David Byrd
Chief Marketing Officer for ANPI
10 Lessons from Volleyball, Part 2
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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CloudTC and N-Able Acquired
"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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ProfitBricks: Where InfiniBand Meets Cloud 2.0
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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Proactive Care Puts Operators One Step Ahead
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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10 Lessons from Volleyball
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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Emerging Threats Combats a Million Plus Pieces of New Malware a Week
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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NFV-Based Software Telcos Need OSS/BSS Interoperability
One of the goals of ETSI NFV is to allow new entrants to provide solutions to carriers based on software instead of...
Full Story »Povitica, Latkes and IBM
December 13, 2010Going into the weekend I had no idea as to what the recipe of the week would be. I didn’t have a hankering for anything and I hadn’t purchase anything that needed to be cooked. Friday, my wife made a shrimp casserole that was pretty good. It consisted of shrimp, cream, cheese and very few vegetables.
Broadband is not Scarce
December 10, 2010The latest FCC report on the state of broadband in the US labels broadband as “scarce”. That is hardly the case. Several good things have come from the FCC this year regarding broadband. First, it was useful to announce a globally competitive target to deliver 100-Mbps services to 100 million households by 2020.
What does this have to do with Broadvox?
December 8, 2010It has been more than two years since I began writing this blog so I was a little surprised that the discussion regarding Level 3 and Comcast merited a “what does this have to do with Broadvox?" response. Just as Butterball reaches out to bad or adventurous cooks every Thanksgiving with advice on cooking turkey because someone either just became of age, got married or decided it was worth the effort. I understand I need to restate the purpose of this blog from time to time. This blog is not about Broadvox.
Jambalaya and a Movie
December 6, 2010Friday evening I made pan seared steaks. They were very good seasoned with my white seasoning mixture which developed a great browned crust quickly. Saturday, was cheese fries for my wife and leftover chili for me. However, I was looking forward to having jambalaya on Sunday.
Erlangs...Really?
December 3, 2010Most IT managers find it easy to determine how much bandwidth they need for data and it is not difficult to determine the bandwidth requirement for a SIP Trunk. With the Broadvox service a SIP Trunk should have an allocation of 88KB per Concurrent Call Sessions (CCS). The standard does allow for some variability in this rate depending upon options and even Broadvox engineers will sometimes use 100KB in order to have a bit of leeway. This is referred to in some calculations as the “fudge factor”.
Testing Has Begun, Please Disconnect Your Laptop
December 1, 2010It has been an interesting week for bandwidth utilization discussions. First, there is the announcement by Level 3 that they have been forced by Comcast to pay higher fees to terminate traffic over the Comcast network. It is suspected that the traffic demands of Netflix users has reached a point that it is upsetting the previous traffic sharing or, possibly, peering arrangement between Level 3 and Comcast. Although the discussion rapidly evolved into a debate about net neutrality, a larger question looms.
Gobble but don't be Gobbled
November 29, 2010I hope you had a good Thanksgiving holiday. Obviously, it was an opportunity for me to cook. Thanksgiving Day was shared with my stepdaughter and grandkids so the meal was very traditional. As such, I was only responsible for the turkeys, gravy, mashed potatoes and bread.
Thanksgiving Day History
November 24, 2010As we extend Happy Thanksgiving wishes to colleagues, friends, family and strangers, it is worth taking a few moments to remember how this celebration became a national holiday.
The first Thanksgiving was held in 1621 to celebrate the survival of an early colony of settlers in Plymouth, Massachusetts and it included some 91 Indians that aided the Pilgrims. The celebration lasted three days.
The next celebration of thanksgiving was in 1623 when the Pilgrims survived a severe drought. The day after the drought broke, the Pilgrims, who had been praying for rain, celebrated with a feast and the local Indians.
Sauerbraten and HIPPA Compliance
November 22, 2010There are times when I first taste a thing and wonder where it has been all my life. I still remember my first taste of mayonnaise, brown mustard, a croissant, nachos and fish head curry. This weekend I added sauerbraten to that list. I had the expectation of a sour dish but the result was a broader range of flavors than a traditional piece of roast beef.
My Favorite IP PBX Features
November 19, 2010Okay we now know the most popular end-user features:
- Call forwarding
- Call waiting
- Conference calling
- Call hold
- Unified Communications features:
- Presence
- Unified messaging
- Instant messaging
- Find me/follow me/one number reach
- Click to dial
And we know which features IT managers prize:
- Intrude
- Call blocking
- Call drop
- Night service
- Auto attendant
- Corporate phone books with global extension dialing
- ACD management and reporting
- Business continuity/disaster recovery
I thought it interesting that several of my favorites did not make the list. While Click to dial made the list and perhaps Caller ID and CNAM are merely expected, my other two faves are Simultaneous ringing and Distinctive ringing.
