Nikolai Manek

Revolutionary approach to growing as a VoIP provider

manek@remwave.com — Thu, 22 May 2008 04:20:59 GMT

For most companies starting a VoIP and collaboration provider is a big step. Besides knowing your market and the technology, you also need to deal with a lot of additional steps like finding the right carrier for inbound and outbound termination, collocation space, buying the right hardware and maintaining it. REMWAVE has created a revolutionary path which will make it very easy to grow on a very smooth path.

The easy start (Phase 1)

You can start as a white label provider (VVP Virtual VoIP Provider). REMWAVE will deliver a complete up and running VoIP Company to you, hosted in REMWAVEs 24/7 manned data center. All you need to do is to add some content to the website (or build your own, using our templates for self provisioning etc.). You install nothing on your side. No Hardware needed, no specialized knowledge is needed. REMWAVE’s experts will help you to set up incoming DIDs and connect you to carriers we partner with.

The advanced setup (Phase 2)

In addition to phase 1 you will now have a “switch partition” which enables you to freely pick your own carriers and routes. Total control over the complete platform like it would be installed on your own servers. This is our REMWAVE on Demand solution. It enables you to run the complete VoIP business without investing in infrastructure or man power to run your platform

The enterprise solution (Phase 3)

The on-site installation is the most complex setup but can make sense for companies running their own datacenters, network, hardware and software. It allows for a maximum of flexibility and integration into existing infrastructure (such as legacy switching equipment). It is the ITSP Enterprise edition

Phase 2 and Phase 3 offer the same set of features, in the end a question of what you prefer. The trend to Software as a Service (SaaS) shows a clear direction for the future. To us, it’s very exciting being able to accommodate all VoIP providers wherever they stand in their life cycle. Whether it’s the ambitious startup, or the establish player – we have the perfect solution for you.

Will all "pure" B2B VoIP companies go out of business soon?

manek@remwave.com — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 04:10:25 GMT

REMWAVE offers a complete one stop shop for Voice over IP companies. From billing software, infrastructure like SIP proxies to the end customer software like soft phones or screen sharing/collaboration software for Windows and OS X platform. Our customers are Voice over IP service providers (ITSP), Cable Operators, ISPs or phone companies who stand out for offering a consistent and high end product line of Voice over IP services.

Our customers offer:

1. Hosted PBX services to small and medium businesses

2. Retail VoIP services like Vonage or Skype

3. Calling Card services

4. Call Shops (throughout multiple countries from one hosted platform)

5. Carrier wholesales services

6. Switch partitioning or White Label services

and more.

In my oppinion companies who just offer ordinary "phone call" services will be out of business very soon. (therfore my headline...)

What small business customers want is a service offering including hosted PBX and also instant messaging and other enterprise collaboration services. Can you offer that today? If not you should talk to us. I would be very happy to help your business to take off in a way you could not imagine before (or maybe simple did not find the right solution). Picture all your business customers paying an additional monthly fee per extension for it's added value. Do you think that it is hard to accomplish to increase revenue like that? Think twice. I am thrilled about our product line and I have to bite my tounge (fingers?) not to brag about things we will release soon. Our customers believe in innovation and integration as their competitive weapon. And I invite you to check out our software and take it for a drive or schedule a online presentation with us.

Back on the Macintosh!! REMWAVE's soft phone for Apple OS X

manek@remwave.com — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 13:21:37 GMT

I am thrilled to announce that we have a SIP phone for the Mac platform again. After we were first developing Mac2Phone almost 5 years ago which was a Java software running on a mac we did it again. This time we developed a native Cocoa first class citizen and the result is a streamlined slick tool, allowing you to place SIP calls in a carrier grade quality. Since REMWAVE is not serving end customers this soft phone is for VoIP companies. We offer branding and many add ons. Just contact us for more information. Highlights:

1. Use AppleScript to automate phone calls

2. 100% address book integration

3. drag and drop conferencing

4. forwarding

5. all regular call features (hold, mute etc.)

Get your Beta copy here: http://63.214.186.103/apps/Communicator_1.0.9.zip

Microsoft Virtual machines including REMWAVEs Enterprise edition available for download

manek@remwave.com — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 01:14:10 GMT

Today we have done it. 4.5GB in two virtual machines are ready for download and 30 days of evaluation of almost everything REMWAVE has to offer. This is a complete ITSP infrastructure jammed into 2 virtual machines running Windows Server 2003 enterprise edition. You can download the virtual machines at:

http://kimiko.remwave.com/downloads/VM1.exe

and

http://kimiko.remwave.com/downloads/VM2.exe

After extracting the disc image you will find detailed documents of how to run the virtual machines. Please be advised you need to install Windows Virtual Server 2005 Service Pack 1. We recommend at least 1GB of RAM per virtual machine.

This is the first time in IT history that a multi server enterprise grade setup has been delivered in virtual machines. Enjoy it!

You can get more information here (VM part 1/2) and here (VM part 2/2).

Your

Nikolai Manek

REMWAVE & Microsoft virtualization

manek@remwave.com — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 07:25:09 GMT

A little while ago REMWAVE entered an agreement with Microsoft, allowing us to preinstall our solution on Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition and delivering it for evaluation purposes. The new REMWAVE turn-key solution weights in over 5GB and comes on two virtual machines. Offering a multitude of features for Calling Card, Call Shop, residential VoIP providers, B2B VoIP providers etc.

This makes REMWAVE the globally first company who ever offered a complete infrastructure for evaluation on multiple virtual machines. Now you can download a complete Voice over IP enterprise grade infrastructure and literally get it up and running in minutes. You will be able to check it out in early December or just contact us and we will provide you a copy.

Your

Nikolai Manek

REMWAVE - New Edition

manek@remwave.com — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 23:07:15 GMT

In a few days we will release the next version of our ITSP Turnkey Solution for your evaluation. It will contain all innovations from 2007 and some additional very useful features which will help you to succeed in the VoIP market place. The REMWAVE solution will be available in 3 editions:

Standard Edition

The ideal solution for companies who are just starting to offer VoIP or who would only like to offer a particular module like carrier wholesales, calling card, call shops or other parts of the complete solution. The standard edition will be available for up to 2 servers plus redundant systems for simple (manual) failover.

Professional

The professional edition offers all features of the enterprise edition but does not offer load balancing and is limited to 512 concurrent call sessions.

Enterprise

Features complete enterprise grade VoIP carrier solution, featuring a sophisticated failover system and intelligent load balancing for all signaling and call traffic.

In addition to above mentioned editions our engineering teams are working on REMWAVE appliances which will be available soon. This way you will be able to obtain an optimized system which is ready to go once you connect it to the internet and power it up. It can’t get easier than that.

Please stay tuned.

Nikolai Manek

iPhones first 3d party voice messaging application

manek@remwave.com — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 09:01:25 GMT

Today is a great day. The iPhone has now a very cool addition in it's growing library of (so far non approved) 3d party applications. Since a few weeks our partner company nikotel (www.nikotel.com) which was one of the first true voice over IP companies is running a beta test of a new service which will start very soon. This new service will be a revolutionary new way of instant messaging. It includes text, audio, video, collaboration and more. A few weeks ago we started looking into a new deployment platform, the highly elegant new iPhone. We strongly ~~hope~~ believe that Apple soon will release a first "real" SDK for it to open this beautiful platform to thousands of eager waiting developers. Time will tell. What we did was porting one of the several new services in nikotels new service to the iPhone. The voice chat. How often do you just want to tell someone something without trying to reach them on the phone (waiting for several ringtones just to find out from a colleague that you might want to try the cell phone where you then will hit the mailbox after 5 rings...)? So imagine this:

You grab your iPhone, click the nikotalkie logo, pick a name from your buddylist (coming soon) and press "talk". Then you press send. That's it. Now the message will travel to your friends cell phone or PC or Mac. It does not matter if she is online. The moment she will connect one of her devices to the nikotel network she will get the message. It's kind of like "Push to talk" but asynchronusly if necessary. I was using it the last few days and do not want to miss it anymore. It is a pure pleasure driving the car and sending messages around without losing temporary control over the vehicle;-) I would NEVER do that but heard of people who email during driving a car or even do SMS. MMS or IM. Forget about all these. Here comes "Nikotalkie service from nikotel".

Website: http://www.nikotalkie.com

It is very easy:

1. Pick name

2. Record message

3. Send it

Breakthrough GEO IP VoIP routing

manek@remwave.com — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 01:16:36 GMT

Today we rolled out the first implementation of GEO IP routing in a live customer network. As part of the REMWAVE Enterprise ITSP solution, GEO IP routing was the next logical step of our “liquid backbone” strategy where an arbitrary amount of PSTN switches and connections to other carriers shows as one unit.

In the past you had to manually decide of where you would like to route your customer’s traffic based on the customer physical address and/or country he signed up from. You also could give your customers a particular SIP proxy address to use and then routing all resulting PSTN traffic over a particular gateway. This is a problem every global VoIP company has to deal with (and who isn’t global today). In 99% of all cases this will result in customer complaints down the road about quality issues due to long hauling traffic over the internet or in some cases even multiple crossing the ocean in one call.

With REMWAVEs GEO IP routing this is very different now. The platform will detect from where the customer is calling and will route always to the closest network access point. There is no guessing and planning anymore. The REMWAVE “cloud” is doing that for you. GEO IP routing is included in our ITSP Enterprise edition now. Existing customers will be contacted the next days to plan the roll out.

World leading screensharing for service provider

manek@remwave.com — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 09:55:41 GMT

Starting today REMWAVE offers a leading edge screen sharing solution suite. As a service provider you are searching permanently for new ways to serve your customers better and fulfill their needs. Enterprise collaboration and especially screen sharing became very popular over the last few years and now you have the possibility to ride this wave, utilizing the new REMWAVE collaboration platform. Features you can offer your customers:

Share your screen with one or many (16 in standard edition – more upon request) others
Give the keyboard and mouse control to other participants
Switch presenter so everybody can see the screen of a participant
Switch to video mode and show your webcam live stream

The solution comes with an easy to use desktop software (Windows 98, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista), a complete set of portal components for fast integration and a server component running on most popular platforms (Windows, Linux and Solaris). If you would like to see first hand what I am talking about please use our first implementation at:

http://www.nikomeeting.com

You can sign up and test for free for a limited time.

This solution is perfect for people who demonstrate or sell over the phone and want to use a computer to bring their point across or for technical support. In many cases this solution is used to collaborate over distance and work together on documents.

As all other products you can obtain a SPLA (service provider license agreement) at a per customer subscription pricing to start offering the service without huge capital outlays.

Enjoy your test drive on nikomeeting.com and imagine how much your own customers would love that service once it’s deployed and tightly integrated into your product line.

Your Nikolai Manek

REMWAVE’s VoIP solutions scale to millions of concurrent users

manek@remwave.com — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 18:03:48 GMT

During the installation of the REMWAVE ITSP solution the installer displays an info box, recommending the user to contact REMWAVE if the test environment will be tested with more than 5,000 users. I received the question of why we would ask the user to contact REMWAVE?

The REMWAVE evaluation solution we offer for download is somewhat optimized to be installed on a single Windows 2003 server. All components are configured in a way to use the least amount of resources as possible. The SIP proxy starts in a special mode and the Oracle Express DB uses a small footprint and so on. This setup should be fine for a couple thousand registered users. The moment you want to scale it is when REMWAVE outshines the competition. It scales horizontally and vertically perfectly. For those of you who "like to play it safe" there is no single point of failure, addionally, there is room for almost infinitive scalability. Unlike other solutions available we offer true load balancing of our core components. SIP sessions can be spread equally over a large battery of SIP proxies and fill entire racks with nothing but SIP signaling (yes, also UDP) and PSTN gateways can be load balanced as well. This is unlike other solutions which confuse load balancing with fail over configurations which is way easier to realize. REMWAVE does scale! The first step for larger installations will be to change parameters and the second step will be installation on multiple systems. In some cases we might also consider setting up multiple machines in virtual containers which will be later moved to different servers. Many scenarios are possible. As a matter of fact – even during your system evaluation you will be covered, just ask us and we can show you how you can scale REMWAVEs solutions to meet true enterprise needs.