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.
Articles
CAT ScanVII: 2005: Yet Another Year of Intelligent Migration
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.â€
CAT ScanVI: CAT’s Future is in the Hands of IT Policy Makers [and they don’t even know it]
Several seemingly unrelated product introductions and refinements herald the next generation of Conversational Access Technologies (CAT). They also spell a challenge to enterprise IT personnel responsible for assimilating new technologies as systems become unmistakably more conversational. The message is “Be prepared.†In this case, it means an ounce of policy [regarding such things as the installation and use of IM-clients] is worth hours of technical support or even disaster recovery in the future.
CAT ScanV: Mergers Trigger Need for Network Identity Strategy
Cingular’s US $41 billion acquisition of AT&T Wireless is a done deal. Judging by the opinion of the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ), which gave its go-ahead on Monday Oct 15, having two huge behemoths atop the wireless service provider stack is a good thing for competition. The Federal Communications Commission followed suit in approving the merger the following day. As a result of their rulings the new Cingular will have to divest itself of operations in 16 markets in eleven swing states, and will have to forego bidding in the next wireless spectrum auction.
CAT Scan Three: VoIP *is* Hype
From a CAT point of view, the services that carry the banner of “VoIP” to the market place, most conspicuously Vonage, Skype and AT&T CallVantage, are vying for expanded market share and ultimately revenues, while they help customers and prospective customers make a transition to converged network services.
CAT ScanTwo: Meanwhile, In Another Part of the Enterprise
Conversational access technologies originated in two distinctly different places in business enterprises. Contact centers (nee “call centers”) comprise the first site of concentrated interaction between a firm and its customers. Yet it is the corporate Web site that is having the greatest impact in cultivating the tastes, preferences and (most importantly) expectations of end users who are trying to carry out business, engage in a conversation or simply get information from the resources within an enterprise.
CAT ScanOne: Clues to Conversational Access
“Markets are conversations.” These are among the first words in the bible of open source, “The Clue Train Manifesto,” by Doc Searls, David Weinberger and Chris Locke. My own derivative of said theorem is that “conversations are markets” — a tenant that I hold near-and-dear while establishing the foundation of the Conversational Access Technologies Program at Opus Research.
These are among the first words in the bible of open source “The Clue Train Manifesto” by Doc Searls, David Weinberger and Chris Locke. My own derivative of said theorem is that “conversations are markets”, a tenant that I hold near-and-dear while establishing the foundation of the Conversational Access Technologies Program at Opus Research.