While at VON.x to accept our award as a Top to Editor’s Pick for the VON Magazine Innovators Award, I had a chance to catch up with Jeff Pulver, Chairman of Pulvermedia (and all things VON). Jeff is a visionary in area of IP communications, and he has some interesting insights into the enterprise mobility market, on Agito’s expect success in driving the market forward.

Watch the video of our conversation below.

Pej

We are honored to be selected by VON magazine as a Editor’s Top Ten Pick for the VON Innovator awards. From a field of over 200 companies spanning a wide variety of technologies, we were the only eFMC/FMC company to be selected and ranked #4 overall.

This is the first time that we’ve gone head-to-head against competitors in our space for an industry designation such as this, so the recognition was even more satisfying. The industry players, just like enterprises, are selecting Agito Networks. More on this in our press release, and watch for further news from us about upcoming industry honors and recognition.

It was great seeing old friends at the show and it was great to make new ones.

Pej

Pej accepting the award from VON Editor-in-Chief Bill Sell

I just came back from VoiceCon in Orlando last week. It was clear on the show floor that “mobility,” “mobile convergence” and “FMC” were the new monikers at Voicecon, while “unified communications” is still very much in vogue. All of the major enterprise voice vendors clearly messaged this in their booths, and all had a dedicated showcase of some kind of mobile-enabling voice solution. I couldn’t be happier to see large IP Telephony and Unified Communications companies underscoring our message – you can’t do UC without mobility! The challenge they have is their lack of products and solutions for mobility, and that is where Agito partners together with them to deliver a solution that solves customers’ mobility issues.

The conference sessions were well organized and well attended, including the panel on “Enterprise FMC: Is It Real?” that I participated on. To an audience of more than 150 attendees, moderator Michael Finneran delivered a colorful introduction to the fast developing market space of FMC gaining much attention at the show. He did a thorough job in outlining the potential approaches to enterprise FMC, and gave a crisp summary analysis of strengths/weaknesses and important considerations. Of these approaches, only the “PBX-integration approach” (that was the term he used) has real product available today and in production use by enterprises.

On the panel, I was able to talk in the context of actual customer deployment experiences, which I believe the audience appreciated over other panel members. Representatives from a large cell carrier and a large telecom equipment provider could only discuss future direction and intentions. I think the audience appreciated the real-world context of my responses. As proof, in the Q&A session at the end, all the questions from audience were about real-world implementations.

Kudos, to Fred Knight and the old BCR team for putting on another great show.

Rob

PS

If you are interested in more background on eFMC, we have a webinar rebroadcast you can watch and a nice whitepaper with more background information.

Wow! What a great week Agito Networks just had. On March 3-5, Agito was a sponsor and exhibitor at the Gartner Wireless & Mobile Summit, one of the premier mobility-focused shows on the conference circuit. While I didn’t attend too many of the individual sessions, Dan Spalding, my booth partner, and I had the pleasure of hosting dozens of the largest enterprises as they were searching for the next “new and exciting technology” to come to enterprise mobility for 2008. On During the event, sponsor booths were open to attendees to spend time with vendors to understand their value proposition, and experience demonstrations where available. On a side note, during my walk-through, unlike Agito, I noticed very few vendors with working demonstrations. Confirmed by event officials, Agito was in the fortunate position to have garnered significant interest at the event. Nearly every attendee who visited us was interested in increasing their company’s mobile worker productivity while reducing cellular expenses.

Agito had success across multiple fronts:

1. drawing large numbers of customers to our booth
2. retaining their interest with an interactive demo
3. being recognized by Gartner as having an innovative technology the analysts are interested in.

Customers were attracted to our four value propositions:

• Better In-Building Coverage
• Extend Desk Phone features to the Mobile Phone
• Drastically Reduce Mobile Costs
• Increased Visibility and Control

All of this in a platform that works with all PBXes and any wireless carrier.

We hosted an awesome demo that showcased our “sub-second location-aware, WiFi/Cellular handover”. Customers were able to experience an actual call starting in WiFi and transparently handing off to Cellular without any interruptions and another call starting on Cellular and transparently handing off to WiFi. In many cases, users were pleasantly surprised that Agito was able to deliver this level of performance without any dependence on the carrier. Agito’s patented Location-Aware Routing architecture worked its charm. By the end of the conference, we had heard the phrase “amazing technology” quite a few times, describing our product. While these were all interesting experiences, let’s investigate some of Agito’s drivers for success during this conference.

Sandeep briefing a customer on the RoamAnywhere Mobility Router user interface

Almost everyone who came by was drawn by a few words on display: “Increased In-Building Coverage” and “Works with All Cellular Carriers”. Big names in aerospace, defense, city and state government, higher education, healthcare and automotives were drawn by Agito’s value proposition of increasing in-building coverage to help improve mobile worker productivity. Having business voice become the killer application to deliver converged enterprise services over an existing in-building wireless infrastructure was compelling to customers. The excitement from the prospects about the potential benefits from Voice over WLAN (VoWLAN) was apparent, namely how Agito’s innovative eFMC platform can increase accessibility and mobile worker productivity within their global workforce, while helping them reduce cellular expenses (as much as 60% in many cases). It was clear that we had exposed a pain point and hit a sweet spot with these prospects.

For example, a large multi-national company shared that they have relationships with all four major cellular carriers in the US, and accelerating in-building coverage for cellular using carrier-specific DAS systems would be a very expensive proposition. It would be cost-prohibitive, not to mention complex to deploy, and this infrastructure would be specific to voice within the enterprise. They are now looking at Voice over WLAN solutions that can provide “Fast and Automatic, Sub-Second handover” with support for all of their existing cellular carriers, narrowing their search to Agito. We look forward to starting our trial with this customer next quarter.

Another customer in the consumer durables sector was interested in driving greater value out of their IP Telephony infrastructure they had put millions of dollars into. With an increasingly mobile workforce using the mobile phone as their primary phone, it was increasing their mobile costs. When we presented Agito’s Mobile Extensions features, they instantly saw how this technology could help them increase the utilization of IP Telephony, and finally blend the flexibility of a mobile phone with the value of One Enterprise Number to drive increased productivity while lowering costs.

Overall, we had the chance to speak with over a hundred companies. Almost all of them had WLAN and IP Telephony deployed, and searching for innovative applications that can leverage this infrastructure to enhance the RoI of their investment. In many cases, Agito’s technology was the missing piece of the Mobile Convergence puzzle. Agito will be engaging with over two dozen customers in starting global trials on VoWLAN over the coming quarter.