
Last fall’s acquisition of Gizmo5 gave the Google voice team a nice SIP client. However, they still didn’t have anything to match Skype’s crack team of AV codec developers – the team responsible for SILK, and so many of the other quality innovations that differentiate Skype in the market place.
Late last night Google moved to plug that gap, offering a cool $68 million to acquire publicly traded Global IP solutions. GIPS supplies most of the major vendors in the communications industry, including folks like Nortel, Samsung, Yahoo, Webex, and AOL. GIPS says that they will continue to be supported in the future.
The major vendor that’s not part of GIPS customer base is none other than former client Skype.
Piece all this together, and what do you have? A pincer play by Google focusing on mobile IP handsets with Android, and next generation voice applications led by Google Voice with Gizmo5. And potentially a potent future channel for distributing all kinds of Google products via telecommunications industry players.
Does anybody doubt that Skype’s in the bullseye?
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- Google to buy VoIP technology firm Global IP solutions for $68.2m (guardian.co.uk)
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- Google to Make Cash Offer to Acquire Global IP Solutions (eon.businesswire.com)
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But still no SIP connectivity. I really don’t get it.
Ironic, isn’t it Ward? Not only that, but Skype seems to be acquiring a SIP braintrust with folks like Jonathan Rosenberg and Jason Fischl as recent recruits.
Everybody in the industry says that Google wants to control the core VoIP technology. Its bid for GIPS makes much sense in this respect. But what it means for the customers of GIPS, and some of them, by the way, are in direct competition with Google. It’s not unlikely they will be left with limited or no support at all. Google will use VoIP as a platform in its Android OS, Google Chrome and probably in its Google Apps. Google will need GIPS’ expertise and engineering resource to back its VoIP strategies.
SPIRIT DSP which successfully competed with GIPS over all these years is now the only independent VoIP technology company on the market. SPIRIT dislodged GIPS from Skype and was named among the Top 10 VoIP leaders by FierceVoIP. Today SPIRIT offers its VVoIP platform on a variety of desktop and mobile platforms, supporting not only Google’s Android but iPhone, Symbian, Windows Mobile. SPIRIT offers a video server with 1000-channel capacity. Now SPIRIT is the number one choice for service providers, application developers, and telcos that are deploying voice and video communication services.