Jim Machi : Industry Insight
Jim Machi

October 2014

You are browsing the archive for October 2014.

The Contact Center's Seemingly Oxymoronic Play: How to Decrease Costs Yet Improve Customer Service

October 28, 2014

I was recently asked to talk to some of our many contact center customers about the new contact center trends.  It struck me that all the trends I’ve seen over the years all pivot around one theme – how to both improve customer service yet also decrease costs.  This is not an easy thing to do, yet it’s always lurking in the background with contact centers.  And this is one of the reasons, if not the key reason, contact centers embrace new technology. 

Signaling Offers Great Differentiation for Mobile Value-Added Service Offerings

October 21, 2014

We’ve all heard that some Value Added Services (VAS) revenue such as Short Message Service (SMS) are starting to decline in some markets due to competing OTT services.  However, overall, the mobile VAS market is expected to grow at over 10 percent until 2018.  While I couldn’t find anything recently on the Internet that I could point to regarding market size, suffice to say globally it’s between $10B to over $20B per year, likely over $20B. So it’s sizable, still important, and worth fighting for if you are a mobile operator.

IOT tests do NOT tell the whole story

October 14, 2014

Service providers typically have infrastructure from multiple vendors installed in their networks.  Mostly this is by design since they don’t want to be locked into a single vendor, but some of this is also determined by consolidation that they have done, etc.  Either way, there is equipment from various infrastructure providers that make a telecommunications network run. 

LTE Asia Focus on Applications. Finally.

October 7, 2014

A couple of weeks ago, I spoke at the Signaling Focus Day of LTE Asia.  I spoke about the evolution of the Diameter Signaling Controller beyond just a Diameter Routing Agent (DRA) to one that includes the Interworking Function (IWF) so that value-added services can be enabled.  If you want to see my talk, please find it on Slideshare here.  Alan Quayle, who chaired the Signaling Day, has written a nice blog on LTE Asia and the Signaling Day in general.

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