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 »Are Current Government Policies Hurting SMBs?
May 5, 2010A recent cover story by CRN interviewed small IT related businesses regarding President Obama's 2009/2010 legislative activity/wins and the impact on their business. While I am sure the story was not attempting to accurately poll IT related SMBs, it was clear that most of those interviewed were not optimistic about the newly passed laws. The most discussed law was the Healthcare bill. Most of the SMBs see additional cost, potential taxes and very little improvement in the health insurance plans they provide for their employees.
Chili Crab, Pepper Crab, the Heat is On
May 3, 2010Chili Crab, Pepper Crab, the Heat is On
On Friday, I blogged that I would share with you one of my favorite recipes. Well, guess what. You are going to get two of them today.
An Improved Strategy for US Broadband
April 30, 2010We are down to the final leg of the three-legged stool, speed. Most studies examining broadband use a speed of 200kbps as the minimum measure. However, in 2008 the FCC finally realized that 200kbps was insufficient to support the bulk of existing Internet based services and applications. The new definition requires a speed of 768kbps for access to be called broadband.
Further Broadband Penetration Deconstruction
April 28, 2010Before I begin, I want to remind you that most of the numbers used for the subject for this week's blog come from the Rural Utilities Service (RUS), National Telecommunications Infrastructure Administration (NTIA), Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and National Telecommunications Cooperative Association (NTCA). I am also using numbers from Insight, Belcher and ChannelVision Magazine. As this is not a college dissertation, and I do not plan to gain economically, I will not be labeling all of the usage going forward. Okay, the disclaimer is out of the way.
Deconstructing Curry and Broadband Statistics
April 26, 2010It was great to be home for the weekend and cooking my favorite foods. For starters, on Friday we had my fried chicken. Sometimes I'll purchase chicken but after having been in New Orleans for a long a weekend and traveling to Denver for a couple of days, I longed to cook. The chicken was delicious.
Another View of the US Position on Broadband
April 23, 2010While there is much wringing of hands with regard to broadband in the US versus the rest of the world, I wondered if we were analyzing the numbers properly. Currently, broadband usage is measured using three factors price, speed and penetration. However, most of the time, I see price used as a measurement, it is not normalized to average income, disposable income or any other relevant measure of income across countries. Given that, I looked at several reports including a global study of broadband usage and penetration and average world salaries.
Must It Always be Premise PBX Versus Hosted Service?
April 21, 2010With the recent Broadvox announcement of a virtual PBX offering, GO!Hosted, I have been contacted by a number of VARs and OEMs asking for clarification of our product strategy. I find this interesting because, Broadvox has always supported both premise based and hosted solutions. Previously, I shared the stage with Eric Thomas, CEO FreedomVoice, and discussed the decision process and benefits to both alternatives. You can read Hosted VoIP vs.
Mama, Put Your Red Dress On and Put Down the Cell Phone
April 19, 2010I spent the weekend in one of my favorite food cites in the world, New Orleans. This was my first trip back since Katrina and it did not disappoint. I went to one of the classic places for a jazz buffet brunch, The Court of Two Sisters. The food was Creole, French and American.
Saving Net Neutrality with Finesse or Brute Force
April 16, 2010An important lesson learned in my youth was if I use the right tool to repair something then brute force would seldom be necessary. In fact, most of the time using brute force resulted in additional damage. This begat a more deliberate process of studying the problem, developing various alternative solutions examining my tools, and ultimately making the right choice. Immediately, after the FCC lost its net neutrality case with Comcast, one of the alternative fixes under discussion was to alter the manner in which ISPs and ITSPs are regulated.
Over Reach and Just Right
April 14, 2010It has been a few days since the Federal court ruled against the FCC in the matter of Comcast Cable. It is important to note that few players in the carrier world wanted to see Comcast lose. However, there are those of us that want to see a different result than a complete victory for Comcast. For example, If Broadvox or another ITSP sells a VoIP service to a Comcast customer; both the customer and we rely upon Comcast to deliver those voice packets in a timely and proper fashion.
