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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Skype, Charter Communications and Covad Heating up VoIP

September 1, 2004

Skype recently launched the beta version of a Mac OS X client for their VoIP service. With over 20 million downloads and nine million users, these guys are taking the VoIP world by storm. SkypeOut lets Skype users connect to PSTN customers at around 2 cents per minute and Mac users for the first time can get connected to the largest peer to peer VoIP network on the planet. For more on this announcement please check out Up for grabs: Skype for Mac in Beta by TMCnets Johanne Torres. We are so excited to have Niklas Zennstrom, the co-founder of Skype keynoting TMC's Internet Telephony Conference and Expo next month in Los Angeles California.

Warren Buffett Sends a Letter to TMC's Tracey Schelmetic

August 25, 2004

As publishers, we get our share of feedback and we love it. Negative feedback is great because it allows us to improve, while positive is nice as it reinforces what you are doing right. As you might expect, most of our feedback comes from people either buying or selling technology products or services, the typical readers of our publications. Occasionally, you receive feedback from someone so well-known and respected that you do a quadruple-take.

Such was the case yesterday when I was shown a letter to Tracey Schelmetic, the Editorial Director of Customer Interaction Solutions Magazine, from none other than Warren Buffett.

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I purchased a Mosquito Magnet Liberty Plus

August 7, 2004

I purchased a Mosquito Magnet Liberty Plus recently as the whole West Nile scare has gotten to and I wanted to do whatever possible to reduce the risk. I believe it was Consumer Reports that said that there is no proof that these devices catch the mosquitoes responsible for carrying West Nile. Regardless, I went out and purchased one jut in case. I was going to write about how bad the product was because I couldnt get it to work after reading the manual repeatedly and thoroughly. A brief discussion with tech support told me that most problems are caused by using propane exchange stations instead of pumping real propane.

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The Airlines Embrace CRM?

August 6, 2004

Having been a vocal critic of the airlines in the past, it is my responsibility to point out what they do right as well as wrong. On the way out to the VoIP Developer Conference, my team was delayed for about 3-4 hours. Here is a great e-mail they sent as an apology. OK American Airlines, apology accepted Now how about some bonus frequent flyer milers

Big News At VoIP Developer

August 3, 2004

TOSHIBA AND HELLOSOFT DEMONSTRATE LOW-COST, DSP-FREE VOIP PHONE

SIP Forum Kick Off at VoIP Developer in San Jose

August 3, 2004

The SIP Forum had a kick off reception tonight at VoIP Developer and it was an opportunity to get a number of developers together to start networking and discussing the opportunities in VoIP. A number of old friends and some new ones were there. What surprised me most was how many different types of companies I met with. There were contact center companies looking to IP enabled their offerings. Product testing vendors looking to add VoIP to their offering.

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Have a Drink on Vonage

July 29, 2004

At the Democratic National Convention this week, Vonage in conjunction with the Distilled Spirits Council of the U.S., threw a party at Anthem restaurant, luring politicians and others to learn about VoIP and why it shouldnt be regulated by the states but instead the federal government. (To find out more about this story see the July 27th WSJ story Vying for Attention). Vonage has been doing a great job fighting in the senate to keep our government from taxing VoIP like POTs lines. This is exactly what the industry as a whole needs to do and Vonage should be commended for their efforts. The government has taxed telecom to death via the Universal Service Fund and various other fees.

Vendors Invited to ICCM PARTY

July 26, 2004

If you are going to be in Chicago during ICCM Please come to our party and make sure to RSVP!!! See you there. Sincerely,
Rich

Vendors Invited to ICCM PARTY

July 26, 2004

If you are going to be in Chicago during ICCM Please come to our party and make sure to RSVP!!! See you there. Sincerely,
Rich

Latest News on VoIP and Speech Rec

July 26, 2004

There was a good article in the New York Times about IP Telephony this weekend that you might want to read: Web Phone Service May Have IT All, Except Many Users (registration required). Another article in todays Wall Street Journal (if you can link to their articles I dont know how) titled 1-800-USELESS that has an interesting statistic on speech recognition. Verizon recently replaced a touch-tone system that enable 6% of their callers to meet their needs with a speech-based system that allowed that figure to increase to 20% The mainstream acceptance of speech technology seems to coincide nicely with the launch of TMCs Speech-World Event to be held later this year. 2005 will likely be the year of speech. Come to the show to find out more.

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