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April 16, 2005

TeleSym Shuts Down

By Glenn Fleishman

Voice over IP in the enterprise company winds down: Five short weeks ago, I was over at Telesym’s bustling headquarters east of Seattle having a great conversation recorded partly in this podcast about Telesym’s latest products and the tweaks they had made to their offering to better integrate it into enterprise phone switches.

Now the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports that the company has laid off most employees with severance packages and hopes to return some capital to investors if it can sell its intellectual property. The CEO says fairly bluntly that their product doesn’t scale, so I’m not sure how encouraging that would be to potential buyers.

The company’s two co-founders were pushed out in previous months, and they’re a little bitter about how the products developed without their shepherding them to completion.

One of their competitors, Vocera, says the company floundered by not having a sharp focus and by—at least initially—targeting voice over PDAs. This disregards the success that phone/PDA combos have had in the marketplace, of course, but the company was too far ahead of that market. They were also too far ahead of convergence phones that would have benefitted from their integration on the enterprise and Wi-Fi side while roaming onto cellular as necessary.

My kiss of death interview record is unfortunately quite good: I interviewed the CEO of Cometa just weeks before they coasted to a halt.

Posted by Glennf at April 16, 2005 7:23 AM

Categories: Competition

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