Most folks are casually covering Nortel Networks’ acquisition of Pingtel, which specializes in open source VoIP and unified communications solutions. But there’s a bigger story here — much bigger, folks — that most observers have overlooked.
Indeed, Pingtel is only half the story. The other half is SIPfoundry, which Pingtel describes as:
“an international open-source community dedicated to accelerating the adoption of SIP applications as well as the underlying technology. Since early 2004, the SIPfoundry developer and user communities have rapidly expanded to include participants from 63 countries around the world.”
The difference between Pingtel and SIPfoundry is just like the difference between Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora, notes Pingtel. Or as SIPfoundry says on its web site:
“SIPfoundry is a fully independent not-for-profit open source organization. sipXecs is free and can be downloaded by anyone. However, “free” is sometimes not good enough. If your career is on the line when the phone system fails and you have nobody to call have a look at the commercial version of sipXecs, called SIPxchange, and provided by Pingtel Corp … Pingtel offers full commercial support as you would expect from any commercial company.”
What’s the Point, VAR Guy?
Admittedly, The VAR Guy is babbling a bit. So here’s the main point of this blog entry:
- Nortel won’t control the SIPfoundry developer community.
- However… Nortel essentially gains a hotline into the SIPfoundry community. Put another way, Nortel gains a perceived “best friend” advantage when working with the SIPfoundry community.
- And as you know, open source communities disrupt traditional technology companies. Cisco Systems, are you listening?
The VAR Guy has been warning Cisco Systems for about two years that open source would disrupt the networking, VoIP and unified communication markets in a big way. Our resident blogger keeps hyping companies like Digium (Asterisk-based IP PBXes) and Vyatta (open source networking).
But this Nortel-Pingtel deal snuck up on The VAR Guy. Cisco is committed to building communities. But today, Nortel gained a valuable connection into a promising online community of its own.
Tags: | Cisco Systems | Digium Asterisk | Nortel Networks | Open Source VoIP | Pingtel | SIPfoundry | Unified Communications
Interact: Add a Comment | Trackback Link | Permalink
Share: digg | del.icio.us | Technorati | StumbleUpon
Subscribe: RSS Feed
_3.gif "ManageEngine")
No doubt open source can change the game for near-monopolistic markets. The trouble has always been how to monetize the mechanism. Pingtel did not survive as an independent company because they ran out of cash, which is why they were acquired. For established players (ask Microsoft) the issue has been how to integrate the model into their existing lines of business.
Note that Nortel’s not been shy about their support for open source and their use of open source. Here’s my post from January on their open source-based telephony product.
Paste this url into browser if the link doesn’t work:
http://www.brockmann.com/index.php/200801231160/communications/voip/nortel-does-open-source.html
– Peter
Thanks for the news, Var Guy. This is very interesting. I wonder how Nortel will work with the open source community.
BlueSocket had just purchased PingTel around a year ago, and they are already ready to sell it?
http://www.pingtel.com/page.php?id=70&view=155
Tristan: The VAR Guy thinks Nortel will use Pingtel as a learning experience. Let’s hope the deal goes better than other Nortel acquisitions. Our blogger has to wonder if/when Digium and/or Fonality will be pursued for possible open source acquisition… … …
I wonder if Dell would want to further develop their relationship with Fonality by possible acquiring them? They purchased the ISCSI vendor Equal Logic recently, so it shows that they are branching out to more technologies and have set a precedent for acquiring smaller companies.
As for Digium, their Asterisk technology and brand is the biggest name in open source VoIP so they will fetch a price premium similar to MySQL. Nortel is not going to buy them, so who will? Or is an IPO a better outcome for Digium?
While an architect in CTO at Avaya I recommended the company do this kind of thing with either asterisk or SipX. The idea was to do an analog of what IBM did back in 1999 in adopting Linux and building a services/support/integration business. Of course Avaya couldn’t see logic in self-disruption.
Another perspective … whatif nortel percieved opensource as a threat to core business hence acquired ,,, and would make it go a slow death. Point is what is it that pingtel has and nortel does not … in terms of technology.
Sachin: The VAR Guy understands the scenario you raised. But if Nortel wanted to kill open source VoIP, the company would have to spend $1 billion or more buying Digium, Fonality and other Asterisk-oriented companies, our resident blogger believes.
Fact is, there’s no killing open source VoIP. It’s (nearly) everywhere.
SCS500 opens up new channels to the SMB market (like IBM and Dell) while moving Nortel further into software space.
See
http://blog.tmcnet.com/the-hyperconnected-enterprise/unified-communications/nortel-opens-up-to-pingtel.asp
Tony: The VAR Guy welcomes your readership and perspective. But what’s with the URL graffiti? It took our resident blogger several months to make this site beautiful. Please stick with links that are words rather than long, ugly URLs.
Go with something like this: Come to Tony’s site when you’re done here. Sorry, The VAR Guy couldn’t resist. Good to have your perspectives, despite the playful poke at your lengthy URL.