VoIP & Gadgets 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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Japan Goes the Way of the Dodo & Still Supports Fax

February 14, 2013

I've admired Japan for their innovations since the mid 1970s, including the Sony Walkman, the Sony portable CD player, and how their took on the American automobile juggernaut to offer smaller, more fuel efficient, and yes, more reliable cars. While Japan was killing American companies with their superior consumer electronics, I couldn't help but admire their ingenuity.

Well, to my shock and horror I just read a NY Times piece claiming that fax is alive and well in Japan and in fact the Japanese are reticent to ever give it up. Say what? In the age of email, social media, online banking, etc.

Posted in Cloud, Internet, TMCnet, Technology and Science

Tagged: dodo, extinct, fax, japan, myfax, rich tehrani, vahid hashemian : Related Tags: robert hashemian, hashemian right, analyst maury, japan, hashemian, japanese

Cisco Strengthens Products For Midmarket

February 12, 2013

Cisco today announced a series of news surrounding their midmarket product line and their partners that sell Cisco products in this space. A quick overview is that they announced some enhancements to Cisco Business Edition 6000, their midmarket collaboration platform, a new Cisco Express Collaboration specialization, simplification of Telepresence Advanced Technology Programs, and tools for Midsize Business Marketing Campaigns.

I spoke with Marc Inderhees, Senior Manager, Worldwide Collaboration Channel Sales about this news. He stated that Cisco sees the midmarket as 100-1000 employees with over 3.7 million midmarket businesses worldwide. According to Cisco, 1 in 6 employees work for a midmarket company.

Posted in Cisco, Unified Communications, VoIP

Tagged: business edition 6000, cisco, midmarket, partners, resellers, smb, telepresence, uc, var, voip : Related Tags: cisco business, business edition, technology programs, express collaboration, collaboration specialization, cisco

It's the Tablet Size Niches!

February 7, 2013

The original 2010 iPad diagonal screen size was 9.7" (9.5" width). Three years later, the fourth generation iPad is still 9.7". Amazon was able to carve out a new successful tablet size niche with the Kindle Fire, which has a 7.1" diagonal screen size. Apple was forced to respond with the Apple mini which sports a 7.9" diagonal.

Posted in Android, Apple, Microsoft, Tablets, Technology and Science

Tagged: android, apple, google, ipad, notebook, surface pro, tablet, windows 8 : Related Tags: tablet niche, tablet notebook, notebook hybrid, windows tablets, windows explorer, tablet

Add-on Makes Microsoft Lync Feature-Complete to Compete with PBXs

January 31, 2013

Yesterday, at ITEXPO I met with some representatives from Bressner, a German-based company with some interesting add-ons for Microsoft Lync. Now targeting the U.S. (English website) their Lync add-ons add some powerful features to Microsoft Lync that help make Lync have feature-parity with PBXs, allowing enterprises to use Lync as a PBX replacement with no compromise.

Bressner's Dr. Klaus Zünkler, Principal Solutions Architect and Mitch Friend discussed three of their Lync products. The first was FonComfort, which is designed to fill the feature-gap in Microsoft Lync. One of those feature-gap fillers is "true busy" so the caller doesn't have to pay for the call if you're already on another call. I asked Klaus and Mitch why this was a popular feature since typically a call would drop to voicemail if you were on a call or unavailable and they said this "true busy" feature was more popular in Europe due to a cultural thing.

Posted in ITEXPO, Lync, Microsoft, TMCnet, Unified Communications, Video Conferencing, VoIP

Tagged: bressner, busylight, foncomfort, kuando, lync, microsoft, uc, ucfeaturebox, unified communications : Related Tags: audible alert, personal assistant, secretary functions, feature, foncomfort, microsoft

Telefonica Digital's Tim Marsden Keynote Begins

January 30, 2013

Telefónica Digital's Tim Marsden just began his keynote presentation at ITEXPO Miami. He's talking a lot about mobility, high availability, disaster recovery, and cloud technologies. Here's a photo.

Posted in ITEXPO

Surf Communications Solutions Aims to Slay the Video Giant

January 30, 2013

Video conferencing has held promise for many years - dating back to the 1964 AT&T Picturephone, but now has the time finally arrived for video conferencing to take off? The simple answer is "yes", but it's way more complicated than that. Yes, standards like SIP and H.264 have made video interoperability between endpoints less of an issue, but there are other issues to consider. For instance, Polycom, Cisco, Avaya, and LifeSize have very expensive MCUs for their in-room conferencing systems.

Posted in ITEXPO, SIP, TMCnet, Unified Communications, Video Conferencing, VoIP

Tagged: android, apple, cisco, ios, lifesize, mcu, mobile, orion-mcu, polycom, surf communications solutions, transcoding, video conferencing, videophone : Related Tags: video conferencing, video participants, cloud based, conferencing systems, communications solutions, video

Asterisk 1-2-3 Workshop Well-Attended at ITEXPO

January 29, 2013

It always pleasantly surprises me how well-attended the Asterisk 1-2-3 Workshops are at past ITEXPOs and now the current one, especially considering today is a "pre-conference" day with no exhibit hall open today. Tomorrow is when the "big" day is -- with lots of attendees showing up for both the conferences and the exhibits. But the Asterisk 1-2-3 Workshop is its own draw even without exhibits. Asterisk is certainly one of my favorite VoIP topics so I can see why the room was pretty packed. Here, see for yourself with a panoramic photo [click for larger view]: [Star Wars Stormtroopers make an appearance adding to geek nirvana!]

Posted in Asterisk, ITEXPO, Unified Communications, VoIP

Tagged: asterisk, asterisk 1-2-3 workshop, itexpo, linux, open source, unified communications, voip : Related Tags: exhibits asterisk, asterisk workshop, asterisk

ITEXPO 2013 Miami Exhibits Construction Underway

January 28, 2013

ITEXPO 2013 in Miami is in full swing with vendors such as Microsoft (Lync) setting up their booths in the exhibit hall. Should be a great show. Here's a photo of the construction happening with the Microsoft Lync pavilion in the background. It'll be much more impressive once all the booths are setup and I'll be sure to post more photos then.

Tagged: itexpo, lync, miami, miami beach convention center, microsoft, tmc : Related Tags: itexpo miami

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