On Rad's Radar?

CloudTC and N-Able Acquired

By Peter on Wednesday, May 22

"Australian-owned IP PBX systems company, Vixtel, has completed the acquisition of Silicon Valley based glass phone developer, CloudTC, for an undisclosed figure,"...

Full Story »

Tagged hosted pbx, itexpo, mergers, phone system, RMM

ProfitBricks: Where InfiniBand Meets Cloud 2.0

By Rich Tehrani on Wednesday, May 22

In a recent meeting with William Toll and Pete Johnson of ProfitBricks, the pair were ecstatic to explain how their company has...

Full Story »

Tagged amazon, cloud computing, data center, ec2, infiniband, interop, profitbricks, public cloud, technology

Proactive Care Puts Operators One Step Ahead

By Peter Bernstein on Monday, May 20

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 »

Tagged Alcatel-Lucent, big data, customer care, KPIs, network monitoring, procativecare | Responses

10 Lessons from Volleyball

By Peter on Monday, May 20

I've played volleyball for over 25 years. I have traveled around the US to watch the pros live - both indoor...

Full Story »

Tagged hiring, strategy, volleyball

Emerging Threats Combats a Million Plus Pieces of New Malware a Week

By Rich Tehrani on Friday, May 17

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 »

Tagged emerging threats, interop, malware, security

NFV-Based Software Telcos Need OSS/BSS Interoperability

By Rich Tehrani on Friday, May 17

One of the goals of ETSI NFV is to allow new entrants to provide solutions to carriers based on software instead of...

Full Story »

Tagged bss, carrier, ericsson, huawei, interoperability, nfv, nokia siemens networks, nsn, oss, sdn, software telco

SysAid's Lifshitz: The Cloud Will Dominate ITSM Market

By Rich Tehrani on Thursday, May 16

Cloud computing has really become a household word with mainstream media outlets running stories on television about the growth in the space...

Full Story »

Tagged help desk, itsm, mdm, sysaid

Previous Pause Next

CIO's Top Tech Investments

April 16, 2009

Robert Half interviewed 1400 CIO's for a research study (press release here), It's not a surprising list: Security, VOIP, Virtualization, SAAS, and data center efficiency. Considering power costs much more than space, getting energy and hardware efficient means cost savings. Oh, wait, that's virtualization too. And Software as a service and VOIP.

In summary, the top tech investments of CIO of companies with 100 or more employees is IT Security and cost cutting initiatives.

Posted in data center, saas, security, technology, voip

Tagged: data center, SAAS, saas, security, voip : Related Tags:

Telcos on twitter

April 16, 2009

Do you know what twitter is? It's the text messaging to the masses application platform. Officially, I think it is described as a micro-blogging social networking platform, but huh? The idea with twitter is to update a group of folks about what is of interest to you.

I'm on twitter and so are many TMC folks, like Rich, Tom, and sales guy extraordinaire Anthony; so is the TMC news service.

There are some telcos on twitter like Embarq, CenturyTel, and Windstream.

Posted in TMC, social network, telco, twitter, voip

Tagged: freedomvoice, rich tehrani, tom keating, twitter, windstream : Related Tags: telcos twitter, twitter, doing, folks

Comments

Why Security Will Be Priority 1

April 16, 2009

As I skim the Verizon Business 2009 Data Breach Investigations Report (PDF) to find that "295 million records were compromised and there were 90 confirmed breaches last year", I think where is the security? The Intrusion Detection Systems, the firewalls, the vigilant admins. Oh, wait, most companies don't have that. What else is missing?

Posted in Web 2.0, security

Tagged: firewall, ids, mpls, pci compliance, saas, security, verizon : Related Tags: security, breaches, managed

Video Competition at the FCC

April 9, 2009

The FCC assesses the competition in the video market on the same day that the FCC approves the acquisition of a de facto controlling interest in DIRECTV by Liberty Media Corp. and Liberty Entertainment Inc. (DA No. 09-780)

The FCC adopted a supplemental Notice of Inquiry to Congress On Video Competition for Years 2008 and 2009. The docket 07-269 can be commented on until 5/20/2009 (FCC No. 09-32).

Posted in FCC, video

Tagged: dbs, directv, FCC, satellite, video : Related Tags: video competition, competition, video

FCC Broadband Policy Beginnings

April 9, 2009

As the FCC, USDA, and NTIA get set to disburse $7.2 billion in moneys to telecommunications companies for broadband deployment, penetration, and mapping along with E-Rate type services and tele-medicine, the FCC has to actually come up with a National Broadband Strategy.

"The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act charged the FCC with creating a plan to give all Americans access to broadband. The FCC began the effort, which will include a series of hearings and meetings, on Wednesday by asking for public comment. The FCC must present the plan to lawmakers by Feb. 17, 2010." [Infoweek]

One would have thought that former FCC Chairman Martin would have put a national policy in place, but all he had was a chalk board with "ideas" or guidelines that the telcos could ignore. Now acting FCC Chair Copps has been tasked and he takes this seriously.

"This commission has never, I believe, received a more serious charge than the one to spearhead development of a national broadband plan," FCC Chairman Michael Copps said in a statement Wednesday.

Posted in FCC, Internet, broadband, politics

Tagged: broadband, FCC, fcc, NTIA, politics, RUS, stimulus : Related Tags: national broadband, grant program, broadband deployment, access broadband, broadband, national

Mobile VoIP is a Problem

April 8, 2009

There are so many mobile voice apps I cannot even keep track. Some are convoluted. Some are callback services. Some are pure packet based VoIP that eat up data usage.

Posted in apps, cellular, telecommunications, voip, wireline

Tagged: apps, cellular, mobile, voip : Related Tags: voice calls, calls, mobile, voice, office, calling

Comments

Caught My Eye at VoiceCon

April 8, 2009

At VoiceCon, Grandstream had some new SIP-based gadgets including the video telephony units that VidTel is using and video surveillance gear. As TMC's Erik Linask reports here, "The first products in the new line include one- and four-port video servers/encoders -- its GXV3501 and GXV3504 -- and an IP video camera -- the GXV3601.... All three products leverage Grandstream's experience with H.264 real-time video compression, providing clear video while optimizing bandwidth usage, and SIP-based VoIP technology for providing two-way audio and video streaming to mobile phones and desktop video phones."

But the other hardware surprise for me was Aastra's Clearspan. It's basically an Aastra branded version of Broadsoft on a blade server for enterprise.

Posted in broadsoft, technology, unified communications, video, voip, wimax

Tagged: aastra, broadsoft, ctia, grandstream, nokia, sip, video, voicecon, wimax : Related Tags: wimax gadgets, video, wimax, gadgets, broadsoft, nokia

Are You Still an ILEC Agent?

April 7, 2009

This from Telephony online and the Convergence Consulting Group:

The latest in an annual study of the bundled services market shows US telecom service providers are losing wireline voice customers at a faster pace and being transformed in the process into companies that will look very different from their traditional telecom roots. The Battle for the American Couch Potato: Bundling, TV, Internet, Telephone, Wireless, released this week by the Convergence Consulting Group, shows maintaining a broadband connection is increasingly important to telecom providers, as wireline voice services become much less important.

If you look at the numbers in that PDF report and you still think that the QBPP is a viable option or that the last 400K businesses in the BellSouth region will somehow see the light and convert, I have some land for you in South Florida.

I have written about this in years past: the telcos have finally hit the wall. Everything is flat or down now: TV, wireline, cellular, and broadband.

Posted in Internet, agents, bellsouth agent, broadband, cableco, cellular, channel, duopoly, telco, video, wimax, wireless, wireline

Tagged: cableco, cellular, channel partners, embarq, financials, ilec, mso, numbers, qwest, rboc, triple play : Related Tags: consulting group, convergence consulting, telcos residential, voice customers, residential telephone, voice

How Many Minutes?

April 7, 2009

Telecomweb has an interesting set of stats:
Last year, U.S. wireless subscribers burned through 2.2 trillion minutes and 1 trillion worth of SMS. As such, mobile data accounts for 25 percent of a carrier's revenues, and all that from 270 million users.
Indeed these are huge numbers. No wonder AT&T says its a wireless company. TDM LD must be shrinking by the minute

Posted in cellular, telecommunications

Tagged: cellular, numbers : Related Tags:

Merger Rumors Abound

April 7, 2009

Well, it is conference month with the industry gathering at CTIA and VoiceCon (and other shows). And when we get together we tend to gossip. The latest rumors (some thanks to Telecom Ramblings) involve XO, TWTC, and Qwest.

Apparently, Qwest longhaul business - the original Qwest - is for sale, but who has that kind of money to buy it?

Posted in mergers, telecommunications

Tagged: level3, mergers, qwest, twtelecom, xo : Related Tags: level, qwest

Previous 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 ... 142 Next