Brockmann and Company | Customer Insights

One of the coolest companies I met with at VoiceCon was GN Netcom, also commonly associated with their brand Jabra, the Danish company focused on headsets for enterprise and consumer markets. Their elegant technologies were displayed in brightly lit displays. It was like presenting jewelry.

I met with Patrick Pecorelli, VP Marketing where we discussed the company's various offerings. 

The company offers an extensive set of appliances:

• Headsets that offer comfortable, wearable microphones and earphones with USB interfaces for PC clients such as Skype, Microsoft Office Communicator and SIP softphones
• Bluetooth wireless headsets that mobilize landline and IP phone users
• Bluetooth headsets that home to mobile phones
• Bluetooth hubs
• Noise suppression DSPs and processors that reduce noise on incoming calls
• Slick battery-powered BlueTooth speaker phones for your car
• Multi-use headset that combines the phone headset, mobile phone Bluetooth extension and UC client

Jabra headsets are available through office supply retailers, telecom distributors and both online and catalog IT resellers.

While at VoiceCon 2008, I met with Marie Wold, the CFO and President of the European enterprise mobility startup, OnRelay. Founded in 2000, OnRelay has been positioning the MBX appliance as a mechanism to eliminate desktop telephones. In fact, it was their creative press release about how 25 million deskphones and the network infrastructure and cabling to be purchased by companies in 2008 are likely to become waste, that got me over the 'should I / shouldn't I' hump. Kudos to Iris and the PR team for that great pitch.

In fact, here is suggestion on jewelry that can be made from old desktop phones. Instead of jewels, they've got the digit chicklets and other components.

The MBX is well beyond emergence and strongly into production since the company's founding in 2000. Certified with Cisco, Nortel,  Siemens and Avaya, the MBX is a proven solution to enabling enterprise mobility. Each of these vendors have implemented their own Fixed-Mobile Convergence solutions (some through acquisition), but the MBX offers a cross-brand solution not unlike enterprise-wide voicemail systems being independent from the telephony brand.

At the heart of the MBX is the TINP (Telephony Inter-Networking Protocol) which tightly couples a client on the mobile device (very small footprint) with the appliance connected to the PBX. The service is not available on RIM, PalmOS, Motorola or Apple devices which are significant share of the enterprise market. Instead, they rely on the Nokia S60 v2 and v3, and Microsoft Windows Mobile 6 to empower their customers.

With approximately 100 employees in Europe, profitable operation in 2006 and the soon-to-be-opened USA office (Washington DC area), the company also announced a hosted offer for mobile operators. Building up the North American channels (IBM, Dimension Data and Westcon have agreements) and sales resources in competition with DiVitas, Tango Networks and Agito will help deliver on the promise of the desktop-less, fully mobile enterprise.

Lou D'Ambrosio's keynote - his first since taking Avaya private, and the opening keynote at VoiceCon reminded everyone of two immutable facts:

• The US is in the middle of a Presidential election year
• Every IT department has a responsibility to buy itself (and the rest of us) out of recession

In an attempt to democratize unified communications, he spoke eloquently and positioned clips of Hilary Clinton, Barach Obama and John McCain as reinforcement messages to help us all decide that we should do UC as key parts of his impassioned plea.

Avaya announced a mobile worker package at $0.15/user/day over 3 years ($164.25/user). The package includes:

• video license for the softphone 
• VPN client
• Speech access
• Mobile call control
• Avaya one-X Communicator client (softphone, desktop video, visual voicemail, rich presence, email and instant messaging, conference bridge integration, directors and contact histories)