On Rad's Radar?

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...

Full Story »

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,"...

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

Previous Pause Next

Best Practices for Webinars

October 30, 2012

Just finished moderating a webinar for Kontiki on Adding Live Video to All-Hands. It seemed like a good time to go over some best practices for webinars for speakers.

Do not use cellphones if possible. The feedback from the phone and the poor call quality diminish the speaker's impact.
Speakerphones are not a good idea due to background noise. I have been on a lot of calls with barking dogs, TV blaring, and other noises.
Remember that it is ultimately about the content and the user experience.

Posted in Marketing, PR, conferences, conferencing

Tagged: conference, marketing, webinar : Related Tags: practices webinars, audience, platform, slides

It's All Just Shifting

October 26, 2012

"Ovum, in a latest research report, has warned that OTT VoIP will cost the global telecoms industry $479 billion in lost cumulative revenues by 2020, which represents 6.9 percent of cumulative total voice revenues," according to reports. Notice that it says Over-the-Top VoIP, not VoIP the way cellcos, FiOS and cablecos deliver it. I think it is a wild guess.

If you believe that tablets and smartphones will replace desktops and PC's, then OTT VoIP will be a good part of that.

Posted in CLEC, cableco, economy, sales and selling, smb, voip

Tagged: cableco, clec, economy, numbers, sales, smb, voip : Related Tags: customer acquisition, revenue, customer, acquisition

Moves by AT&T

October 25, 2012

"An industry executive argues that service providers face becoming "irrelevant" to consumers, though it might be unusual to hear it said in public," writes Gary Kim. It is the same argument - dumb pipe versus value added reseller.

While VZ and ATT have billing relationships with hundreds of millions of customers, is that enough? Without valuable contact to your customers, service providers are relegated to being a line item on the credit card bill -- commodities to be RFP'ed or shopped.

Tagged: apps, att, cellular, mergers : Related Tags: service providers, customers, mobile, appcelerator, service

The Future of the Desk Phone

October 25, 2012

Have you read that the desk phone is disappearing? It seems to be a recurring theme for Jon Arnold (here and here).

When I spoke with snom at ITEXPO, I asked them about the disappearing desk phone. snom's response was that they were taking market share from Cisco and Polycom, so they were doing okay growth wise.

Tagged: phone system, voip : Related Tags: phone, phones

Your Cellphone is Spying on You

October 18, 2012

There is so much talk about malware on Windows computers. Apple users think they are safe. HA! It was simply a matter of volume. Now that iOS is on millions of devices it is worth the time for bad guys to turn their focus.

Posted in cellular, privacy, security

Tagged: cellular, iphone, privacy, security, vzw : Related Tags:

Zayo Grabs First

October 17, 2012

First Communications came to my attention as a long distance company a few years ago. Since then it has sold off its LD business and focused on its regional fiber business. Zayo is going to acquire First Comm. for $110M.

Zayo is fiber ll the time. "First Telecom Services manages a network of over 8,000 route miles of fiber and approximately 500 on-net buildings. It is focused on providing dark fiber and wavelength services across its 11 state footprint, with the highest concentration of network and revenue in Pennsylvania and Ohio." This helps add some depth to Zayo's network map. The First network runs from Chicago to Toronto through Penn., DE, MD, NJ and Ohio.

Posted in fiber, mergers

Tagged: fiber, mergers, zayo : Related Tags: network, fiber

Where's Your Special Sauce?

October 17, 2012

Just saw a blog post about a company rolling out SIP Trunking to meet the market demand for low cost dial-tone. Really? Hasn't that been done? Over and over and over by so many companies?

Posted in Marketing, PBX, sales and selling, sip trunking

Tagged: marketing, pbx, price war, sip trunk, sip trunking : Related Tags: special sauce, price, special, sauce, trunks

The Changing VAR World

October 15, 2012

Opening evening at UBM's BoB Conference was a panel discussion about the change in the VAR and MSP community. This is a collection of tweets about the panel discussion #bob12.

Social Media (SM) , mobility, are cloud - threats to some, opportunities to some - both to many.

"Behave like a three-year old: fall down, learn something, try again."

Posted in Marketing, VAR, VDI, channel, cloud computing, managed services, mobile, msp, organizations, saas, sales and selling, social network, technology, twitter

Tagged: channel partners, cloud computing, managed it, managed services, mobility, social networks, tech data, technology, VAR, var, vdi : Related Tags: social media, cloud services, channel partners, vendors understand, managed services, channel

Previous 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 ... 142 Next