The overall number of channel partners -- VARs, SIs, ISVs, what have you -- offering cloud services to U.S. small and medium businesses has grown enormously since 2008, according to AMI-Partners' 2010 US SMB Channel Partner Report, fueled in part by the prevailing economic conditions and new cloud solutions and technologies.
With strong adoption by these SMBs, Remote Managed IT Services are “growing rapidly and becoming more structured in the U.S.,” according to the report’s officials, who add that according to new research by New York-based AMI-Partners, “there are more products available for U.S. SMBs and more methods for delivering these tools in an efficient manner for channel partners.”
The research finds that overall, “current conditions are very promising for partners to embrace the cloud, cautioning that however, “the channel partners are hampered in their transition to cloud-based services by their small scale and accompanying legacy cost structures and business models,” according to Avinash Arun, Channel Partner Research Manager at AMI. These factors have resulted in somewhat higher costs for end-users.
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According to Benjamin Stone, a lawyer of the Seattle office of law firm Cozen O'Connor, who handles Telephone Consumer Protection Act class actions nationwide, Simon & Schuster recently agreed to pay up to $10 million to settle a putative class action by consumers who allegedly received text messages promoting a new Stephen King novel.
“Thus, if your company uses any type of dialing hardware or software, or uses vendors that do,” Stone writes, “you should be aware of the provisions of the TCPA and strategies to prevent litigation.”
Stone provides a good summary of the key points of TCPA you should be aware of if you’re using this technology. Some highlights from his summary:
The FCC, which issues regulations interpreting the TCPA, has interpreted "automatic telephone dialing system" broadly. The FCC has ruled that a predictive dialer — which, in relevant part, stores pre-programmed numbers or receives them from a database — is an automatic telephone dialing system.
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Bandwidth.com, a provider of Internet and VoIP services, outgrew its homegrown CRM system -- but its partners required controlled access to the Bandwidth.com CRM, This meant they needed a system with enough security but still easily accessible over the Internet.
The company’s specialized pricing engine, a component of the sales process, needed “sophisticated, bidirectional integration with the new CRM,” company officials said, adding that because Bandwidth.com is a reseller of communications services providing first-line customer support, “the efficiency of the company's service teams was critical to profitable operations.”
So after looking at their integration, customization, and functional requirements, Bandwidth.com selected Salesforce CRM. Using Salesforce CRM Service, Bandwidth.com officials say, they “coordinate and manage customer service and support across the numerous telecommunications parties involved in delivering service to customers."
Force.com enabled integration between Bandwidth.com's proprietary pricing engine and Salesforce CRM, according to Bandwidth.com officials, adding that the company used Salesforce.com's customization tools to help track inventory, business initiatives, and referrals. To meet the needs of four different customer support operations, Bandwidth.com implemented multiple case record types -- “a standard Salesforce CRM capability,” company officials said adding that VoIP integration “boosted call center and inside sales productivity through incoming call screen pops and outbound autodialing."
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Going beyond VoIP, IPTV or even Triple Play? Today’s unified network monitoring theme is Service-over-IP (SoIP). So say officials of Gigamon Systems.
In other words, they say, “all revenue-generating next-generation services (voice, video and data) introduced by carriers now share the common feature that they are simply digitalized data carried over IP-based Ethernet.”
But it won’t be all cut and dried, leading to such problems as societal struggle.
SoIP will be a source of struggle – “not just the obvious market-based struggle between cable providers and telecommunication providers, but a societal-based struggle between expectation and business reality.”
The way Gigamon sees it, as SoIP enjoys mainstream deployment, “consumers will demand Quality-of-Service that they are accustomed to with traditional mediums like analog telephone and television.” This is in spite of added features and reduced price.
Read more here.
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