VoIP Blog - Tehrani.com

June 20, 2007

Some of the rumors from last night’s party at NXTComm are that many of the enabling technology companies in communications are for sale. I know of one of these companies who is having some financial problems but I can’t say who. Expect consolidation.

June 20, 2007

BroadSoft just announced they will be providing their BroadWorks platform to enable Cox Business Services – a hosted IP communications offering aimed at corporate customers. This a huge win for Broadsoft and should also be of great concern to the incumbent phone companies. The cable companies have been very aggressive in the residential VoIP market and SMBs are next.

June 20, 2007

So I got up this morning at 4:30 am which is a bit earlier than I would have liked (this is really 5:30 EST). I was hoping to get lots of work done but last night and this morning I could not get onto the hotel broadband connection. I would get the login screen but when I put in my room number it would time out.

 

I rebooted and played with settings for a long time and then I decided to call tech support. The person who answered asked me to turn of the firewall and a whole bunch of other things like changing my proxy server.

 

Nothing worked. He then asked if I have “Skypee” which I inferred was Skype (I also inferred the tech support team may be based in Italy). I told him indeed I do have “Skypee.”

 

When I disabled “Skypeee” it solved the problem and I can now join the internet community once again. Happy day. :)

June 20, 2007

 

As telephony transitions to corporate WANs and LANs the issue of ensuring telephone systems continue to function regardless of network problems becomes an important issue. In some corporations there is a belief that the users are there to tell tech support when there are problems with the phone system.

 

In fact this may be OK if telephones are not mission critical or you have a small number of phones in your organization. But in either of these cases it pays to be proactive in determining of your VoIP solution is functioning correctly in your organization.

 

In a recent conversation with Clarus Systems, company executives explained to me how their VoIP testing products are doing quite well in the market and especially Fortune-class financial companies.

 

One area the company has been successful at is deploying branch office VoIP solutions with high levels of certainty the solutions will work in each branch. One Clarus Systems customer in fact is now able to turn up 15 branches per week as a result of working with the company.

 

Gurmeet Lamba VP of Engineering at the company explained to me how VoIP systems change constantly as new firmware is updated on phones and patches are added to servers.

 

Some real world problems the company has identified is a case where a company forgot to upgrade their UPS system and as a result if a power outage had taken place a large bank of phones would have been out of service. This is due to the fact the PBX had not been backed up and subsequently the configuration files were vulnerable to loss.

 

In another case a centrally managed system which implemented a single change saw 14 other phones affected.

 

The company utilizes automated active testing to ensure phones are working properly. For example using a TAPI driver they are able to make the phone ring and take samples of various office environments. They further make local and long distance calls to ensure network connectivity in both scenarios. The further test voicemail, directory services and conference bridges.

 

They also have a reporting system allowing administrators to do a sanity check. For example if there are 15 physical phones in a branch and only 14 show up in a device pool there may be a problem worth looking into.

 

The company also understands the nuances of the telephony system like the difference between a lobby phone and an executive phone. The first difference is the executive phone should likely be allowed to make long distance calls and the lobby phone should not. Moreover the lobby phone should probably be encrypted and moreover have its Ethernet port disabled so a visitor cannot come into a building and plug a laptop onto the network.

 

The company’s solution offers reporting which comes from a portal which provides a good deal of telephony information and in doing so allows less experienced technical people to quickly diagnose tech problems.

 

For example if a phone is misbehaving its configuration can be compared against that of a working phone to see if there is an easy way to solve problem.

 

Clarus Systems also has a screen allowing technicians to take control of a phone via remote control over IP and a soft client. This can be helpful in recreating problems as well as training.

 

If you plan on installing large scale VoIP in your enterprise it makes sense to connect with Clarus Systems to ensure your rollout goes as smoothly as possible. According to the company, they create software making IT look good and communications appear as just another application. In the end, who doesn’t want to look good?