Communications and Technology Blog - Tehrani.com

Hats off to Benioff and company at SalesForce.com for beating the quarterly estimates and also for keeping guidance for the year. Analysts are grappling with whether the SaaS model is immune from slowing in a down economy and the simple answer is while SaaS has the potential to reduce costs for a company and increase productivity, the challenge for SalesForce.com and other vendors is to grow as unemployment rises rapidly.

I feel unemployment will hit at least 12% and in this environment, SalesForce will have to expand by talking share from other companies to keep growing. Perhaps this is why the company added 700 new employees in the first three quarters of this year and plans on continuing this hiring spree.

Benioff remains optimistic about selling to customers of all sizes and the optimism is in stark contrast to most every other company exec. So congrats to SalesForce.com and the team for bucking the trend and the takeaway here is that SaaS is really performing well in a very difficult economic environment.

For $99 to start and $9.95 a month you are able to get photos from your camera phones to show up on this picture frame via unlimited MMS. Like the Kindle from Amazon, here we have another product which leverages the cellular network to provide additional value.

Sure, there are ways to do this with WiFi and sure Kodak has camera and picture frames which work fairly seamlessly with one another. But who cares?

You see, today's kids are also able to use email for free with any mobile data plan but they don't - they use SMS/text messaging instead. And they pay through the nose to do so. So it is possible these kids might also gravitate towards a photo frame which can be updated remotely by MMS-enabled camera phone (which by the way does not include the iPhone). One wonders if they can get this frame to also display messages as well so a person could text the cameo frame when he/she is running late.

Mobile phones and texting have become just so popular. If T-Mobile plays its cards right, this could become a popular new category of electronics and T-Mobile could be the major player in the space.

Assuming you could nail down who is truly qualified for this plan, giving away service is probably not a good idea as it drives up usage of cell towers. This could lead to slower service for customers who pay the full amount.

Could the carriers implement service of lower quality for people who pay less - and make this discounted service available to the unemployed? Perhaps. If you can make it easier for this group to get phones, perhaps there will be incremental revenue from text messages, ringtones, etc.

For fascinating analysis of why wireless carriers should/should not give away service, check out this article.

Adtran has mentioned repeatedly just how expensive their test
equipment is from copanies like Spirent, Ixia and Tektronix Agilent.

As an alternative they are using their own modified equipment to test
when possible.

Too bad... This pub was an early inspiration to me. It will live online though.

My other inspiration was InfoWorld and sadly it is gone as well.

This is what Tom Keating had to say.

The campus is massive. We are in a new building seeing more testing equipment. There is voicemail testing, voice quality testing, compatabilty testing, etc.

Check out this massive phone bank used for interop and load tests.

Moreover, game sites employ Flash routinely and more and more consumers are using mobile devices for gaming.

There is obviously some tension between Adobe and Apple which needs to get resolved soon.

If the iPhone does not get Flash support, at some point it will definitely eat into sales.

One thing worth pointing out is the company says they rarely run into feature deficiencies and they are quick to react if they need to add a feature. The Huntsville, AL based company seems to thrive/focus on adding value to traditional products with better features and/or service levels.

One point worth noting is that as the economy has slowed, the incumbent router vendor (hint their name is taken from San Francisco) has been called into question due to the high prices. In this environment, Adtran is seeing increased interest and RFP activity.

The company acknowledges it needs to focus more on building its brand in the hopes that as a result, it will be included in more RFPs. According to Adtran, if they get in the RFP process, they close the deal close to 70% of the time.

One interesting point is the company is working with others and internally to add video to its product suite. Responding to a question about video in the Adtran product line, Schneider responded, "Check back with us in about a year."

There is an article in the Wall Street Journal today discussing how Green Hills Software - a company making operating systems for medical equipment and the brakes in a car is looking to expand by developing technology to make PCs more resilient. An obvious application for this technology would be data centers and of course one of my favorites, telecom.

If I could just get everyone who sent me an email this decade to send me a dollar, I could probably bail out Detroit on my own. About five years ago in San Jose, I had a few hours to kill between meetings and I remember feverishly deleting emails to get down to two thousand or so. I routinely remember seeing numbers like 16-30,000 messages in my inbox over the last decade.

A few years back I decided that I would give up sleep and rest to ensure I get a handle on this chaos. The good news is I am now under 200 messages. In order to keep it this way I multitask and have been doing so for years.

If I am at a conference for example, I take notes, blog, monitor industry sites and check email while keeping an eye on the financial markets. My brain is a multitasking wonder but to compensate my neurons don't allow me to focus on a single issue like I used to be able to. If I lock myself in a room or get on a flight - I can concentrate just fine (this becomes a problem as internet access pervades the cabin). It is just the availability of massive amounts of information that keeps my brain wondering what news I am missing and keeps me having the focus I had in a pre-internet/CNN/CNBC era.

And it is not the need for personal knowledge that fuels this drive. I direct dozens upon dozens of stories each day on TMCnet and decide what I will cover as well. If I don't see everything how can I keep my blog and TMC net readers informed?

Part of the reason for this blog is to document my ordeal and to hopefully inspire others to believe they too can tame their inbox. Believe me, if I can do this, so can you,

Sendio has an antispam device which I have been using for a few months. The user interface of the device is not good for those who get massive amounts of email like me. But if you have a manageable amount of email, the company's solution may be worth a try. Tom Keating for example really likes it and Tom is a harsh critic so this says a lot.

Couple this with the idea of having a national CTO and you begin to realize there could be a massive shot in the arm for the tech sector next year. Specific areas to get the boost include wireless, broadband equipment and telepresence/video.

One salient prediction according to Lipman? Greater FCC appreciation of VoIP. Basically good news for most in the industry and with a little luck, this momentum will carry across the tech space making 2009 a much better year than some of the gloomy analyst estimates.

The media is on a site tour here in Huntsville, Al. Low and behold
Adtran does small scale manufacturing right here in Alabama. This is
one of the few companies in tech which I have seen building in the US.

Adtran investors, worry not - the company builds in China too.

Afraid of lead paint? Adtran is quick to point out that quality
control in China is the same as in the US.

Maybe the toy industry can learn from them?