Jim Machi
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 »2012 Predictions! Oh No!
December 20, 2011It’s the time of year to make some predictions.
- 2012 will be year of interactivity. What does that mean? The increased penetration of smartphones worldwide, with worldwide 3G network buildout, will enable more mobile interactivity via social networking tools like Facebook and Skype instant messaging.
Scoring Last Year's Predictions! Oh No!
December 13, 2011Just in Time for the Holidays...Fast, Fast , Fast , FAST!!
December 7, 2011Yesterday, I experienced my first LTE interaction by using an LTE phone that belonged to a colleague. I am not usually easily wowed, but Wow, that was an unexpected experience. I knew it would be fast but I was floored by just how fast it was! I mean like it says on the commercials, going out to websites and grabbing videos was faster than using my laptop from work, not to mention from home. Now, maybe I was the only person in the cell vicinity to be on that LTE network so there was no bandwidth hogging action going on, but I was impressed. If anyone in my family is reading this, I want one for Christmas fast!
The Future Premise Network, Part 2
December 6, 2011Last week, I level-set on what a typical Premise Network might look like today. Advanced networks, including mobile networks, are impacting the definition of the premise though and so this “typical” concept is evolving rapidly. More and more people are connecting to the enterprise network via mobile devices, even on mobile devices the IT people wish they wouldn’t connect with. But customer desire is overwhelming the IT people and these devices are coming to the enterprise networks, whether IT managers like it or not.
The Future Premise Network, Part I
November 29, 2011Two weeks ago, I presented at the US Telecom Voice Innovation 2011 Conference on the topic “The Premise Network.” While it might not sound so interesting, the Premise Network is undergoing much change because work is not just a place to go anymore, it’s a state of mind. The talk was mostly about the future of the premise network, but before I got to that, I needed to level set on what a typical premise enterprise network might look like. In my estimation, “typical” means there is likely still a traditional TDM network, but only because it’s there and exists and IT doesn’t want to rip it out and remove it, and there is a VoIP network as well. There is no doubt that on most enterprise networks, VoIP is there and is either the lead communication network overall, or major pieces of the enterprise network have been totally VoIP enabled.
My iPad, One Year Later
November 22, 2011About a year ago, I got an iPad to use at work. About a month after I got it, I predicted I wouldn’t use it too much since I found the iPad great at consuming content but not creating content. And I create a lot of content, for instance this blog (yes, this is content to some folks).
Now that the holiday season is upon us and many people out there will be finding iPads in their stockings, I figured I’d tell you how in fact I used mine.
Mobile Payments and the Role of SS7
November 15, 2011Back in June, I wrote a blog about mobile commerce and using your phone to pay for services, or using your phone to enable mobile banking. These are all huge growth opportunities for the industry.
I wanted to follow that up with some comments about how this works.
Pure Kryptonite for SMS?
November 8, 2011The last few months, I have been thinking a lot about SMS. We’ve had customers deploy and develop voice and video SMS solutions, which are innovative in their own right, and we’ve seen what Twitter can do. But at a very high level, what is the future of SMS?
Smartphones and Aliens: Why Does This Not Compute?!
November 1, 2011Given Halloween was just yesterday, and some Aliens came to my door to get candy, it got me thinking…
When you look at the picture below, the takeaway should be – WOW, there are A LOT of smartphones in the United States.
Keep this fact is in your head. You may also know that seemingly most UFO sightings occur in the United States.
The Land (and soon to be land) of the Mobile Internet
October 25, 2011Last week I visited Japan and China. Japan truly is the land of the mobile internet, as pretty much all 120M mobile subscribers are on 3G now, with something like 25% of mobile subscribers expected to be on LTE by 2015. It’s interesting having great mobile internet connections. One of my colleagues was using an iPhone and got great connectivity, at faster rates than he was used to in the US.
