Telecom Reseller / Technology Reseller News

By Gary Audin

The carrier and service provider landscape is changing. In the past, carriers met and networked with other carriers and vendors. So has the association changed for them changed to INCOMPAS, formerly known as COMPTEL. The name has changed and the membership has expanded. Members now include Facebook, Amazon, Google, Twitter, and Cisco Systems.

Chip Pickering, the CEO of INCOMPAS www.incompas.org , and Gary Audin discuss the recent INCOMPAS Show in this podcast. Chip explains the association’s core values and how they have evolved into the present association. They discuss the exhibitors, vendor/provider networking, and the association’s name change.

INCOMPAS, the Internet and competition association, is the leading trade group advocating for competitive networks. The association promotes competition, innovation, and new network deployment for both wired and mobile networks. INCOMPAS represents Internet, communications and technology companies large and small, advocating for laws and policies that promote competition, innovation, and economic development. Learn more at www.incompas.org or follow them on Twitter: @INCOMPAS.

Register for the next INCOMPAS Show is in Dallas TX at the Gaylord Texan Resort Hotel & Convention Center October 23 – 26, 2016.

By Gary Audin

You want fiber to your building and/or data center. Most of the time that direct fiber connection, especially for 1 to 100 Gbps, is not available in your area. But the CIO wants a fiber connection for business continuity, security, reliability, as well as network diversity. You can select to buy a dark fiber connection, lease one, or connect to a lighted fiber. You want a provider that offers all three types so you can migrate into any of the three connection types.

Jim Hintze, SVP of sales at FiberLight www.fiberlight.com and Gary Audin discuss accessing fiber networks in this podcast recorded at the INCOMPAS conference. FiberLight expects to connect 10,000 buildings this year offering services to VARs and enterprises.

FiberLight owns and manages over 1.6 million fiber miles in over 44 metro areas across the United States. It also maintains over 17,000 backbone access points, 1,700 on-net locations, and presence in over 100 data centers across the country.

“Demanding U.S. government agencies and industries rely on FiberLight for best-in-class customer service and network reliability and security,” comments Jim Hintze. “Our evolving dark fiber reach affords carriers, enterprise and government customers that rely on critical high-bandwidth applications to gain greater access to cloud-based services.”

Plantronics manufactures a family of products that will become more critical than ever as UC becomes UCaaS: end points. For decades the basic model of many companies in the channel focused on installing and selling the big chassis, often leaving smaller components such as end points as a side sale or an add on. But as the channel embraces a recurring income model, the end point has become central to the end user experience, and therefore the success of the agreement that produces the recurring income.

Even with excellent underlying cloud services in place, the wrong end points can create a poor experience triggering customer defections. The Plantronics Manager Pro is a software subscription service that customers and partners can use to manage audio communications devices. Now, IT and contact center managers can gain insights from voice interactions, turning the headset into a data aggregation tool by using analytics to improve collaboration and customer service at the point of interaction.

In this podcast Chris Thompson, Vice President of Enterprise Product Marketing discusses with Telecom Reseller's Doug Green how Plantronics is helping the channel use this new tool to craft better solutions for their customers, and how ManagerPro helps IT teams and actual final end users.

Read the press release here. Listen to the podcast below.

BlueJeans turns video into three levels of a video conferencing experience with IT management tools to boot: A Podcast from the The Channel Daily News

Don Witt of The Channel Daily News by Telecom Reseller speaks with Lori Wright, the CMO of Bluejeans about how BlueJeans has delivered video quality and better user experience with three levels of service for their customers including:

Business – 25 participants

Enterprise – 100 Participants

Prime Time – 100 Presenters & 5000 Participants

Often overlooked by other video companies, Bluejeans pays close attention to the support organizations with an IT Command Center.

It is all about the experience with BlueJeans and they want to deliver the best video experience in the market.

Interoperability

Incorporate video into existing workflows to quickly grow culture, efficiency, and effectiveness across your workforce

Scalability

Manage, secure, and customize your video communication deployment to address real time video needs from small meetings to large events

Integration

A delightful and consistent experience accelerates adoption and ensures a video-first culture, with less time needed for end user training and support

A podcast with Christopher Lodge, President and COO of United Fiber & Data (UFD) www.ufd.com and Gary Audin

Your hear about redundancy. It is live and backup equipment, service, or carrier. What if the live and backup are hit by a common fire, hurricane, cable cut, malicious behavior, or flood. Then the redundancy does not work. You need diversity, physical diversity. In networks that means two transmission paths that are separated by miles not feet. Consider hurricane Sandy. What about the burned out cables sharing the Baltimore train tunnel. The primary and alternate transmission paths shared the same physical corridor and went down together.

Christopher Lodge, President and COO of United Fiber & Data (UFD) www.ufd.com and Gary Audin discuss the requirement for diversified network routing to deliver business continuity in this podcast recorded at the INCOMPAS conference. UFD offers physically diverse transmission paths in the Northeast corridor and Manhattan to enterprises, VARs, and carriers. Christopher explains how geographic diversity and good planning can also deliver faster service restoration when a failure occurs.

United Fiber & Data (UFD) www.ufd.com provides a superior alternative for fiber networking and broadband solutions. As a privately owned and operated network, it is strategically positioned west of the North East Corridor's traditional route. UFD is diverse to single points of failure between New York City and Northern Virginia. Their data centers offer a cost-effective delivery of ISP bandwidth and carrier interconnects for their customers. UFD’s hands-on Professional Services Group offers a complete suite of solutions that has the backing of an owner-operated, highly redundant, and secure infrastructure.

Just managing contact center agents is not enough. You need to ensure the quality of customer/agent interactions generate satisfied callers who want to continue doing business with you. This is called quality management. Did you know that 96% of the dissatisfied customers won’t even contact the business to discuss their experience? Did you know that 86% of consumers quit doing business with a company because of a bad customer experience? Finally, 51% said they would only try to reach support once before giving up on a purchase. Quality management can reduce these numbers.

Nigel Olding, Sr. Product Manager at Enghouse Interactive www.enghouseinteractive.com and Gary Audin discuss quality management as applied to the contact center in this EDUcast. The EDUcast explores the tools, processes, and procedures that should be adopted by a contact center that produces a highly effective site that will satisfy both customer and agent requirements.

What you will learn in this EDUcast:

Overview of Quality Management Tools

Drivers for using Quality Management Tools

How to quickly identify training gaps and improve coaching

Methods for reducing liability and maintaining compliance

Tactics to boost agent skill levels, satisfaction, and retention

Enghouse Interactive’s www.enghouseinteractive.com integrated suite of solutions includes omnichannel contact center, self-service, attendant operator consoles, and workforce optimization. This wide portfolio places Enghouse in the unique position to offer customers and partners a fully featured single vendor solutions. These solutions support the full range of deployment methods from premise-based to private, public, or community cloud and even hybrid requirements.

The solutions scale from a single site call reception console to multi-tenanted, multimedia contact centers with users in excess of 10,000. They have more than 1 million agent seats handling over 1 billion interactions through their systems daily – making Enghouse Interactive one of the biggest providers of customer contact solutions in the world.

Visit www.enghouseinteractive.com and watch the EDUcast below

As cloud based managed services continues to dominate the world of UC and UCaaS, taxes can be a major speed-bump. With over 3,000 counties, 19,000 incorporated cities, not to mention fifty states and several territories, companies reselling or providing telecom services can easily miss and become liable for innumerable local, state and federal taxes. Revenue hungry state and municipal governments have become more aggressive in collecting unpaid taxes viewing such revenue as more obtainable than more visible tax increases on income or retail sales. CCH SureTax is one of the most comprehensive and technologically advanced tax calculation engines available in the U.S. market, enabling communications service providers to remain in compliance to avoid the unfunded tax liabilities, interest and penalties.

Known for its robust, real-time, accurate tax calculation solutions in the energy and communications sectors, the CCH SureTax platform is now newly-enhanced, including an additional 900 taxability groups that support general sales and use tax calculations.

In this podcast, Doug Green, Publisher of Telecom Reseller, recently interviewed Mike Sanders, Vice President of Product Management for Wolters Kluwer Tax and Accounting, about CCH SureTax and the direction of the product.

Learn more about CCH SureTax at www.salestax.com and please listen to the podcast below-

There are a number of advancements being made in the tech world, of course the well known multinational technology and consulting corporation, IBM is leading in these advancements. They work closely with Oracle organizing web commerce for corporations to improve the user experience for their customers, which often times means improving the experience for the employees dealing with the customers.In today's consumer driven world, customer experience is of utmost importance, that said what ways can big corporations like IMB, or Oracle make a user experience that not only meets their needs, but keeps them coming back? The answer lies in tracking consumer habits or targeting the right audience, to create meaningful user experiences.

In this podcast, Ted Grunebaum, an associate partner of Enterprise Transformation at Global Business Services for IMB discussed in detail with freelance reporter Kate Clodfelter, the work IBM is currently achieving with Oracle to make these user experiences a reality.

IBM was founded in 1911, is headquartered in Armonk, North Castle, NY with offices across the globe, and has a current stock price of $144.05. To find out more on the advancements IBM is making in the tech world, visit http://www.ibm.com/us-en/.

For more on Oracle and the conferences held, go to http://www.oracle.com/index.html

This mother’s day, Avaya’s Zang has an answer for all those who are either memory or time zone challenged. Among the many applications Zang can deliver, you can now record a message and have it delivered at the local time you select.

In this podcast, Mo Nezerati, GM of Zang and Doug Green, publisher of Telecom Reseller discuss Zang and the way in which Zang’s cloud based possibilities are changing the UC and UCaaS landscape with creative solutions for many industries and needs. Among these are the ability to pre-record a message and deliver it to a recipient at a pre-selected time.

Avaya unveiled Zang earlier this year at Enterprise Connect, as a communications platform and communication applications- as- a-service that revolutionizes the way businesses can use communications to connect with their customers and employees. Zang offers easy to use drag and drop tools, pre-built applications and robust APIs that make it possible for anyone to leverage the best of the web to quickly build and deploy applications that communications-enable consumer or enterprise applications and services.

Visit Zang

Unified Communications (UC) has stopped. Now what? Your cell phone can make calls but you have little or no control or data about the calls. This certainly won’t due for the contact center, help desk, or collaboration connections. You may even have non-compliant calls that will open you up to legal and regulatory violations and fines. This is to say nothing of your organization’s reputation that will be damaged by the UC failure. You need high availability (HA) UC.

This EDUcast, recorded with Trish Harris, Channel Sales Director at Tadiran Telecom www.tadirantele.com, and Gary Audin discuss the implementations of Unified Communications and how and why high availability for UC is so important Trish presents several backup solutions for UC and how they can be implemented on-premises or in the cloud. Trish also demonstrates how the enterprise can reduce their licensing costs through the active-active design.

This EDUcast covers:

Why UC Business Continuity?

What is High Availability?

Business Continuity Solutions

Example Configurations for HA

Cloud Solutions

Selecting a HA Solution

The ultimate HA solution is a design with an active-active configuration. This configuration delivers uninterrupted switchover from a failed UC system to a live UC system without losing connections. Trish explains the pros and cons for active-active design.

For over 50 years Tadiran www.tadirantele.com has been serving businesses of all sizes, including some of the world's largest companies and organizations in various market segments across 41 countries worldwide. Tadiran features a comprehensive family of products including IP PBXs, Softswitches, Contact Centers, and Business phones. Tadiran endeavors to provide superior solutions, support, and service to our global customer base. At the same time Tadiran Telecom strives to increase environmental awareness in the telecom market by utilizing "green technology" in its products.

Watch the Educast below. You may also watch it above on YouTube

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