- JBCP business plan: target market segments, customer categories, revenue projections, competitor analysis
- Go to market strategy: formulate value of packaging Mobicents open source projects into JBCP commercial offerings; follow up with sales team on recognizing opportunities and delivering the message
- Marketing collateral: create and feed to sales, pre-sales and marketing teams globally
- Product Requirements: work with customers to capture requirements for future product and services improvement
- Operational: maintain product offerings in internal systems such as sales portal SKUs and support portal entries
- Partner ecosystem: refine and execute on partner ecosystem plan
- Product Awareness: identify key industry events to participate in; inform leading industry analysts of product progress; publicize achievements in business press
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Mobicents looking for A+ Product Manager
Things around Mobicents continue to keep us very busy. An area where we feel growth pain is Product Management. The amount of incoming leads and interest in the commercial JBoss Communications Platform is calling for a dedicated top-notch Product Manager who can handle the following responsibilities:
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
Mobicents at JavaOne 2008
Tuesday May 6 was a big day for Mobicents. The two
sessions at the JBoss booth were overflowing. There were 3-4 times more people than chairs for both sessions delivered consequently by Vladimir and Jean. The live demos were both impactful, especially the facebook plugin demo where two people of the audience were able to talk to each other on mobile phones.
The Red Hat media team also recorded a podcast and
posted it on jboss.org.
In the midst of the presentations we were approached for a purchase order by a sizeable call center company in the San Francisco area.
See the crowd around Jean during his sesion. I am listening carefully since most of what he says is news to me. Mobicents SIP Servlets is growing just too fast. Vladimir is answering questions in the back to someone who watched his presentation.
sessions at the JBoss booth were overflowing. There were 3-4 times more people than chairs for both sessions delivered consequently by Vladimir and Jean. The live demos were both impactful, especially the facebook plugin demo where two people of the audience were able to talk to each other on mobile phones.
The Red Hat media team also recorded a podcast and
posted it on jboss.org.
In the midst of the presentations we were approached for a purchase order by a sizeable call center company in the San Francisco area.
See the crowd around Jean during his sesion. I am listening carefully since most of what he says is news to me. Mobicents SIP Servlets is growing just too fast. Vladimir is answering questions in the back to someone who watched his presentation.
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Mobicents JSLEE or Mobicents SIP Serlvets: Which one is better?
Religious arguments over alternative technologies can be fun...for a few days. Then they become wasteful. Instead of taking sides, we decided that it is important to encompass the largest possible community of developers.
The Mobicents team now offers implementations of both JSLEE and SIP Servlets. Jean Deruelle, Ranga M, Vladimir Ralev, Bartosz Baranowski and other members of the core Mobicents team built the SIP Servlets (JSR 289) implementation from scratch in less than 3 months. As can be expected it shares many of the underlying components with the existing JSLEE SIP Resource Adaptor, most notably the JSIP open source stack from NIST.
Web developers who are still shy to open the doors of the VoIP realm will find it easiest to prototype using SIP Servlets. As their needs grow with the sophistication of their converged applications, they will reach to JSLEE, which has an advanced programming model optimized for solving communications problems and a rich palette or Resource Adaptors covering a variety of telco protocols.
What is next? As we're acquiring experience with Java EE, JSLEE and SIP Servlets, we are thinking about a unified programming model. It should be intuitive to add voice and video features to an application based on EJB3 and Web Beans. Some early work shows that this is possible and we are confident it won't take long before the open source community rallies around a unified model. Join the discussions.
The Mobicents team now offers implementations of both JSLEE and SIP Servlets. Jean Deruelle, Ranga M, Vladimir Ralev, Bartosz Baranowski and other members of the core Mobicents team built the SIP Servlets (JSR 289) implementation from scratch in less than 3 months. As can be expected it shares many of the underlying components with the existing JSLEE SIP Resource Adaptor, most notably the JSIP open source stack from NIST.
Web developers who are still shy to open the doors of the VoIP realm will find it easiest to prototype using SIP Servlets. As their needs grow with the sophistication of their converged applications, they will reach to JSLEE, which has an advanced programming model optimized for solving communications problems and a rich palette or Resource Adaptors covering a variety of telco protocols.
What is next? As we're acquiring experience with Java EE, JSLEE and SIP Servlets, we are thinking about a unified programming model. It should be intuitive to add voice and video features to an application based on EJB3 and Web Beans. Some early work shows that this is possible and we are confident it won't take long before the open source community rallies around a unified model. Join the discussions.
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
JBCP training class at Nortel
Last week, I had the privilege to teach a four day class on JBoss Communications Platform (Mobicents) to a team of sharp cookies from Nortel. I am usually not great at repeating the same presentation many times, so I appreciate it a lot when the audience is interacting with me - asking questions, catching bugs in the examples, or making fun of my drawings. Well in this case, the audience was so interactive that they made me feel I knew nothing about real world converged telco applications. I think I learned more from this class than I taught. Looking forward to go back to Dallas and spend more time with this team. They have several exciting projects lined up that will make a splash appearance sometime next year.
Monday, December 10, 2007
Japanese telcos still on the cutting edge
During the week of November 26, the Red Hat telco team had a series of meetings in Tokyo with the leading Japanese telcos. Okashita-san, responsible for business development in Japan, organized the logistics and included several folks from sales, marketing and engineering from the Tokyo office. Until this trip, I had no idea Red Hat has such a big office in Japan. The quality of the people in that office beat my expectations by a long shot. There was a lot of energy in the air. It was great to be part of it for a few days.
During our meetings, I learned a lot about the advancement and innovation created by the Japanese operators. Its no news that they have been world leaders in mobile technology for years. Still it was amazing to see their R&D labs first hand.
The engineers we met had the mentality found in US startups. The discussions were involved and technical. It was quite unusual scene for companies of such size. Even more exciting was the fact that these companies launched specialized open source departments focusing on OSS initiatives with the forward looking goal of introducing them to main product lines. NTT OSS for example in collaboration with NTT Labs have already identified specific areas of development and we were glad to help them.
Towards the end of our trip, the Red Hat business development team organized a media briefing. Following are some of the articles published after the event:
http://japan.zdnet.com/oss/story/0,3800075264,20362184,00.htm
http://enterprise.watch.impress.co.jp/cda/topic/2007/11/30/11755.html
http://www.atmarkit.co.jp/news/200712/03/redhat.html
http://japan.internet.com/linuxtoday/20071203/4.html
http://news.livedoor.com/article/detail/3410805/
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Towards the end of our trip, the Red Hat business development team organized a media briefing. Following are some of the articles published after the event:
http://japan.zdnet.com/oss
http://enterprise.watch
http://www.atmarkit.co.jp/news
http://japan.internet.com
http://news.livedoor.com
Telco 2.0 Executive Summit, October 2007
Tom Wunderlich and I attended the Telco 2.0 Executive Summit on behalf of Red Hat. We presented the JBoss Communications Platform in the Product Innovation track. The content of the presentation was more technical than the audience expected. Tom had to improvise and bring around the technology message into one of value proposition meaningful to telco executives. Apparently it worked, because we god a fair amount of feedback. Consequently, the organizers of the summit were kind enough to post a blog entry related to our presentation.
The event was good in content and pace. There were about 200 people, most holding executive positions at incumbent or next generation telco companies around the world. There were a series of tightly scheduled presentations and product demos followed by short brainstorming sessions. I learned some interesting facts about the telco pain points, service usage statistics and consumer trends.
The event was good in content and pace. There were about 200 people, most holding executive positions at incumbent or next generation telco companies around the world. There were a series of tightly scheduled presentations and product demos followed by short brainstorming sessions. I learned some interesting facts about the telco pain points, service usage statistics and consumer trends.
Sunday, July 08, 2007
Telco 2.0 and Disposable Apps
Disposable apps is a popular term for applications built rapidly by "power users" who need to address a specific problem only relevant to a few people for some period of time. Example: How do I find an apartment in Austin close to a running trail and an Internet cafe?
Yahoo Pipes is a tool enabling disposable Web apps. Microsoft is competing via Popfly, Google has Mashup Editor.
Web mega-brands are beginning to figure out ways to secure long term consumer loyalty by enabling power users to extend their networks of services.
While Yahoo Pipes is an awesome data flow oriented app design tool, it leaves out the domain of communications apps. For example, it is not possible to build a pipe, which 1) monitors an RSS feed for new sports cars and 2) when a new car is posted, and 3) when Alice and Bob are both online during off-hours, then 4) connect them and 5) pop-up the new car web page so they can discuss it. With slightly different parameters, the same application can be useful to a person looking for a house with given criteria and is interested to discuss with their broker each new offer on the market that matches the criteria.
These examples are in the domain of converged applications - mix of web and communications features. To make them possible, there needs to be a foundation of basic communications services pluggable into mashup editors like Yahoo Pipes.
British Telecom made a brave step in the right direction with its new Web21C SDK program. Although BT SDK cannot be readily plugged into web mashups, it is just a small step away.
Another practical example is a mashup between Google Calendar and a hypothetical Conferencing Service similar to the one offered by BT. Lets call this mashup - GCal Conference Service. Its purpose is to make conference calling a better experience - it won't require people to remember the exact time of a conference; they won't need to have a conference bridge number handy either; they may even be stuck in traffic on their way to the office as the call begins.
GCal Conference would work as follows: 1) It will monitor the RSS feed of a user's calendar and watch for events tagged as Audio Conference. 2) 5 minutes before the event starts the service will create the conference room and begin joining participants to the call. The list of participants is found in the GCal event. Address book will be used to lookup each participant's phone number.
Undoubtfully there are many other ideas for disposable converged apps. We are barely scratching the service of what will surely follow. There will be telco players who will hop on the rising tide and ride it. There will be others who will continue contemplating their next big move and find themselves left behind in the 20th century.
Yahoo Pipes is a tool enabling disposable Web apps. Microsoft is competing via Popfly, Google has Mashup Editor.
Web mega-brands are beginning to figure out ways to secure long term consumer loyalty by enabling power users to extend their networks of services.
While Yahoo Pipes is an awesome data flow oriented app design tool, it leaves out the domain of communications apps. For example, it is not possible to build a pipe, which 1) monitors an RSS feed for new sports cars and 2) when a new car is posted, and 3) when Alice and Bob are both online during off-hours, then 4) connect them and 5) pop-up the new car web page so they can discuss it. With slightly different parameters, the same application can be useful to a person looking for a house with given criteria and is interested to discuss with their broker each new offer on the market that matches the criteria.
These examples are in the domain of converged applications - mix of web and communications features. To make them possible, there needs to be a foundation of basic communications services pluggable into mashup editors like Yahoo Pipes.
British Telecom made a brave step in the right direction with its new Web21C SDK program. Although BT SDK cannot be readily plugged into web mashups, it is just a small step away.
Another practical example is a mashup between Google Calendar and a hypothetical Conferencing Service similar to the one offered by BT. Lets call this mashup - GCal Conference Service. Its purpose is to make conference calling a better experience - it won't require people to remember the exact time of a conference; they won't need to have a conference bridge number handy either; they may even be stuck in traffic on their way to the office as the call begins.
GCal Conference would work as follows: 1) It will monitor the RSS feed of a user's calendar and watch for events tagged as Audio Conference. 2) 5 minutes before the event starts the service will create the conference room and begin joining participants to the call. The list of participants is found in the GCal event. Address book will be used to lookup each participant's phone number.
Undoubtfully there are many other ideas for disposable converged apps. We are barely scratching the service of what will surely follow. There will be telco players who will hop on the rising tide and ride it. There will be others who will continue contemplating their next big move and find themselves left behind in the 20th century.
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