Jim Machi
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.
Full Story »
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...
Full Story »
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...
Full Story »
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 »
SysAid's Lifshitz: The Cloud Will Dominate ITSM Market
Cloud computing has really become a household word with mainstream media outlets running stories on television about the growth in the space...
Full Story »
Avaya Takes Networking Lead in SPB
At Interop Las Vegas 2013 Avaya was demonstrating their real-world Shortest Path Bridging (SPB) solutions and while interoperating with Spirent, HP and...
Full Story »
Alianza Wants to Host Your Software Telco
The software telco(r)evolution representing the move from hardware to software is perhaps the biggest trend in the world of carrier telecom this...
Full Story »
Russian Winter in Early October and Italian Bling
October 18, 2011In early October, I visited Moscow to attend Capacity Russia and CIS. Everyone I was with kept telling me it looked like a regular Russian winter day (except it wasn’t cold ). See the picture above and you get the idea. Red Square was more than I expected and I was particularly impressed with the memorial to WWII soldiers just off the Red Square.
Which FoIP Codec is Best? The Definitive Answer
October 11, 2011On July 19th, I wrote a blog about Fax and FoIP and the cloud, and I got a few questions in regarding which codec to use when FoIPing, T.38 or G.711. And since Dialogic just wrote a white paper called “Considerations for Using T.38 versus G.711 for Fax over IP.” I was ecstatic that I’d have a short answer.
Before we get to the simple answer, it’s important to understand a few things.
Where is PacketMan Flying Next?
October 3, 2011A few weeks ago, PacketMan was thawed from his nine year ice cave and took the time to explore some of the changes during his hibernation, and future expectations of the Packet network. Another big change right now for PacketMan is what he actually sees as he’s traveling through the network with the other packets. Increasingly, as he’s traveling along with the packets, he notices multicolor packets, and if they congregate close enough, he’s able to actually view something. Yes, because a key part of IP communications now is video of all sorts – downloading movies, watching YouTube, making video calls, etc.
IT Expo West Turns Up the Heat
September 27, 2011A couple of weeks ago, I attended the IT Expo event in Austin, Texas. After many years of being in Los Angeles, the event organizers decided to move the venue to 102 degree heat. It’s a dry heat though so it’s OK, right?
Thrive with Communication Solutions
September 20, 2011The increased capabilities of mobile networks, the increased capabilities of smartphones, and the increased availability of network based applications go hand in hand as revenue growth and ARPU growth engines. However, it can be argued that of the three, network- based applications are the most important, because if there were no innovative or interesting applications, the networks would be acting simply as on-ramps to the internet. And if the networks were just on-ramps to the internet, then they just act as pipes and you’d quickly get to pure commoditization.
PacketMan Re-Emerges
September 13, 2011Back in 2002, before blogs, Twitter and Facebook, a key way to get your message across was to write articles. I wrote a monthly article for many years for the famously yellow-colored Internet Telephony Magazine. Things are a little different now – while there is still a yellow-colored Internet Telephony Magazine and there still is an IT Expo, TMC corporation, who runs both of those, now has a very, very large website, runs webinars, and hosts bloggers. So the magazine is one of their properties as opposed to the main key property.
Numbed by Analyst Research - What I Did on My Summer Vacation
September 6, 2011I spent the summer engorged in analyst research. It was all over my office. It was in my briefcase. It was on my computer and iPad. It was in my head.
So What's the Deal with User Experience Convergence?
August 30, 2011In my last blog, I talked about the effects that convergence may have on the future. This week, I’d like to address the factors that need to be considered when it comes to user experience convergence. First of all, the delivery network needs to be context-aware. For example, what is the type of end-point being used (since you don’t want to send 720P to a CIF device)?
The Next Wave in Communications Convergence
August 23, 2011Last week, I wrote about the pro and cons of convergence. But what does the future hold because of convergence? Due to the capability of the converged networks, hosted offerings have morphed into cloud computing offerings and we have seen communication-based cloud computing offerings emerge. Cloud computing is about a $100B business, split between SaaS, PaaS and IaaS, with VoIP/UC accounting for $5B.
Challenges and Opportunities Abound When it Comes to Convergence
August 16, 2011In my last blog, I discussed the history of convergence and how it’s affected the telecom industry. Now, I’d like to talk about the pros and cons of convergence.
Let’s start with the cons.
