Telecom Reseller / Technology Reseller News

“It’s very much about collaboration and making things work better with that,” says Stephen Wingfield of Bicom, about the buzz this year at ITEXPO and in the industry at large. In this podcast Wingfield maps out the way in which things such as SMS are now central to corporate communications and therefore must be integrated with corporate communications systems. Wingfield believes that the nature of communications is changing and that companies need to partner with solutions that can meet those challenges, noting that even internally, people are using different tools to communicate. “Above all our vision of Unified Communications becomes more important as each additional item is put together, how that remains useable with the rest of the ecosystem.”  Wingfield discusses Bicom’s close work with partners and their vital role in the developmement of new technologies and products.

Visit www.bicom.com

Cato Networks, the leading provider of cloud-based SD-WAN, announced this week that it has been certified as a connectivity partner by RingCentral, a leading provider of enterprise cloud communications, collaboration and contact center solutions. The certification was provided as a result of call quality and resiliency testing performed by RingCentral that demonstrated the ability to maintain enterprise call quality even with sub-standard network performance using SD-WAN from Cato Networks. In this podcast Ron Hamlett, Director of Channel for the Americas for Cato Networks walks us through the announcement and its impact on the larger channel and UCaaS community. According to Hamlett, the certification validates that Cato’s solution works and that Cato can help deliver the QoS that is sometimes being lost on migration. Hamlett notes that RingCentral’s certification was a global validation. “As more customers are displacing MPLS, why don’t we give that back, leveraging our backbone,” says Hamlett about what inspired the idea. Hamlett recognized a gap that needed to be filled. Hamlett outlines opportunities for the channel and thinks that this announcement points to the value proposition being offered.

Visit www.catonetworks.com

“We offer two sides of the coin,” says Mario Cuello, CEO of Epygi. The eighteen-year-old solution provider offers both on premises and cloud products, enabling Epygi partners to offer customized solutions to end users. In this podcast, Cuello outlines some news on the Epygi, including expanded features for school, hotels and new vertical markets. Cuello discusses Epygi’s call center solution, which now includes outbound call center capabilities. Cuello notes that the firm has picked up many prominent customers including the Miami-Dade Office of the State Attorney, 11th Judicial Circuit, the largest legal prosecutor’s office in the State of Florida and the fourth largest overall in the United States, requiring them to handle a large volume of calls. Cuello outlines cloud opportunities for channel partner and MSP companies.

Visit www.epygi.com

Raymond Pearson, Channel Director at Virsae, knows first-hand how challenging it can be for a contact center manager to gather information about the health of their customer interactions. In this podcast, Pearson discusses how Virsae Service Management delivers on the gaps that typically confront contact center managers.

As a former consultant who provided advice to large contact center customers, Raymond Pearson has a passion for those in charge of the customer experience.  He also knows how frustrating it can be for contact center managers to gather information about the health of their ecosystem.  That is why he views Virsae Service Management (VSM) as a Contact Center Manager's best friend. "There's a whole lot of (additional) information that can dramatically effect customer experience that most contact managers never see, and VSM shines a light on those data points," says Pearson.

Pearson says VSM alerts call center managers to logical faults with call handling systems, providing insight on how customer service could be affected.  VSM can also notify call center managers whether or not calls are actually being recorded. A lot of contact center managers don't even have basic data that shows usage of their carrier trunks, for example," says Pearson, noting that VSM provides insight on all those data points. Pearson notes several areas, critical to customer service and to workforce management, where VSM provides crucial and actionable insights. We learn how VSM delivers call flow diagrams and color codes potential logical faults in those call flows, whether it be a call flow that is never called or steps in the if/then flow that occur after a stop step, for example.  The logical faults are potential landmines for customer experience issues. VSM reports and alerts on failures within the call flows.  For example, when queue announcements fail to play, or when agents and callers can’t be connected due to constraints with network bandwidth. We also learn how VSM helps call center managers with peripherals like call recording and WFO. As a cloud service, VSM collects data that is only available in the CC environment for seconds at a time and stores it for reporting.  With VSM there's no limit on storage and processing, which gives contact center managers information with historical depth for trending. "When I was managing 1800 locations across the US, if I had a platform like this, my life would have been much, much easier," says Pearson. Learn more at www.virsae.com.

“What we are starting to see is organizations embarking on digital transformation,” says Eric Bauer, VP Marketing and Business Development, for North America. In this podcast, Bauer outlines a new initiative from AudioCodes designed to meet the challenges of that transformation: Software Defined Voice Networking (SDVN). Bauer outlines SDVN and makes the case for its deployment. Notably, SDVN is one of those products that uses software to pull together legacy investments and enable those assets to serve in a n improved network, even while immediate rip and replace is avoided. Bauer describes how the vendor agnostic approach will work with what you have, be it Avaya or Cisco, embrace what a company might be working on adopting, such as Teams, without disruption of high costs. We hear about some real use cases and how SDVN represents a unique partner opportunity. Bauer discusses availability and additional resources.

Visit audiocodes.com

Read the January blog entry on SDVN here

Dheeraj Remella, chief technologist at VoltDB indicates to Don Witt of The Channel Daily News, a TR publication, that 5G is going to be seriously fast.  In order to identify network and telecommunications anomalies, the database needs to be screaming fast. Utilizing traditional disk and cloud-based databases will lengthen the response time before an intruder is detected costing the carrier thousands of dollars every time they occur. Organizations need to operationalize fast data and make informed business decisions in-events and in real-time, a challenge CSPs must meet if they hope to succeed in the race to monetize 5G.

Carriers will be making decisions on technology that they will be using when 5G is deployed.  In many cases, traditional solutions may be adequate. However, all applications that will be used in 5G should be evaluated for their performance in the 5G world.

Critical areas such as fraud detection and intrusion detection should use a speed enhancing technology to keep the dark side from making any headway with the technology advancements which will be deployed soon.

VoltDB powers applications that require real-time intelligent decisions on streaming data for a connected world, without compromising on ACID requirements.

Real-time now means milliseconds. Businesses demand moving from post event reconciliation to in-line data processing. Value of data diminishes rapidly if action is not taken immediately. Then opportunity to monetize an event is lost.

Traditional databases fall short in meeting these requirements; as Dr. Michael Stonebraker, founder of VoltDB, discovered during his research: almost 90% of the database’s allocated hardware resources were being used just to manage the DBMS instead of doing useful work. This research led to the H-store project which in turn led to the commercialization of VoltDB.

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

“This was the best event I’ve attended yet,” says Ivelin Ivanov, is Co-founder Telestax, in relation to having been at several Cloud Communications Alliance (CCA) conferences over recent years. In. this this podcast, Ivanov reflects on the rapid evolution of the cloud communications market, the Cloud CCA and CCA events. “This is the first time I have seen at any conference that every panel, every session… was in reference to the CPaaS market,” says Ivanov. “That was unprecedented.” This podcast features Ivanov’s review and impressions of the event and information on Telestax. “It’ a new era, service companies have to be almost like software companies, they have to move, they have to create constant product value…” says Ivanov about what he observed at the conference. Ivanov discusses the search for sticky high value growth, successes with SD-WAN, and how CPaaS has emerged as an ultimate platform to build high value services. “The type of solutions that we are seeing built with our (Telestax) platform are commanding 80 to 90% margins, (including) unique, tailor-made quickly built solutions for verticals for enterprises,” reports Ivanov on how Telestax is helping service providers stay ahead of the need to offer value.

Visit www.telestax.com

“For us healthcare has to change from static to a more dynamic environment,” says Christian Aboujaoude, Senior Director Enterprise Architecture at Scripps Health. Recorded at the recent Avaya Engage conference, Aboujaoude provides real world insight into how a major health care provider is changing a very large installed communication network in order to accommodate the digitization of health care delivery. Aboujaoude discusses the “legacy” patient experience of calls and missed appointments in contrast with online services that permit people to directly set up appointments, get notifications and more. Aboujaoude outlines hot the digitization of health care also helps people that are caring for children, an elderly family member or a vulnerable adult, not tom mention offering better and more coherent oversight of one’s own care. “We are working very heavily with Avaya to truly try to build an ecosystem that is unified in a fashion that when I make a change in one place, I am able to see the ripples of that change many steps down the line, so that we can understand, modify, adjust and be ready so that we are not introducing a negative patient experience.”

Visit www.avaya.com

“Our first priority was to bring together the UC, says Melanie Totcky, Global Infrastructure Contact Center Lead, for Johnson Controls. In a story that will be familiar to many TR readers, Totcky describes how, step by step, Totcky and her team put their arms around UC and their contact center needs in the aftermath of a major merger. Totcky describes how Johnson Controls partnered with Avaya to update the contact centers, to plan and execute a still underway process of bringing together the company’s general UC needs and introducing a series of modernizations to the contact centers. With over 100,000 employees in 150 countries, nearly 1,100 separate sites and 10,000 agents, Totcky describes how the projects was divided into stages and how her team and partners have introduced changes while avoiding disruptions and at a pace the workforce of the firm could absorb. In this podcast we learn how Avaya played a role in this process, an example of the San Jose based solution provider’s strengths on the larger contact center market. Totcky notes that when better tools are offered to employees, the employees in turn can offer better service to the public, illustrating that improvements inside a company’s infrastructure can actually impact the company’s image and experiences with the public.

Visit www.avaya.com

“This market has become so competitive, and it is a world of a lot of me-too products,” says Robert Cooper of Wildix. Recorded love at ITEXPO and MSPExpo, where Cooper presented a session on market differentiation to a sellout crowd (standing room only). Cooper thinks many companies are suffering in not being able to offer a difference and therefore are pushed to compete on price only. In this podcast, Cooper lays out the case to differentiate a set of services that set the services offered apart. Cooper looks at mobility, flexibility and simplicity as being critical. “With Wildix, we started with the end user focus out,” says Cooper. Copper thinks that offering simple to use services is important because complexity discourages users and can even lead to dissatisfaction and defection. We learn about Wildix and how Wildix is working with its partners to deliver better results and experiences.

Visit wildix.com/us/