Telecom Reseller / Technology Reseller News

Networks Reimbursement Program (SCRP), an initiative designed to Remove Replace and Dispose (RRD) of certain non-US equipment.

Regulatory agencies urged rural carriers to buy less expensive products to speed connectivity to sixty million Americans who live in rural areas and smaller towns, that are often left behind by a lack of connectivity. Later, the same agencies began to urge the same players to replace many of the same products as security, including national security issues mounted. Congress launched a program designed to help with those replacements. Many rural carriers have small subscriber bases, serve modest income customers and simple lack the cash and capital to abandon long term investments before their (usual) time.

Congress funded the replacement program, however, only partially.  In this podcast Summit Ridge Group’s Armand Musey walks us through the problem. Due to the lack of full funding from Congress, many participants have been stuck waiting to approve and start the Rip & Replace program. In many areas of the country, the work required to replace the telecom equipment takes several weeks or sometimes months. If wireless carriers’ emergency shutdowns aren’t accounted for, there will be major disruptions in service across the country as many carriers will be forced to go bankrupt to make these repairs.

Summit Ridge Group is the leading financial and business valuation consulting boutique focused exclusively on the telecommunications, media, and satellite industries globally.

Mary Clark is the New President of Numeracle

“Whether it's a call or a text message or an email, our vision is to restore trust, says Numeracle President and COO, Cathy Clark. At the recent Enterprise Connect 2024 event, Numeracle, an innovator in Verified Identity and Entity Identity Management for communications, announced a series of innovations and initiatives designed to specifically help enterprises preserve and improve the value of their contact centers and other parts of their communications complex, by ensuring trust and transparency with every phone call made.  “We can help make sure that enterprises are not mislabeled to spam when they're trying to reach consumer, that they're appropriately labeled and get through to that consumer.”

Clark is Numeracle’s new president. In this podcast, Clark shares her insights as person with a deep background in the telecom industry and perspective on the problem of solving fraud in communications and returning trust to all calls.

Trusted Logo and Name, Test How You’re Being Seen

Clark explains how Numeracle’s approach ultimately places a logo, the trusted brand logo of the enterprise, on the phone of the customer or call recipient. “You will see the logo and the reason for the call and the name of the company, giving the person on the other end, that consumer, myself, my kids, my parents, your parents, the opportunity to feel more confident in answering that call.” Numerical also offers Number Check, where organizations can test how their calls are delivered and displayed on consumer devices, utilizing screenshots of real phone calls across all top 3 wireless carriers.

Channel Opportunity

Clark also reaches out to the partner community with an opportunity. Organizations have huge investments in their brand and companies of all sizes need to be able to reach customers, clients, patients, students, citizens, vendors, and contractors via calls that will be answered and texts that will be seen and read.

https://www.numeracle.com/contact-us.

“When you think about the big pillars today, flexibility, mobility, AI…. these are going to be pillars for your productivity and collaboration at a workplace in the future, says Vandana Thomas Principal Group Product Manager Microsoft. In this podcast, Vandana shares with us how AI is being applied, almost as a loyal companion, eager to help with everyday projects, while quietly working across and being accessible from, many platforms. “Let's say I'm on LinkedIn or I am writing a Word document and I have a few thoughts. But if I want to structure the thoughts well, to use a certain tone, a fun tone and a somber tone, a formal tone, I can let Copilot know and Copilot can create the content to suit the needs.” Vandana tells us she used it in connection with this upcoming conference.  “I, in fact, used some of it to create my bio for the Cloud Connections Alliance.

Vandana Thomas will be at the upcoming Cloud Connections conference and will be speaking on Cloud Mobility Revolution: Revealing the Power of Mobile. In this short podcast we catch a glimpse of her thoughts on this key topic and learn a little bit about Microsoft’s approach. Microsoft seems determined to take AI and mobility, together, to deliver a seamless step(s) forward.

“Our solution is to provide the simplicity,” says Hon Kit Lam, the Vice President of Hybrid Connectivity Services for Tata Communications Network Business. “Our solution is to provide simplicity to consume all those connections between the cloud, between data centers, and even between their offices.” In this podcast, first of a series of three, we get an overview of Tata Communications and their approach to the paradox of modern communications, where a series of decisions and layers of technology may have made the network more complex, while enterprises need to be able to use simplified process to communicate to people, be they customers, employees, partners, investors, vendors, or contractors. “It's more complicated at the background and we try to also make the complicated things simple for them to use.”

Hon Kit Lam

We learn how Tata Communications is using AI to deliver simplicity at the user level. “The complexity itself can be addressed. However, the platform they need to select needs to have the intelligence, and to be open for the customers to consume with the API. They also need to have the muscle… they need to select the providers with the muscle plus the intelligence.” In this podcast series we learn how Tata Communications endeavors to deliver both.

Visit https://www.tatacommunications.com/

Webex's Jono Luk Says: Experience Matters, in the delivery of better EX and CX, AI—should serve the human component of work...

"Experience matters...," says Jono Luk, Vice President Of Product Management, Webex Contact Center, Webex by Cisco. In this podcast recorded live Enterprise Connect EC24, Jono outlines a broad-based vision to help the enterprise step up EX and CX. Cisco is unveiling general availability of the all-new Webex  Customer Experience Essentials for customer-facing employees who are not traditional contact center agents. Cisco is also announcing new innovations in the Cisco AI Assistant for Webex Contact Center, quality management functionality and CRM integrations.

AI—should serve the human component of work...

In this podcast we also discuss the role of AI in the service of helping people work. From a related Cisco blog (read below): "That is why, experience matters. Any tech—even #AI—should serve the human component of work. It should work quietly and transparently in the background, making things easier, better, and faster. Our entire  Collaboration portfolio is designed with that goal in mind: to deliver unrivaled experiences for customers and employees."

Visit www.webex.com

More on Cisco

Webex's Jono Luk Says Experience Matters

___________________________

Previously Published... Cisco Blog on AI

Experience Matters: The Role of AI for Customer and Employee Experiences

We are in the middle of a major technological transformation that promises to change how we work and collaborate. We’re already seeing the benefits that AI can bring, but in an AI-first world, human interactions – experiences – matter more than ever.

Experiences, connections, interactions—these are at the heart of collaboration. Things like real-time discussions, sharing of ideas, and brainstorming are the moments when teams make progress and real work gets done. Your customers want to engage in different ways, too. The difference between satisfied and unsatisfied customers is your ability to connect with them. And the bar for using AI in customer experiences is high—it must make human interactions better.

That is why experience matters. Any tech—even AI—should serve the human component of work. It should work quietly and transparently in the background, making things easier, better, and faster. Our entire Collaboration portfolio is designed with that goal in mind: to deliver unrivaled experiences for customers and employees.

Customer Experiences

The bar has never been higher for what it takes to deliver a great customer experience. Customers expect a personalized experience that is accessible through their familiar channels of communication. That’s why we built a world-class contact center platform with support for a wide array of digital channels in addition to voice.

Webex Contact Center is built on the same platform as the Webex Suite, which means we can scale innovations across workloads, including AI. We believe that AI will have a profound effect on customer experiences—the future of customer experience will be intelligent.

The AI Assistant for Webex Contact Center is a key part of our self-learning contact center. We have brought industry-leading AI capabilities to all the places that matter, empowering agents and customers alike. Innovations like topic analytics and automatic customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores, now available in beta, intelligently analyze large amounts of data to improve agent performance and maximize customer satisfaction.

The same audio and language intelligence capabilities powering meeting, message, and call summaries in Webex also enable virtual agent and dropped call conversation summaries, which will be available in beta later this year. And AI-powered suggested responses, agent coaching highlights, and wrap-up summaries are also expected to be available in beta later this year.

We are also introducing new workforce optimization quality management ...

“We want to make sure we're delivering a product out the gate that meets the needs of the peer network,” says Josh Blalock, Chief Video Evangelist at Jabra. “Knowing full well that those needs are evolving at lightning speed.” Hearkening to both past traditions of “evergreen” products, while at the same time, building devices that anticipate changing needs and technologies, we learn how Jabra is working to make product investments last. Jabra is also looking to help people use video better, to literally be their best selves in video and to get more out of conferences. We learn how AI will play an active role in doing that and more.

Visit www.jabra.com

“Call Fabric is sort of like the second coming of the entire SignalWire platform, says Anthony Minessale, founder, and CEO of SignalWire and FreeSWITCH. Call Fabric simplifies complex communication technologies into user-friendly building blocks, enabling the creation of tailored communication solutions, from call routing to AI interactions, without requiring advanced technical expertise. “Call Fabric is the culmination of all the, say the true vision of SignalWire,” adds Minessale.

In this podcast recorded live at Enterprise Connect, we learn about a set of products that SignalWire is offering the large enterprise community, that enable more choice, often lower cost and open the door to more customized experiences.

Visit www.signalwire.com

The Pulver’s 25 Cent Solution, Enterprise Connect Podcast, The key to successful deployment for AI in a company is one word, discernment.

“It's 40 years old, 40 years old, has not necessarily been tried out in this capacity yet. But imagine that before you initiate a call to call someone, you paid something. $0.25,” asks Jeff Pulver. In this Live podcast recorded at Enterprise Connect, Pulver looks at an old solution to a growing problem. People aren’t answering the phone. Everyone now has a phone. Everyone has a phone almost everywhere they go.

But no one is answering the phone because calls can’t be trusted.

Can charging strangers a simple 25 cents (or some sort of fee) be the spam speed bump the industry has been looking for?

Discernment

“The key to successful deployment for AI in a company is one word, discernment,” declares Pulver.

“I mean, the key to successful deployment for AI in a company is one word, discernment. If you learn how to discern and you understand, if you're the person running the company or running the department and your boss says, well, you must be using AI tools now, it really doesn't matter so much whose platforms you're using. But what does matter is the people whose hands you give the tools to, that they understand the problems being asked.”

Visit www.jeffpulver.com

More Jeff Pulver

Arnold sees three large use case families, analyzes the role of AI

Are we at a Jeff Pulver AI Moment?

“AI is dominating every conversation, probably more than the Informa folks who produced this show maybe care to realize because the show floor is still dominated by vendors in the comms and contact center space,” observes leading industry analyst and speaker, Jon Arnold. In this special show wrap podcast, Arnold goes beyond the slogans and tag lines on AI, to take a closer look at how AI will change the enterprise and especially the way enterprise’s use their vast contact center investments, to engage the many people who need to interact with an organization. Arnold links past trends to things shaping the future. “My focus is on the impact of AI on speech technology, specifically in the enterprise.”

Arnold also gives us a glimpse of the presentation he made at Enterprise Connect. Arnold has organized the technologies into three broad types: employee based, line of business based, and organization based. Everyone in our industry should look at this interesting model, especially as we enter a period of intense change.

2025

Arnold walks us through a what we might be seeing in the coming twelve months and we look at the growing need for a better and more certain regulatory structure. Capital isn’t shy of risk, but capital does not like regulatory uncertainty, where a sudden arbitrary decision can create unintended impacts. Are we at a Jeff Pulver AI moment?

Visit https://www.jarnoldassociates.com/

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