Telecom Reseller / Technology Reseller News

We’ve all been there. A mission critical product fails or underachieves, a service falls below expectations or outright fails, and we turn to our SLA, our trusty service level agreement, for a cure. It’s a moment of truth because we might learn the hard way what the service provider is actually obligated to do, and what he’s not. In this podcast AOTMP Executive Vice President, Tim Colwell outlines in great detail what that “best effort guarantee chicanery” is all about. Colwell discusses SLA trends, describes what we mean by “best effort guarantee”, describes SLOs service level objectives, and provides us with a way to evaluate SLAs. As always, Colwell, who writes a blog in TR, offers actionable advice, having defined the problem.

Visit www.aotmp.com

In the United States and Canada, Avaya remains the number one installed brand of real time communications solutions running voice and contact centers in hundreds of thousands of sites. Even as customers move to cloud or new on-prem solutions, Avaya’s large installed base remains an enterprise favorite. In this podcast John Croce, CEO of NVT Phybridge, outlines how Avaya users can avoid expensive rip-and-replace solutions. Croce discusses how Avaya recently enhanced its relationship with NVT Phybridge. The enhanced partnership will make it even easier to deploy Avaya devices and applications using their Power over Long Reach Ethernet (PoLRE) switch. Croce says that this approach can lead to 50-80% infrastructure savings, accelerated deployment, minimal IDF closet requirements, simplifying the network and ongoing management, and enable a migration to all IP with the infrastructure already in place.

NVT Phybridge will be at booth 727

NVT Phybridge will be hosting a session called, “Digital Transformation Simplified by Avaya and NVT Phybridge” Tuesday, from 10:45–11:45.

EVP, Steven Fair, will be co-presenting in a Wednesday session called, “Exploring ROI Derived from Implementing Solutions from DevConnect Technology Partners”, Wednesday, at 11:30. Please check show guides for updates times on all sessions.

Visit www.nvtphybridge.com

The contact center is the jewel in Avaya’s real communications crown. In this podcast Joe Fuccillo, CTO of Nectar, outlines how Nectar’s CX assurance helps Avaya users deliver quality experiences. In this podcast Fuccillo previews Nectar’s presence at the upcoming Avaya ENGAGE event. Nectar is a DevConnect Partner: certified with IP office and communication manager. Fuccillo describes the significance of Nectar’s presence on the Avaya global price list. Fuccillo walks us through their focus, at ENGAGE, on CX assurance. According to Fuccillo, contact center management can give you a detailed cost per call. However a bad customer experience can be very costly and at the same time much harder to measure, since the impact might include loss of years of customer loyalty and repeat purchases. Fuccillo outlines how they will be showing Avaya customers at ENGAGE how Nectar can help an Avaya user stay on top of these challenges and how Nectar’s certified and tested solutions enable Nectar’s customers to provide quality assurance across an Avaya network in all stages of digital transformation.

Visit www.nectarcorp.com

When you are installing IoT, if you are not using licensed wireless, you are gambling with your customers experience and critical data. Brian Ray, CTO for Iota Communications, explains the differences, which are significant, to Don Witt of The Channel Daily News, a TR publication.

Iota Commercial channels include Smart Building/Smart Energy and Iota Networks which focuses on the technology for OEM, Telcos and other IoT wireless solutions.

Brian Ray

Brian continues to explain the ramifications of using licensed or unlicensed spectrum as well as advantages to ensuring your spectrum is licensed.  For example, using a licensed spectrum has two significant benefits: greater reliability and better performance. Why? Think of it like a crowded room: As more and more people are packed in and talking simultaneously, it becomes harder to hear. Unlicensed spectrum users are competing with other users for priority. As an unlicensed user, you have no protection from interference on the part of other parties.

The Iota Network is the backbone and enabler of all of the  IoT solutions the company offers from Smart Buildings to Smart Energy. Purpose built for the Internet of Things, they are the first IoT network employing FCC licensed spectrum. Hop on board!

Their goal is to help businesses leverage technology and connectivity to reduce cost, increase efficiency and advance sustainability. Their dedicated carrier-grade network is purpose built to enable low-cost, long-range connectivity in even the most challenging of environments. This connectivity powers a data collection, analysis and visualization process that provides actionable insights, drives sustainability and profitability, and positively impacts our planet.

For more information, go to: https://www.iotacommunications.com/

By Gary Audin

Traditional enterprise software ring-fences your knowledge to the insights gathered within just one technology deployment - your own. Imagine exploding your effectiveness by having access to the knowledge and insights gained across thousands of similar deployments globally. This EDUcast provides quantitative data on what UC and CC sites are experiencing on a global scale and the data that influences CX.

Ross Williams, COO of Virsae www.virsae.com and Gary Audin recorded this EDUcast that provides a briefing on global UC management insights.

Ross discusses:

What is important for UC and CC CX

Opportunities for change

Applying big data and AI to analytics

Configuration issues that hamper CX

Insights collected from cloud-based service management

What you learn in this EDUcast:

Cloud UC / CC – driving change and opportunity for all of us

Different things matter now

Making those differences really count

Visit Virsae at Booth #412 Avaya ENGAGE, 2-5 February in Phoenix, AZ.

The smarts behind UC service management; Virsae delivers the insight and foresight to enable flawless communication. Our cloud-based platform, Virsae Service Management (VSM), continuously processes billions of data points from thousands of deployments around the world – delivering AI-powered analytics and diagnostics to enable progressively smarter management of your contact center and UC platforms. www.virsae.com.

“RingCentral made it easy,” says Jason Bystrak, Vice President of Cloud Business Unit at D&H. D&H has been present in the UC market long before unified and communications were ever used in the same sentence. So, when a company with over a century of experience of being a source to the channel decided to grow it’s cloud offering, keeping it simple for the partners is part of the picture. In this podcast we learn why and how D&H chose to offer its partners RingCentral. “Part of the reason we chose RingCentral, as well, is that we have a long-term legacy of selling end point devices… and we wanted to help our partners round out that solution and attach great products like RingCentral to that end point,” said Bystrak. Bystrak offers a detailed look at the opportunities that selling RingCentral gives to the partners. “There are some deep integrations into Office 365,” adds Bystrak, noting that RingCentral’s window into Microsoft matches the needs of many D&H customers.

Speaking to the channel community, Zane Long SVP Global Channel Sales RingCentral, says, “It’s not too late, your timing is perfect.” Long says that the cloud communications market is now $75 billion on 10% penetration. He believes that the new decade is pivotal, noting that customers who sign up often stick for up to seven years. The largest opportunities of cloud, according to Long, have just arrived.

Visit www.ringcentral.com and www.dandh.com

by Gary Audin

Where we work, how we work and when we work has changed significantly over the past decades. Audio conferencing has grown to become common place. However, where we are collaborating can be in a conference room, open office, cafeteria, conference exhibit floor, airport, or even outdoors. These varied locations present challenges to the conferencing technologies that need to be addressed. The conferencing endpoints are portable and have to overcome a range of environmental conditions to be effective.

Phil Marechal, VP Product Management & Business Development at Yamaha UC www.uc.yamaha.com and Gary Audin recorded this brief EDUcast tutorial discussing workplace conferencing technologies. The discussion starts with reviewing the changes to workplaces where an audio conference may be held. Phil then reviews the conditions that are encountered for today’s conference calls. He moves on to present the challenges that modern audio conferencing technologies have to contend to produce clear conversations under many distracting conditions.

What you will learn in this EDUcast:

The Changing Workplace

Workplace Conversation Goals

Challenges to Effective Collaboration

Technology Solutions

How does technology help?

Yamaha UC www.uc.yamaha.com audio and video conferencing solutions streamline collaboration and boost productivity wherever people need to speak openly, share freely, and create exceptional things. Yamaha’s considered approach to building enterprise-grade microphone systems, conference phones, and video sound bars ensures exceptional audio quality, ease of connectivity and flexibility for meetings across the table or across the globe. Wired and wireless options complement today’s nuanced and hectic business systems. With core tenets of simplicity, clarity, and efficiency, Yamaha brings to unified communications a passion for sound and performance that has been creating excitement and inspiration for more than 130 years.

by Gary Audin

A video collaboration connection can be made up of different vendors for the platform and endpoints and a service provider. When a video connection experiences screen freeze, pixilation or distortion, who do you contact? If you are an enterprise, MSP, vendor, or service provider, you want to avoid endless finger pointing, locate to the problem, and implement the resolution ASAP.

Steven Purcell, Sr. Director, Global Cisco Program Management at Nectar www.nectarcorp.com and Gary Audin recorded this informative EDUcast. Steven presents a thought process for analyzing measuring, monitoring, and mitigating video collaboration problems. He points out that the problem can be internal as well as external. Knowing there is a problem after the user complains is too late. Steven describes the real time performance analysis during a connection. He starts with the challenges and then moves on to how to view collaboration connections; what to monitor and report on so that problems can be flagged in real time. He finishes with how to deliver business value for the investment in the tools used by IT professionals & IT leadership responsible for operating and supporting voice & video collaboration environments.

What you will learn in this EDUcast:

How Collaboration is Changing

Real-World Operations Challenges

What’s Unique About Video

Segmenting the Problem

Nectar Approach

Delivering Business Value

Nectar Services www.nectarcorp.com has been committed to delivering market-leading software solutions that empower our partners and customers to dramatically improve management, visibility, and service delivery across global and enterprise converged Voice-over-IP (VoIP), SIP and MPLS networks. With a rapidly changing landscape, organizations are facing new operational challenges, increased complexity, interdependencies, and a failing eco-system of technologies to support newly converged networks.

Their flagship offering, Unified Communication Management Platform (UCMP) improves service delivery across integrated voice, data, video, and application solutions by providing critical performance information to executives and technical resources.

In the last decade, one of the biggest stories in the UC community was the advance of consumer products into the workspace and the blending of both work and private environments. Few other companies, other than Poly, were closer to the epicenter of that change. In this podcast, David Danto, Director of UC Strategy and Research at Poly, takes us into the ‘20s with the idea that artificial intelligence and machine learning will be the big stories this year and, in the years, to come. Danto describes how these technologies are being applied in a new generation of Poly equipment to enhance user experiences. Danto discusses how Plantronics and Polycom, “…better together…” as Poly, focused on a refresh of the major product lines in 2019 and then discusses the company’s vision for the new year and new decade. In this podcast, we learn how Poly is getting its customers ready for the new decades’ revolutions that will spring from AI, ML, and 5G, with innovative “smarter security” and products such as NoiseBlock.

“The handcuffs are off,” says Danto, referring to the end of forced purchases driven by siloed environments. Enterprise end user buyers enter the new decade with the freedom to buy what they like. “We need to be trusted partners for our end user clients,” says Danto regarding the channel. “The solution to a problem is more important than a product,” declares Danto, urging channel companies to adopt a long-term posture that creates lasting relationships and revenue verses an older one-time model. Danto describes how Poly has positioned itself to be a strong choice for people and for organizations as they shift from personal activities, work and collaboration at work, over the course of the day.

Visit www.poly.com

In the sixth and final episode of the Business of Technology Podcast Series, John Croce, CEO of NVT Phybridge, explores the idea of “Scope Creep” and whether it represents a threat or an opportunity. Croce reflects on the crash of Nortel, from a leader in networking and communications equipment to an extinct company. According to Croce, Nortel is gone, partly due to scope creep. Croce reflects that today, many large voice providers with an extensive legacy customer base are losing market share. Selling communication is more complex, with additional stakeholders and decision-makers to consider.

What can we do about scope creep? Gain end-to-end control and bring a more compelling voice offering. Croce offers recommendations and discusses how NVT Phybridge innovations create a modernization path to reduces network readiness costs while delivering better reliability and quality of service. For more information, visit www.nvtphybridge.com