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10 Lessons from Volleyball, Part 2

By Peter on Thursday, May 23

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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Tagged sales, strategy, volleyball

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,"...

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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...

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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.

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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...

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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...

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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...

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

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Politics on the Internet

September 28, 2008

The first presidential debate was streamed live, which just shows you that the Internet is becoming a mainstream news and entertainment outlet. YouTube has channels for both candidates. Both parties are working the websites, forums, "social networks", etc. to get the message out and spread the word.

Posted in Internet, broadband, politics

Tagged: internet, politics : Related Tags: debate, people, internet

Jazinga

September 28, 2008

Jazinga launched its entry into the SMB PBX space after winning the Best of Show Award at Internet Telephony Conference & EXPO. Jazinga's box is about the size of a D-Link router, but is more that a wireless access point and QOS router. It is a full fledged, SIP-capable IP-PBX that can use IP Phones or Plain old RJ11 phones. (You know those ugly ones on your desk now).

One big selling point is the easy configuration, which comes from a consumer focus that means you don't need an IT gal or a PBX guy to set it up or manage it.

Posted in PBX, smb, voip

Tagged: ip-pbx, jazinga, voip : Related Tags: access point, wireless access, jazinga, router, phones, point

FTC Red Flag Rules

September 26, 2008

As businesses increasingly rely on technology to store and maintain data, including customer records, the risk of identity theft also is increasing. The Federal Trade Commission ("FTC"), together with federal banking regulatory agencies and the National Credit Union Administration, has adopted new regulations intended to combat identity theft. Known as the Red Flag Rules, these new regulations require financial institutions and creditors to develop and implement a written identity theft prevention program to identify and combat identity theft in connection with new and existing customer accounts.

If you are an operator that provides service in advance of payment, then your company is a "creditor" because your company regularly extends, renews or continues credit or defers payment for goods or services.

Posted in FTC, privacy

Tagged: ftc, privacy, red flag : Related Tags: identity theft, protection program, customer protection, identify theft, board directors, program

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Keynoting for ADTRAN & XO

September 25, 2008

I'll be in Ft. Lauderdale on Oct. 21 Oct. 23 to keynote a partner luncheon for ADTRAN and XO. The content is based on where the indirect channel is heading in the next couple of years and what the value proposition is for both kinds of resellers - telecom agents and hardware VAR's. How many times will I say Converged? XO is giving every attendee a copy of my book, SELLECOM.

Posted in channel, expo, xo

Tagged: keynote : Related Tags:

Dialogic Partner event

September 25, 2008

Jeff Dworkin, Enterprise Segment Manager at Dialogic, sat down with me at IT Expo West to talk about Dialogic's re-focus on the channel. There are two groups that Dialogic is reaching out to: the system integrators and the development community.

Dialogic is launching a new Reseller Program in January 2009, which they will build a community around (in the social media sense with blogs). I guess you could say that the partner event on Oct. 20-21, 2008 at The Hotel Coronado near San Diego will be the start of the launch.

Posted in PBX, channel

Tagged: dialogic, fax-over-ip : Related Tags: partner event, dialogic, event

Best Kept Sprint Secret

September 23, 2008

Here's something to do: surf over to Sprint.com and try to find any wireline services. After 5 minutes of searching Business Services, navigation takes you to Nextel.com for Sprint's MPLS offering. On that page, you can find info about MPLS, VPN, IP Convergence, and Internet Access. Yesterday, Sprint gave a presentation to re-affirm to agents that Sprint was still in the wireline game.

Posted in telco, telecommunications, wireline

Tagged: mpls, sprint, wireline : Related Tags: sprint still, sprint, wireline

Cisco is Jabbering

September 20, 2008

In 2007, Cisco integrated Jabber components into its conferencing platform. Today, Cisco buys Jabber, "an open-source IM and presence protocol used by Google Talk and Gizmo, for an undisclosed sum". On our panel at IT Expo, The Role of Apps in VoIP, we talked about Gen Y not liking to talk on the phone. My conclusion is that you will need to incorporate XMPP and XML to enable chat, instant messaging, SMS messaging to IP phone - all to communicate with employees, customers, vendors - without talking on a phone.

Posted in apps, im/chat, mergers, voip, xmpp

Tagged: chat, cisco, jabber : Related Tags: phone, cisco

Congrats to Thomas Howe

September 18, 2008

Thomas Howe has been wandering around IT Expo. Last night he won the Broadsoft Xtended Voice Mashup Contest with Disaster Dispatcher, "a voice mashup that integrates Twitter, BroadWorks and RSS feeds to provide a one-window communications tool for emergency operators. By keeping all data in one window, emergency personnel can analyze the collection of information after the emergency to optimize response procedures." Congrats, Thomas!

Posted in broadsoft, voip

Tagged: broadsoft, mashup, thomas howe, twitter : Related Tags: congrats thomas, voice mashup, thomas, emergency

Art of Peering

September 17, 2008

When I wrote about peering breaking down back in April, Dan Golding at Tier1 gave me a beat down in his newsletter. I chose not to respond at the time. Ars points us to a white paper on the Art of Peering written by Mr. Norton of Equinix. Dan Caruso reminded me to mention it.

Posted in Internet

Tagged: peering : Related Tags: peering

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