But I do again think that the Sonus route with the NBS is where things will migrate, and while both that type of architecure as well as SBCs will have allot of growth over the next few years … as the SBC growth tapers off the Sonus route will still be growing for the next decade or more.

It just depends how for into the “future” one wants to look.

While I have everyones attention, a common opinion is that SBC’s have no future and will be obsoleted. Agree or Disagree?

Certainly did not convey an “Incumbent Carriers vs. Sonus” environment, it is “Incumbent Vendors vs. Sonus”, with the carriers going along for the ride off the cliff. The carriers are stuck in the same mindset you are, let’s give this business to unproven or in many cases “yet to be written” solutions and they can “work like hell” and get these services up and running. So in access cases where TDM solutions are currently servicing customers, they just wait and wait. When access service offerings by new operators like Carphone or core upgrades(VZ, KDDI, Cingular) require equipment to function at or above current service levels now, Sonus wins. There is plenty of core business just from the world’s wireless operators to make Sonus a great investment, I’m not stressed about what is going on at BT, VZ, and ATT, I just cannot understand their acceptance of failure.

The incumbents can’t even get this right and you are already looking to a future where the intelligence Sonus provides moves to the device. Peer into the future too far, you are. :)

I enjoy the vast majority of your blogging, just think you have this one wrong.

Cooters

The flip side of this is Ericsson is working like hell to solve a problem and learning along the way. 21CN is a project that is ‘too big to fail’ and Ericsson will emerge stronger. Ericsson has a bigger installed base to migrate than Sonus, something they can monetize in a way Sonus cannot.

Good software cannot be written by working like hell… you must not be a s/w guy like I am. It introduces bugs and that’s what NT, LU, had been facing for years (and Ericsson is going to face this reality someday, too!).

You must not be a s/w person or should know how many LOC (lines of code) of softswitch has. It is obvious SONS started when rest were sleeping (LU did try but shutdown R&D as part of their cost-cutting in late 90s). There are millions lines of code in a softswitch; debugging requires execution of this code over a long period of time and testing all functional components. You cannot do replicate all possible scenarios in labs regardless of how big your team is or how smart the heads are. SONS is carrying billions of minutes every month. It has already filtered out all the bugs – you must accept this fact. Rest has not yet gone to deployment let alone facing the bugs and filtering.

It is a time-consuming thing and has a long development cycle. I wish Ericsson good luck working like hell – a perfect setup to failure IMHO.

The street would much rather see that then see a situation like Sonus where the vast majority, even industry professionals have a hard time seeing how instrumental Sonus is really becoming. As NT, ALU and to this point ERIC aren’t able to come up with real deployments like Sonus has done … they appear to have a good shot at quietly becoming the dominant company in carrier VOIP.

But when research reports that include Hybrid VOIP deployments in the same catagory as deployments SONS does … all the street sees is Sonus as the laggard. And until it becomes more evident of Sonus’ sucess, and more importantly that sucess is translating into revenue (which b/c of Sonus’ rev recognition practices can actually be lagging 3-4 Qs of actual deployments) … the street still won’t understand Sonus.

I think allot of this has been caught up with SONS vs. APKT. At least for the immediate future I don’t think it is one vs the other. Thinking APKT has success with SBCs in the next few years doesn’t mean that SONS won’t have success with the NBS in that same time frame and beyond.

I totally agree. They are complementary which is why Sonus resells Acme Packet.

You are right about my bias. Trust me, I wish I was a SONS investor as of late. If you think the market has a hard time understanding Sonus, try Acme Packet on for size. We should both just give in to the herd and buy Riverbed…

Your slide shows it all, Carphone began deployments with Sonus AFTER BT started theirs with ERIC and right now BT has 1 exchange in trial and Carphone has 1,100 in service. What does that say?

I think allot of this has been caught up with SONS vs. APKT. At least for the immediate future I don’t think it is one vs the other. Thinking APKT has success with SBCs in the next few years doesn’t mean that SONS won’t have success with the NBS in that same time frame and beyond.

And when you say “What if softswitches are obsoleted by the time carriers figure out how to make them work?”. I think the more correct phrasing would be “by the time the INCUMBENT VENDORS figure out how to make them work”.

The fact is Sonus is the only vendor worlwide to have successful, major, scalable, non-TDM hybrid, carrier class VOIP deployments … in the world. The comparison of BT to Carphone shows this example quite well. Sonus has multiple examples to show of … can you give ANY example of such from ANY other vender? Even one?

jmho of course. But I do believe that just as you think Cooters investment in SONS is skewing his view of APKT, I believe your bias towards APKT is skewing your view of Sonus, perhaps significantly.

Again, but that’s jmho.

Reading your comment reminds me that one should never become so emotionally tied to a stock that you ignore the reality of the facts. If carriers are siding against Sonus, as you say, what is the likelihood of a massive decision reversal?

What if softswitches are obsoleted by the time carriers figure out how to make them work? Why not just put a SIP stack on every client and push the brains of the network to the edge?

Your opinion is shared by many in the industry, Sonus investors just disagree with it. This is not only common for a dispruptive little company, it is standard practice. You can look back to MSFT as PC OS’s developed, QCOM in wireless, you name it, there seemed no way incumbents could be un-seated. Sometimes(maybe often) incumbency does prevail, it is a powerful force to overcome.

Sonus has won significant core network upgrades against well ingrained incumbents – KDDI and Cingular are the wireless highlights, VZ and DT are expanding networks with Sonus in the wired arena. Access wins at incumbents have been tough.

Where I would take issue with your article is you chose not to mention Sonus, though you did display a slide with Sonus listed. After listening to the network presentation from Carphone, I heard multiple references to a simple concept – Sonus replicates Class5 services and Ericsson does not. Sonus scales well, we have no clue if Ericsson scales because the service has not moved beyond trials. The impression the presentation gives and the one you give are not the same. You highlight incumbent operator vs. upstart, we feel it is incumbent VENDOR vs. upstart.

Of course we are defensive, we see time and time again an incumbent win access business on a promise against our proven solution, any time press or blogs or analysts further that idea we try to get our side of the story out. Here we have a real world example of what happens when one operator chooses Sonus and another chooses a promise from a Powerpoint slide. We’d like to see that highlighted. We feel it is the same thing at Verizon(Nortel) or SBC(Lucent), mounds of press about the contract, barely a peep when the service offering is months or years late to market.

I will say the Jedi Mind Trick article was great, although it did not reference us directly, I think it represents a mindset at incumbent operators.

Cooters