Movero's Mobility Study, Verimatrix in Slovenia, Vestitel in Bulgaria, Sun's Speech Design, Level 3, Caller ID

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Movero's Mobility Study, Verimatrix in Slovenia, Vestitel in Bulgaria, Sun's Speech Design, Level 3, Caller ID

The news as of the second cup of coffee this morning, and the music is another of The Beach Boys' unjustly overlooked post-Pet Sounds albums, Wild Honey:

Movero Technology , a vendor of managed IT services for enterprise mobility, has co-sponsored the newly-released Aberdeen Group analyst research report on enterprise mobility, titled "More Mobility - Less Budget: Enterprise Strategies in the Current Economic Downturn." 
 
The study finds that companies "continue to maintain or increase their level of mobility support," with best-in-class companies "increasing their mobility budgets year-over-year as a percentage of total IT spend by 27.4 percent," demonstrating "the importance of mobility in delivering greater productivity and workforce effectiveness."

Melanie Gray, CEO at Movero, said the results show "a rapid uptake in mobility initiatives across a broad range of industries. From health care to higher education to even large automotive dealership networks, it is increasingly rare to find an organization that doesn't have some level of mobility in place."

The study looks at how companies in the top 20 percent across multiple metrics have found "additional efficiencies through consolidating central device management." Oh, it also recommends outsourcing to "highly specialized companies" providing mobile IT services, including device procurement, staging and logistics, invoice and expense management, over-the-air device management and 24x7 certified mobility support, just like companies such as... well, Movero.

John Smolucha, vice president of marketing at Movero, said as the total cost of owning and supporting mobile devices continues to increase, "organizations must adopt a more strategic approach to managing mobility."
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Verimatrix, a vendor of content security technologies for pay-TV networks, has announced Telekom Slovenije as the latest customer of the Verimatrix Video Content Authority System for IPTV. The product is intended to help protect video-on-demand and live broadcast premium content. 
 
The operator's IPTV service, known as SiOL TV with 80,000 subscribers, currently maintains the majority market share in Slovenia, according to the Agency for Post and Electronic Communications.

Telekom Slovenije's subsidiary, Planet9, creates platforms for mobile, Web and IPTV media, as well as producing content. According to Miran Nikolic, technical director, Planet9, Verimatrix's "strong technical leadership position in IPTV security" made VCAS for IPTV a candidate for deployment. Nikolic said Verimatrix's partner ecosystem also helps the telecom "integrate all the components."

VCAS for IPTV is a software-based, renewable content security product that can be updated as required to combat evolving security threats. VCAS for IPTV is tasked with protecting SiOL TV's 120 broadcast channels and library of 800 VOD titles. For the SiOL deployment, VCAS for IPTV will be integrated with Thomson's SmartVision middleware and Sagem's set-top-boxes.

VCAS security has been approved by major studios for protection of premium content, as well as by major broadcasters. It's used by pay-TV operators worldwide.
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Continuing in Central Europe, Bulgarian triple-play operator Vestitel BG , has selected Orca Interactive, a vendor of IPTV middleware and applications and a Viaccess subsidiary, to supply their RiGHTv IPTV middleware platform to underpin their new model-based IPTV service. 
 
Vestitel officials say the IPTV middleware will be deployed to replace the existing product powering Vestitel's current IPTV service, and will be the basis for their Partnership model - "to which multiple Bulgarian operators have signed up" -- scheduled to go live at the end of April 2009.

Vestitel BG, a subsidiary of the Bulgarian natural gas company, is a triple-play operator offering Internet, telephony and video services. The operator launched its own IPTV service two years ago and decided to use the investment in IPTV by launching a managed service to other Bulgarian service providers. Company officials say they liked Orca Interactive products such as COMPASS, a personalized content recommendation platform.

Ahead of the official launch, Vestitel has signed up some operators with the aim of rolling out the service to a nationwide subscriber base within the next two years.
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Sun Microsystems has announced that Speech Design, a European vendor of messaging and mobility products for businesses and network operators, has selected Sun's MySQL Cluster database to "promote carrier grade availability, performance and scalability" of their new messaging offering. 
 
Speech Design's products and services include messaging, call completion and other carrier products. Their open standards-based Thor platform is capable of integrating multiple services on a single system. 
 
The company has developed a new "call completion and advanced messaging" product, designed to address what Speech Design officials say are the "roughly 40 percent of all calls that are never directly connected -- usually due to the recipient being on another call, busy, in an area of poor service, or having their mobile device turned off." Speech Design's product provides users with SMS messages to make it easier to re-connect missed calls.

This system is based on MySQL Cluster Carrier Grade Edition, Sun's open source database, designed and certified for use in carrier grade communications environments, such as Subscriber Data Management systems and in Service Delivery Platforms.
 
Speech Design is using MySQL Cluster Carrier Grade Edition as a key component of the Thor application platform. Company officials say that since doing so, they have been able to improve developer productivity to accelerate time-to-market, achieve 99.999 percent carrier-grade availability with consistent millisecond response times, handle massive subscriber growth through dynamic scalability and provide redundancy across multiple sites through geo-replication.
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Level 3 Communications has announced that the company has expanded its relationship with Telefonica International Wholesale Services to establish a dedicated wavelength network across North America, which represents the largest single capacity commitment in Level 3 history.
 
Jose Ramon Vela, CEO of Telefonica Wholesale, says the Level 3 network has the scale necessary "to grow with our needs... across geographically diverse areas."

Under the terms of the 10-year agreement, Level 3 will transport voice, data and Internet traffic for over 250 million Telefonica customers from Europe and Latin America. The dedicated wavelength network includes triverse routes - with three alternative fiber paths - between high-traffic locations and route diversity across the remainder of the network. Level 3 officials say they have dedicated bandwidth along each route for Telefonica to expand with future demand growth.

"Level 3 continues to be a committed network partner for Telefonica and we are pleased to reach a new capacity milestone in delivering this solution for them," says Andrew Crouch, president of Level 3's Wholesale Markets Group. 

Telefonica has a significant presence in 25 countries and a customer base that amounts to 259 million accesses around the world, as well as a strong presence in Spain, Europe and Latin America. It is a 100 percent listed company, with more than 1.5 million direct shareholders.
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American Network has unveiled a Caller ID feature through PhoneCaption.com 's services for Hard of Hearing individuals. Until now, Hard of Hearing (late/accidental loss/difficulty in hearing) callers using captioned telephone services could only see the service provider number and not the calling party's information. 
 
PhoneCaption is now offering a captioned telephone service provider to feature Caller ID pass-through for inbound and outbound telephone calls. This lets Hard of Hearing individuals view their calling party's landline/mobile/IP phone number before answering the call.
 
The service uses technology which allows Hard of Hearing consumers to see caller ID prior to accepting the call and to receive captions while talking on the phone. As the caller speaks, the Hard of Hearing individual receives the spoken words in text captions to be read via the Web or a Cisco 79XX IP phone screen display. 
 
American Network officials say this approach combines technological resources "into a single efficient ecosystem that can take advantage of telecommunication's advanced core technology building blocks including voice, text and video."


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