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,"...

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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

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

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Secret Rooms

June 20, 2008

Mark Klein was the AT&T tech that outed the "Secret Room" in the AT&T CO in San Francisco. Now there is a secret room in AT&T's Internet POP in St. Louis.

News 4 Investigates: Illegal internet spying [May 5th, 2008]

Watch the TV news segment here. (IE required)

Isenberg points out that Congress is ready to give the Telcos retroactive immunity for wiretapping US citizens without a warrant.

That sound you just heard? That was our Founding Fathers screaming at the way our Constitution has been ignored. Privacy and individual rights are disappearing. That happens when you don't vote (get involved in the political process) and you don't read a newspaper.

Posted in Internet

Tagged: wiretapping : Related Tags: secret

Job Hunting

June 16, 2008

As unemployment rises (along with layoffs) and fewer jobs are being created, people need help job hunting. I get hit up for help all the time. Success Secret #4: Build It Before You Need It.

Create a LinkedIn profile - that is your new Web 2.0 resume.

Posted in Web 2.0, off topic

Tagged: jobs, offtopic, web 2.0 : Related Tags:

4 Hour Work Week

June 16, 2008

At a blogger MeetUp last week, the book 4 Hour work Week by Tim Ferriss came up as a must read. I don't know if I would call it that. The concept of paring everything down and outsourcing everything you can is clever, but for most folks it is unrealistic.

For people looking to make a fast dime by leveraging as many other folks as possible, then, yeah, go read the book.

Posted in off topic

Tagged: 4hourworkweek, outsource, time management : Related Tags: folks, people, money

ISP throttling and DPI

June 16, 2008

We in the US have ISP's that are throttling users, metering users, and adding DPI (deep packet inspection) to the network. Most of it is causing a stir.

The privacy experts are aghast at the Charter-NebuAd DPI situation for targeted advertising.
Google is working on detection tools for consumers so that you can tell when your ISP is throttling or blocking -- YouTubers and VoIP folks will be thrilled.
Net Neutrality folks want hands off the network - no throttling or network management.

It has often been said that this is an FTC issue about False Advertising than it is an FCC issue.

Posted in Internet

Tagged: dpi, internet, net neutrality : Related Tags: common carrier, network, throttling, common, should

768k - now that's fast!

June 16, 2008

The FCC has updated its definition of broadband from the clunky 200K to the new, faster 768k. Telecomweb reports:

"The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), following years of criticism and threats of Congressional action, yesterday finally issued an order scrapping its previous definition of "broadband" as any service delivering of at least 200 Kb/s. .... The order, to be implemented by new rules to be issued within 120 days, sets 768 Kb/s as the minimum speed for what the FCC is now calling "basic" broadband, which extends up to 1.5 Mb/s.

Posted in FCC, broadband

Tagged: broadband, fcc : Related Tags: definition broadband, broadband, definition, providers

Why Hasn't SAAS Taken Off

June 13, 2008

Why North American Enterprises Aren't Interested in SaaS (according to Networld World mag)

According to a Forrester Research survey, these are the top 8 reasons why companies say "No Thanks" to SaaS.

Percent Reason

66% Integration issues
61% Total cost of ownership concerns
55% Lack of customization
50% Security concerns
42% "We can't find the specific application we need"
39% Complicated pricing models
39% Application performance
34% "We're locked in with our current vendor"

The security concerns and pricing models are the only thing in the hands of the people selling SAAS. Over at InfoWeek, there's an article about what people who use SAAS like.

Posted in saas

Tagged: saas : Related Tags: security concerns, pricing models, concerns

SAAS and Security

June 9, 2008

Here's the downside to SAAS: security breach and down time.

This week Amazon was down twice, which is hard to believe because I can not remember them being unavailable. Yahoo! Mail has had outages. Twitter is constantly down.

Posted in Web 2.0

Tagged: saas, security : Related Tags: security, think, business

When to SAAS

June 9, 2008

On LinkedIn Answers, there is a question about when you would use SAAS in place of in-house apps. Bob Raffo points out some reality:

Failure: CEO sees SaaS as a low cost replacement for in-house systems and as a path to reduce IT headcount. CIO is seen as a marginalized procurment manager.

That's mentality is a definite problem. But then often IT and automation are all about reducing head-count.

Posted in Web 2.0

Tagged: saas : Related Tags: success offering, business, hosted, people

TWC Metering Bandwidth

June 5, 2008

This week the US is abuzz with news that Time Warner Cable will be performing a trial in Texas on metering bandwidth. TWC set caps and overage is $1/GB. Now, as someone who once had a metered EVDO card, it is amazing how fast 40MB in a day in just email (and attachments) adds up.

Considering that YouTube, MySpace and Facebook are the top 3,4,&5 visited sites in the US, hitting your cap will be quick and easy.

Posted in Internet

Tagged: bandwidth, internet, metering : Related Tags: metering bandwidth, cable, bandwidth, unlimited, think, privacy

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