basis of those capabilities. The core technology is based on the Internet Communications Engine (ICE) from ZeroC.com. ICE is a freely distributed set of telephony middleware distributed according to the GNU General Public License (GPL). Therefore, it is ready-made for open source distribution and management.

For its part, Digium is stepping up to the tasks of managing a variety of resources for a developer community aimed at taking the “open source ACD” into new use cases that are global in nature and distributed, while at the same time highly reliable, secure and large-scale. Flexibility will be encouraged by the introduction of a low-level API that obviates the need for either the Asterisk Gateway Interface (AGI) and the Asterisk Management Interface (AMI), each of which evolved “in front of” the original Asterisk code base to paper over some of the deficiencies of the original Asterisk code as it sought to support multiple application instances and handling real-time interactions and transactions.

Use of a low level API enables a broader set of developers, using the programming languages of their choice to build new applications and upload them to “the cloud” where they can be invoked and executed by others. It amounts to a much more capacious and feature-laden way to deploy new communications-enabled applications. At least that’s where things are heading. The evergreen issues, such as general security and the protection of data pumping through the signaling layer, are being sorted out. In the mean time, the system is architected to support “100% test coverage”, which is already an improvement over deployments of standard Asterisk implementations.

Here’s a link to the press release announcing the Asterisk SCF Project. In it Digium spokespeople note that this is definitely not a replacement for the existing Asterisk product (which is in release 1.8 at this time). But it encourages “early adopters” to visit the Asterisk SCF Project Web site to register, download the software and stay abreast of the latest developments.

The tools are available for download here. The SDK ships with sample code that provide “how tos” for originating phone calls or IM-based chat. Registration also entitles a user to log on to the Tropo platform which, in turn, will enable the user to associate a real phone number (local or toll-free) to his or her softphone and to create apps that are enabled with voice processing, SMS, IM and Twitter. Chris Matthieu provides a 3 1/2 minute demo of the app here.

The folks at Voxeo are already working with the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) to ensure that microphone controls are embedded in the specification for HTML5. In the mean time, here’s a link to the PhonoSDK online forum where you can witness the democratization of RC development in action.

The description of the range of services to be offered sounds exactly like the Skype application offered on the iPhone. The most salient difference will be that the app will be running constantly in background on the nine devices described (which is not possible on the iPhone). It also marks the symbolic end to Verizon’s (as well as its wireless cohort’s) long-standing concern that VoIP services offered over the data link will cannibalize their core voice revenues. John Stratton, Verizon’s Chief Marketing Officer, told attendees of the Mobile World Congress that he was not concerned about either erosion of the voice traffic on its network or a decline in quality that would result from congestion caused by massive demand for Voice-over-3G.

Stratton said that the application was jointly developed from the ground up, leaving many details up for interpretation. My own belief is that the always-on Skype will be “link agile” using WiFi when available, 3G in some cases or the Verizon cell network if required to sustain qualities. At least that’s how I would architect the service given that subscribers must contract with Verizon for one of its Voice and Data plans. According to an article by Roger Chen in the Wall Street Journal, the “cheapest monthly voice plan now costs $40 for 450 minutes, and a $30 data plan is required with any smart phone.” So you may as well make the best use of all the links you can.

As for the impact on the wireless VoIP world at large, the application seems underwhelming. Sure it rattles AT&T Mobility’s cage by offering a nailed up voice-over-3G service one week after AT&T made it clear that it would continue its WiFi only approach. Yet, the range of services that are offered have an entry-level feeling to them. Meanwhile, Mobile World Congress was brimming with some really impressive X-over-wireless-IP services. Of special interest to me is a “video calling over the Internet” offered through the iTunes store by Fring and this intriguing voice-to-voice universal translator service offered by wireless personal assistant specialist VoxOx.

Harking back to my post about “satsificing”, I’m not sure that any of the services will work at high-levels of quality in all instances, but they are working well enough to make them ready for prime time.

VoxBone’s special ingredient and differentiator is its ability to assign “iNums”, based on the +883 country code assigned by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) as an “international number. Since introducing them in November 2008, VoxBone has assigned 18 million iNum numbers. When it launched the service, it noted that it was teaming with Iotum, Jajah, Mobivox, Gizmo5, Ribbit, Truphone, Rebtel, Voipbuster and Voipuser. You’ll note that Jajah, Gizmo5 and Ribbit have since been acquired by Telefonica, Google and BT respectively.

The trends shaping the Recombinant Communications ecosystem are taking shape. Increased call volumes and revenues are in the model. So is continued industry consolidation as companies themselves become building blocks in the ultimate solution stack.

As part of the Skype for SIP open beta program, Skype has created a low introductory price for the monthly channel subscription of $6.95 per month. According to Phil Wolff’s post, the going rate for Skype Out is $0.2.1 per minute in 36 countries.