Posts Tagged ‘Interactive Intelligence’

Ask and ye shall receive…

Monday, February 9th, 2009

Greg Galitzine

I really love when companies that I don’t think are completely approachable completely prove me wrong… Well that’s how I feel about TMC this week, I received a response from Greg Galitzine, Editorial Director of INTERNET TELEPHONY magazine, via his blog regarding the Best in Show award that they gave to Interactive Intelligence at the 2009 IT Expo East. (Read my initial thoughts.) To break it down quickly I agree with him, on the surface it seems funny for Interactive Intelligence to receive an “SMB” award. But as Greg points out: “While small and medium business, or SMB, generally implies companies on the smaller end of the spectrum, we often tend to forget the “M” or mid-size group of businesses.” (Click here to read the full story at tmcnet.com.)

Well that makes sense to me… I am man enough to admit when I’m wrong, and in this case, I admit it. So thank you Greg for the clarification.

Interactive Intelligence’s Best of Show Award confusion

Wednesday, February 4th, 2009

Interactive Intelligence

So I feel I need to clear up the the stink that I caused with Interactive Intelligence and their Best In Show Award that was issued to them by the show’s editors for “Best SMB Solution”. As I mentioned in the previous blog post, InIn was given the award at the 2009 IT Expo East show in Miami. (Click here for a complete list of winners.) Here is my excerpt if you didn’t read the whole post (It was a little lengthy):

“Shortly before the show closed I attended a “Bullseye routing” demo given by Interactive Intelligence. Now what caught my eye here is the award in the picture. “Best SMB Solution” was what it read… SMB Solution? There is nothing SMB about Interactive Intelligence and their solution. They don’t pretend to be SMB and will always claim to be an enterprise solution. I asked one of the InIn folks and she wasn’t sure what that was all about but would look into it. I even approached TMC’s Greg Galitzine about it and he told me he’d look into it. Greg I’m going to hold you to that and expect a response…”

Well I didn’t get a response from Greg yet but I did speak with an Interactive Intelligence representative working the booth and she told me that their PR representative made a mistake and entered them into that category. Now I don’t think she was giving me lip service and that this was an honest mistake on the PR rep’s part, but I still have a problem here.

So where’s the beef do you ask? Well in my humble opinion, the editors at TMC should have caught this mistake. They live and die in this communications space and should know that II solutions are not SMB but rather definitivly enterprise. There is not even a blend where it could cross the chasm and maybe, even remotely be SMB designed, etc. So TMC editors, I ask that if you want these awards to really mean something, which I think do, please, please, please make sure you review your applications a little more closely, and make sure the shoe fits, so to speak, before you issue the next round of awards. I understand that you guys are busy at these shows and that may be a difficult task, but a glaring error like this should not go undetected until after the fact.

The show was fantastic otherwise, I spoke with more people then I expected, and attendance seems like it was record breaking. So hats off to TMC in that respect. You guys do know how to put on a communications conference and I can’t wait to see what the show in Los Angeles in October will bring.

Editors note: Click here to read the outcome.

IT Expo Wrap-up – Day 2

Wednesday, February 4th, 2009

After a lack of time and an annoyance with my iPhone and the Wordpress application, I decided to just give a general wrap up of yesterday’s events…

I was able to catch the tail end of the Service Provider Roundtable moderated by Andy Abramson. Companies participating in the discussion were Packet8, Broadvox, Telefonica, TW Telecom, and MagicJack.

So my first real session of the day was the keynote session with John Frederiksen General Manager of Microsoft’s Response Point, and Digium CEO, Danny Windham. The hourlong keynote was split into two half hour speeches about each company’s take on the current VoIP market. While John was interesting to listen to and made some fascinating points, I was more interested in hearing what Danny had to say about the current state of Asterisk.

Keynote with Microsoft's John Frederiksen

Then the show floor opened and I waded through the over 150 exhibitors. One of the standouts was Snom (who Switchvox has now added to their Auto provisioning feature in their 4.0 release.) The Snom Snow edition phones are definitely different and caught my eye. I was able to get my hands on a Snom 820 so expect a review in the near future.

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I had a firsthand demo from Cashton Coleman from IonLogix. He showed me the inner workings of their Phone Manager 2008 platform. His blog is a great read and I think he has a fascinating take on the Asterisk world.

I also took a look at the AdTran TA900 gateway’s. They can be used to provide SIP trunks to legacy PBX systems. The system will convert SIP to PRI that the legacy system can speak hence “VoIPifying” the legacy system…

AdTran's TA900 series gateway.

I bumped into Mitchel Constantin (who you may remember as the developer of “Snap A Number” which Digium bought from him last year) while at the Switchvox 4.0 overview given by Switchvox’s Tristan Deganhardt. Mitchel’s new company, Weavver, is doing some interesting things in the Asterisk space. Stay tuned for news and products that Weavver is now currently developing and testing. I can’t talk about it publicly, but he is on to something…

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Shortly before the show closed I attended a “Bullseye routing” demo given by Interactive Intelligence. Now what caught my eye here is the award in the picture. “Best SMB Solution” was what it read… SMB Solution? There is nothing SMB about Interactive Intelligence and their solution. They don’t pretend to be SMB and will always claim to be an enterprise solution. I asked one of the InIn folks and she wasn’t sure what that was all about but would look into it. I even approached TMC’s Greg Galitzine about it and he told me he’d look into it. Greg I’m going to hold you to that and expect a response… :)

Interactive Intelligence

So that was Day 2. I’m heading over for Day 3 and hitting the airport this afternoon. Hopefully I win that Jeep they’re giving away.

-chromiszach