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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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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

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...

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Tagged help desk, itsm, mdm, sysaid

Avaya Takes Networking Lead in SPB

By Rich Tehrani on Wednesday, May 15

At Interop Las Vegas 2013 Avaya was demonstrating their real-world Shortest Path Bridging (SPB) solutions and while interoperating with Spirent, HP and...

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Tagged alcatel-lucent, avaya, hp, interop, lucent, mpls, networking, spb, spirent, zeus kerravala

Alianza Wants to Host Your Software Telco

By Rich Tehrani on Tuesday, May 14

The software telco(r)evolution representing the move from hardware to software is perhaps the biggest trend in the world of carrier telecom this...

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Tagged acme packet, alianza, etsi, hosted ims, nfv, oracle, software telco, software telco congress, virtualization

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Dr. Reed in The House

July 21, 2008

Dr. David Reed gave testimony to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce last week in a hearing on DPI (deep packet inspection). The House Committee is trying to figure out what to do about DPI, Privacy (HA! What privacy?), NebuAd and Targeted Advertising. Dr. Reed wasn't the only one to testify.

Posted in Internet, broadband, cableco, telco

Tagged: congress, dpi, privacy : Related Tags: common carrier, content provider, house committee, house, privacy

40 Hour Work Week

July 16, 2008

I don't know about you but a 4 Hour Work Week seems unlikely, but just a 40 hour one would be grand! Tim Ferriss wrote the book, 4 Hour Work Week, and gave a great 45 minute summary of the book's principles at SXSW 2007 (here). David Seah has an exhaustive review of the principles of the book here. I'm just focused on his outsourcing.

Posted in Internet, off topic

Tagged: outsource, virtual assistant : Related Tags: virtual assistants, folks, ricki

Why Twitter

July 16, 2008

Duct Tape Marketing has a post about the business use for Twitter. I can see why Twitter would work for a conference like it did for SXSW: great way to update attendees; remind people about keynotes and sessions starting; let people comment about what was cool and where they are going (dinner anyone?); etc. (Read article about it here). And that is a good use for Twitter, but what other business uses are there?

Posted in Web 2.0, social network

Tagged: twitter : Related Tags: twitter, people

OCS in the Sandbox

July 15, 2008

TechRepublic has a great review of Microsoft OCS. "The verdict: For most organizations, Microsoft's current unified communications product will supplement-not supplant-traditional telephony systems."

OCS has 3 main weaknesses. One is 911.

OCS does not support enhanced 911 location information and not many (if any) third parties provide E911 services for OCS. E911 is critical in a college environment.

OCS does not provide for hunting or conference calling.

Maybe it will be fixed in SP3 or with the next version of OCS.

Posted in PBX, apps

Tagged: microsoft, ocs, pbx : Related Tags:

Broadband Corruption?

July 15, 2008

DSLReports.com has an editorial titled, U.S. Broadband Cannot Be Fixed Until You Tackle Corruption. It seems that the new group, Internet for Everyone, has upset Karl. Karl is right in a way. There have been numerous groups over the years, including COMPTEL and its prior siblings, that have tried to get grass-roots support for a change at the FCC and in DC.

Posted in FCC, Internet, broadband

Tagged: dc, fcc, internet : Related Tags: tackle corruption, corruption, lobbyists, broadband

VZ R&D is Court

July 15, 2008

Over the past 9 years that I have been in telecom, Verizon has probably been in court at least once a month either suing the FCC over some rule or part of the Telecom Act or being sued for anti-trust. VZ has also sued for patent infringement. It has been sued often for billing disputes, since the ILECs make billing a profit center. And numerous states have taken VZ to task for awful customer service.

Posted in telco

Tagged: cpni, lawsuit, verizon : Related Tags: customer service, court, millions, marketing, customer

Dvorak Likes Shrink Wrap

July 14, 2008

In a recent column in PC Mag, An Ode to Shrink Wrapped Software, John Dvorak talks about the ten weaknesses of online apps. It really comes down to this: "Using the Internet to return to the old model of mainframe computing is a misuse of resources and a dead end."

Everything else he says just comes back to either the model sucks or the security / reliability stinks. His argument is really about Control.

Posted in Web 2.0, apps, saas

Tagged: apps, saas, web 2.0, web apps : Related Tags:

Wasted Ad Money

July 14, 2008

I have worked on marketing for ISP's, CLEC's, ITSP's and MSP's as well as non-tech firms like lawyers and real estate firms. My suggestion has always been to forget the Old Media Tradition of radio and TV advertising. Now there is a presentation on SlideShare about how at least Half the Advertising money is wasted. See here:

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Posted in Marketing

Tagged: advertising : Related Tags:

The Last Lecture

July 9, 2008

Carnegie-Mellon Professor Randy Pausch gave a Last Lecture after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. It is a lecture about the lessons learn while achieving your childhood dreams. He is very goal driven, because he went after his dreams. Not many can say that.

It's available as a book, an audio CD, or you can watch it on You Tube, Google Video or Carnegie-Mellon's website.

Lessons include: Brick walls are there for a reason. How badly do you want it?

Posted in off topic

Tagged: lecture : Related Tags: carnegie mellon, lecture

PCI Compliance

July 7, 2008

Elizabeth Bowles at Aristotle.Net gave a session on e-Commerce that included some PCI DSS stuff. PCI DSS is like HIPAA in a lot of ways: buzz but no one has a handle on it. There's more myth than fact, but who is going to sift through the hundreds of pages of law?

In most of these laws (HIPAA, PCI, SOX) it is a matter of securing data.

Posted in apps, compliance, security

Tagged: pci compliance, security : Related Tags: level merchants, service providers, information security, security, compliance, level

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