Monday, September 26, 2005

Networks

BlueNote finds the right tone for Fidelity

By Efrain Viscarolasaga

Another group of New England networking entrepreneurs is getting into the voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) fray. After several months in stealth mode, Tewksbury's BlueNote Networks Inc. entered the market this week, armed with $8.4 million in funding, a working product, a large customer and an executive team of well-known networking industry locals.

Former Unisphere Networks Inc. and WaveSmith Networks Inc. executives Tom Burkardt, Brian Silver and John Burnham sowed the seeds of the company earlier in the year in response to a project search by Fidelity Investments. The local investment giant had been looking for a way to create a global voice system it could integrate into all its locations and collaboration applications. Its request for proposals resulted in few substantial plans and Burkardt and his team saw an opportunity.

"We went to Fidelity Ventures and said 'there is a clear need and business here,'" said Burnham, now vice president of corporate marketing at BlueNote. "They said, 'Go find some entrepreneurs and make it work.' "

So they did. The team added former Unisphere and WaveSmith colleague Mike Regan as vice president of engineering and brought in Sally Bament, former vice president of marketing at Boxborough's Seranoa Networks Inc. and Lowell's Convergent Networks Inc. to be BlueNote's new vice president of product management and marketing.

The company has raised $8.4 million in funding from Fidelity Ventures and North Bridge Venture Partners. Over the course of the year, the company already has grown to 36 employees and is still hiring.

Like a New England networking supergroup, the team came together for reasons similar to its music brethren - they wanted to get back to the small team, startup feel.

"It's great to be able to work with people we know and trust," Burnham said. "Being in a real startup is tough slogging, but it is something we all love. Burkardt takes the chief executive officer role, while Silver is the company's chief technology officer.

BlueNote's product offering is a modular enterprise IP platform designed to integrate voice, video and other interactive services over any network. The group is calling it an interactive communications platform, and the product is named SessionSuite.

"The market needed an alternative to fixed-function voice systems, such as PBXs or IP-PBXs," said Bament. "(SessionSuite) is similar to how Skype delivers services to the customer, but for the enterprise, you need higher quality, higher security and other elements that differ from the consumer market."

Because it is an open standards-based, modular architecture, that uses session initiation protocol (SIP), the platform can conceivably integrate with any number of collaboration platforms on the market, such as the Groove Networks/Microsoft platform, as well as integrate those services with other applications, adding voice, video and other services, said Bament.

Fidelity is already on board and is using the system as part of the pilot deployment. BlueNote is aiming at the first quarter of 2006 for the release of the product's second phase, which will add web-based infrastructure management, point-to-point video services and a greater session and user scale.

Fidelity is in the early stages of its pilot deployment, with an eye on the larger goal of having BlueNote become the application platform for a low-cost SIP infrastructure across the company's network, said Jon Erickson, VP of network architecture at Fidelity Investments.

"This (SessionSuite) allows us to build an Internet-facing voice service that can help us evolve into other media types," he said. "We're very big believers in SIP. The SIP/VoIP combination will do to the telephony industry what HTTP and the web did for the Internet."

Matthias Machowinski, a directing analyst at Infonetics Research in Woburn, said the market could be ready for such a product. BlueNote may face competition, however, from incumbent equipment vendors within potential customers. Large enterprises may want to stick with what they have until their vendor of choice (Cisco Systems Inc. for example) develops something similar.