The rebirth of the VON show, eagerly awaited, took place last week. The VON saga has been widely covered, but do want to say that Mike Saxby, Rick Martin, Khali Henderson, Leez May and team did a great job. The quality of the panels and reporting, as well as the behind the scenes management was excellent.
The panel I moderated; “Flying Blind: Navigating the International Wholesale Voice Market” featured Chris Lengyel, Director of Product Management at iBasis, Vanessa Matamoros, VP Sales for Latin America at Arbinet and Andriy Zhylenko, CTO of PortaOne. Andriy argued that there is still a good business case in 2009 for entering into the Wholesale marketplace, but pointed out that margins were often extremely low, even averaging 1% in some markets, which underscored the need for vigilant fraud protection and proactive billing management. He made the practical suggestion that carriers ought to standardize rate change sheets using a web-based technology rather than emailing .xls files back and forth. Sounds a bit like Arbinet I thought as Vanessa dived into their systems for managing trading, codes, billing and settlement. Chris amusingly pointed out that within iBasis any route with margins in the 1% zone would be termed “Toxic Minutes” and made a strong case for outsourcing the International wholesale equation for overall cost savings and route quality. The complexities and risks of the business all seemed to tip the scale away from service providers developing large carrier services departments at this stage of the game, and towards outsourcing these functions to dedicated outfits such as Arbinet and iBasis.
The VON conference concluded with a Keynote by Christopher Dean, the extremely sharp Chief Strategy Officer of Skype. Mid-way through he transitioned into Skype’s plans to integrate the Channel into their applications, which was fitting since his speech was also the kick-off for sister show Channel Partners. Among many interesting points, Christopher made the case that while Skype is estimated to account for 8% of the overall International voice market, it has not cannibalized the legacy minutes to the extent many had speculated in years past but rather grew the overall pie, i.e. that voice utilization when reduced to free or next to free follows the “price elasticity of demand” principles. This resonated with me, since as a Skype user I have on several occasions managed to forgo transatlantic flights and contribute effectively to full-day meetings via a string of hour-plus free Skype calls.
This brings us back to one of the most important sessions in my opinion which was “HD Voice: the future of VoIP.” Jeff Rodman, Founder and CTO of Polycom, Alan Percy, of Audio Codes and William Bumbernick of Alteva. Jeff is a visionary and when he claimed in his presentation that any enterprise phone system purchased today that didn’t support HD would be obsolete in five years my ears perked up. Yes this is a sales pitch, but in a world of 1% wholesale margins, free voice and unmetered broadband – its seems inevitable that the communications industry will turn its marketing focus on consumer and business applications for high definition audio and video telephony.
Revesoft
Broadview Networks
Ron Pass, Sales Director for ReveSoft enjoying South Beach
ifbyphone
Posted by au24 
