I’d call it “fashionably late,” but nobody’s ever accused Redmond of having that kind of style.

You’d probably have to be living under a rock not to have seen their  VoIP As You Are campaign, pitching unified communications on MS Exchange Server. Maybe you even saw the Unified Communications Launch back in October. (You can catch a sample on YouTube.)

It’s darned impressive, and they’re touting it like it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread. Except for the fact that, like just about everything else, it’s already been done.

This isn’t a sour grapes thing for me - Iperia’s not the only company on the block with UC software in its product mix, and it’s not like UC was invented at Iperia’s Billerica headquarters.

In fact, it’s quite the opposite. It’s a pat on the back for a ten-year-old industry in general, and for the companies in particular that broke new technological ground.

And there’s still more to be done. As Gartner notes:

The UC market and its technologies are maturing, but, overall, the market remains at an early stage of maturity, and the adoption of converged solutions remains slow.

After ten years, and with Redmond in the arena, however, something’s gotta give. I, for one, am glad Iperia’s moved beyond just UC applications to full-blown service creation. Sure, applications that tie into the communications infrastructure will always be necessary.  But being able to customize solutions on the fly will make it that much easier to stay ahead of the lumbering Microsoft UC beast.

…allow me to share in the meantime. Iperia’s working with Chariton Valley, a local exchange company providing state-of-the-art telecommunications services to businesses and residents in Northeast Missouri, to create revenue generation opportunities and improve customer retention with IperiaVX.

According to Jim Simon, Chariton Valley’s General Manager:

“We needed our service creation platform to have the ability to interoperate with multiple switch vendors, and to work in both a wireless and wireline messaging environment. IperiaVX delivered on those requirements, with quick and easy installation as well as great customer support.”

They’ve been in business for more than 56 years, and you don’t stay in business that long - especially as a local  exchange carrier - without innovating. They’re leading their state (and are pretty far ahead nationally, as well) by offering the benefits of a fiber optic network to their businesses and residential customers.

Now, they’re innovating their service offerings with IperiaVX, much to the delight of Iperia’s Chris Poer:

“It’s a pleasure to work with forward-thinking companies like Chariton Valley. They understand that in today’s service provider industry, you need to offer features and services tailored for specific niches within your market.

“That way, you stand apart from your competition, creating added value for which you can charge a premium price, and reduce customer churn at the same time. Otherwise, your service becomes commoditized, and your margins drop as you spend more and more to acquire and retain your customers.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

I’m in California for three weeks, and clicking through the channels on the TV in our rented townhouse, I saw an ad for Time Warner Cable’s “All the Best” triple play package, with these three benefits called out right up front:

• One package.
• One simple bill.
• One low price.

This is exactly the same value proposition being offered by MetroCast, the small regional MSO serving more than 100 communities in New Hampshire (my home state), Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Connecticut and Maine. Here’s the benefit statement for MetroCast’s “VIP Package” (for Video, Internet, and Phone):

Video, Internet and Phone—all under one roof: Yours. Enjoy the convenience of three great services on one bill, from one company.

That nationwide phenomenon I mentioned in the headline of this post? It’s commoditization. At the B2C level, both companies are saying the exact same thing, and if they were competing in the same market, the only differentiating factor would be the brand reputation of TWC parent Time Warner.

The ever-helpful Wikipedia adds another wrinkle to the issue:

Today, triple play services are offered by cable television operators as well as by telecommunication operators. It paves the way for these service providers to compete with one another. It relies on the assumption that an integrated solution will increase opportunity costs for customers who may want to choose between service providers. Interoperability is not a design target.

That’s a pretty dangerous assumption. It reminds me of wireless carriers in the pre-number-portability days. Look at Verizon Wireless now. They unapologetically refuse to compete on price, because “It’s the Network.” They’re succeeding because they’ve positioned themselves based on one of the biggest pain points for cell phone users - network coverage. (Once AT&T catches up reputation-wise in that area, though, all bets are off.)

When you commoditize your service and compete only on price, you start from a place of zero loyalty with your customers. It doesn’t take much to create a stagnant customer base willing to jump if you annoy them enough. And the annoyance threshold is a lot lower without that whole loyalty thing, regardless of the alleged “opportunity cost.”

VoIP Logic is a long-standing Iperia client, and they just announced the launch of their new Support Portal Knowledge Base. In their words:

VoIP Logic’s Knowledge Base will serve as an invaluable, self-service resource for the company’s customers and partners by providing full transparency to the latest solutions and scripts, addressing more than 500 hundred (and growing) engineering issues on all VoIP Logic-supported systems…

Chris Poer, Iperia’s VP of Sales, notes that one of the hallmarks of VoIP Logic’s business and reputation is their “good customer support,” so we’re confident their new Knowledge Base will be welcomed by their competitive carrier customer base.

(Iperia was mentioned in their news release because VoIP Logic delivers unified messaging features within its integrated solutions using Iperia’s ActivEdge, precursor to the IperiaVX service creation platform.)

Congrats to the VoIP Logic team! Iperia looks forward to helping you create new revenue-generating opportunities for your customers, for many years to come.

The biggest thing going on in Vegas next week isn’t the latest hotel opening - it’s IBM’s 2008 Impact Smart SOA Conference, touted as “the largest SOA conference in the industry.”

Why “Smart SOA™” you ask? Because this is the approach IBM takes to ensuring the productive implementation of a service-oriented architecture. They call it “The experienced approach to acceleration, innovation and differentiation.” Here’s a little more detail from IBM for you:

The Smart SOA approach is a set of guiding principles developed by IBM, based on our unique experience working with more than 5700 customers using our SOA offerings.

The Smart SOA approach benefits both business and IT by extending the business value of deployment, from basic to advanced projects. The Smart SOA approach demands simplicity and robustness in every project, eliminating unnecessary complexity while building a strong foundation for future growth.

This is great stuff, as far as Iperia is concerned. Our service creation platform, IperiaVX, allows its users to rapidly deploy new and differentiated service offerings, while significantly decreasing the development cycle time. So IperiaVX and IBM’s Smart SOA are a perfect fit.

Iperia is one of eight select Business Partners joining IBM in their booth, represented by Sales VP Chris Poer and Solutions Engineer Scott Chong. Chris will also be giving a Birds of a Feather presentation there, entitled Service Creation: Creating Customer Value Through Rapid Service Deployment. (See a theme emerging?)

If you’ll be investing in this highly-regarded educational, technical, and networking event at the MGM Convention Center, please take a few minutes to drop by the Iperia pedestal, and tell us about your business.

The “official” announcement (read: press release) will come soon enough, but until then, let me say how thrilled the folks at Iperia are to have been recognized by pulvermedia with an inaugural Innovator Award from VON Magazine.

The award goes to Iperia for its IperiaVX service creation platform in general, and its Mobile Visual Voicemail application in specific, as representative of the best and brightest companies creating “the future of Internet Communications.”

In a nifty little twist, there’s an additional achievement yet to be announced - the Judges’ Top 10, which will be revealed at the awards ceremony, taking place on Tuesday, March 18th, at Spring 2008 VON.x in San Jose.

Speaking of the judges, they were drawn from VON Magazine’s “editorial community” (I love that term), including:

Carl Ford, VP of Content and Community Developer for the VON.x Conference and Expo; Bob Emmerson, European Editor, VON Magazine and Euro Innovations e-newsletter; Ross O’Brien, Asia/Pacific Editor, VON Magazine; Bob Frankston, Frankston Innovating and Joel Maloff, founder of The Maloff Company and a contributing columnist for VON Magazine; and Doug Mohney, Editor-in-Chief, VON Magazine and the von:focus e-newsletter.

To win an Innovator Award based on the opinions of this group of industry watchers, thought leaders, and communicators is a honor, and we thank all of them for their consideration.

You have have seen the news on Reuters, TMC, or MSNBC, but in case not, it’s official: IperiaVX has been certified “HiPath Ready (U.S.)” on the Siemens HiPath 8000 Platform.

For us, this is a pretty big deal, because as Iperia Enterprise VP Josh Veshia notes:

“Many of the largest enterprises and service providers in North America rely on Siemens and the strength of their IP solutions … IperiaVX is the first Service Creation platform to successfully complete HiPath 8000 certification. This certification enables Siemens and Iperia to offer a unique value proposition to their customers: The ability to deliver high-margin, high-value communications services for their employees, partners, and clients.

These services, whose time to market used to take a year or more, can now be designed, created, tested, and deployed in just a few months with the IperiaVX Service Creation Platform.”

Though getting a certification like this one is a team effort, I’d like to flag three folks who really brought it all together: Bernd Weimar and Chuck Brooks at Siemens, and Gary Raches at Iperia. These three joined together in the Siemens lab and played a vital role in Iperia’s HiPath 8000 certification.

We’re grateful to these three guys, their teams, and to Siemens Communications in general. Now that it’s all said and done, it looks like the certification process could be the beginning of a great working relationship together.

Mae Kowalke, an Associate Editor at TMC.net who also blogs for them on Wireless Mobility, posted this item last week in the IP Telephony Online Community section, about VoIP Logic making its Web Services APIs available to service providers. Her article caught my attention because of this paragraph:

Further, VoIP Logic’s APIs enable a variety of ways to access and make use of information from third-party vendor subsystems from companies like Sylantro, High Deal and Iperia.

Exposing APIs as Web Services is also key to the success of IperiaVX - that’s what makes it easy for web developers to tightly couple voice with internal and third-party applications, without having to dig around in the telecom infrastructure.

(Thanks, Mae, for dropping us a nod.)

More than a year ago, I helped Iperia with one of its first demos of the then-under-development service creation platform IperiaVX. The demo was for a “trader desktop” - an integration of voice and data functions in a portal for a hypothetical financial broker.

One of the examples in the demo was a stock watch situation. Using IperiaVX, the trader could quickly see when a stock fell below a pre-defined alert level, and a list of her clients with holdings in that stock. As a result, the trader could record a single voice broadcast about the situation, and with a few clicks, send the message out to all the relevant clients with instructions on how to take action - sell it off, buy it for the dollar-cost averaging, etc.

Now, just expand that to the scale of a multi-billion-dollar financial services firm - like Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, or Bear Stearns, for example. How happy would their clients be to get that kind of rapid information? And how much in trading commissions would that generate?

Especially on a day like today, when the stock market is diving, having a service like this to offer isn’t just good in the short term. It’s a competitive advantage.

So my mind snapped to that demo this morning, and a lot’s changed since I wrote and recorded the voiceover track for that old trader desktop. But the potential to help traders and their clients react fast to market moves - that opportunity still exists.

It’s the planning time of the year, and considering that IperiaVX has expanded the range of clients we can serve, we’re rethinking the trade show mix for 2008.

One of the biggest decisions to come out of this rethinking is that Iperia won’t be exhibiting at Spring VON in March 2008. It was a business decision that also played a part in Iperia CEO David Jodoin’s joining of a pulvermedia advisory panel. Our commitment to pulvermedia events is evolving, and we’re excited about the new direction. (Isn’t everything exciting in the brainstorming phase?)

But to all the folks who met Iperia team members there in 2007: Thank you, stay in touch, and we hope you’ll consider coming to our neck of the woods for Fall VON in October.

That said, one of the shows we’re looking at for 2008 is Interop. Between them, CTIA, and the National Association of Broadcasters, April in Las Vegas is looking pretty crowded, but according to Carol in the sales office at Interop, their New York show just came off a fabulous 3rd year in the Northeast Corridor, where IT professionals have been “underserved” in terms of shows.

Just from eyeballing it so far, the New York show looks like it falls right in the market space where IperiaVX needs to be. And the Interop folks also happen to have an offer similar to the Unified Communications sponsorship we did at Fall VON 2007 - and our early feedback seems to indicate that’s where we’re most satisfied with our marketing investment.

So my questions to you are: Have you been to an Interop event before? If so, what did you think? And if not, how come?