A global provider of integrated access technology for converged communications says it hired VoIP and unified communications industry veteran Jeff Dixon to direct its SMB and enterprise market strategies.

 

Officials at U4EA Technologies, an international company with U.S. offices in Fremont, California and Acton, Massachusetts – a major sponsor of back-to-back British Open golf champion Padraig Harrington – say they’re relying on Dixon’s VoIP and UC sales experience with Polycom (News - Alert) to excel in his new role as chief strategy officer.

 

Polycom – a market share leader in SIP IP telephony endpoints – evolved into a premiere company under Dixon’s leadership as vice president of VoIP, Microsoft (News - Alert) and strategic alliances. U4EA group chief executive officer, Columb Harrington, says his company sees Dixon as a proven executive with developed VoIP and UC industry contacts.

 

“U4EA’s (News - Alert) goal is to establish a leadership position in the rapidly evolving Unified Communications market and Jeff’s experience and leadership will be a key ingredient that will help us solidify our position with service provider customers and Tier 1 channel and technology partners,” Harrington said.

 

The hiring of Dixon hasn’t gone unnoticed.

 

In the wake of the announcement from U4EA – a company that’s showcasing its products and services at the Internet Telephony Conference & Expo in Los Angeles next week – testimonials poured in, hailing the executive’s imagination, rolodex and professionalism.

 

“As CEO of the company who performs installations for nearly every major North American service provider, I can say with both experience and confidence that Jeff has a reputation in the industry as someone who can bring people and ideas together to produce significant financial results,” said Justin McLain of Endeavor Telecom (News - Alert), Inc., an Atlanta-based company that serves carriers, service providers, systems integrators, VARs, and equipment manufacturers.

 

Less than a week into his new job, Dixon spoke to TMCnet about the future of UC for SMBs, U4EA’s value proposition for smaller companies, especially hosted service providers and VoIP resellers.

 

Our exchange follows.

 

 

Jeff Dixon: I think that the availability of UC is an important development for businesses of all sizes. The ability to become more agile in decision-making, more “available” via presence-aware applications and more “carbon-conscious” in travel behaviors will have a positive impact for all who decide to use it. This will hold true whether your company is geographically disperse or federated within a business community of common interests and it has the potential to become a great accelerant to business continuity. For small or medium-sized businesses in particular, simple-to-use and affordable UC solutions will allow smaller companies to take advantage of capabilities once available only to large organizations with sophisticated IT infrastructures and diverse skill sets. U4EA’s role in UC will be to ensure that the multiple real time applications within UC-like Voice, Ad Hoc Video and Business Content (think Live Meeting or Share Point) operate in a secure and quality manner, using the existing broadband connections a given business already has.

 

 

JD: Wow, I learned so much while at Polycom. It is a great company with great people and products. Perhaps the most important lesson I am taking with me to U4EA is operate as a team at all times and to be successful on a global scale you must deliver world class quality internally and externally. The “team” concept I am referring to must extend beyond the hallways of U4EA to include our Channel Partners, Service Providers and especially our End Customers. I am going to make sure that the business strategies, product innovations and commercial relationships that we establish at U4EA hold true to principles of the entire value chain and that everyone has to benefit in some way from whatever course of action we decide to take.

 

 

JD: That is a great question and one that I look forward to speaking with many people about in the coming weeks and months. Right now, U4EA is a small business, too, and as such, U4EA is going to bring affordable secure convergence to the edge of the network. For small companies that decide Hosted/Managed services are the best option for their communications needs, they will see a full family of products suitable for deployment equally within their small office or at their home office. These products will include sophisticated QoS techniques that ensure that whatever components of UC that they decide are important to moving their business forward, those apps will operate and be available at all times. Small businesses leverage wireless capabilities to create strategic advantage every day, and U4EA is going to make sure that all of our solutions include a wireless option and that those options are going to be more affordable and extendable than those on the market today. Finally, small businesses should expect that U4EA is going to partner with other world-class technology companies and the most popular SIP-based service providers to bring complete solutions to the table. All too often, companies don’t realize that smaller businesses don’t have the time or desire to be a systems integrator. We are going to be very focused in our execution in the same way that we are going partner carefully ensure our part of the overall solution set is fully supported and easy to implement alongside our partners products or services.

 

 

JD: Visitors should expect to see and interact with many of our exciting products that I have referenced above. They should also expect to be able to meet with many members of our Sales and Marketing teams to discuss openly how U4EA solutions can help ease the implementation of UC within their business construct – big or small.

 

 

JD: Thanks for asking, as this is of particular interest to me. I have “grown up” in Voice over BB and now VoIP over the past nine years. I have seen the good, bad and especially the ugly when it comes to the LAN/WAN boundary. The evolution from dedicated DS0-type installs to dynamic bandwidth implementations has greatly aided the move to converged applications. Cisco’s leadership in routing technologies and establishment of priority queuing took us to the next step in quality and capability for running voice on the net. However, now there are more than one real time applications that come in different sizes and shapes (packet-wise, anyway) that need their own “special treatment” by the queuing mechanisms contained within the router. U4EA’s patented GoS takes the important lessons provided by Cisco’s LLQ and CBWFQ and multiplexes them into 9 distinct application-aware Quality Queues.

 

In today’s LLQ-based deployment topologies it is recommended that no more than 33 to 50 percent of the available wire speed link be assigned to the one and only priority queue. U4EA’s GoS capabilities provide the service provider the flexibility to assign up to 95 percent of the wire speed to priority applications across multiple priority queues. The results have been documented and demonstrated in various benchmarks around the world by leading Tier 1 service providers, by independent test houses and by U4EA customers. The existing last mile link, whether it is xDSL-based, T1/E1, PRI or Ethernet becomes 30 to 50 percent more effective and more available to mission critical applications than it was under a singular queuing technique. To me and to many customers, this is real world optimization of an existing last mile resource and most importantly it opens the door to the secure and reliable deployment of UC and other real time and bandwidth intensive applications.

 

 

JD: I am not familiar with Jim’s comments, as I have just recently arrived this past week to U4EA and Jim has been away on his honeymoon. Congrats Jim, best of luck. However, it has been clear to me and to many around me for years that SIP is going to continue to change the world of communications, social networking, technology integrations, et cetera, for years to come. I am not sure what new protocols are out there on the horizon, but I sure am glad that those smart Engineers who pared down H.323 into the first SIP derivative and that they stuck to their beliefs and convictions about making protocols “thinner” and more portable. To any of you who may be reading this article...THANK YOU.