VON Europe Spring 2007

Today I visited VON Europe Spring 2007 in Stockholm, see VON Europe Spring 2007. It was a very early morning in a sunny and warm Stockholm when the first meeting started at 8.00 AM with a coffee and water (yes, it was very warm) in the bar. It's funny with all these meetings, they add limited value individually but the total mass of meetings somehow magically seems to add up and deliver value. I met with our strategic partner Broadsoft to discuss ongoing deals in EMEA. Since it was VON with its focus on VoIP it was the perfect place meeting Broadsoft.

What we're doing with Broadsoft is very interesting, especially the extendability part where it is very easy to add complementary features to an existing Broadsoft installation. One such thing we're seeing quite some interest in is how to connect IPTV with Broadsoft residential VoIP or IP-Centrex. Many telco's and triple/quad players have Broadsoft deployed and an IPTV offering and are thinking on how to make use of the investment done. Using BEA and our products that comes out as a result of our strategic cooperation solves this elegantly. Of course this can as always be done in several different ways, but our solution is open and adaptable to changing contexts. It's not limited to just IPTV, even if that is what customers are asking for a lot.


Another feature that we enable through our Broadsoft based products is to very easy do Presence Based routing of calls. When a call comes in we can do a presence check and then use the result as a decision point on where to route the call. That in combination with White/Black lists creates a very powerful, yet simple solution and extends the OOTB features provided by Broadsoft.



One thing that disturbs me with Broadsoft and their likes is that they somehow believes that just because they do the best product in one area, it doesn't necessarily mean that all they do meets the same standard. For example, why would I bother using the Ringback Tone solution that comes with Broadsoft? There are numerous solutions out there that are probably better or at least are more adjusted to what the specific operator's customers want. Using the BEA offering allows extending/replacing the RBT that comes with Broadsoft.



Talking about RBT, I met also with Movial today to see what can be done using their client expertise. They have an excellent address book application that is synchronized with a network based repository using XCAP. It works very nice and the repository can be reached from any device and all devices are always up-to-date. What I would like to see in addition to this is a RBT enabled address book that allows me to automatically set the RBT for this person from my address book. This saves me the time to use a browser to update my RBT settings. Suddenly it would become useful and I can actually imagine myself using it.



Apart from this the show was smaller than last year and not many participants. We'll see if it survives next year.