VoIP & Gadgets Blog

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

SysAid's Lifshitz: The Cloud Will Dominate ITSM Market

By Rich Tehrani on Thursday, May 16

Cloud computing has really become a household word with mainstream media outlets running stories on television about the growth in the space...

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Tagged help desk, itsm, mdm, sysaid

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Artisan Infrastructure Solves the MSP Competition Conundrum

September 12, 2011

At ITEXPO I met with Artisan Infrastructure's CEO Brian Hierholzer to discuss how Artisan offers a compelling cloud-based solution for MSPs and service providers. Brian explained that one problem with existing managed service providers (MSPs) is that they often compete against their service provider customers by building and selling applications. Brian explained that competitors such as Amazon and Rackspace are now offering their own hosted applications, which undercuts service providers trying to offer hosted applications such as BDR (backup & disaster recovery), email, and hosted phone services leveraging VoIP.

Artisan on the other hand is a 100% pure play wholesale infrastructure services provider. They don't do any business direct to end users so they don't compete against service providers that use their service to build applications.

Posted in ITEXPO, Lync, TMCnet

Tagged: amazon, artisan infrastructure, bdr, cloud, hosted, mitel, mos, msp, qos, rackspace, voip, wholesale : Related Tags: service providers, service provider, brian explained, artisan infrastructure, hosted applications, service

ITEXPO in Austin, Texas - Business & Pleasure

September 9, 2011

Rich Tehrani snapped some more photos in Austin, Texas (including some night life shots) and he writes:

The night life here in Austin is legendary with the huge emphasis on live bands. I had a chance to check some of the bands and crowds out last night. It reminded me a bit of Greenwich Village in New York actually. These bars will be a great place for networking next week at ITEXPO for sure.

Posted in ITEXPO

Tagged: austin, fogo de chÃ£o, ip communications, itexpo, steakhouse, texas, tradeshow, voip : Related Tags: austin texas, itexpo, austin, night, texas

ITEXPO in Austin, Texas Just Days Away - Some Photos from Today

September 8, 2011

Rich Tehrani has some great shots from his hotel room in Austin, Texas in preparation for TMC's ITEXPO next week. Clear blue skies from what I can see in his photos. Nice! Between Hurricane Irene knocking out my power and Tropical Storm Lee dropping tons of rain in my area last night, I'm looking forward to Texas. I'll be out there on Monday and will be covering the show extensively, including the co-located StartupCamp 4. I'm also looking forward to seeing the Spazmatics at the ITEXPO party:

Here's the photos I borrowed from Rich:

Posted in ITEXPO, TMCnet, Unified Communications, VoIP

Tagged: austin, ip communications, itexpo, rich tehrani, spazmatics, texas : Related Tags: austin texas, itexpo, photos, texas

Daily Skype Stats in An Infographic

September 6, 2011

Would you like to see just how successful Skype is? Well, look no further than this infographic put out by Skype to celebrate their 8th birthday last week:

It's indeed impressive. Skype's Big Blog writes, "700 million minutes of free Skype-to-Skype calls each day. To put it in perspective, 700 million is the equivalent of going around the earth 28,000 times in one day, if each minute represents a mile.

Posted in SIP, Skype, TMCnet, VoIP

Tagged: debt, deficit, infographic, skype, statistics, video calls, voip : Related Tags: video calls, skype calls, skype skype, calls skype, perspective million, skype

HTC Unveils HTC TITAN 4.7" and 3.8" Radar Smartphones

September 6, 2011

HTC has unveiled HTC TITAN (image above), its largest screen smartphone featuring a 4.7 inch WVGA 480x800 pixel display and the smaller 3.8 inch HTC Radar, both of which run on Windows Phone 7.5 Mango operating system. The HTC TITAN sports a slim 9.9 mm (0.39 inch) aluminum shell and a whopping 8 megapixel camera with a f/2.2 aperture lens, dual LED flash, BSI sensor (for better low-light captures) and 720p video recording.

The HTC TITAN, previously codenamed HTC Eternity, is powered by a 1.5GHz Scorpion processor, Adreno 205 GPU, Qualcomm MSM8255 chipset with 512MB of RAM and integrated GPS. The internal storage memory of the device is only 16GB. I'm really surprised such a high-end smartphone sporting a large screen and a high-end 8MP camera doesn't sport 32GB of internal storage for storing lots of photos and other media (music, videos).

Posted in Android, Apple, Gadgets, Google, Mobile Phones, Skype, TMCnet, Unified Communications, Video Conferencing, VoIP, Wireless

Tagged: android, apple, galaxy note, htc, ipad, microsoft lync, radar, samsung, smartphone, titan, windows phone 7.5 : Related Tags: camera video, video calls, internal storage, processor adreno, memory device, titan

PowerView Offers Powerful Microsoft Lync Reporting

September 2, 2011

Unify2 PowerView is a reporting and billing solution for Microsoft Lync Server 2010 and Office Communications Server 2007 R2. It comes with pre-canned reports including a report to track ROI so you see exactly how Lync's unified communications feature-set is saving your business money.

PowerView 3.0 aggregates data collected from Call Detail Records, Active Directory, carrier billing rate tables and other data sources. According to Unify2, "PowerView effectively complements the raw transactional data contained in the Lync CDR databases and provides a rich view of the data that's correlated with the enterprise's organizational and geographical topologies, enabling enterprises to leverage a comprehensive set of PowerView reports or easily develop custom views of business data related to Lync."

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

Tagged: active directory, billing, lync, microsoft, powerview, reporting, unified communications, unify2 : Related Tags: carrier billing, unify powerview, total usage, usage costs, usage reports, reports

NextUC Offering Limited-time free beta trial of hosted Microsoft Lync

September 1, 2011

I spoke with NextUC back in June to learn about their hosted Microsoft Lync offering but got swamped with other projects, so never wrote about them. However, I wanted to share the news that they are now offering a limited-time (2-month) free beta trial of hosted Microsoft Lync so you can try it out with no obligation.

Customers can sign up by accessing the NextUC self-provisioning trial portal and you can be provisioned within an hour after signing up. The 2-month free trial includes NextUC Enterprise and NextUC Messenger. According to NextUC, NextUC Enterprise is a cloud-based, all-inclusive voice, collaboration and conferencing platform designed for companies that want to streamline their enterprise-class telephony, instant messaging, Presence, audio, video and web conferencing and collaboration tools into one interface.

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

Cisco Senior Vice President Ian Pennell Keynoting ITEXPO

September 1, 2011

In addition to magicJack Vocaltec keynoting and Internet legend Bob Metcalfe at ITEXPO in two weeks, we also have Cisco Senior Vice President Ian Pennell keynoting as well. TMC has really lined up some major IP communications players at this next ITEXPO, which will be out biggest show ever!

Check out the news:

Cisco's Ian Pennell to Deliver An Opening Keynote Address at ITEXPO West in Austin

Senior Vice President of Cisco’s Small Business Technology Group to Kick-Off ‘The Communications and Technology Conference’

Posted in Cisco, Unified Communications, VoIP

Tagged: cisco, ian pennell, itexpo, keynote, small business, smb, voip : Related Tags: technology group, business technology, president cisco, cisco senior, pennell keynoting, cisco

Michael Tribolet magicJack VocalTec CBO to Keynote ITEXPO

September 1, 2011

Rich Tehrani wrote about some important ITEXPO news worth sharing:

Two months back I told you that IP communications veteran Michael Tribolet, someone involved in the founding and growth of the VoIP space joined magicJack Vocaltec and would be at ITEXPO West in Austin Texas, September 13-15, 2011.I have great news to share and that is that Michael will be keynoting at the show at 8:45 am on Sept 13. He kicks off what is perhaps the best keynote line-up ITEXPO has ever seen - he will be followed up by representatives from Cisco, IBM, DHL, Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe and many more.

magicJack is one of my Top 20 VoIP Innovators of All Time. I recently reviewed the magicJack Plus, which still isn't officially launched (still beta). I wonder if magicJack will be launching this product at TMC's ITEXPO?

Posted in ITEXPO, TMCnet, VoIP

Tagged: itexpo, magicjack, michael tribolet, rich tehrani, tmc, voip : Related Tags: michael tribolet, magicjack vocaltec, magicjack, itexpo, michael

Vlync Pilot - Hosted Microsoft Lync Launches

August 31, 2011

VCOMM, a subsidiary of internet telephony provider Coms Plc, a UK-based company, has launched Vlync Pilot, a hosted version of Microsoft’s Lync. Vlync Pilot is a fully managed and hosted Microsoft Lync service that comes bundled with 5 user licences and 5 Polycom handsets (per bundle) enabing businesseses to pilot Microsoft Lync.

Vlync Pilot brings full unified communications functions to the desktop in a hosted setup. Another similar offering is from Workflow Communications who told me back in February to be the only hosted Lync provider offering direct SIP trunking. Features in this hosted offering include: Instant Message conferencing, peer-to-peer voice and video, AV and web conferencing, Federation, desktop sharing, Exchange UM, Outlook Web App, Enterprise Voice and integration into Microsoft Office applications.

Posted in Lync, Microsoft, SIP, TMCnet, Unified Communications, VoIP

Tagged: lync, microsoft, polycom, sip, unified communications, voip : Related Tags: vlync pilot, enterprise voice, fully managed, hosted microsoft, polycom phones, pilot

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