Well-heeled Brix looks to make VoIP more manageable

You can look at the news that VoIP management company Brix Networks has received its fifth round of venture funding two ways: "Wow, this company must really be onto something" or "Hey, this company has been around for six years. What's taking it so long to stand on its own two feet?"

The Chelmsford, Mass., company, which has raised $61.5 million in funding to date, got to the market very early. Now that VoIP implementations appear to be taking off, Brix is looking to exploit its experience and convince companies that managing VoIP isn't quite the same as managing other IP applications. Here's an edited version of CEO and President Tom Pincince's take on a variety of issues, as told to Executive News Editor Bob Brown.

The market:

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You can look at the news that VoIP management company Brix Networks has received its fifth round of venture funding two ways: "Wow, this company must really be onto something" or "Hey, this company has been around for six years. What's taking it so long to stand on its own two feet?"

The Chelmsford, Mass., company, which has raised $61.5 million in funding to date, got to the market very early. Now that VoIP implementations appear to be taking off, Brix is looking to exploit its experience and convince companies that managing VoIP isn't quite the same as managing other IP applications. Here's an edited version of CEO and President Tom Pincince's take on a variety of issues, as told to Executive News Editor Bob Brown.

The market:

We're seeing a little bit of a barbell effect. We're seeing tremendous energy at the very largest customers, who are being marketed to very heavily by the Avayas, Nortels and Ciscos. Then there's also a lot of energy in terms of small offices -- health clubs, schools, etc. - they are all going to VoIP. But if you look in the middle of the marketplace, where the bulk of the revenue and phones are, a lot of these folks are still trialing the technology. It's going to be that battleground where the winners and losers are going to be seen.

Customer rollouts:

Some enterprises are buying it themselves and installing it. But others are asking carriers to help, and unlike earlier in data market where they were trying to get relatively lightweight data services, we're seeing more and more hosted or onsite PBXs, and management of that infrastructure by the carriers.  There's also been the emergence of what I call service-level agreement (SLA) brokers. IBM Global Services, EDS and the largest integrators are taking a more aggressive role and acting as full service telephony providers and converged applications providers. They source the interconnections for you, implement the applications and manage it all. They're used to operating closer to where the business value lies for customers.

VoIP management:

One thing that makes management a prerequisite to success in VoIP is as an end user you are very adept at figuring out if the service delivered to you works or not. Pick up the phone and if it sounds good you know it. With other applications quality isn't as clear cut - people don’t know whether SQL Server is indexing at the right layer. Despite everyone saying that we've been sort of numbed about voice quality by the cell phone experience,  I think that's actually not true. A lot of us have churned based on quality. The cell phone industry is a good example of all the competition being about quality. Another thing we've seen happening in the marketplace is that there isn’t a single vendor that offers the complete solution. We talk to customers, and carriers have 20 vendors and enterprises start with Cisco, maybe, but end up with an interactive voice response (IVR) systems and some phones and all of a sudden they have five or 10 vendors. But nobody is raising their hand to say: "We'll manage all this."  That's where the opportunity for a third party comes in.