You know I have to cook on Valentine's Day, especially when it comes on a weekend. Most of you are fortunate in that going out to dinner is a favor to your spouse. My wife considers going out to dinner an inconvenience bordering on a major bother. That's fine with me, as I rather eat my own cooking most of the time. Sunday was a packed day for cooking. I have been curing beef to make pastrami and corned beef for the past couple of weeks. The pastrami was smoked for eight hours with pecan wood and the corned beef boiled for 1 ¾ hours. Two were successful and one not so. I'll have to work on my cure mixture and timing a bit more. In the break between cooking the corned beef and waiting for the pastrami to complete, I prepared a heritage tomato salad, Yukon gold mash potatoes and Kansas City cut (bone-in) strip steaks with Green Peppercorn Sauce. Served with a wonderful wine from the Haut Medoc region of France, dinner was quite good. I choose the steak as the recipe of the week because it is easy to make and taste very good. I added mushrooms and tarragon to what is a traditional French style steak dish. You can also substitute filet mignon for the strip steak to increase its elegance. I, also, suggest using a sauté pan without a non-stick finish to get a good crust on the steaks. Kansas City cut strip steaks with Green Peppercorn Sauce, Enjoy!

Money

After reading the comment from the Frost and Sullivan analyst that the saving associated with VoIP/SIP Trunking were now too big to ignore, I decided to dust off a few of my previous blogs discussing savings and ROI. Since I wrote the initial blogs, additional competition has entered the SIP Trunking space. I would characterize the savings provided by the major LECs as closer to 10-30% less than their TDM offerings. While ITSPs like Broadvox continue to offer 30-70% less. The reason for this difference is both a combination of price and equipment requirements. Both AT&T and Verizon charge extra for mandated connectivity in addition to a higher per concurrent call session (CCS) price. The effect has been to slow full IP communications adoption among enterprise customers that want service from a tier one provider. However, perhaps because the savings we provide is too big to ignore, we are engaged with more enterprise customers than ever before.  In addition to our industry gaining on the value proposition front, we are also overcoming the FUD that overhangs SIP Trunking (voice quality and reliability). I like to point out that we may not be at five nines (99.999) but we are at four nines and a five (99.995). The difference between us is 21 minutes per year and closing.

Enough for today. On Wednesday, we address the key cost savings components.

Is there really a question about the future of telecommunications? Over the last thirty years, I have participated in the development of the Intelligent Network Architecture that brought us Service Control Points and out of band signaling (SS7), Cellular communications (now mobility with Wi-Fi, Mi-Fi and femtocell) and today, IP Telephony. There is no doubt in my mind that the transition to IP communications is inevitable and I wonder why the FCC is asking for opinions on the subject? As usual, I'll keep an eye on that for you as well.

In other news, Cisco has found in an internal study of the marketplace for commercial voice and data that 50 percent resides with businesses that have fewer than 24 phone lines and 5 Mbps or less of broadband. This is consistent with the sales activity we have experience over the last year. It is not our preference that a majority of our sales is to SMBs, it is the nature of the landscape. With millions of SMBs as a target market and only a few thousand enterprises, it is not surprising the total number of clients in the SMB space far exceed enterprises. Moreover, the sales cycle is such that closing business with an SMB can be accomplished on the same day as an enquiry while the sales cycle with an enterprise can take over a year.

Finally, the same Cisco study noted that the average small business had 2.7 or 2.8 phone lines. I prefer to say three. This is one of the reasons that Broadvox moved from an offering of a minimum of six concurrent call sessions to three CCS.  This expanded the opportunity for our partners to approach and satisfy a larger number of users. The conclusion Cisco offers as a result is one where they can substantiate their efforts to collaborate with a major cable company or MSO to provide their IP communications and computing solutions.

Clearly, products like Verizon's FIOS are capturing the imagination of residential users and SMBs but will it be the primary broadband of the future? It seems to me that the successful broadband implementation will support physical offices and virtual/mobile offices. We are becoming far more dependent on our ability to conduct business while on the move, even if only locally. Cable telecom access is replacing traditional landlines but is it truly disruptive? Solving mobility issues is the key to me in determining where we as businesses and a government need to make investments. Even so, I would not bet against Cisco.

See you on Monday with another new recipe and have a great weekend!