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It's almost August, 1996 and this really has been the year which VON technologies have had their share of media attention... Actually I hope to get some more attention for these technologies at the upcoming Talking Net conference which I'm producing. :)
With both Netscape and Microsoft in the beta testing stages of their VON products, the landscape of the VON marketplace has changed forever. Gone are the early days of 1995 when this was a marketplace filled with many small development companies. Albeit some of those firms recently went public and others are in the early planning stages, but the marketplace will never be the same, as the rules of doing business have changed.
One of the challenges both of these firms face is their ablity to convice their respective business partners to support their "standards". Whether the standard is LiveMedia with RTP, or H.323 / T.120 it will be up to all of the firms in the marketplace to determine which of these standards to support (if not both) and to not only announce support of these standards but actually ship a version of their product which reflects support for these standards.
With the advent of Intel's release of the first H.323 Internet telephony product, they (together with Microsoft) have shown the leadership which has been missing in this industry to date.
These days VON technology offers a real opportunity to those corporations who recognize it's place and begin to start using these products on their own Intranets as well on the net. These products really do work. (See NY Times - 19-May-96).
In August, 1996 my first book - "Internet Telephone Toolkit" will be published by John Wiley & Sons. Please feel free to let your friends know about this :)
I'm in the planning/production stages for several VON related conferences - including "The Talking Net" which will be held in NYC on September 10th and 11th - as well as additional events in December '96 and at the Fall Internet World Show with Mecklermedia. If you are interested in obtaining more information regarding these upcoming events, please send e-mail to: conference-info@pulver.com.
Please drop by often, new products are added at times daily.
The report on the recent OECD Dublin meeting can be found here. Jeff Pulver, jeff@pulver.com - 01-Jul-96
There are products which sometimes fall into more than one of these categories, such at Streamworks from Xing Technologies, and they are listed at least twice.
With the advent of Netscape 2.0, many of these products have a plug-in either already available, announced or just about to be announced. Other vendors have announced a programable API which other third parties could use to develop add-on products. The VON aftermarket appears to have some of the same characteristics as the Spreadsheet add-on aftermarket did in the late '80s...time will tell.
The April 22, 1996 issue of Business Week estimates that over 1.5 million copies of Internet Telephony software has been downloaded. While this may be close to the actual number of total copies distributed, it does not reflect the actual number of weekly users of these products.
Most of these products use UDP while others use TCP. One thing you will notice is that most of these products are not compatible with each other...yet. Although suggested standards exist from the IETF and people have been using the MBone for years to accomplish similar functionality, now that these products have "gone commerical" all bets are off. Each and every vendor wants to promote their approach as the "Industry Standard".
On March 11, 1996 more then 100 leading companies joined together with Intel and Microsoft to support standards based communication over the Internet. You can read about it here. With the advent of the Intel and previous Netscape announcements - there is a chance that before the end of 1996 multiple VON products will exist which can interoperate with each other. However, it is real easy for just about anybody to walk join together and announce their support for a standard. The real proof will be when, if and how many of these VON companies actually ship a product which supports these standards.
Over time a true standard will eventually be reached. But for now, all bets are off. Whatever product you chose to use, you need to make sure the other party also has a product from the same vendor.
Marketing a VON product on the net is different than promoting a product via "The Channel". To be successful on the net, a VON company needs to have both a home page and an evaluation copy of the product freely available for a trial period. The competition is great enought that if a company doesn't comply, chances are that after the hype is over, the product will be forgotten.
Most of these products were developed for the Windows marketplace - Windows 3.11, Windows95 and some for NT.
In the past the most popular platforms for VON products were both Unix and Apple's System 7.x. Since February, 1995 this is not the case...except for the client/server VON products such as "Live" Radio Broadcasting - in which case the Server side is generally developed first for Unix and then for NT - and the client software is generally first available for Windows 3.11/Win95 and then eventually Mac and/or Unix.
Many (if not all) of these products have been discussed on the VON mailing list.
If you are aware of a product which I may have missed, or a new product which is available for review, please e-mail: newproducts@von.com. If you would like to be notified when updates are made to this page, please send e-mail to: von-update@von.com.
In December, 1995 I took a vote of the TopTep VON vote. If you are interested, you can view the results.
This is the same stanard which Netscape made their annoucement about on January 31, 1996.
Back issues of VON-Digest are available from here.
Creation Date: Monday November 13, 1995
Modified Date: Sunday June 2, 1996