Graham Francis
| The SIP Blog is just that; with opinion and analysis on all things SIP in the world of VoIP
CloudTC and N-Able Acquired
"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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ProfitBricks: Where InfiniBand Meets Cloud 2.0
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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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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10 Lessons from Volleyball
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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Emerging Threats Combats a Million Plus Pieces of New Malware a Week
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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NFV-Based Software Telcos Need OSS/BSS Interoperability
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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SysAid's Lifshitz: The Cloud Will Dominate ITSM Market
Cloud computing has really become a household word with mainstream media outlets running stories on television about the growth in the space...
Full Story »WebRTC School Pre-Registration now available
May 21, 2013At Enterprise Connect I was asked a few times by people if The SIP School would be getting involved with WebRTC but I couldn't really answer as things were in the 'early stages' of development at that point. Well now, today we've posted the following to our website / facebook page and other locations ... So YES... we are doing something with WebRTC
"WebRTC has become the hottest topic in the world of communications today and of course there will be a demand for training on both how WebRTC works and how to develop WebRTC applications.
Cisco and The SIP School
January 9, 2013
Simply put, Cisco has started to resell all SIP School training and certification programs on it's Learning Network Store and you can probably guess that we're quite happy about this development.
Anyone who works for Cisco automatically gets a discount when purchasing through this site so please check it out here...
https://learningnetworkstore.cisco.com/market/prod/homeWork.se.work
Now, which other giant is next?
Anyone who works for Cisco automatically gets a discount when purchasing through this site so please check it out here...
https://learningnetworkstore.cisco.com/market/prod/homeWork.se.work
Now, which other giant is next?
Networking 4 VVoIP released into the wild!
November 15, 2012
It’s taken us a while but at last the update to our Networking for VoIP program is here!
It’s had quite a makeover and is now called Networking 4 VVoIP where VVoIP stands for Voice and Video.
USTelecom and The SIP School
July 2, 2012
Here at The SIP School we're proud of all of our associations and partnerships which have helped us to established our training and SSCA® SIP certification as the industry standard.
Well, we now have another one and it's massive..!
USTelecom, "the nation’s premier trade association representing service providers and suppliers for the telecom industry" has now partnered with us to provide access to our SIP programs via their own website at http://www.ustelecom.org.
Here's a copy of the press release that is going out this week....
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Announcing USTelecom Online SIP Training and Certification
In cooperation with The SIP School™, USTelecom is pleased to offer online training in the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), the foundation of voice communications all over the world. SIP is the underlying protocol of VoIP, voice over LTE and is the fundamental building block of the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) architecture.
USTelecom members receive 10% off retail course/exam prices.
Well, we now have another one and it's massive..!
USTelecom, "the nation’s premier trade association representing service providers and suppliers for the telecom industry" has now partnered with us to provide access to our SIP programs via their own website at http://www.ustelecom.org.
Here's a copy of the press release that is going out this week....
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Announcing USTelecom Online SIP Training and Certification
In cooperation with The SIP School™, USTelecom is pleased to offer online training in the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), the foundation of voice communications all over the world. SIP is the underlying protocol of VoIP, voice over LTE and is the fundamental building block of the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) architecture.
USTelecom members receive 10% off retail course/exam prices.
SIP Sales training for 2012
June 29, 2012SIP Communications for Sales and Marketing professionals has now been updated and the new elements of the training are now live.
New stuff includes:
- Lots of general updates re: Competitors and Pricing comparisons inc. US/Canada/UK and Global locations
- More on Hosted PBX especially how to compare Hosted PBX to SIP trunking offerings
- What Hosted PBX can and should offer
- How to describe benefits of Hosted PBX to clients
- Hosted PBX analysis spreadsheet for you to download
- Plus a 'Mini-module' that describes MPLS
There is a lot of valuable information in this program that will help Sales and Marketing people see what's happening in the market in order to build their own offerings, target their clients and make sales.
SIP survey results are in..!!!
May 21, 2012
At last.... the results of the SIP survey 2012 are in and now published online - you can find the document by visiting www.thesipschool.com.
With a rise from 400 to 500 on last years respondents and a few new questions we aimed to take a look at SIP Trunking and specifically, to find what the most common issues during SIP Trunk deployment are and what can be done to make these issues occur less frequently, if at all.
There are some great numbers to check out such as:
Thanks to all for participating and of course, we'll be running this again next year.
With a rise from 400 to 500 on last years respondents and a few new questions we aimed to take a look at SIP Trunking and specifically, to find what the most common issues during SIP Trunk deployment are and what can be done to make these issues occur less frequently, if at all.
There are some great numbers to check out such as:
- 55.5% or respondent companies are using SIP trunks now!
- 70% have a VoIP PBX as their main PBX
- Avaya leads the manufacturer list
- Acme Packet is top of the SBC list
- Most problems reported last year are still occurring
- Yet support seems to be getting better from most companies
- Also, Fax seems to be requested more than HD voice
Thanks to all for participating and of course, we'll be running this again next year.
March madness!
April 10, 2012Phew! what a month March was – I was running around all over the place and The SIP School team rarely saw me.
First up, UCexpo in London at Olympia on the 6th.
This was a great show and apart from the fact that a cancelled train service almost made me miss my own session it was a well spent day.
My main observation from the show was that there was a big presence from Microsoft and a lot of other manufacturing/service companies wanting to show that they are working hard to enhance a ‘Lync based’ UC solution with their own offerings. Cisco had a very small presence though it’s big rival Avaya did have a reasonably sized booth though right up the corner?
Unified confusion - I think not!
February 20, 2012Last year I kicked off something called ‘The SIP trunk challenge’. The idea was to try to find a good clear description of what SIP trunking is and the challenge worked well with over 353 votes and a worthy winner – blog here.
So I got brave… I tried again with the ‘Unified Communications challenge’ with the remit of:
“Define Unified Communications in a simple phrase that when used to explain UC to a new client, they ‘get it’ right away and then want to get their cash out.
The SIP School and OnSIP
January 10, 2012
SIP education is what we do and we like to think that we help people become confident in this ever changing protocol. To help them learn about SIP we advise students to get themselves SIP addresses to run the labs and to help them, we point them to a myriad of free services such as SIP2SIP, Iptel, Voipuser.org and many many more - in fact, the more the better as it gives people choice and also alternatives if one doesn't work too well in their part of the world.
Today we added another option by working with our friends at OnSIP.
When a new student joins us, they are automatically provisioned an OnSIP SIP account for the domain thesipschool.com i.e. John1234@thesipschool.com ... This adds a fantastic dimension to our training service and helps our students even more.
So a BIG thanks to OnSIP and for the full press release, please read on...
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Today we added another option by working with our friends at OnSIP.
When a new student joins us, they are automatically provisioned an OnSIP SIP account for the domain thesipschool.com i.e. John1234@thesipschool.com ... This adds a fantastic dimension to our training service and helps our students even more.
So a BIG thanks to OnSIP and for the full press release, please read on...
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January 10th 2012
The SIP Trunk Challenge - Winner!
November 14, 2011So it all started off with the question ‘What is a SIP trunk?’
I went to the ‘Channel Partners’ conference in Chicago back in September and this question was being asked so many times it got me thinking that there is no single and clear explanation that people can use over and over again and be sure that the client understands what SIP trunks are. Of course, a lot of clever people out there have no problems explaining what a SIP trunk is and their clients are making SIP calls all day long and reaping the benefits of this ever evolving technology but after hearing this question repeated over and over again – not just at Channel Partners but other events such as ITEXPO and Enterprise Connect I thought that people in the Telco business could help me out in my quest.
So, I placed the question on a number of groups on Linked in and received around 90 responses.
