Telecom Reseller / Technology Reseller News

by Gary Audin

If you are an ITSP, or are expecting to be one, then you know that operating an ITSP service is more than implementing a VoIP switch. The BackOffice is where you can either lose money or produce profits. DID control and management needs to be automated. You need to control what is delivered to the end user. You also want to provide customer access to as many capabilities as possible which makes them happy and loyal while reducing your workload.

In this EDUcast, Nick Medina, VP of Business Development for VoIP Innovations www.voipinnovations.com and Gary Audin discuss the ways to improve BackOffice efficiency and deliver increased profits. Nick provides a number of recommendations, advice, and guidance that can benefit the ITSP. He offers comments on how to leverage your positions with carriers and VoIP wholesalers.

What you will learn:

Selecting Your Carrier(s)

Automating Your Inventory

Controlling Your DIDs

Managing Your CustomersEmpowering Your End Users

Controlling Your Costs

VoIP Innovations www.voipinnovations.com is a key player in the VoIP industry. The provisioning, support, and billing teams developed at VoIP Innovations bring over 20 years of telecommunications experience to the table. The key to their success is to use technology to provide choice, automation, and control for the customers. This is delivered through the BackOffice platform, Titanium III. VoIP Innovations provides Wholesale VoIP origination and termination services, as well as thousands of DIDs and E911 connections. They are committed to delivering the best quality of service and the lowest possible price and no one else in the industry does it better.

Session border controllers (SBCs) are a critical component of any on-prem and cloud UC and UCaaS deployments. SBCs represent an important part of the dealer portfolio as well. In this podcast, Ingate’s Steve Johnson makes the case for resellers to consider SBCs as a path to improved profits and recurring income. With SIP migration occurring, we learn how SBCs offer resellers the ability to serve customers in motion, and how Ingate’s SBCs work with most every PBX installed or currently sold.

Visit www.ingate.com

Listen to the podcast:

Delivering the best service to your customer clients is everyone’s goal, yet many organizations handle the issue internally with improvised solutions to save money.  The fact is, when DDOS occurs, you will lose customers.  If it happens again, you will lose a ton more. In reality, getting a commercial solution may actually save your company more money in the long run.

Listen to Sean Newman, Corero Network Security’s Director of Product Management describe the DDOS problem as well as the real time solution to Don Witt of The Channel Daily News a TR Publication. Their newly released 100GB support allows them to provide protection to the larger carriers and deliver protection service faster.  Their service can also be resold to enterprise customers creating another recurring revenue stream for carriers, hosting providers and managed service providers.

There are many ways to cause a DDOS problem for a specific site including:

Volumetric DDoS Attacks

Reflective DDoS Attacks

Resource Exhaustion DDoS Attacks

Other DDoS Attacks including IoT

Of the above attack styles, there are dozens and dozens of individual attack options for each.  Improvised solutions will not stop the trained attacker looking to do harm and collect money.

Corero Network Security is dedicated to improving the security and availability of the Internet through the deployment of innovative DDoS & Network Security Solutions. The Corero SmartWall® Threat Defense System (TDS) family of products can be deployed in various topologies, (full edge protection or  scrubbing). the SmartWall Threat Defense System (TDS) family of solutions utilizes modern DDoS mitigation architecture to automatically, and surgically remove DDoS attack traffic, while allowing good user traffic to flow uninterrupted.

To find out more, go to: https://www.corero.com/

Enterprise networks can be complex, large and operate under multiple concurrent challenges. Optimizing existing resources, simplifying network operations and meeting multimedia needs of both customers and employees can be achieved by applying a specific set of rules to IP-based communications such as VoIP calls, video conferences, Unified Communications (UC) sessions, and third-party applications and messaging systems. Intelligent session control solutions can also help enterprises to significantly lower their long-distance fees, use fewer mobile minutes, simplify network administration, optimize bandwidth utilization and reduce network downtime, and even save on recurring communications costs.

In this podcast, we learn about the Sonus PSX. Walter Kenrich, Director, Sonus Product Marketing discusses how the Sonus PSX meets the requirements of large enterprises and addresses broader requirements such as redundancy, increased scale, geographic distribution or advanced features such as E.164 number mapping (ENUM), and quality of service based routing (QoS). Sonus PSX can managed centrally by a master PSX Server in larger enterprise environments, bringing together multisite, multivendor, networks together. Kenrich describes how Sonus PSX can cut operational expenses, improve use of existing assets and provide better customer and employee experiences.

Visit www.sonus.net

Many people have seen a television commercial where a robbery occurs, but a character dressed as a guard doesn't do anything. The character says that he's monitoring. Irony aside, the information provided isn't enough. End to end testing sounds thorough, but in this podcast we learn where it comes up short. Tim Titus of PathSolutions discusses the deficiencies of end -to-end and the better practices available. Titus tells us that end-to-end testing confirms the presence of a problem but may not point to the cause. Titus discusses better options. Beyond confirmation of the problem is to get visibility into your network. Specifically you need to be able to see packet loss and related issues. In this podcast we learn more how to get that level of insight.

Visit www.pathsolutions.com

Bob Knauf, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Polycom in charge of Centro reviews the current state of Polycom since the purchase by Siris Capital.  Bob also discusses the key components of a conference call and how Centro resolves the issues with Don Witt of The Channel Daily News, a TR publication.

Traditional conference room challenges

Each local room participant has a different experience than the end of the conference table or remote participant.

End of Conference room table and Remote participants do not get to fully interact with the participants closest to the camera because they feel left out

Sharing content challenge

With Centro, far site participants are right in the middle of the conversation.  For local participants, each is about the same distance from the camera and each other with a 360 degree multiple-lens camera in the center of the room. Now everyone is treated equal and you can actually feel the difference. Centro eliminates the inhibition resulting from the end of the table and remote location syndrome.

Via smart pairing, participants can easily connect devices wirelessly enabling the hassle free sharing of documents. Utilities which allow markup, erasure, or modifications of screens are friendly and easily accessible.

The industry leader in unified collaboration solutions

Companies choose Polycom for solutions that enable their geographically dispersed workforces to communicate and collaborate more effectively and productively over distances. Using Polycom telepresence, video, and voice solutions and services, people connect and collaborate from their desktops, meeting rooms, class rooms, and mobile settings. Organizations from a wide variety of industries and the private sector work with Polycom standards-based solutions to:

Gain a fast return on their investment as their teams easily collaborate "face to face" wherever they are

Cut the time, cost, and carbon emissions associated with gathering the right people in one place to solve problems

Apply saved resources, time, and energy to primary business and organizational challenges

For more information, go to: http://www.polycom.com/content/www/en.html

Dave McCrystal, Evolve IP’s Vertical Markets Manager for Healthcare, describes how their system’s HIPPA compliance has helped them migrate into more comprehensive services which now guard against cyber attacks to Don Witt of The Channel Daily News, a TR publication.

The Evolve IP security product portfolio was enhanced with their recent announcement of a new Nimble Storage partnership that will benefit healthcare organizations across the U.S. This agreement will provide an easy way to deploy on-premises Nimble Storage flash arrays, supported by HIPAA-compliant and HITRUST-audited hybrid cloud, cloud backup, and disaster recovery solutions. The partnership also allows Nimble Storage healthcare customers across the United States to take advantage of Evolve IP’s HIPAA and PCI-compliant cloud communications services, which offer encrypted IP phone systems and hosted call centers.

The best way to recover from a RANSOM threat is to have prepared for it prior to the actual threat.  Then, you can be assured of a successful and happy ending to the story.

Designed from the beginning to provide organizations with a unified option for cloud services, Evolve IP enables decision-makers to migrate all or select IT technologies to its award-winning cloud platform. Evolve IP’s combination of security, stability, scalability, and lower total cost of ownership is fundamentally superior to outdated legacy systems and other cloud offerings. Today, over 100,000 customers across the globe depend daily on Evolve IP for cloud services like virtual servers, virtual desktops, disaster recovery, unified communications, contact centers, and more.

The award-winning Evolve IP OneCloud™ platform integrates world-class technologies from EMC, VMware, Cisco and Broadsoft with Evolve IP’s proprietary OSSmosis cloud management system. Evolve IP’s nationwide data centers are geographically redundant, active-active and SSAE 16 SOC II/III compliant with N+1 network connectivity to provide complete survivability. In contrast to a legacy, on-premise model where an organization builds and continually needs to re-invest in its own systems, data centers and infrastructure, Evolve IP efficiently migrates organizations to the cloud while freeing up IT resources, eliminating CAPEX and lowering total cost of ownership.

For more information, go to: http://www.evolveip.net/

Earlier this week, West’s Unified Communications Services and Dolby Laboratories, Inc. announced a partnership bringing the exceptional sound quality and clarity of Dolby Voice to the world’s largest conferencing-dedicated network with the launch of InterCall® Reservationless-Plus® with Dolby Voice®. Reservationless-Plus with Dolby Voice provides users with enhanced audio quality through Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) networks. Dolby Voice and the Dolby Conference Phone bring Dolby audio innovation to business communications. With Dolby Voice, meetings sound clearer and are easier to follow, making collaboration effortless. Reservationless-Plus with Dolby Voice integrates with a full range of West’s proprietary solutions, including InterCall Unified Meeting® 5 and InterCall MobileMeet®, as well as partner solutions such as Cisco WebEx® when used with InterCall Reservationless-Plus audio.

In this podcast Warren Baxley, ‎Director of Product Management, West Unified Communications Services, walks us through the announcement and why this innovation is critical to confronting widespread conferencing challenges many companies face. The improved quality of calls promises to boost productivity and simply improve the quality of life for many workers.

If local telecommunication providers are looking at cost effective ways to wire the last mile, what Federated Wireless CEO Iyad Tarazi is telling Don Witt of The Channel Daily News should be of interested to you. They are announcing a partnering with Nokia at Mobile World Congress.  They currently have conditional approval from the FCC and will have completed product by August.

The Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) ecosystem, CBRS Alliance founding members Nokia and Federated Wireless now includes the likes of Google, Intel, Qualcomm Ericsson, Nokia, wireless carriers, cable companies, tower companies and equipment makers like Cisco.

The new agreement announced with Nokia relates to their product portfolio and its integration with the spectrum access system.

The solution will be great for campuses, hospitals and manufacturing situations. It will also work where IoT requirements are high.  It is a solution that looks like wireless, but with much more bandwidth and range.  Thus, it can be used for the last mile.

It is a new product category of cloud based software

Shared Spectrum Enablement (SAS + ESC)

Software-defined spectrum

Automated & programmable spectrum lifecycle management

Federated Wireless is unlocking a spectrum of possibilities by breaking down barriers to wireless spectrum, giving greater access to operators by creating a shared model for what was previously individually licensed. Headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, Federated Wireless is an influential first mover in the industry that has spent the last 5 years leading the creation of the shared spectrum market from the ground up, developing and nurturing the necessary standards, and working to ensure that customer deployments can be successful in all network environments.

More information can be found at: www.federatedwireless.com

Amdocs is announcing their aia real time intelligent platform running in all of their IT products for machine learning. This technology is contributing to the 4th industrial revolution which will have a significant effect on all lives around the world.

Carrier and media companies now find they are spending more on:

Infrastructure

Mobile to 5G

More Bandwidth

Media Content

AT&T and China Mobile team to provide Open Network Architecture (ONA). It will change the way Networks are developed.  Being open source, it will grow fast.

Gary also describes what Amdocs will be demonstrating at the Mobile World Congress.

They will be targeting, Enterprise and B2B markets for the carriers allowing them to provide better service to multi-location banks and more.

Amdocs is the market leader in customer experience software solutions and services for the world’s largest communications, entertainment and media service providers. For more than 30 years, Amdocs solutions, which include BSS, OSS, network control, optimization and network functions virtualization, coupled with professional and managed services, have accelerated business value for its customers by simplifying business complexity, reducing costs and delivering a world-class customer experience.

Amdocs and its more than 24,000 employees serve customers in over 90 countries. Listed on the NASDAQ Global Select Market, Amdocs had revenue of $3.6 billion in fiscal 2015.

To find out more, go to: http://www.amdocs.com