Daily News 2006/05/18

Aculab to support Microsoft Speech Server 2007

Britain Aculab, a leading provider of telecom techniques and products, announced on May 9 that it would support Microsoft Speech Server (MSS) 2007. Compared with earlier edition, MSS 2007 is more powerful, supporting VoIP, SIP and RTP, and having more VXML programming interfaces.

AOL to cut off 1300 positions

According to foreign media, AOL said on Tuesday that it would downsize by cutting off 1300 positions, about 7% of the total. Major reason for the downsizing is the rapid decline in the business of the departments that provide telephone-based consulting service.
Nicholas Graham, speaker of AOL, says that in the past two years the business volume (telephone-based consulting service) declined by 50%. On one hand, AOL users are now much better at computers, and on the other, AOL has been providing more online Help Tools to the users so that they can solve the problems by themselves.
In recent years, AOL has been losing the users who dial into Internet. For example, it lost 835,000 users in America in the first quarter of this year (Some of these users begun to use broadband service provided by AOL or Cable TV Dept. of Times Warner). AOL says that from now on it will make more efforts to earn more income from online advertising. However, It is forecasted that the sales income in the first quarter of this year will decline by 7% because the company is still adjusting the marketing strategies.

Sales of IP PBX keep growing, and has overtaken that of traditional TDM PBX

The latest research report shows that the sales of IP PBX has overtaken that of traditional TDM
According to the latest research report made by In-Stat, by the year 2009, IP PBX will account for 91% of all the PBX all over the world. The report also says that due to the growth in the sales of PBX (annual growth rate: 6.6%), the sales of IP PBX is more significant.
Growth rate of the sales of PBX is calculated according to the sales of PBX lines all over the world. The report forecasts that the number will keep growing from 9,500,000 (lines) this year to 28,100.000 (lines) in 2009. In the field of VoIP, a line is defined as an end-user license agreement.