Telecom Reseller / Technology Reseller News

by Gary Audin

The number of endpoints and other devices (PBX, SBC, Gateway…) you have to manage keeps expanding. The endpoints are driven by software, software that is frequently updated and patched. Trying to verify that all the endpoints are installed and configured properly is a laborious task. How do you ensure that end user has not changed the endpoint without authorization or contacting IT? The elapsed testing time could be weeks. This is where automated testing saves time, labor, and reduces costs delivering an unbiased report of the endpoint installations.

Chakra DeValla, CEO of tekVizion www.tekvizion.com and Gary Audin recorded this EDUcast so that you could learn about the issues, problems, and resolutions surrounding testing endpoints. Chakra covers testing and why and how to rethink testing. He explains the process of automated testing. He finishes with a discussion of the business case for testing and the benefits of automating the testing process. TekVizion is in a vendor/provider neutral testing organization.

 

What you will learn:

Philosophy of Testing

Why and How to Test

Testing Benefits

Downside of Not Testing

Testing Methodologies

Making the Business Case

A blog interview with Chakra “The State of SIP Trunking” covers what tekVizion has learned from its SIP trunk testing techniques.

tekVizion www.tekvizion.com helps service providers, vendors and enterprise customers accelerate implementation, improve reliability and reduce the costs of deploying multi-vendor communication networks. tekVizion offers a range of services including interoperability testing, on-demand access to virtual lab environments, integration services and custom application development. Founded in 2002, tekVizion hosts the first interoperability lab of its kind. The company’s extensive lab resources include over 250 network elements and a team of dedicated specialists, certifying over 400 applications per year.

by Gary Audin

There are three capabilities that IT has to deliver; agility, orchestration, and service assurance for today’s networks. This is even more important when there are multiple service providers. IT departments are overwhelmed because the ever-expanding corporate networks along with constant user demand for newer and better apps.

IT management is responsible for a vast volume of workplaces within the network, covering numerous locations. IT receives complaints about app performance from users, with the users also expecting better app availability. Assuring this requires IT departments use visible and accurate, round-the-clock application performance management solutions that can measure and predict service outages and degradations in real time.

Christopher Cullan, Director of Product Marketing, Business Service’s Solutions at InfoVista www.inforvista.com and Gary Audin recorded this podcast at the MEF 16 conference. The discussion covers the need for CIOs to maximize user application experience by adopting a new management approach. He continues with a discussion of the tools to measure and predict performance. He explains the balance between performance and network costs.

A valuable report that covers more on this topic is “Is your network future-ready? Managing the network demands of changing generations” http://pages.infovista.com/WP-Benchmark-Report-BT.html?utm_source=website&utm_medium=website

InfoVista www.infovista.com is the leading provider of cost-effective network performance orchestration solutions that help communications service providers, mobile operators, and large enterprises meet the challenge of providing top-quality user experience (UX) while increasing the capital efficiency of their network infrastructure. Eighty percent of the world's largest communication service providers, more than 250 mobile operators, numerous global enterprises, and public administrations all rely upon InfoVista solutions to deliver industry-best IT services dedicated to optimal network performance.

by Gary Audin

Designing a support team can be a difficult task when monitoring network infrastructure globally 24/7 and responding to issues delivering agreed-upon SLAs. Choosing a model for organizing support resource is important. One model consolidates all resources into one location. This delivers multiple operational efficiencies including in staffing and training. It is difficult however to find the qualified staff and it can be expensive (evenings, weekends, holidays). A second option employs global support teams monitoring and troubleshooting issues during their normal business hours.

Joel Alagaratnam, Business Development at INOC www.inoc.com and Gary Audin recorded this podcast at the MEF 16 conference. They discuss the NOC issues and resolutions offered by a third-party NOC provider. INOC has separate provider, enterprise, and optical NOCs. With the surge to cloud services and virtualization, NOC support becomes even more important. This is further complicated when multiple service providers are involved.

INOC’s www.inoc.com end-to-end network services and solutions include needs analysis, planning and design, vendor selection and equipment specification, as well as building, provisioning and ongoing 24/7 network monitoring, and support. INOC engineers are experts in Gigabit Ethernet (GigE), SONET, OCx and ATM. This capability extends to any protocol — SONET, Ethernet and Fiber Channel — over DWDM, GPON and technologies such as MPLS, PBB, and OTN. INOC network services support the optical and IP platforms of a variety of equipment manufacturers, including Cisco, Ciena, Juniper, Infinera, and ADVA.

INOC combines state-of-the-art software technology, highly resilient and redundant NOC infrastructure, proven processes and expert technical staff to improve uptime, availability, and performance of customer networks, applications, and servers.

The CEO of Oculeus, Arnd Baranowski, discusses how his Frankfurt Germany based company entered into the realm of fraud detection and subsequent prevention to Don Witt of The Channel Daily News by Telecom Reseller.  Telecommunication fraud is at two levels - the carrier level and the user level.  In both situations, the faster the fraud is detected, the faster it can be stopped and the lower the amount of money that will be lost.

This is one of the most serious problems facing the Carriers and businesses today. Oculeus has taken a new approach to this issue with results that provide much more accurate and faster identification of fraud saving carriers and business enterprises huge amounts of money.  Once identified, the suspected abuser is also placed into a database which is accessible by all Oculeus technology users.  You will want to listen in and hear more about this innovative technology.

Oculeus Anti-fraud system enables Telecom Carrier and Operators to fight Fraud caused by

FAS

Long Duration Calls

PBX Hacking

SIM Boxing

Arbitrage

Wangiri

AIT

International Revenue Share

and other methods

Fraud Detection patterns can contain parameters such as

Number of Calls, Amount

A- and/or B-Numbers

A- and/or B-Number Ranges

Duration and Occurrence

Revenue

Cost

ASR

ACD

and others. These patterns can be freely defined and do not require any programming or additional development.

Find more information at:

http://oculeus.com/index.html

Don Witt of The Channel Daily News interviews Dan Cunningham, the Chief Technology Officer with ReadyTalk about their history and their continued successful development of product which includes a wide range of conferencing technology including:

Web Conferencing

Audio Conferencing

Video conferencing

Mobile Conferencing

Recording & Archiving

Webinars

Webcasts

It is clear that the customer/user of their products comes first, since their products are centered around mobility first solutions.  They have also highly integrated the WebRTC technology into their solutions which enhances the Mobility First concept.

Today, whether your need is holding a small virtual meeting or hosting a large webinar, ReadyTalk can meet your needs. They provide audio and web conferencing services that are highly reliable, affordable and easy to use, so you can focus on the substance of your meeting rather than the technology behind it. And when you need support, they make it quick and easy for you to connect with a knowledgeable and helpful professional. Their hope is that after you’ve contacted them, you will hang up the phone and remark, “Wow, that was great customer service, just like every other time I’ve interacted with ReadyTalk.”

Their consistent focus on “WOW through Service and Technology” and their commitment to the quality of their work environment has allowed them to earn recognition as one of the fastest growing companies in North America and also as one of the best companies for which to work.

by Gary Audin

WAN-connectivity at remote sites can be costly and limited thereby becoming restrictive to your business. You need reliable performance, rapid deployment, and automation at our remote sites. Would a dynamic path conditioning feature be desirable? As application migration from the data center to the cloud is driving the requirement for geographically distributed, organizations need to re-evaluate their networking requirements. Adopting broadband to connect users to applications using SD –WAN solutions are rapidly gaining acceptance around the world. IDC predicts the SD-WAN market will reach $6 billion by 2020.

John Vincenzo, Sr. VP, Chief Marketing Office at Silver Peak www.silver-peak.com and Gary Audin discuss the value of the emerging SD-WAN services in this podcast recorded at the MEF 16 conference. John says that organizations have reshaped how they connect users to applications across hundreds of branch office locations, realizing significant cost savings without compromising network or application performance. John covers how organizations can deploy services quickly while optimizing their resources. For example, voice traffic can be routed over paths delivering the low latency necessary while non-real time traffic can traverse alternate paths, all delivered in real time based on traffic conditions. This allows organizations to move applications, on-premises or cloud based, and to quickly respond to traffic changes

Silver Peak www.silver-peak.com is the global leader in broadband and hybrid WAN solutions. Silver Peak offers a high-performance SD-WAN solution that provides secure and reliable virtual overlays to connect users to applications with the flexibility to use any combination of underlying transport without compromising application performance. This results in greater business agility and lower costs. More than 2,275 globally distributed enterprises have deployed Silver Peak broadband and hybrid WAN solutions across 80 countries. The EdgeConnect SD-WAN solution delivers easy-to-deploy, inexpensive broadband connectivity to branch offices while ensuring data and applications are secure and perform to user expectations.

by Gary Audin

Products and solutions should be designed to future-proof service provider’s networks for higher scalability, traffic engineering, and increased security. An MEF CE2.0 compliant, end-to-end solution should fit any site requirement and any deployment scenario – single or multi-business, fixed or modular, outdoor or indoor deployment. This includes E-Line, E-LAN, E-Tree, E-Access, TDM convergence, single or multi-vendor networks while supporting a wide range of capacity options. The solutions should deliver carrier-grade equipment, providing protection mechanisms to ensure a high level of service availability, and advanced OAM and HQoS. Carriers need to focus on providing their revenue generating services, rather than just managing their devices, and provide complete simplified mechanisms to manage, maintain, and optimize the entire service lifecycle.

Ariel Efrati, CEO of Telco Systems www.telco.com and Gary Audin discuss core network technologies in this podcast recorded at the MEF 16 conference. Ariel covers the influence of virtualization and software driven products that can be hardware independent. The discussion continues with coverage of MEF Certification and the interoperability issues across multiple networks that are involved in servicing end users.

Telco Systems www.telco.com offers a portfolio of best-in-class products and solutions. Among the first vendors to receive the Metro Ethernet Forum’s Carrier Ethernet (CE) 2.0 certification, Telco Systems’ CE 2.0-compliant, end-to-end Ethernet product portfolio delivers a significant boost to large, medium, and small service providers, as well as utilities and city carriers competing in a rapidly evolving telecommunications environment. They are experts in guiding service providers toward the advantages of CE 2.0 while they preserve and enlarge their customer base with continuously improving quality of service without service interruption.

by Gary Audin

Operators need the ability to transform their current service delivery processes by connecting the cloud and physical resources with business management processes and systems.

There are pain points for catalog-centric quote-to-order-to-install solutions enabling digital multichannel business, operational and technology transformation. As CSPs move to advanced digital pricing and service plans, they need to ensure the customer-facing lead-to-quote-to-order stack. This can be combined with aligned central catalog management and service fulfillment.

Steve Hateley Sr. Director, Industry and Partner Marketing, Service Orchestration for Comptel www.comptel.com and Gary Audin discuss the issues, pain points, and solutions that service providers need to deal with in their daily operations in this podcast recorded at the MEF 16 conference. Steve also covers The Third Network, Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO), and service fulfillment, all issues facing operators. Steve discusses FlowOne that delivers carrier-class catalog-driven service order orchestration and fulfillment. Comptel's strength is to support a federated inventory, provisioning/activation, and order fulfillment value chain, with the catalog at the center of its architecture.

You may want to download their eBook “Operation Nexterday” http://www.comptel.com/news-and-events/the-book-operation-nexterday. NEXTERDAY is their phrase for their own transformation project that helps them stay competitive. Once you have read it, you will have a clear vision of how to implement your own “Nexterday”. You will have a path for conducting a successful post-digital business with Generation Cloud.

Comptel www.comptel.com has 300+ customer organizations serving more than 1.2 billion end users. This support covers 90 countries. Some of the customers include 50+ large integrators and IT service providers. Comptel has the staff and resources to support 1400 major delivery projects. Their single biggest deployment included 250 million end-users. The largest machine-to-machine project included capturing and processing the smart meter data from 28 million households and 2 million small businesses.

by Gary Audin

Communicating and collaborating over distance have become the norm for the way we work today. When it comes to conference rooms, the quality of our communications experience begins with the devices we use, including the conference phone. Everything from room sizes and design materials to the number of participants and seating arrangements can affect how well we can hear and understand what is being said. One size does not fit all.

Denise Iverson, industry expert representing Revolabs www.revolabs.com and Gary Audin discuss the technical challenges and solutions for ensuring a high quality conference experience in this EDUcast. Denise provides a good tutorial on the factors influencing speech transmission from voice capture at the near end to voice reproduction at the far end. She covers the methods for reducing noise and sound reverberation, the effects of compensating for distance on voice pickup and reproduction, and best practices for speech intelligibility.

You will learn:

Why one size of audio product doesn’t fit all rooms.

Why the biggest/highest specification is not always the best.

What you should look for:

From audio pick up

From audio playback

From audio processing

And when you have all that right, what else can you do?

Revolabs www.revolabs.com delivers professional microphone systems and conference phones for telephony and unified communications. The company’s introduction of wireless microphones for conferencing revolutionized business communications by allowing unprecedented freedom in meetings. Revolabs’ ability to produce superior sound in large, complex spaces delivers a full portfolio of conferencing solutions that enable the most reliable and natural conversation in every meeting space. With a full range of choices - installed or plug-and-play systems, wireless or wired solutions, and local or remote management  capabilities - Revolabs offers the most flexible and uniform set of solutions to accommodate the needs of the entire business.

Many Telecom Reseller readers from the IT end user community are characteristically do it yourselfers. That is natural. Most people who go into technology, especially as a manager, began as tactile enthusiasts, creating their own technology and learning much of their craft in the field, and not in a class room. But as network challenges mount, well-meaning “homemade solutions” can not only fall short, but they don’t gain from hard won experience of similar challenges people have experienced in other but similar networks. In this podcast Patrick Herron of Nitel discusses how his company is solving end user challenges by providing a flexible set of services, when and where it makes sense to turn to a third party for help. Herron also tells us about their partner program.

Visit www.nitel.com

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