Gawker Media, WIN 211, Alcatel-Lucent, VoltDelta, 9900 Wireless Network Guardian

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Gawker Media, WIN 211, Alcatel-Lucent, VoltDelta, 9900 Wireless Network Guardian

Gawker Media is a blog-publishing company located in New York City which found it had difficulty analyzing complex and multi-dimensional advertising contracts in aggregate.

Part of the issue was poor visibility into certain types of financial information, leading to inefficient billing processes and reduced spending controls. A lack of consolidated information slowed decision-making processes, making it impossible to produce on-time, accurate reports, company officials say.

The majority of Gawker Media's income is derived from advertising, but until this year the company had fairly limited knowledge about its advertisers. The reason: Gawker's managers, marketers, and IT people were using Excel spreadsheets and QuickBooks applications to gather business information.

Gawker's ability to look at its client base as a whole was limited. There was no easy way to look at advertisers by category (such as automotive) or region of the country when deciding how to allocate limited sales resources.

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Washington State, which has interconnected multiple, independently operated call centers under one common call handling and data management system, is on track to deliver a statewide implementation schedules among all 2-1-1 projects to date.

Tom Page, executive director of Washington Information Network 2-1-1, said the non-profit organization is tasked with implementing the 2-1-1 call center in the state to provide access to information about health and human services to the general public.

WIN 211's challenge, Page said, was to "define system requirements, manage the competitive evaluation process and select a vendor that could interconnect eight call centers across Washington and Oregon into a single, cohesive information service system."

WIN 211 is a group represented by more than 30 organizations, including United Way, several key state agencies, local community action programs and committed private individuals.

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Michael J. Schabel, a director of research at Alcatel-Lucent's Bell Laboratories is the general manager of the Alcatel-Lucent 9900 Wireless Network Guardian for the management of operators' wireless network resources. He recently wrote an article outlining his contention that wireless networks are the next frontier for the policy management controversy.

Policy management, as he's written, is "the enforcement of predetermined rules that allocate scarce network resources to users to ensure a consistent service quality." Needless to say the practice has a checkered history - remember Comcast's exploits in the field? - but Schabel says "wireless will be its final test."

There are ways to manage your wireless network data, which has "introduced extraordinary challenges for wireless operators who must manage network performance, subscriber experience and application quality," says a recent post on an Alcatel-Lucent blog.

The Alcatel-Lucent 9900 Wireless Network Guardian is a tool to enhance your wireless data network, with multi-vendor and multi-technology networks, real-time analysis for network control and "links the subscriber experience to every network element in real-time," company officials say.

Read more here.
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VoltDelta
's DeltaTouch platform is a resource for Directory Assistance and Enterprise-based customer care. According to company officials, the SaaS-based platform accepts calls via TDM or VoIP, uses voice recognition to engage callers in automated dialogs, and transfers calls to operators and call center agents located virtually anywhere.

Recently the call center solutions provider claimed the platform had reached a significant milestone: answering its 10 billionth call. With that sort of expertise under its belt, VoltDelta has written a white paper explaining "what it takes to deliver customer care performance and reliability with exceptionally high call volume as proof of performance."

VoltDelta's TDM and VoIP infrastructure currently supports over two billion calls and messages per year, relying on "a combination of network intelligence, established process, and personnel to support massive call volume with less than 5.26 minutes of unexpected downtime per year," company officials claim.

At a high level, three key technology components work together to support billions of calls, the paper explains. There's Interactive Voice Recognition, which is voice self-service using VoltDelta's speech recognition technology to engage callers with agent assistance and seamless automation to agent transfer when required.

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"Data has introduced extraordinary challenges for wireless operators who must manage network performance, subscriber experience and application quality."

So says a recent Alcatel-Lucent blog posting, discussing the company's 9900 Wireless Network Guardian, a product billed as something to enhance your wireless data network. It has multi-vendor and multi-technology networks, real-time analysis for network control and "links the subscriber experience to every network element in real-time," company officials say.

Executives familiar with mobile broadband network operations "know that radio networks can, and do, become congested for reasons having to do with signaling, rather than bandwidth consumption," according to an interesting blog post recently, noting that "executives at Spirent and Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs,  for example, have pointed out that mobile phone design can itself cause problems."

The iPhone itself tries to save power by disconnecting from the network whenever possible. Sometimes it disconnects a bit too frequently for users, but that's a different article.

Read more here.


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