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 »Survivability
August 18, 2010Last week, I missed posting my Friday blog. I was working on a response to a proposal for a large multi-national enterprise. It was different from most RFPs we receive, in that pricing and traffic were not the primary concern. Instead, the primary concern was business continuity or survivability.
Cloud Nine is Thai Green Curry and No PBXs
August 16, 2010I had my older grandson, Jake, for the weekend, so cooking took an interesting turn. Friday was burgers with Belgian fries. Since Jake loves sushi, Saturday, we took him to an Asian buffet for dinner called Tokyo One. Although, only thirteen he attacked the variety of food with zest.
The 75 Coolest Service Providers
August 11, 2010When I joined Broadvox three years ago, I was not familiar with the company. Although, I had an asterisk-based PBX in my home office, I was also unfamiliar with SIP Trunking. The challenge at the time of my hiring was to establish both the company and the technology as mainstream for VARs, consultants and, of course, end-users. Over the last three years, we have developed a superb organization (see the August Newsletter) and a very robust and feature-rich product offering.
Roasted and Fired
August 9, 2010I actually accomplished a long desired goal this weekend. I took my grandkids to the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Previously, they were too young or too busy or lived out of the state. Sunday, though everything came together.
Combating the Seven Deadliest Attacks with an E-SBC
August 6, 2010The seven deadliest attacks on Unified Communications do not need to be fatal. However, they do require multiple approaches. First, here is the list as developed by Dan York. If you want to see details, please visit the Wednesday blog or read his book, the "Seven Deadliest Unified Communications Attacks".
1) The Ecosystem Expansion exposes voice and video applications to the same security challenges as data.
The Seven Deadliest UC Attacks
August 4, 2010The number of end points continues to increase dramatically. As such, they are drawing the attention of hackers globally. Just as smartphones using Apple OS and Android are attracting the attention of hackers, as noted with the increase in benign and malicious phone apps, so too has the IP community become a target. In addressing this increase, service providers must work in conjunction with their sales channels and customers to make every effort to prevent or minimize the exposure.
CPNI
July 30, 2010As the FCC has increased penalties for violating CPNI, service providers are improving their policies regarding the requirement. Customer information such as name, address and billing telephone number, is known as "Customer Proprietary Network information," or CPNI. Additionally, service features, class of service, phone charges, billing and call records are considered elements of CPNI. The FCC has issued a requirement that all parties with access to CPNI must give the customer the option of disallowing the information to be used for certain marketing activates and certainly restricting its resell to third parties. The penalties are such that each violation carries a substantial fine.
SIP Trunking is Flourishing
July 28, 2010Cost savings continues to lead as the reason for transitioning from TDM to SIP based facilities. The decision may be driven by the lower cost per voice path or the fact that SIP Trunks can be provisioned in units of one up to the capacity of the available broadband. This is in contrast to a T1, which is deployed in units of 24 and normally turns up as a fractional T (approximately 12 voice paths) or a full T. SMBs and enterprise branch offices can be deployed and supported much more efficiently and cost effectively with a SIP Trunking based network architecture than a TDM architecture.
In Infonetics' most recent study, they also concluded that two additional reasons are offered by IT Directors.
Crab, Pork and an Expanding SIP Market, Good Stuff
July 26, 2010Going into the weekend, I had already decided on my recipe of the week, Crab Cakes. With that done, I could cook in a more relaxed fashion because my recipe was set. That is until I saw an episode of Man v. Food Puerto Rico.
The USF Needs Fixing but are these the Guys to do IT
July 23, 2010Congressmen Rick Boucher (D-VA) Chairmen of the Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet, and Lee Terry (R-NE) have introduced a bill to address the outdated priorities, contribution participants and recipients of the Universal Service Fund. As expected, the bill will add broadband to the mix of mandatory services for unserved markets.
According to the two congressional representatives, "The measure will expand who pays into the Fund, control the growth of the Fund and modernize the Fund by allowing its use for the deployment of high-speed broadband service."
Exactly what this means to ITSPs like Broadvox and the currently participating CLECs and ILECs is unknown. However, I always get a little bit suspicious when I see that AT&T, Verizon and Qwest endorse an effort.
