Telecom Reseller / Technology Reseller News

While Skype for Business enabled better communications Microsoft Teams really makes major advancements in the work efficiency of a company department or project. Brad Chapin, Product Manager for Microsoft Solutions at Ribbon Communications discusses the transition from Skype for Business to Teams.

In the discussion learn:

What is Teams

What is the Teams client

Teams is a standards based approach to work groups or departments.  A person can be in a number of Teams groups.  Each group would be able to notify members when a comment has been made or a modification was made to a document.

The early version of Teams was limited to 12 countries. This actually limited the reach of Teams projects. To correct the issue, Microsoft introduced Direct Routing.  This corrected the country restriction. It allows Inbound and Outbound Calling plans via Ribbons SBC portfolio now enables customers to additionally leverage their TDM or SIP Trunks for PSTN and PBX voice calling in the Teams client interface natively.

One of the requirements of Teams is that you use a certified Session Boarder Controller (SBC). Sonus is working closely with Microsoft to certify their SBC.

I have been using Teams for a few days now and it is very intuitive.  The icons convey their function and the functions are easily understood.  It seems to be a great way to provide group access to Office365 files.

For more information, go to: https://ribboncommunications.com/search/site?keys=Teams or https://ribboncommunications.com/

It is not often that a technology company employee gets the opportunity to travel to the other side of the world to help children with cleft palates and change their lives forever for the better. That is what Bob Knauf, Global Vertical Solutions Manager for Polycom did a short time ago. He explained to Don Witt of The Channel Daily News, a TR publication, that the entire team had a wonderful experience.

It started by setting up the technical equipment.  This allowed the doctors to broadcast the operations around the world as a teaching session.  A secondary function for the equipment was to be used as training instruments for the patients.  After the operation, they would have to learn how to talk again.  The Polycom equipment allowed the speech therapists to provide their service remotely.

Marty Sexton, Brian Larnerd, Bob Knauf, Chris Bryant with Operation Smile, Karina Kupczak, Sonal Bisht,

Once the equipment was operational, Bob and the rest of the Polycom team assisted the children through the operations. Listen in as Bob conveys the emotional highs and lows that the potential patients and patients experience.  Hear of the overwhelming joy the parents and child experience when they see the newly reconstructed facial area and palates. Great job Polycom and Operation Smile team!

For more information, go to: http://www.polycom.com/ or https://www.operationsmile.org

With their fully automated Connectivity as a Service (CaaS) provider enabling network service providers to:

Procure

Provision

Manage

through their Partner Portal. Their product is any to any network and has the capability to reroute traffic should there be an incident on the network.

The reseller program is expanding rapidly.  Via the Partner portal, their partners or their customers can order services from 1G to 100G with access instantaneously. Listen in to hear more about their technology and how easy it is to join them.

PacketFabric is developing world class technologies which are changing the way networks communicate with one another. Their first-of-its-kind infrastructure was strategically built to deliver automated and cost-effective capacity from 1Gbps to 100Gbps and beyond. Their powerfully simple user interface enables you to instantaneously provision highly scalable network connections between any two or more points across their private and secure network. Their aiming for nothing less than a complete revolution in the way networks communicate with each other. By integrating modern software technologies into their state-of-the-art network which they’ve built from the ground up.  You are in control of creating network connections when and where you need them in seconds instead of days and weeks.

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

Ryan Walsh, Pax8's Chief Channel Officer, and Jennifer Bodell, VP of Channel, talk to Don Witt of The Channel Daily News, a TR publication about their new products and just announced Pax8 Stax. Ultimately, it is all about the experience. For a distributor, it is at two levels – the reseller level and the end consumer level. Pax8 has revised the normal distribution model of pick, pack and ship, which is related to customer premise-based hardware solutions, to a cloud solution distribution model. Pax8 represents three to four vendors in the listed categories:

Then, Stax offers a single, aggregate view into your customer base allowing you to easily identify up-sell and cross-sell opportunities.

Next, they identify gaps in your customer's technology stack and easily access the right vendors and marketing resources to build a complete solution for your customer.

Easily move, add, or change subscriptions from multiple vendors for your customers with a single click.

As a born in the cloud company, Pax8 empowers businesses to capitalize on the $1 trillion cloud opportunity and achieve more with cloud. Through billing, provisioning, automation, industry-leading PSA integrations, and pre-and-post sales support, Pax8 simplifies cloud buying, improves operational efficiency, and lowers customer acquisition cost.

For more information, go to: https://www.pax8.com/#/home

A survey conducted by Avant and Channel Partners used 17,500 transactions as the basis for the survey.  The vendors and customers were also surveyed. The results were very insightful.  Drew Lydecker, President and Co-Founder of Avant reviews the findings with Don Witt of The Channel Daily News, a TR publication. Two distinct groups were identified in the Survey – The Lean Forward group and the Lean Back group.  The Lean Forward group was cloud centric and composed 29% of the resellers. The Lean Back group sold voice and data networks and composed 42% of the resellers.  More surprising was that the cloud centric group sold 42% of voice MRR and 51% of the data network MRR.

The Lean Forward and Lean Backward groups have very specific characteristics as well.  The channel is changing.  You may not know who the best resellers are now. Drew may give you some insight on who to look for in the future.

Avant channel is composed of:

91 Carriers around the world

15,000 Data Centers around the world

110 Cloud providers around the world

The way Avant has been achieving so much success is based on their sales enablement programs. It allowed Avant to triple its size in the last 12 months.

Contact Avant for more details about their survey.  The results are truly amazing.

For more information, go to: https://goavant.net/

Sergio Bea, VP Global Enterprise and Channels for Accedian, discusses how Service Providers monitor and manage network performance and assurance with Don Witt of The Channel Daily News, a TR publication. Their technology allows their customers to identify trouble spots in seconds and minutes instead of days and weeks.  It provides a very comprehensive control panel that allow the user to drill down immediately to identify problem servers or applications in the network.

The same technology is now available for enterprise that are going through the digital transformation when moving to the cloud. If they move completely to the cloud or have a hybrid architecture, how will their applications perform? Accedian will help them ascertain the actual numbers in real time.

Listen in to hear how you can improve the performance of your carrier and enterprise networks.

With open, multi-vendor interoperable, programmable platforms, Accedian delivers ultra-precise, granular, real-time performance monitoring and MEF-certified networking and QoS optimization. With a range of network performance elements, modules and virtualized instrumentation, Accedian solutions provide complete Core-to-Edge coverage for total network performance visibility and assurance.

Packet networking performance is variable and inconsistent, and mission critical applications, including mobile communications over LTE and small cell networks, high-speed trading, hosted data center connectivity and cloud computing are often subject to quality of service (QoS) issues.

For more information, go to: https://accedian.com/

by Gary Audin

Frustrated customers, costs to VARs and MSPs! Failed installations, slow and poor support and truck rolls lead to dissatisfied customers, customer churn, and no contract renewals. Network Edge Orchestration (NEO) will reduce these problems for the customer and increase profits for the VAR and MSP. By deploying a cloud based model, NEO can provide 24/7 support while reducing the CAPEX by changing to an OPEX model.

Brian Gregory, Director Product Marketing for Edgewater Networks www.edgewaternetworks.com and Gary Audin recorded this EDUcast to provide a tutorial into the issues, challenges, and solutions pertaining to network edge orchestration (NEO). Brain defines NEO. He covers the results of their survey into the challenges and struggles where NEO can mitigate the problems. Brian looks at the ROI of NEO and the benefits delivered. He then walks through the customer journey from installation through contact renewal and churn avoidance.

What you will learn in this EDUcast:

What is Network Edge Orchestration (NEO)?

NEO Challenges

What about the Session Border Controller?

How does NEO Address the Challenges?

The Customer Journey with NEO

Customer Problems

The ROI of NEO

Edgewater Networks www.edgewaternetworks.com is a market leader in enabling real time communication services for service providers with our Network Edge Orchestration solution. Network Edge Orchestration is Edgewater Networks’ Hybrid Cloud/Edge approach to security, service quality management, and analytics.

Edgewater Networks’ customers use Network Edge Orchestration to power their hosted unified communications and SIP trunking offers.  With Network Edge Orchestration, they are able to rapidly provision services from a central control center, minimize truck rolls, ensure service quality, increase customer satisfaction, and, most importantly, rapidly scale to meet customer demand.

The company helps customers deliver intelligence at the network edge with its Network Edge Orchestration platform that includes the EdgeView Service Control Center, Intelligent Edge solutions, and the QuickConnect certification program.

Even some of the installed base continues migration to VOIP and from prem to cloud, many enterprises are looking to the next frontier: mobility. In what Andrew Bale, General Manager, Cloud Services, of Tango Networks, describes as a “blind spot”, the enterprise faces the challenge of putting its arms around a form of communication routed and controlled by mobile service providers. In this podcast Bale discusses how an IT department might see and control these communications. Bale discusses Tango’s solutions, the an on-premises version labeled the Kinetic Communications Platform and the Kinetic Cloud, a cloud-powered version launched this year. Tango believes that users can find a way to reconstruct their ability to manage and control communications, including rules, occupational boundaries and more, even as these communications are run over third party carrier platforms.

by Gary Audin

The European Union (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has arrived. Enterprises have gone beyond planning and implementing changes to their personal identifiable information. GDPR covers that. They now have to operate under the regulation. Will there be a flood of requests to report on the personal data and requests to remove the data? How does an audit work?

Anthony Gadient, CEO and co-founder of Voci technologies www.vocitec.com and Gary Audin recorded this podcast to help enterprises understand what may be encountered now that the GDPR is in force. Anthony discusses the compliance and risk management issues that arise from GDPR compliance. He covers the reporting and data changes that will be ongoing. He delves into the limited knowledge of how GDPR will be audited. He points out that voice-to-text translation will be fundamental to accomplishing satisfactory GDPR compliance combined with AI and learning mechanisms.

Voci Technologies www.vocitec.com provides the market leading enterprise speech-to-text platform for businesses seeking to improve customer experience, optimize contact center efficiency, manage risk due to fraud and compliance violations, and improve sales effectiveness. Voci employs AI and deep learning algorithms to deliver highly accurate transcriptions, as well as insights related to gender, sentiment, emotion, and speaker biometrics either in batch or real-time. Focusing on enterprise speech analytics solutions, Voci offers the fastest, most accurate and complete enterprise transcription platform built on an open architecture for ease of implementation and integration.

Charlie Patsios, Director of Channel Marketing and Anna Michniewska, Director of International Marketing discuss the results of their revealing survey from 200 VARs, MSPs, VADs, Direct market resellers, and Systems integrators from around the world. Forty-five percent of the respondents were international. One of the most revealing pieces of the survey’s results indicates that 75% of the respondents had experienced a breach in the last year.

The breaches can be the result of weak or non-existent passwords, the lack of privileged credential access control as well as endpoint access control.

Currently, Thycotic secures privileged account access to over 75,000 organizations.  To help enterprise understand the degree of their exposure, Thycotic provides free tools which help identify problems with:

privileged accounts

endpoint

browser stored passwords

weak passwords

least privileged tools

Listen in as they discuss the survey results and then provide suggestions that will help enterprise secure their network more completely. They provide some great tips.

Delivering innovative Enterprise Privileged Password Protection combined with proven Endpoint Security and Application Control for Windows and Unix

Unlike any other security offering, Thycotic solutions assure the protection and control of your privileged accounts while being the fastest to deploy, easiest to use, scalable enterprise-class solution offered at a competitive price.

For more information, go to: https://thycotic.com/