Telecom Reseller / Technology Reseller News

by Gary Audin

Looking for an IP or SIP phone? What you want is a supplier with a variety of phone choices. You will soon look for Skype for Business (Skype4B) phones, if not already. The suppler should offer low cost, easy to use, and quick to install products. This means short boot times and rapid troubleshooting.

Jeffrey Cao, VP, Global Key Account for Yealink Network Technology Co. LTD. www.yealink.com and Gary Audin recorded this podcast at the Microsoft Ignite conference. Jeff discusses the reasons for multiple phone choices. He also compared the life cycle of the desk phone (about 5 years) to the headset (about 1 to 2 years). As an example of phone choices, Yealink has five certified models of Skype4B connections both to on premises as well as cloud solutions.

Yealink www.yealink.com,  is a leading UC terminal solution provider dedicated to communication telephony innovations. They help their clients make the most of their Unified Communications (UC) experience and embrace the power of .

Yealink’s One-Stop UC terminal solutions unify voice, video, and data. They design products for businesses of all sizes. Their solutions work for every kind of user, from executives to receptionists, and can accommodate staff communicating from an office, a conference room or on the go. The products integrate into both on premise and cloud/hosted ecosystems. The comprehensive product portfolio includes video conferencing systems, conference phones, desk IP phones, wireless DECT phones, and accessories.

Everyone has had the experience of being in a work space, hotel lobby or other public area where wireless has been poorly planned. Today, access to wifi is as critical as any other factor in planning the places people work and recreate.

Making a workspace actually work for your employees means rethinking the office environment in terms of people, spaces and tools. When these three factors harmonize, employees benefit from a culture that encourages collaboration, spaces that bring them together and tools that allow them to interact in ways that make the most sense for tasks at hand.

In this TEC37 pre-recorded webinar, Joe Berger, manager of WWT’s Collaboration Practice, David Lathrop, director of the Applied Research Network for Steelcase Inc., Brandon Echele, business video practice manager for WWT, and Dave Blatt, director of business development for WWT Asynchrony Labs, will dive deeper into what’s needed for investments in workspaces to pay off and ultimately inspire innovation.

 

Save

Jeff Abramowitz, President of Cloud4Wi, reviews the current retail WiFi product offering to Don Witt of The Channel Daily News by Telecom Reseller and announces the release of the next version of software – VolareXP - A Wi-Fi services solution tailored for service providers. It provides for:

•    A service platform for guest WiFi

•    Retailer provides WiFi

•    VolareXP provides:

o    the engagement to the customer via their Moblie phone

o    Identifies when in the store

o    Who the customer is

o    Engages by providing a coupon or other option

o    Develops customer loyalty

The technology is now being widely accessed by over 55 Million users world-wide with US based companies like Olive Garden and Chili’s providing the enhanced experience.

It is all about the experience and this is product enhances the experience.

Cloud4Wi offers Volare, the industry’s leading services platforms for advanced guest Wi-Fi. With Volare, large retail chains, restaurant chains, and shopping malls build their brands by leveraging their existing Wi-Fi networks to provide superior on-site mobile experiences, while gaining valuable customer insights.

Volare’s open, cloud-based platform is distributed through channel partners and connects more than 55 million mobile users across 15,000 locations in more than 80 countries. Customers include Armani, Burger King, Bulgari, Clarks Shoes, Olive Garden, Prada, and Telecom Italia.

The company is based in San Francisco and has offices in London, Paris, Milan, Pisa and Manila.

To find out more, go to: https://cloud4wi.com/volarexp/

David Patton, Senior Sales Engineer for Rocana, explains how big data is required for service providers to Don Witt of The Channel Daily News by Telecom Reseller.  Many providers are letting big data fall into the bit bucket, but Rocana Ops helps the service provider perform network optimization by capturing data from 10s of thousands of devices and packages the information back to the service provider in a service panel.  Based on the information, the service provider will know if the network is going to have a problem, needs to expand and where or needs to contract.

Convert Data Traffic into Dollar!

Enterprise IT environments are extremely complex. Seeing across all systems, stacks, services, and endpoints requires a completely new approach to IT monitoring. Enter Rocana. Combining a massively scalable and open event data warehouse with advanced analytics and guided visualizations, Rocana Ops gives technologists total operational visibility. All sources, all the time, forever.

The Root of Digital Transformation

Rocana empowers technology leaders to see more and accomplish more through total operational visibility. Combining event data warehouse capabilities with advanced machine learning, Rocana Ops captures and analyzes all data from all sources, keeping it online and available for years so technologists can identify emerging problems, improve performance, and drive innovation.

To find out more, got to: https://www.rocana.com/

This week at the London IP Expo show Avaya unveiled its new cloud solution for enterprise and mid-size businesses. The Avaya Cloud Networking Platform offers an approach to delivering cloud based communications that combines security and resilience. In this podcast Prasad Pammidimukala, Director of Product Management of Avaya Networking, walks us through the new platform and how this approach is significantly different from what has come before. We learn about the advantages of taking this approach, services, benefits and other differentiators. Pammidimukala also discusses security and the robustness of the platform. The platform also offers the Avaya channel a great opportunity to not only offer a strong cloud choice (in addition to Avaya on prem platforms), but also a strong path for their customers seeking to migrate to the cloud from legacy gear.

Save

Save

Paul Master, Senior VP of Alternative Channels with Birch, reviews the growth of Birch and their commitment to customers to Don Witt of The Channel Daily News from Telecom Reseller.  Through the acquisition of 28 companies, Birch has expanded service to all 50 US states and US territories including 5 provinces in Canada while at the same time maintaining a consistent positive user experience and providing an expansive portfolio of products. Paul goes on to discuss the channel which has developed and how the personal touch of the channel continues to enhance the end user experience. Lastly, Paul reviews their advanced services.

Communications. Connectivity. Commitment.

Birch is a leading nationwide provider of communications, network, cloud and IT services celebrating 20 years in business (1996-2016). They meet the needs of small, mid-sized, enterprise and wholesale businesses and residential customers by offering a diverse portfolio of integrated technology solutions coupled with a relentless focus on customer service.

Their industry-leading product portfolio includes Metro-Fiber, Metro-Ethernet, unified communications (UC), hosted phone systems, hosted data centers and hosted file storage services. By shifting their technology management to Birch, their customers save valuable time, money and resources.

Their mission is to provide the highest quality service at the best possible value while giving each of their customers the personal attention they deserve.

Their Reach

•    Service spans 50 U.S. states, Washington D.C., Canada and Puerto Rico

•    Nationwide IP-Network with 600 POPs in 22 states

•    400,000 Metro-Fiber Lit Buildings, Ethernet over Copper, MPLS, VPN

•    31,000 Fiber Route Miles and 4 Data Centers

•    Business-class products tailored to the needs of our business customers

•    Enterprise-grade SOC2/SOC3 Cloud solutions that are PCI & HIPAA ready

•    Best-in-class Customer Care – award-winning, 24/7/365, U.S. based

•    Diverse, efficient sales channels designed to serve each business segment

Starting as Thinking Phones in 2006, they were one of the first cloud PBX companies.  Michael Affronti, VP of Product at Fuze continues to discuss with Don Witt of The Channel Daily News from Telecom Reseller about the acquisition of Fuze, a video telecommunications company, and how they continued to use the Fuze name and grow at an expanded rate while integrating the technology from both companies into the new Fuze mobile and desktop application.

There’s been a lot of change in the communications technology market in the last 10 years with mobility, consumerization of IT, migration to the cloud and the move towards unified communications.  Learn how these changes have affected what businesses and employees are looking for in a unified communication platform.

With Fuze working with enterprise customers all over the world, find out about the global trends and how companies work to streamline their communications and collaboration capabilities.  Find out about notable distinctions between US preferences and preferences in other regions of the world.

Technology is prompting an increasingly distributed workforce, meaning more and more people are able to work where and how they want. Find out what this means for IT teams in terms of support and managing expectations.

Lastly, find out how today’s workforce technology mirror personal preferences, how enterprises have responded and what has been the impact for IT departments.

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

by Gary Audin

Network quality and connectivity to the cloud is critical when planning and implementing Skype for Business (Skype4B) deployment leveraging the Office 365 cloud. UC Assessor helps ensure a positive user experience of voice, video, and application sharing. You need to measure across the LAN/WAN and all the way up to Skype for Business Online in Office 365 before users are migrated to the Skype4B. UC Assessor by IR identifies network quality and performance levels according to Skype4B minimum requirements, and will help troubleshoot and remediate identified problem areas across the entire network path.

Skip Chilcott, Head of Product Marketing at IR www.ir.com and Gary Audin recorded this podcast at the Microsoft Ignite conference. They discuss the value and benefits of testing the BEFORE migrating to Skype4B online. Skip recommends running the UC Assessor for at least a week. A snapshot of a few hours or a day will not point what problems will be encountered in the O365 online migration.

IR www.ir.com is the corporate brand name of Integrated Research Limited, a provider of proactive performance management software for critical IT infrastructure, payments, and communications ecosystems. More than 1,000 organizations in over 60 countries rely on IR Prognosis to provide business critical insights and ensure continuity-critical systems deliver high availability and performance for millions of their customers across the globe. Every second, thousands of teams work tirelessly to maintain order but the threat of a problem is never far away. IR makes sure these systems run at their best and predict vulnerabilities before they arise.

Today IR Prognosis solutions for payment hubs, unified communications ecosystems, and contact centers are trusted by Fortune 500 companies to keep their business running. IR continues to be an industry pioneer with innovations in predictive and prescriptive analytics as well as advances in automation, allowing IT to stop a problem even before it happens.

by Gary Audin

Is your network ready for VoIP calls? Is it ready for Avaya or Cisco? If so, migrating to Skype4B will introduce new challenges. What worked well for your IP PBX may not function as well with Skype4B. You need to perform a network assessment before you migrate and after the migration is completed. A continuous problem is that traffic keeps changing even while the network remains relatively static. You will not know why the voice quality is impaired without an assessment.

Tom Tuttle, SVP, UC Strategy and Global Alliances and Matt Christopher, VP, Customer Experience at Nectar www.nectarcorp.com recorded this podcast with Gary Audin at the Microsoft Ignite conference. Tom and Matt believe assessments are important for the enterprise. MSPs and VARs can generate a new revenue stream performing assessments for their customers.

Nectar 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. Organizations are facing rapidly changing operational challenges, increased complexity, interdependencies, and a failing eco-system of technologies to support newly converged networks.

The Nectar 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. Armed with this knowledge, IT now has the foundation to align the IT initiatives with business objectives, transform your infrastructure, and free up critical resources.

by Gary Audin

You have an Avaya or Cisco communications system. You are also deploying Microsoft’s Skype4B and you want them to work together. You want one method to manage the phones. You want phone data synchronized. You want one identity for each user rather than two identities, one for Avaya or Cisco and one for Skype4B. You have discovered functionality gaps. Managing by Excel spreadsheet is the least productive approach and an error prone solution. Managing two platforms produces:

Slow setup time

Entry errors

Greater ongoing maintenance when employees change status

Your roll out of Skype4B will be by groups, not all at one time. So the two system environment will last for some time. You can benefit from a comprehensive approach if you already have Skype4B deployed. This will make auditing easier and user changes will be less labor intensive. If you are proactive, then implementing a good management system can allow contact center, help desk agents, and users to perform self-service thereby freeing valuable engineering time for IT projects.

Phil Moen, President, and CEO at Unimax and Gary Audin discuss these issues and solutions in this podcast recorded at the Microsoft Ignite conference. Phil points out that not only do enterprises benefit from the Unimax products, VARs and MSPs can create new revenue streams using Unimax.

For more information, visit www.unimax.com.