[February 18, 2005]

Peer-to-Peer Peers Peer Into Future

By David Sims, TMCnet CRM Alert Columnist

Technology Marketing Corporation has released the complete list of panelists for the session titled "A Close Look at P2P VoIP," to be held at 8:15 a.m. on Thursday, Feb. 24, at their Internet Telephony Conference & Expo in Miami next week.

The panel includes Peter Sisson, President & CEO, Teleo; Skype co-founder and CEO Niklas Zennstrom (via teleconference); Dmitry Goroshevsky, President and CEO of Popular Telephony; and Nimcat Networks' CEO, Mahshad Koohgoli.

"Peer-to-Peer VoIP is a potentially disruptive force that is taking the IP telephony market by storm. OK, 'incrementally by storm.' Little by little, bit by bit, this approach to VoIP is taking hold” says Rich Tehrani, president of TMC and conference chairman.

Proponents say that P2P VoIP addresses issues such as scalability, security, redundancy that are required in enterprise and service provider implementations, while supporting basic as well as innovative features.

Skype of course is well-known to VoIP, with co-founder Niklas Zennstrom, one of the industry’s rock stars tabbed as one of the “most dangerous people” to traditional telephony by BusinessWeek. Its P2P VoIP software allowing free calls has been downloaded millions of times, and its cult following rivals that of early Apple and Linux.

According to Rich Tehrani’s blog, Teleo is a new VoIP company that wants to bridge the desktop with the tools mobile professionals use today. Attendees at Miami 2005 will get to hear them announce their strategy. Tehrani quotes Sisson, Teleo President & CEO as saying “ Mobile professionals use cell phone, e-mail and web browsers. They shouldn’t have a new VoIP interface as well. They should have the ability to click on an e-mail and initiate a call and should be able to click buttons on a web site to initiate a call.”

Popular Telephony was being hyped in May 2004 as serious competition to Skype. The French startup introduced two peer-to-peer VoIP software programs, Peerio and Peerio444 with the consumer application, Peerio444, intended to compete directly with Skype, the highly publicized, free VoIP program from Luxembourg-based Skype Technologies.

However Popular Telephony’s hopes are that Peerio 444 will serve to generate interest in Peerio, aimed more at corporate customers and original equipment manufacturers. Their business strategy appears to be to license the middleware to OEM customers. It runs Windows-based PCs and lets users make free, unlimited calls over the Internet to other PCs.

Popular Telephony and Nimcat Networks are both P2P pioneers focusing more on enterprise than residential. As RedNova reports “these companies' Peerio and Peer Telephony eXchange, respectively, are based on middleware embedded in end devices, with no servers used. Each company has been establishing strong relationships with manufacturers of voice terminals and related devices. Popular Telephony also recently introduced its Peerio GNUP, a global numbering plan for IP- telephony users to enable transparent interconnectivity between all VOIP, PSTN, mobile and other networks.”

Nimcat Networks, a provider of Peer Telephone eXchange call processing and Communications Efficiency Management embedded software products has been picking up awards this year, Frost & Sullivan’s 2005 Enterprise Infrastructure Entrepreneurial Company of the Year Award for their peer-to-peer VoIP communications system geared towards the small and medium enterprise market.

Nimcat is pitching their products to SMEs by developing smart, VoIP-ready call processing software that relies upon intelligent, plug-and-play telephone sets to establish connections.

“By using the processing and memory available on a typical IP phone set to run its patented P2P software, Nimcat is able to eliminate the need for centralized telephony equipment,” notes Frost & Sullivan.

The conference will be held February 22-25, 2005 at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in downtown Miami, Florida. "A Close Look at P2P VoIP" takes place Thursday, February 24th at 8:15 a.m.

David Sims is contributing editor and CRM Alert columnist for TMCnet.