Author Archives

Dan Miller has over 25 years experience in marketing, business development and corporate strategy for telecom service providers, computer makers and application software developers. Dan founded Opus Research in 1985 and helped define the Conversational Commerce marketplace by authoring scores of reports, advisories and newsletters addressing business opportunities that reside where automated speech leverages Web services, mobility and enterprise software infrastructure.

As Director of the New Electronic Media Program at LINK Resources from 1980-1983, he helped define one of the first continuous advisory services in the information industry. He then held management positions at Atari, Warner Communications and Pacific Telesis Group (now part of AT&T).

Dan founded Opus Research, Inc. and published Telemedia News & Views, a highly-regarded monthly newsletter regarding developments in voice processing and intelligent network services. He served as Editor-in-Chief of The Kelsey Report, where he also oversaw the launch of advisory services on local online commerce, voice & wireless commerce and global directories.

Dan received his BA from Hampshire College and an MBA from Columbia University Graduate School of Business. He is a frequent speaker at industry conferences. He has been quoted in SpeechTek magazine, the Wall Street Journal, Wired.com, CommWeb and elsewhere. He has also provided commentary on CNN and TechTV.

Contact: dmiller@opusresearch.net
Twitter: @dnm54

• CAT* [CAT with an Asterisk]

  By Dan Miller on April 6, 2005

  Asterisk is accelerating the growth of grassroots providers of low-cost telephony transport and features. The promise of a “virtual PBX” downloaded as freeware to run on any Linux-based PC has attracted several thousand applications developers, system integrators and resellers. But the company may not be up to the task of managing the submissions process associated with management of an Open Source effort.

• Intel Spins off NetMerge Software to Envox

  By Dan Miller on March 17, 2005

  Intel offloads the NetMerge Call Processing Software (CPS) and CT Application Development Environment (ADE) in a sale to Envox Worldwide. The sale ends an era in which the maker of telecom and computer boards, software and subsystems competes directly with some of its best go-to-market partners.

• Making Sense of SIP, CCXML and CTI

  By Dan Miller on March 15, 2005

  In spite of the emergence of standards such as SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), VoiceXML (the Voice eXtensible Markup Language) and CCXML (Call Control eXtensible Markup Language), significant integration efforts are necessary for the future of IP telephony.

• SpeechTek West: Spread the Word

  By Dan Miller on March 7, 2005

  IBM (with Opera), Avaya, Brooktrout, Voxeo, SandCherry and Datria provided the most visible examples of how automated speech is incorporated into well understood business and entertainment activities.

• CAT ScanIX: Whatever it is, It Ain’t Voice

  By Dan Miller on March 2, 2005

  The good news first: Enterprises of all sizes are ready to embrace Voice over IP (VoIP). The bad news? They don’t know what they are talking about.

• CAT ScanVIII: The Toll-Free Angle on the AT&T Acquisition

  By Dan Miller on February 12, 2005

  Twelve months and $16 billion from now, SBC is scheduled to complete its acquisition of AT&T. During the intervening months analysts, journalists and regulators will take turns casting aspersions on the deal. From a financial point of view, it’s hard to see synergies emerging from SBC’s stepped up growth-through-acquisition strategy. As the ‘safe harbor’ saying goes, “past performance does not predict future results,” but several Wall Streeters have already observed that the erosion of AT&T’s top line more than offsets the meager growth that SBC has generated in the past few years.

• Teletech Takes Avaya into Managed Services

  By Dan Miller on January 31, 2005

  The five-year agreement between two leaders in their respective industries signals stepped up demand for distributed contact center solutions. Most importantly, it points to a “managed services” approach using IP-telephony, speech processing and Web services infrastructure to obliterate the line between premises-based and network-based self-service.

• A Directory Delayed is a Directory Denied

  By Dan Miller on January 17, 2005

  Well-meaning regulators have robbed wireless subscribers who may want to have their numbers available through 411 operators (or alternatives) the option for a free listing that is under their control.

• Microsoft Speech Technologies: An Opus Research Impact Assessment

  By Dan Miller on January 15, 2005

  By 2008, Microsoft could claim as much as 20% of the ASR ports shipped worldwide. To do so, it must make the Microsoft Speech Server (MSS) a fit for both large and small enterprises to extend the self-service logic of existing Web services over the telephone.

• CAT ScanVII: 2005: Yet Another Year of Intelligent Migration

  By Dan Miller on January 2, 2005

  Opus Research is a long-standing and unrepentant booster of speech-enablement. We stand for judicious use of advanced speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech conversion (TTS) and all the attendant hardware, software, professional services and tooling (soaking up something on the order of $28 billion in 2005) directed at a single goal. That is to take existing self-service infrastructure – on a Web site, in front of a corporate directory ‘autoattendant’, baked into a contact center or hosted environment – and “make it talk.”