Telecom Reseller / Technology Reseller News

By Gary Audin

Are your bills right? Can you efficiently connect the invoice to the bill? Do you have revenue leakage? Can you detect and mitigate fraud? Can your revenue management system interoperate with your sales and marketing systems? Do you perform analytics on the customers and their revenue stream? With profit margins decreasing, you need to more efficient than ever.

Daniel Olvebrink, Head of Products, Wholesale for Enghouse Networks, and Gary Audin discuss the challenges faced by providers, carriers, and resellers concerning revenue management. In this podcast, Daniel speaks about the consolidation of products that provide end-to-end management with partners for mediation, rating, billing, reconciliation, trading, and routing. He also points out two market trends and their impact.

Enghouse’s www.enghousenetworks.com software product portfolio supports next generation telecommunications and utility network operators. Enghouse is a strategic partner. They build trusted customer relationships, leveraging decades of telecommunications service provider experience and an innovative company culture. You can grow your business profitably, enhance margins, and identify new revenue opportunities through their Revenue Management solutions www.enghousenetworks.com/product/wrm/.

Enghouse’s solutions have been deployed around the world including next generation, mobile, wireless, railway GSM-R operators, and cable multiple system operators (MSO) that are building high speed broadband, cable, fiber to the home (FTTH), fiber to the tower (FTTT), and wireless LTE networks

There’s a lot of excitement about the next generation, but wait -- we’re not sure how the next generation will be defined. The U.S. is in a race. The U.S. has dominated 4G/LTE but there is stiff competition from Japan and South Korea on how the next generation of wireless will be defined.

What’s the pathway for suppliers and carriers to the next generation? This question is what is guiding TIA’s future plans for next-generation and 5G networks at TIA 2016.

Doug Green, Publisher of Telecom Reseller, recently interviewed Dileep Srihari Director, of Legislative & Government Affairs for the TIA, about legislation currently working through congress that may affect wireless networks: in particular, 5G.

For more on the conference, and to register, go to http://www.tia2016.org

More on TIA at www.tiaonline.org

You have an on-premises Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C) system. You are also considering or using cloud UC&C services. You will end up with two separate fulfillment and management platforms. You are not sure how much you want the user to support fulfillment or how much your IT staff should get involved.

Mike Frayne, CEO of VOSS www.voss-solutions.com, and Gary Audin discuss the fulfillment and management issues revolving around UC&C deployments in this podcast. Part of the discussion covers where automation is useful in fulfillment and management. He points out that a product that only does management one way will not satisfy the majority of enterprises or service providers. He believes that the fulfillment and management roles will continue to become more complex with more devices to manage and more infrastructure and endpoints suppliers entering the market.

VOSS-4-UC is a BCOM (business communications operations management) solution that automates and simplifies the challenge of managing today's increasingly sophisticated communications environments. VOSS-4-UC provides a complete tool-set to transform the way that communications architectures are designed, deployed, and operated, in the public and private cloud.

VOSS www.voss-solutions.com  is head-quartered in Richardson, Texas, with offices in Reading, UK, and Cape Town, South Africa. The VOSS technology has been deployed by over 100 cloud service providers and many prominent enterprise organizations across the world.

Network connections can be on-net or near-net. Networks for the enterprise are built to support on-net locations. When network operators design their networks, they consider where to leave slack coils (connections) for future expansion, called near-net. Fiber networks are physical facilities that require pre-determined splice points to add network capacity. Without enough slack coils in the street and without enough splice locations, customers of traditional fiber networks are forced to pay build fees in order to access locations that are not on-net or near-net, making these builds cumbersome and costly.

Walter Cannon, Vice President at ZenFi www.zenfi.com and Gary Audin recorded this podcast at INCOMPAS 16. This podcast discusses the near-net capabilities of ZenFi and their support in New York City. A major value of working with ZenFi is their existing ability to use the rights-of-way through conduit and on poles thereby reducing the network CAPEX especially for wireless providers, both Wi-Fi and cellular. The same is true for enterprises that want to connect to data centers. In both cases, ZenFi can expand the coverage area and bandwidth with vendor neutral fiber facilities.

ZenFi www.zenfi.com owns and operates a carrier-neutral dark fiber network specializing in fronthaul, backhaul, and wavelength connectivity that enables the Internet of Things (IoT). Its New York City purpose-built network is the infrastructure that underlies and enables connectivity in today’s mobile world.

Communications fraud is easier to accomplish with VoIP than with TDM. Automation has increased the problems and made is easier and faster for the fraudsters. Detecting fraud with the call detail record (CDR) is after the fact. You cannot block annoying calls and can be billed $1000s for the fraud. With SIP based analytics, you can stop the call before it is completed thereby avoiding the hassle of fraud.

Jim Dalton, CEO of TransNexus www.transnexus.com and Gary Audin recorded this podcast at INCOMPAS 16. Jim discusses the value and use of SIP analytics that can be implemented in the enterprise PBX or SBC. TransNexus constantly updates the fraud caller identities since they can change by the minute. TransNexus can now block incoming calls that are generated by fraudsters, extorters, survey, and robocalls thereby reducing the network traffic and the user productivity interruptions. TransNexus also offers detailed checklist for the enterprise to help reduce these problems, the Ultimate Telecom Security Checklist http://transnexus.com/.

TransNexus www.transnexus.com is a software development company specializing in applications for managing wholesale VoIP networks. TransNexus provides its Operations and Billing Support System (OSS/BSS) software platform to major VoIP carriers worldwide. Carrier features offered by TransNexus are least cost routing, number portability, fraud detection, profitability analysis, and QoS controls.

TransNexus is an active contributor to open source software projects and only offers software products based on open standards. While TransNexus maintains interoperability partnerships with strategic vendors such as Broadsoft, Metaswitch, Oracle Acme Packet and Taqua, the TransNexus solution is interoperable with any SIP based VoIP system.

In today’s market, physically constructing a network is an ongoing effort. We have passed though wire, cable, microware, fiber optic, and wireless transmission facilities. The change from creating hardware and writing software has changed to writing software and producing hardware to run the software. This requires changes to a provider’s culture as well as the way they manage their networks. It is better if you use a network integrator rather than DIY.

Michael Jonas, President, Global Sales and Marketing for LightRiver Technologies www.lightriver.com and Gary Audin recorded this podcast at INCOMPAS 16. The subjects covered include planning for SDN and changing OSS and BSS to encompass new technologies. Michael speaks about creating software developers for the new technologies and the continued growth of Metro Ethernet as a network technology.

LightRiver Technologies www.lightriver.com designs, engineers, commissions, and supports next generation solutions for mission-critical clients that require the highest capacity, reliability, and resiliency that today’s optical communications technology can deliver. A leader in integrating multi-vendor, Factory Built NetworksTM, LightRiver is an expert in Tier 1 Packet Optical, DWDM/ROADM, MPLS, and Carrier Ethernet systems, and in successfully migrating legacy networks to the next generation. LightRiver delivers unique value with turnkey solutions, carrier-grade quality, and unparalleled customer care in multi-technology networking.

Licensing issues, extra fees, feature packs all produce budgeting complexity. Most UC and PBX vendors can cause more confusion than value adding staff burden when you need to change the features of the implementation. You need a simplified cost model. How about a cost model based on activity, the number of concurrent sessions?

Ken Adams, Director, Solutions Engineering at NetSapiens www.netsapiens.com and Gary Audin recorded this podcast at INCOMPAS 16. Ken discusses the financial pain points of implementing UC and PBX systems mostly those dealing with costs. He points out that their SNAPsolution cost is based on concurrent sessions. All the features are in the product. The customer turns on or off the features by user without encountering extra costs. The SNAPsolution even allows temporary bursting of concurrent sessions without loss of service.

The SNAPsolution http://netsapiens.com/snapsolution/ is a complete solution that service providers and enterprises can deploy to offer more value and improve their ROI. The SNAPsolution is the core of the NetSapiens platform and delivers all of the features and functionality needed to provide next generation voice and unified communication services to any end user.

The NetSapiens mission empowers service providers and enterprises with advanced communication technologies. Their expert knowledge creates positive change in the industry as a whole. Today, the founders lead a team of dedicated professionals who work to innovate solutions for those who want to become competitive forces in the marketplace.

Established in 2006, Covalense is a well-recognised and reliable IT transformation partner to their clients.

They have a diversified, highly trained and motivated talent pool of people working cohesively to deliver effective solutions to organizations of varied sizes and businesses including a number of Fortune 1000 companies across Asia Pacific, India, Middle East, Africa and the United States. Their business operations across geographies are ably supported by our development centers in Hyderabad, Bangalore, Auckland and Sydney.

They’ve done projects and implementations that span across industry verticals such as Beverages, Education, Engineering, FMCG & Retail, Government, Healthcare, ISVs, Logistics, Mobility, Power & Utilities and Telecommunications.

Kate Clodfelter speaks with Kiran Sundarrajan, Director of Sales, while at Oracle Industry Connect about the company and what they do.

More at www.covalense.com

Innovation is a constant requirement for network providers. So is supporting business continuity. These are great traits but the provider must also deliver high quality service to support real time communications. It is also important that there exist powerful and easy to use APIs. You need to consider how a provider migrates to SDN. A good network provider should have a holistic not component view of their network infrastructure and operation.

Brett Scorza, CIO and EVP at www.inteliquent.com speaks with Gary Audin in this podcast recorded at INCOMPAS 16. The podcast covers the inteliquent approach to customer support as a national voice and messaging provider. The growth of their services has three focuses, cost, redundancy, and scalability. The discussion also focuses on the management and growth of network capacity to ensure that there will be adequate resources for their customers even during natural and manmade disasters.

Inteliquent www.inteliquent.com provides a comprehensive suite of innovative voice services. They have established a strong market presence by creating a competitive tandem network that is used by the largest wireless, cable, CLEC, and long distance carriers in the U.S.

Inteliquent's voice services include streamlined SIP interconnection for domestic and international long distance traffic. They also offer terminating and originating access that supports billions of minutes of traffic each month.

You operate a network operation center (NOC). Can you staff the NOC 24 hours a day every day? What happens when the network problem is beyond your staff’s knowledge? Where do you go for specialized NOC technologists? What will happen when you encounter SDN and NFV? You cannot afford to shop around in real time for the technologists to solve your problems. This is when NOC as a Service (NOCaaS) becomes attractive.

Hal Baylor, Director, Business Development for INOC www.inoc.com and Gary Audin recorded this podcast at INCOMPAS 16. The podcast covers a range of NOC issues and how to resolve them. Hal points out that there a few detailed books on NOCs and little information exchange among NOC installations. The discussion focuses on the challenges and weaknesses found in most NOCs whether at the enterprise or provider.

INOC’s US-based Network Operations Center www.inoc.com team is well trained to manage incidents and is mentored via continuous review so they become skilled experts in the business. The INOC NOC platform securely and seamlessly connects to a customer’s infrastructure, providing the most advanced event detection and efficient workflow management. INOC’s network, server, and application monitoring services provide detailed metrics and visibility, allowing the INOC monitoring team to react quickly and troubleshoot effectively.