Communications and Technology Blog

10 Lessons from Volleyball, Part 2

By Peter on Thursday, May 23

Part 1 of the 10 Business Lessons from Volleyball can be found here. In volleyball, the only play you control yourself is...

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Tagged sales, strategy, volleyball

CloudTC and N-Able Acquired

By Peter on Wednesday, May 22

"Australian-owned IP PBX systems company, Vixtel, has completed the acquisition of Silicon Valley based glass phone developer, CloudTC, for an undisclosed figure,"...

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Tagged hosted pbx, itexpo, mergers, phone system, RMM

ProfitBricks: Where InfiniBand Meets Cloud 2.0

By Rich Tehrani on Wednesday, May 22

In a recent meeting with William Toll and Pete Johnson of ProfitBricks, the pair were ecstatic to explain how their company has...

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Tagged amazon, cloud computing, data center, ec2, infiniband, interop, profitbricks, public cloud, technology

Proactive Care Puts Operators One Step Ahead

By Peter Bernstein on Monday, May 20

By Thomas Fuerst, Senior Director, Multimedia Solutions MarketingAlcatel-Lucent

Monitoring and analyzing network data proactively saves operators time, money, and customers.

When a network service fails, it makes headlines, ticks off customers, and costs that network operator money. When a failure is headed off in advance, on the other hand, there might not be praise-laden headlines, but it's newsworthy nonetheless.

The traditional approach to customer care has typically been: a disgruntled customer calls customer service and complains of a service interruption or problem; the rep, learning of it for the first time, sends out a technician the next day, and eventually finds a resolution. Often, customers are left feeling put out, and the operator has spent significant time and money resolving the problem. Even worse is the customer who doesn’t call and just feels this is ‘typical’ of their network experience. That is a customer at risk of leaving.

Proactive care flips this dynamic on its head by using predictive analytics to identify potential outages or errors in the network and stop them before they occur. It consists of three main parts: one, constantly monitoring and measuring data on the network; two, real-time analysis of the data; and three, the most important, acting on that analysis to fix the problem.

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Tagged Alcatel-Lucent, big data, customer care, KPIs, network monitoring, procativecare | Responses

10 Lessons from Volleyball

By Peter on Monday, May 20

I've played volleyball for over 25 years. I have traveled around the US to watch the pros live - both indoor...

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Tagged hiring, strategy, volleyball

Emerging Threats Combats a Million Plus Pieces of New Malware a Week

By Rich Tehrani on Friday, May 17

There are 250,000 plus new pieces of malware being produced each day equating to one piece per person in the US in...

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Tagged emerging threats, interop, malware, security

NFV-Based Software Telcos Need OSS/BSS Interoperability

By Rich Tehrani on Friday, May 17

One of the goals of ETSI NFV is to allow new entrants to provide solutions to carriers based on software instead of...

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Tagged bss, carrier, ericsson, huawei, interoperability, nfv, nokia siemens networks, nsn, oss, sdn, software telco

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2005 Tech Investments - Mortimer, We're Back

December 29, 2004

Are we back? Is it true? I have seen the stocks of eBay and Google rocket ever higher and now this, Amazon logged orders at a rate of 32 items per second over the holiday season! This was their busiest Christmas in history.

Triple Play becomes Quadruple and Quintuple Play

December 28, 2004

Cablevisions Optimum Online recently announced they will add in antivirus, firewall and parental control features. If the triple play is voice, video and data and wireless turns this into the quadruple play then we are surely at the quintuple play mark when service providers continue to give more and more services in a single bundle.

A company like Cablevision needs to now resell wireless service as well to stay competitive. Eventually this may be done via WiFi telephony or WiMAX telephony but for the time being the most frequent network that gets tapped for such jobs is Sprint PCS. AT&T Wireless and Virgin Mobile both resell and rely on this network.

Well AT&T Wireless is a GSM network you say and has nothing to do with Sprint PCS.

Comments

The Best Voice Over IP Event

December 28, 2004

I received a call from an old friend in the contact center business. As you know these are the types of companies that are deploying VoIP like crazy as they are able to save a tremendous amount of money and at the same time change their entire business model.

A company like West for example launched an entire Home Agent strategic differentiating division that runs over a managed VoIP network provided by Level 3.

Getting back to events, my friend wanted to know how the different events stack up against one another. These days, every show on the planet seems to want to be a VoIP show. Knowing we launched the first event in this space focusing bringing in buyers, not industry insiders he asked my how I would explain our conference was the best one for his dollars.

VoIP Resellers Raking in the Money!

December 27, 2004

The best reseller opportunity in the world is still VoIP. Resellers are making a killing. In fact a recent article in CRN quotes Doug Bowlds a Cisco reseller in Vienna Va, tripling his sales!

Here is an excerpt:"We're looking at a three-fold increase in growth just on our VoIP business next year," said Doug Bowlds, vice president at AAC Associates, a Cisco Systems partner in Vienna, Va., whose IP communications division represents about one-quarter of its $15 million in revenue. AAC Associates has seen widespread acceptance of VoIP among its education, local and federal government customers, Bowlds said.

Verizon's VoIP Rollout

December 27, 2004

These a great article from a site called rednova. I never heard of this site but this article gives great insight into Verizon and their VoIP plans. The article consists of an interview with Stuart Elby, Verizon Network Services vice president for Network Architecture.

One of the more interesting quotes attributed to Elby is:

"We're throwing as much out there as we can to see what's going to take,"he says.

It is great to see an entrenched player experimenting. In some ways VoIP makes it easier to play around with new services such as IP Centrex. The article also gives a unique view into the problems that todays VoIP service providers face when rolling out service.

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Intel & AT&T in WiMAX and VoIP

December 26, 2004

Many people have predicted AT&Ts demise. Industry insiders told me that the stock is a definite short since VoIP became popular in 1999. You figure with all this new IP telephony competition around, how could they survive? Well the truth is that now in 2005, AT&T is doing an amazing job fighting off VoIP competition with their CallVantage service. They are very late to the game and Vonage has amazing mindshare for a start-up but AT&T is a strong number 2 player. The company has so much more potential however and that is why they are partnering with Intel in a technology alliance that taps into a virtually unlimited number of products and services.

Posted in VoIP

Bush, GPS and VoIP

December 26, 2004

I received this e-mail today and thought it worth responding to.

Mobile Phones Hurt DNA

December 22, 2004

Interesting read for biology/technology buffs.

The Truth about Optimum Voice VoIP Service Pricing

December 21, 2004

Tom Keatings blog entry today titled Cablevision Optimum Voice could have just as easily been titled Cablevisions Optimum Profit as he details how the company claims they have established themselves as value priced leaders but at the same time they are perhaps the highest priced VoIP provider around.

So should they listen to Tom and lower their price? No, in my opinion. I say this because the company has access to a virtually unlimited supply of remnant advertising. They have likely spent the equivalent of 100 million dollars this year alone based on my TV watching research.

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Consumers Union Launches hearusnow.org

December 20, 2004

The people at Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports have recently unveiled a site that focuses on what is happening in the communications space. For example, here is a letter that the site will let you easily send to politicians:

I am writing to urge to you to stop phone companies from imposing misleading charges on my monthly phone bill so I can truly compare prices of phone services. I support the petition filed by the National Association of State Utility Consumer Advocates and endorsed by other consumer advocacy organizations, including CU. This petition, CG Docket No. 04-208, Petition for Declaratory Ruling Regarding Truth-In-Billing and Billing Format, is long overdue.

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