60 Seconds with Vivek Khuller
CEO & Founder, DiVitas Networks

Vivek Khuller was Venture Partner at Clearstone Venture Partners, where he incubated DiVitas. Vivek also was Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Matrix Partners. He had worked at Sycamore Networks in business development, leading strategic sales for the tier-1 carrier market and managing software business development. He worked at Verizon Communications in various roles, including Manager of the Internet Center of Excellence as well as in Network Systems Engineering. At Verizon, Vivek received the Spirit of Excellence Chairman's award - the company's highest honor - in recognition of his technical leadership. Vivek earned an MBA with Distinction from Harvard Business School, an MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland at College Park, and a BS with Distinction in Electrical Engineering from Mangalore University, India.

Richard "Zippy" Grigonis recently spoke with Khuller.

RG: How does DiVitas play in UC and mobility?

VK: We are mobilizing enterprise communication apps which starts with something as basic as your fixed line or desk phone, your corporate IM and contacts and several other select applications which are verticalspecific such as push-to-talk and presence. We've also included your personal status message - think of it as a Twitter equivalent for mobile. We have our own client that you download into your mobile phone. Our server component sits within the enterprise or a carrier can host it. This server component talks to the phone applications I just mentioned, which the company may already have deployed. If they haven't, we have the ability to provide you these applications on the server side directly off of our box because our implementation utilizes open source to a great degree.

Basically, we enable a 'second persona' which we call your 'work' or 'professional persona', on your mobile phone. When the DiVitas client is activated, you have access to all the communication or messaging apps to which you need access to perform your tasks when you're away from your desk. You can make and receive calls on your desk phone line. You can do IM, which travels through the corporate IM network/system. You also have access to your company's directory, in addition to your personal directory, which will coexist on your mobile phone. You can update your presence and access to your personal status message, which can broadcast what you're up to at any given instant.

RG: It sounds like a mobile UC system.

VK: Yes, it's basically a mobile UC system, but we've left two big applications out: One is cellular voice, which we believe is already well-taken care of. The other app we've left out is mobile email - we think existing solutions are sufficient to meet market needs. So in the case of email, we don't do anything on the client side or on the server side. But in the future we'll provide you with an icon on our client and when you click on that it will launch your preferred mobile email client.

For all other applications, we've customized our client. It's flexible: You can use a third-party client or ours for a specific app. For example, let's say you want to start an IM session with me and we work for the same company, but our company uses an IM client different from DiVitas. No problem - you can access the IM application from our client but when you launch the client for IM specifically, it will launch that particular client instead of the DiVitas native client.

Thus, we offer flexibility, both on the server and client sides. We allow people to pick-and-choose because we know that corporate decisions must be made independently, and companies can decide today that they want to use a DiVitas IM network, for example, but they don't want to use the DiVitas PBX. So on the server side we can turn our PBX functionality off and we can talk to an existing PBX which may be ShoreTel, Avaya or Cisco - we really don't care. And if you open up a new office and you don't want to invest in a new PBX, then our box is only one you need. We can talk to any standard SIP-based deskphone, and you can give everyone mobile phone and install our client, whereupon each will be come a fullyfunctioning, self-contained system for voice, IM and all of the other apps.