NATD in the news
Upfront
Economy
Forecast
Fraud
Milestones
Nortel
Open source
Security

NATD in the news

Veramark names new president and CEO
Veramark Technologies announced that the Board of Directors has elected Mr. Anthony C. Mazzullo President and Chief Executive Officer.  Mr. Mazzullo joins Veramark as President and CEO with over 25 years of successfully leading software and professional services companies.  Since 2004, he was Senior Vice President of Operations at ePlus Systems, Inc., where he had responsibility for revenue and profitability for consulting services and for the delivery and support of a line of eProcurement software products.  Mr. Mazzullo established the consulting services business as a profitable and fast growing segment of business for ePlus.  In 1999, he established and served as President and CEO of eTrack Solutions, a professional services company that helped organizations streamline operations and optimally apply software applications to their business.  eTrack Solutions was sold in 2001 to Manchester Technologies, which was acquired by ePlus Systems in 2004. Mr. Mazzullo holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University and an MBA in Accounting/Finance from the University of Rochester Simon School of Business.  He succeeds David G. Mazzella, who had previously announced his decision to retire effective December 31, 2007.
Visit www.veramark.com.


Broadvox executives speak at IT Conference and Expo
Broadvox announced that attendees at the INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference & Expo will have several opportunities to learn more about SIP Trunking from members of the Broadvox management team. Broadvox is co-sponsoring a seminar presented by technology partner InGate.  Eric Eckman, Director of Business Development at Broadvox, will participate in the session “SIP Trunking – The Service Provider Perspective,” which promises to be of particular interest to IAD resellers and suppliers. David Byrd, VP of Marketing and Product Management, will speak to all attendees on the general state and future of the SIP marketplace. Mr. Byrd brings almost thirty years of telecom experience to the conference. Mark Bresler, VP Channel Sales, presents “SIP Trunking for the SMB.”
Visit www.broadvox.net. ^Back To Top

Upfront

IP continues outpacing traditional PBXs
IP telephony has crossed over from an emerging technology to the mainstream choice for business voice, reports In-Stat. User acceptance of IP telephony is high, with sales of IP lines in the first half of 2007 continuing to solidly outpace those of traditional lines as the move to IP telephony among businesses continues, the high-tech market research firm says.  Recent research by In-Stat found the following:

• In the first half of 2007, 11.1 million IP lines were shipped worldwide, comprising over 80% of total shipments.

• Nortel, Avaya and Cisco continue to lead the IP PBX market, but Microsoft's entry into this market will have a major impact for years to come.

• Unified communications is the current battleground for vendors.

The research, “Worldwide PBX Update: It's All About IP,” provides five-year line shipment forecasts for traditional and IP lines and five-year revenue forecasts for traditional and IP lines. It also contains insights into market trends shaping the PBX marketplace and market share estimates for the leading PBX vendors.
Visit www.instat.com. ^Back To Top

Economy

CEO confidence declines to seven-year low
The Conference Board Measure of CEO Confidence, which had declined to 44 in the third quarter of 2007, fell to 39 in the final quarter of 2007 (a reading of more than 50 points reflects more positive than negative responses). The last time the Measure fell below 40 was in the final quarter of 2000 when it fell to 31. CEOs' assessment of current economic conditions was considerably less positive, with just 7% of CEOs -- down from 14% last quarter -- stating economic conditions had improved. In assessing their own industries, business leaders were also less optimistic. Approximately 15% claim conditions are better, down from approximately 17% in the third quarter. Looking ahead six months, the outlook has turned more negative. Currently, 16% of business leaders expect economic conditions to improve in the next six months, down from 20% last quarter. Expectations for their own industries are also less upbeat, with only 17% anticipating an improvement, down from 27% last quarter.
Visit www.conference-board.org.
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Forecast

Telcos in a quandary
Dr. Paul Polishuk, President of Information Gatekeepers Inc., announced that IGI’s chief analyst and forecaster, Clif Holliday, has developed a new forecast that highlights the quandary facing the large telcos in the US today. Dr. Polishuk commented, “For several years, the telcos have been installing and placing in-service high-speed accesses (xDSL) as fast as the market demanded them. In that environment the telcos were adding approximately 5 million new high-speed customers per year. We are now entering a period that the telcos will be limited by the resources available to cutover the new advanced, high-speed services such as FiOS and U-verse. This will present a real test of will for the telcos’ management as they watch their wireline revenues decline while they continue to pour billions of dollars into the advanced networks, but are unable to turn them into profit centers as soon as they would like.” Mr. Holliday further explained, “The time needed to place these technologies in service at each customer’s house is much longer than with the more standard xDSL, and the ‘back office’ activities are much more involved. We are seeing this issue first at Verizon, where their cutover requirements are now limiting their h-s gains to about 75% of what they were previously achieving. Verizon has announced that they are moving personnel to address this, but they still have limits. Our revised forecast going on out to 2012 suggests that the telcos in total will only be adding about 1 million h-s lines per quarter due to this issue. As a result, the ‘catch-up’ date for telcos to match the cable companies in h-s accesses is now much later (2011 as opposed to our previously forecast 2008.)”
Visit www.igigroup.com.
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Fraud

Acxiom Digital steps up battle against email fraud
Acxiom Corporation announced that Acxiom Digital has implemented the DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail) email authentication standard on its IMPACT platform, providing its clients and their customers added protection against email fraud and phishing attacks. The company is one of the first email service providers to implement the DKIM standard and provide the technology to its customers. DKIM, which is an open-source standard, employs a cryptographic signature that can be decrypted by a receiving ISP. This enables the ISP to verify the sender of an email and then make a determination of whether that sender is trustworthy. Further, the DKIM "fingerprint" that is placed in each message allows receiving ISPs to verify that the message has not been tampered with due to phishing scams or email fraud. Messages that have been compromised can be flagged accordingly. DKIM combines features of separate authentication technologies originally developed by Yahoo! and Cisco and improves on the anti-forgery and anti-phishing capabilities of the earlier authentication technologies.
Visit www.acxiomdigital.com.
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Milestones

BICSI mourns the passing of Irving "Jim" Alexander, Past President
Irving "Jim" Alexander, BICSI’s seventh President (1984-1985), sadly has passed away recently after a long illness. He was 82. A WWII Navy Veteran and 38-year employee with Illinois Bell Telephone, Alexander is remembered by many BICSI members and telecommunications professionals as the driving force behind the establishment of BICSI’s Registered Communications Distribution Designer (RCDD) program.  “Jim saw a need within the industry and pushed BICSI to fill it with the development of the RCDD designation,” said David Cranmer, RCDD, BICSI Executive Director. Professionals who attain this designation have demonstrated their knowledge in the design, integration and implementation of information transport systems (ITS) and related infrastructure components. “Very few people believed that BICSI could sustain the 1984 break-up that ended the Bell System of affiliated telephone companies,” said Dunn G. Harvey, RCDD, BICSI Past President (1981). “Yet through Jim’s leadership, the organization held strong and maintained positive relations with those newly separated companies.”
Visit www.bicsi.org.
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Nortel

Nortel to deliver on partner redevelopment in 08
When Nortel launched the revamp of its partner program two years ago a key consideration was laying out a two-year plan of record to give partners visibility into the coming changes and the opportunity to plan their investment with Nortel. A key thrust behind the revamp has been to move to a value-based program, and that's reflected in the way Nortel is handling its new specializations. To qualify, partners will need to demonstrate a mix of technical and practical competencies says John Stasick, director of channel management and development for Nortel Networks. In its plan of record Nortel committed to launching six to 10 specializations by mid-2008. Specializations in advanced services, UC and SMB have already been launched, and Stasick says an advanced data specialization will be launched in 30 to 60 days. Focusing on products like Nortel's Passport WAN family of products and its secure routers, as well as applying that data infrastructure to support applications like VoIP, Stasick says competency requirements for the specialization will include things like certifications, labs and technical gear on the technical side, as well as a certain customer base with certain solutions and customer satisfaction ratings on the practical side.
Visit www.nortel.com.
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Open source

InfoWorld Names Digium Asterisk a top technology
Digium, Inc. announced that IDG’s InfoWorld has recognized Asterisk 1.4 as a 2008 Technology of the Year. Selected by InfoWorld Test Center editors and reviewers, the annual awards identify the best and most innovative products on the IT landscape. Asterisk is the most widely used open source telephony software with more than one million downloads in 2007 and more than 100 million users worldwide. Mark Spencer, creator of Asterisk and Digium’s chief technology officer, commented: “The InfoWorld Technology of the Year 2008 award is an enormous acknowledgement of the work and success of the worldwide Asterisk community. Asterisk wouldn’t be in a position to rival some of the biggest vendors of proprietary voice technology today if it weren’t for the inherent strength of open source and dedication of the community of developers.”
Visit www.infoworld.com or www.digium.com.
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Security

Sipera reveals VoIP threat predictions for 2008
Sipera VIPER Lab, operated by Sipera Systems, revealed its Top 5 VoIP Threat Predictions for 2008.  Based on industry trends that include major IP telephony vendors offering SIP solutions, enterprises deploying VoIP and unified communications (UC) beyond the traditionally secure perimeter, and service providers aggressively embracing fixed mobile convergence (FMC), the predictions for 2008 are:

• First and foremost, as enterprises deploy SIP Trunks and UC for the mobile workspace, denial of service (DoS) and distributed DoS attacks on VoIP networks will become an increasingly important issue.  

• HTTP or other third party data services running on VoIP end-points will be exploited for eavesdropping and other attacks.

• The hacking community, experienced with exploiting the vulnerabilities in other Microsoft offerings, will turn its attention and tools towards Microsoft OCS – taking advantage of its UC connections to public IMs, email addresses and buddy lists to create botnets and launch attacks. As well, enterprise federation for OCS, a major productivity and business process enabler, will be a source of greater VoIP security risk since it exposes once closed networks to the risks found in other federations.

• Hackers will set up more IP PBXs for vishing/phishing exploits. Vishing bank accounts will accelerate, due to ease of exploit and the appeal of “easy money.”

• VoIP attacks against service providers will escalate, using readily available, anonymous $20 SIM cards. With UMA becoming more widely deployed, service providers are, for the first time, allowing subscribers to have direct access to mobile core networks over IP, making it easier to spoof identities and use illegal accounts to launch a variety of attacks.

Visit www.sipera.com/viper.^Back To Top