Telecom Reseller / Technology Reseller News

“The sky is the limit,” says Jason Martin, CEO of Iotum, a CCA member that focuses on offering easy to deploy video conferencing solutions. Martin recalls that over time, video conferencing has traveled from the fringes of the communications industry, once a somewhat ignored novelty, to become, in this crisis, a new normal for global business. “Its time has come,” says Martin.  This leaves channel and cloud communications companies with some critical choices: cede the field of Zoom and Teams, which carries with it the possibilities of a long term commoditization of all of the channel’s services, or offer an alternative that is attractive to the enterprise and a model that offers a future for the channel. In this podcast, Martin discusses CallBridge, a white label virtual offering, that leverages WebRTC to enable seamless browser to browser meetings while it’s white label positioning allows the channel to offer their own branded alternative to Zoom and Teams. Martin points out special features to CallBridge and notes that the brand offers such powerful features such as AI, personalization and live streaming. Martin believes that this will allow channel partners to offer a story that takes conferencing to a higher level, not only enabling company meetings, but empowering companies to stream to customers, prospects or the public at large.

Martin discusses the company’s strong commitment to the Cloud Communication Alliance and extends a special offer for CCA member companies.

Visit https://www.iotum.com/callbridge/

Veena Vadgama, VP Marketing at Telestax and Rick Brashear, VP Carrier Sales with AveriStar, speak to Don Witt of the Channel Daily News about their partnering and the launch of the program. While the technology has been around with smart phones, when implemented with the laptop and desktop, a new approach is available for reaching and supporting a business’s customers and users.

Veena Vadgama

With the “Shelter in place” orders around the country and world, it restricts the ability to communicate with the customers. The easily installed SMS feature allows laptop or desktop devices for Cisco Collaboration user’s personnel to provide more timely responses directly to their customers via the customer’s phone.  This is a huge enhancement for companies to improve their customer communication capability.

Listen in as Veena and Rick describe how the popular Cisco Teams and UC-One packages offer many features, but do not support Texting out of the box.  The TeleStax solution is a big plus for the enterprise unified effort.

Founded in 2007 by two former BroadSoft employees, AveriStar is comprised of highly experienced engineers certified on Oracle Session Border Controllers, BroadSoft BroadWorks, Cisco Networking, and a wide range of CPE vendors.

AveriStar engineering specializes in highly customized, niche engineering projects that have helped service providers and large enterprises integrate and consolidate acquired BroadSoft and M6 platforms, migrate to new hardware, and transition subscribers from legacy voice solutions to next generation Unified Communications. In addition, AveriStar provides contracted Tier 3 and Tier 4 monthly support to providers across North America, assisting with provisioning, CPE customization, upgrades and patching of all Unified Communications components.

For more information, go to:  https://averistar.com/ or https://www.telestax.com/

Fraud not only threatens your customer, it also threatens your basic profitability. “These events can destroy anywhere from $10,000 to $250,000 in margins for carriers, in a very short period of time,” says Chris Lee, CEO Cloud Age Solutions. In this podcast, Lee outlines the scope of the problem and reminds carriers that fraud losses come right out of the bottom line and represent revenue that cannot be replaced. From Lee’s perch, he observes that the carriers are often more revenue focused than security driven, perhaps overlooking the hard reality that lost money on fraud is the most expensive of all losses, since it comes right out of the profit bucket. And a single event can vaporize profits for weeks, or even months. Lee makes the case for vigilance and lays out a plan that consists of prevention and mitigation. Prevention of events before they happen. This can include reviewing processes and better controls. Mitigation means “reducing the attack surface”. Carriers need to watch unusually long calls and other occurrences that basically red flag a call. Lee outlines how Cloud Age helps carriers tighten things up to prevent an event, but can help even when a fraud event has occurred.

We learn about their SaaS platform called gpxcloud that provides CDR analytics and cost management, and the company’s success in negotiating large fraud losses down significantly with underlying carriers, although Lee notes that cannot always be done, and the best move is to prevent fraud before it happens.

Visit cloudagesolutions.com

David McCourt, founder and Chairman of Granahan McCourt Capital, has had a long career in telecommunications and has not stopped! During his career, he has had an affinity for connecting rural areas like Sacramento/Roseville back in the 90s to broadband/internet. With the Ireland deal he will be connecting high-speed fibre broadband to 1.1 million people that do not have it now.

David tells Don Witt of The Chanel Daily News, a TR publication, how the rural areas have traditionally been underserved by telecommunications and the internet and how it is not fare. He will be leveling the playing field for the rural areas of Ireland and providing them the same job and educational opportunities that urban areas have available.

David McCourt

David will be discussing:

Whose responsibility do you think it is to solve this urban/rural digital divide?

What’s the scale of the problem?

How do you think the Covid-19 pandemic will have highlighted the connectivity challenges for rural areas around the world?

What options do countries have to try and fix connectivity for the homes and business that have been ‘left behind’ by commercial operators?

Last year, David published his latest best-selling book that is available on Amazon called “Total Rethink”.

Granahan McCourt Capital has world-leading experience in designing, building and deploying large-scale telecoms infrastructure. Founder, David McCourt, has held senior roles as CEO, President or board member at some of the biggest telecom network operators, including Level 3 Communications, MFS Communications, Corporate Communications Network and WorldCom.

For more information, go to: https://granahanmccourt.com/ or https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20191119005607/en/Granahan-McCourt-owned-National-Broadband-Ireland-signs or www.nbi.ie

David always interested to talk more about his book and some of the themes within it.  More info at www.davidmccourt.com

“You want to be comfortable, but not so relaxed that you’re not in a work mode," says Andy Abramson. Andy Abramson, a most prominent leader in the UC community, has worked remotely “forever” as he puts it. Abramson began working remote in an era that offered no real time communications beyond a phone and fax machine's data crackled over a POTS line. As a teenager, Abramson got a number of reporting gigs, working remotely from whatever venue time and circumstances permitted. In this podcast, Abramson discusses working remotely as a life-long method of getting the job done.

Abramson discusses how working remotely over the decades closely parallels the rise of UC and IT technologies. That rise, which enhanced remote site capabilities, ultimately created today’s virtual office. Abramson discusses the personal advantages of working remote such as better time control and more focused work. Economic advantages include freeing up office rent money and other expenses. He outlines a comprehensive strategy for success at working from home.

Abramson is the CEO of Comunicano, along with several other formal roles at leading UC firms.

Visit http://comunicano.com/

“Antimicrobial protection, this technology has been around for a long time, mostly for medical devices,” says John Lehane Vice President of Client Services at Artisan Power. “We are the first ones to bring that technology to mobile devices: Voice over IP phones from Cisco, Spectralink, and Ascom as well as scanners and printers.” In this podcast, Lehane explains that his company uses this technology as a part of the batteries that they offer for the most popular mobility devices many enterprises use. The batteries work and are placed on the backs of these devices just as other batteries are. These batteries, however, not only function as batteries but the antimicrobial compound on the battery basically prevents viruses and bacteria from living on the surface of the phone. We learn that before he current crises, although wireless devices have proliferated in hospital use, as in other industries, most devices had no on-board antimicrobial capacity. Lehane believes that his virus fighting phones are about to become the new “world standard”.

Artisan Power is a long-term member of the AscdiNatd. Their factory is based in Taiwan thus designating our products as TAA-Compliant per NAFTA and Federal import regulations. Their global order fulfillment center is located in Hudson, MA.

In a matter of weeks, organizations that had decided to not embrace a remote workforce model, and many others that had never planned a migration, have had to move entire workforces to their homes. However, the wrong technology can represent a barrier to adoption. At the same time, working at home also includes a mix of changes for individuals, big and small. In this podcast, Fredrik Hörnkvist, Sales Director for Americas at Konftel, outlines both ideas and technological solutions that can make working at home a productive and engaging experience. Hörnkvist outlines Konftel’s five tips for working at home and then we hear about the role of technology. Clearing clutter, creating a pleasant and ordered workspace, creating an agenda, structuring one’s day are a part of the picture. Having devices that plug and play, that deliver clean and clear audio, means being able to deliver a level of professionalism to every meeting. Hörnkvist believes that our work habits may forever be changed, and that work, as a multiple venue activity might be here to stay. Ideas and strategies are offered for IT managers and the MSP communities.

Visit www.konftel.com

It is clear, China has been actively working on and providing applications and code that have been included into popular Data Center and enterprise Red Hat, CentOS, and Ubuntu Linux versions for the past decade or more. Eric Cornelius, Chief Product Architect at BlackBerry explains to Don Witt of The Channel Daily News, a TR publication, how the survey was conducted and how the data pointed them to their conclusions.

Eric Cornelius

At this point, one has to assume that no area of the internet is safe and that China is watching, aware and stealing data/secrets and corporate assets. Linux, once thought to be secure, now reveals that, “groups examined in this report are using Linux servers as a “network beachhead” for other operations – that is, as a highly available attack vector that is always-on and poorly defended.” 

Listen in and find out –

What this means for enterprises as their employees work from home

How enterprises can better protect and secure their data and networks from foreign espionage

Organizations today face a chaotic environment as cybersecurity threats become more sophisticated, and pervasive, while the numbers of connected enterprise endpoints and the amount of data shared at the edge grows exponentially.

To bring order to this chaos, a comprehensive security approach to endpoint security is essential to protect against and remediate cyber threats, while providing visibility across all endpoints. Unified Endpoint Security needs to protect people, devices, networks and apps by offering improved cross-platform visibility and cyber threat prevention and remediation, while simplifying administration.

For more information, go to: [email protected] or https://www.BlackBerry.com/us/en

Special 120 day no payments financing offered to help companies get back on their feet

“What were seeing,” says Tim Powers, Vice President of Product Management and Strategy, “…are long lead times on certain products that are manufactured in certain regions… products that might have already been in short supply and the Covid-19 just compounded the problem.” In this podcast, Powers discusses the value of being a stocking vendor, which enables xByte to offer same day shipping. xByte is a full-service solution provider and stocking vendor of Dell hardware.

xByte is also responding by offering what Powers calls a “relaxed” set of payment options and financing approaches. Since uncertainty can cause customers to postpone making purchases and creating long term commitments, xByte has created a financing option of no payments for 120 days, and they will reimburse the client for 2 of their first 4 scheduled payments. xByte is offering a 120 day no payments lease program and rental options as well. The company is prioritizing support of heath care and front-line companies.

Visit https://www.xbyte.com/hw/ascdi-solutions.html

As much of the working world decamped to home offices, a revolution occurred in one of the nation’s largest industries. Healthcare went contactless. Since the earliest writings on the practice of medicine, healthcare has been a contact sport, a tactile occupation. As with many other things impacted by the pandemic, a model that has stood for millennia has been disrupted. “It's probably the biggest story in IT right now, how do we help healthcare organizations adopt a completely new way of dealing with patients,” says Gregg Smith, CEO of Remote Care Partners.

In this podcast Smith outlines the immediate crises of healthcare, an industry with empty waiting rooms, shelter-in-place homebound patients and clinicians, meaning both barriers to the delivery of care and revenue. While news broadcasts riveting images of overwhelmed hospitals, the thousands of offices and clinics that provide the more routine care most people consume when not in hospital, are siting near idle. Smith points out that telemedicine consists of much more than a teleconference call. Telemedicine is actually the blending of many IT and UC technologies, hardware, programming and services, to not only provide doctor patient dialogue, but a flow of diagnostic information to the clinician with an overlay of real time communications between patient and doctor and patient and clinic.

Smith describes his company’s RCP Hub that eliminates the chaos that occurs where patients needs to pair Bluetooth devices with incumbent WiFi available at the patients home or work. Smith then outlines how his company has worked to create a straightforward method of delivering health care metrics to the clinician, combined with messaging, conferencing and other communication tools that allows for the delivery of care, while remaining within regulatory boundaries.  We also learn that Remote Care Partners has thought through the medical economics of care. Their system also sets up billable services which are critical in making telehealth a practical activity.

Visit https://www.remotecarepartners.com/