In this episode of the podcast, Doug Green is joined by Matt Hayes, Manager at ISN, the global leader in contractor and supplier information management, to discuss the cybersecurity landscape of the telecom industry.

Over 74 million U.S. telecommunications clients’ data has been leaked onto the dark web in 2023 alone. With only a few major providers, each collecting a wealth of sensitive data about their customers, the telecom industry has remained a prominent target for hackers. Unfortunately, the extensive use of contractors and subcontractors in the telecom industry has opened the space up to further risks. Knowing they are already at higher risk of a cyberattack, telecom companies using high numbers of contractors need to ensure security procedures are thoroughly spelled out and effectively communicated.

Matt Hayes

Matt provides insights into how the widespread use of contractors in the telecom industry can open up the space to new cyber threats. He also shares how telecom companies can effectively communicate best practices to contractors to tighten up their security posture, and what should be included in an effective cybersecurity training for contractors. Click here to learn more about ISN's cybersecurity offerings.

Matt Hayes is a Manager at ISN, overseeing ISN’s efforts in the Utilities, Telecom and Public Sector industries. Matt has been at ISN for 10+years, managing team initiatives focused on sales strategy, customer retention and client services.

Prior to his current role, he worked in leadership roles at ISN throughout the Business Development department, most recently overseeing teams in the Manufacturing space, including Automotive, Consumer Goods and Pharmaceuticals. Matt holds a Bachelor of Business Administration in Risk Management from Baylor University.

Newest Quark.ai board member has a distinguished background in science, leadership corporate development, Girl Scouts and Head Start

Doug Green, Senior Editor and Publisher

“When you think about human development, education is the key,” says Sylvia Acevedo, Quark.ai’s newly appointed board member. Acevedo observes that historically, education sees the “sage on the stage” while the students passively learn. “With AI, and generative AI, you turn that and really flip the script. Students can now own the learning process at a speed that is customized to them, and then the teacher’s role is really the expert, the mentor, the guide who can really crystalize the learning for the student.”

“What really drew me to AI is its incredible potential to make an impact on the world, and my belief that we can navigate its challenges to make sure its benefits are realized.”

Acevedo is an experienced independent board member, currently serving on two public boards, Qualcomm Inc, and Credo Technologies, and a privately held company, Ambri Inc. Previously, she served on two private company boards, Dynamic Signal, a SaaS employee communications company, and Synergis Education, a higher education services company. Ms. Acevedo has a proven track record as a CEO and has been highly awarded for her success in a variety of industries, technology, education, federal government, and national non-profits.

Quark.ai’s potential to change customer service.

In this podcast we discuss the immense potential of AI but also the dystopian possibilities. We learn that as Quark.ai’s founder, Prosenjit Sen, began to talk to Acevedo about Quark.ai and the potential for great change, the conversation included a thought process that includes encouraging the market to use these new technologies wisely, train people for positions where they a re leveraging AI vs being replaced by AI, along with the nearly revolutionary way the technology might transform industry after industry.

“We have built something special,” says Sen. Reflecting on the global discussion on how AI will change industries and employment, Sen reflects on the idea that with proper training, AI has the potential to make employees in, for example major industries such as automotive, more productive. “Regular people will be able to do sophisticated jobs.”

An experienced leader

Acevedo held executive roles at Apple, Dell, IBM, and Autodesk.

Reflecting on her time as Chief Executive Officer of the Girl Scouts of the USA from May 2017 to August 2020 and as interim CEO from June 2016 to May 2017, Acevedo discusses how she led the organization to help close the gender gap among young people in STEM. “What I am really proud of is that over one million STEM merit badges were earned and over 180,000 of these were in cybersecurity.”

Rocket Scientist

A rocket scientist by training, Ms. Acevedo holds a B.S. in Industrial Engineering from New Mexico State University and a M.S. in Industrial Engineering from Stanford University. She has also been awarded an Honorary Doctor of Science from Duke University and an Honorary Doctorate from Washington College.

“What really drew me to AI is its incredible potential to make an impact on the world, and my belief that we can navigate its challenges to make sure its benefits are realized.”

About Quark.ai

Quark.ai’s Autonomous Support Platform is the industry’s first pre-trained, purpose-built Generative AI platform that uses Large Language Models (LLM), classical Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Computer Vision technologies to provide a unique platform for Technical Support, Field Support, and Sale Support. The platforms unique IP enables the user to input a query to then get generated answers with very high accuracy (> 90%), 100 traceability to the right section sections of the documents that were used in generating the answer, minimal hallucination, and – at the lowest cost of ownership.

Quark.

Snom delivers unique opportunity for partners to create new recurring income relationships as clients navigate migration path descions

“We’re the only IP product that solves the puzzle of how to put a virtual line in a fixed button on the phone” says Chris Trittin, Senior Sales Director, Snom Americas. As Trittin explains, for partners who have clients what are holding on to their legacy key-system technology, and its robust and simple underlying functionality, but now could be candidates to make their move to the cloud, including having mobility, Snom has filled the gap. No retraining of on-prem staff, not shifts in work process, but the partner is now able to convert a legacy installation into a recurring cloud model. Snom products fill the gap.

Snom recently expanded its product offerings, all complete with the company’s leading DECT technology. Most notably, the Snom M500 Wireless Family is a wireless office system that allows for flexible wireless deployment anywhere within a business location. The Snom M500 is an “Office in a Box” – this lineup includes the M500 Multicell Base Station, M58 Desk Phone and the M55 Handset which are easy to set up, intuitive to use and can expand with your business. Other offerings for various business sizes and applications include the M100, M900 and M900 Outdoor.

In this podcast episode, Trittin, discusses Snom's specialty – its high-quality VoIP phones – including DECT-based mobility solutions and the company’s reputation for innovation, reliability, and an abundance of features. Snom’s DECT solutions offer a wide wireless range, support a significant number of handsets per base station and are designed with high standards of quality and durability.

For more information, please visit www.snomamericas.com. Snom is a subsidiary of VTech Holdings Limited

News on Snom

https://youtu.be/EKFc4MRqalI

Wildix has positioned itself to stand out in the crowded communications crowded market.

“We decided to go 100% to the channel, says Steve Osler, CEO Wildix. Recorded at the Wildix Partner Day Conference in Chicago, this podcast walks us through a top-level view of how Wildix has positioned itself to stand out in the crowded communications crowded market. The largest message of the conference and the podcast was Wildix’s absolute focus on the channel, and on making each partnership really work. According to Osler that includes three big ideas: commitment to keeping the partner as the only customer facing presence, delivering to the customers unique experiences that are only offered by their Wildix partner, and offering products that keep the partner as the customer’s problem solver.

Osler walks us through the special retail solution called x-hoppers, a complete retail communications solution that uses AI and tackles head on retail challenges by engaging consumers and helping to maximize scarce labor resources. We learn how x-hoppers boosts sales and cuts labor time in unproductive tasks. We also hear about x-bees, a customer communications platform built to boost sales for clients that are more B2B, where other tactics are needed to engage business customers. Osler reports that his company has one of the lowest churn rates in the industry because Wildix supports their partners and continues to enable the channel to offer inventive solutions to their clients.

Visit www.wildix.com

Cisco’s latest SD-WAN product enhancements, make it easier to deliver exceptional experiences while also helping simplify network management, Cisco Podcast

We are really trying to push the envelope in terms of the applications experience that users have,” says JL Valente, VP of Product for Enterprise Routing and SD-WAN. Valente explains how Cisco is meeting the demands of the new work environment by taking SD-WAN to a new level, able to meet the challenges posed to the enterprise by multiple applications, environments, security needs and the rising expectations of a company’s associates, wherever they find themselves, and in whatever task they seek to perform. People want to be able to seamlessly go about their work, and have the same robust and secure access, all the time, from anywhere, basically doing any number of things.

As global enterprises continue to expand SD-WAN deployments, which are increasing in scale and size, the need for more simplified and efficient management grows. The Cisco Networking Cloud vision enables customers to create an enhanced experience for users while helping simplify operations for IT personnel. With Cisco’s latest SD-WAN product enhancements, they’ve made it easier to deliver exceptional experiences while also helping simplify network management.

In this podcast, JL walks us through several key product enhancements to Cisco’s SD-WAN offering.  We learn about a new deployment option or consumption model for SD-WAN connectivity, cloud-delivered Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN.  This new consumption models allows customers to consume SD-WAN as a utility with a flexible subscription consumption model.  Cloud-delivered Catalyst SD-WAN provides a cloud-first experience with automated, rapid on-boarding and single sign-on.

He also shares new closed-loop automation capabilities with Predictive Path Recommendations (PPR). As an integral component of Cisco predictive networks, PPR delivers a predictive network solution for IT personnel to proactively improve application experience. Leveraging advanced algorithms and predictive models, PPR determines the performance and policy compliance of the paths carrying the site application traffic. When performance is below historical benchmarks or SLA, PPR can make recommendations to the IT personnel and automatically implement corrective actions—before impacting users.

And he also gives insights into the newly available Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Hub with AWS Cloud WAN, an integration that provides a dynamic WAN service to rapidly build a global network in a simplified and fully automated manner, within minutes. The solution delivers a secure, on-demand, available middle-mile, leveraging the global AWS backbone.

Learn more at https://www.cisco.com/c/en_sg/solutions/enterprise-networks/sd-wan/index.html

https://youtu.be/9OBcSV0jEoY

“People are angry,” says Sarah Delphey, VP of Trust Solutions of Numeracle. “It’s very empowering,” adds Delphey. As people continue to receive nuisance and scam robocalls, one of the things that they can do is file a complaint with the FCC. Delphey tells us that she is among those that have responded this way too. Nobody is immune from the onslaught.

The challenge for organizations, of all sizes, is the compromise of brand reputation. “Just like any company can develop bad online reviews… in just the same way, a company that’s just going about their business, not committing fraud, not committing anything illegal, if their calling is leaving the wrong impression, or if people think it’s an impersonation attempt, that could cause people to file complaints about you, without your knowledge, and those complaints could be having a negative impact.” Delphey notes that in her previous work inside a carrier, these complaints can move the carrier to consider cancellation of service. Her experience is that customers were often unaware that there was even a problem.

In this podcast, Delphey outlines the damage that can occur, and how Numeracle can help clients have visibility to the problem, before it escalates, along with actionable information. She notes that when a carrier’s client can outline how they are responding, it moves the carrier to see the client as a responsible actor.

Numeracle is an industry pioneer and leader with actionable solutions for legal callers that prioritizes their calling identity as the foundation to restoring trust in the voice channel and to their calls by removing barriers, like improper spam labels, from harming their phone numbers. Numeracle's Entity Identity Management™ (EIM) platform puts enterprise brands, BPOs, and service providers in direct control of their identity, which we vet and verify. Our EIM platform can also be used to manage branded communications, to improve call reputation with blocking and labeling prevention and spam label remediation, and we provide visibility into call display to ensure brand identity is presented as intended, with transparency and consistency. Our KYC-based identity vetting and verification is the cornerstone of the platform; developed in support of evolving federal regulations and telecom standards.

Read the White Papers

Read the Blog

Visit www.numeracle.com

AI deployed: No supervisor. No Command and Control. Better Agent EX. Better CX.

“Find the best people, whenever you need them, wherever they are,” says Tyler Ashby, President at Agents Only Technologies. In this podcast, Tyler discusses a new approach to a long-term challenge: staffing the contact center. Historically, this is the world of the mismatching labor market, with contact centers struggling to be staffed at peak times and seasons, trying to keep costs under control in slower times, matching high customer expectations to available compensation, and the hard work of improving EX, employee experience. Tyler points out that the old career path, when front line contact center agents could rise through the rands to the executive suite, may no longer be available in many companies, meaning that a different approach is needed.

Agents Only combines gig workers, hybrid work, and AI to offer a new answer to an old problem. The AI is agent facing, in the same way the Uber and Lyft platforms face their gig workforce (or ride-sharing people). The AI matches you, as the agent, to a brand and then the AI becomes, coach, trainer, companion, and mentor. No boss. No command and control, which have sometimes been a source of friction with inbound and even longer-term workers. AI talks to the agent in a natural language conversation, and then helps the agent, call by call, rating the transaction and then helping the agent fine tune their approach.

The company has already been doing this for clients, and has processed $250,000,000 in transactions, as basically a proof of concept. Now the firm is going to market. “For large CTO’s this is a short road map to results with limited investment or risk,” says Tyler, who sees this as an easy opportunity for enterprise readers to experience a new way to handle contact center demands, with little fixed outlay. Meanwhile, this is an interesting AI and contact center play for the channel, a chance to offer an advanced, proven AI contact center solution, to customers who would otherwise not know they had such an option. Tyler also sees this a fitting a need for the CSP community.

Visit www.agentsonly.com

More AI deployed stories

https://youtu.be/6GDH2yAb03I

TelcoBridges Announces Media Gateway Certification of Interoperability with Metaswitch CFS

Last month, TelcoBridges, a leading designer and manufacturer of carrier-grade VoIP gateways, today announced successful completion of certification testing by Metaswitch, a Microsoft company. This accreditation certifies that versions of TelcoBridges Tmedia gateways are now fully interoperable with the widely deployed MetaSphere Call Feature Server (CFS).  As a result of the successful certification, TelcoBridges now offers “Tmedia for Metaswitch Networks” as a software option/upgrade for existing and new Tmedia products. This includes integration with Metaswitch’s MetaView Service Assurance Server, for rapid call tracing and fault diagnosis. The new options are now available from the TelcoBridges web site at www.telcobridges.com/metaswitch.

In this podcast, Alan Percy, CMO at TelcoBridges walks us through the announcement and why it’s a gain for the smaller, distributed service providers to meet their goals of expand or modernize their networks, in a cost-effective method. Percy discusses the announcement in the context of a wider TelcoBridges Tmedia™ family of VoIP media gateways are a highly reliable solution for telephony service providers, interconnecting legacy TDM and modern VoIP networks.

“We’ve been able to deliver really outstanding reliability to the customers and we have the customer feedback to prove it.”

Visit https://telcobridges.com/

News on TelcoBridges

https://youtu.be/PKDDE5U0WBw

AIQ Podcast: Helps when cash runs tight or for companies seeking to have a higher value.

When household brand name companies must reduce expenses, they have been approaching AIQ to find savings on their IT and services spend. According to AIQ’s Blake Wetzel, AIQ uses a highly patented reverse auction process to cut services costs by an average of 44.6%. These reverse auctions and their accompanying lower cost, more tailored services, improve EBITDA and can help firms increase their value. “We work with the client to determine which vendors they would like to invite to the client, verses inviting everyone and then we work to make sure the vendors are qualified to provide the services,” says Blake. The curated reverse auction than helps get the cost of the services, that are needed, to be lower. As this is a cost cutting project with external vendors, the saving s come without an internal head count reduction. The idea is to gain the services needed at a better price than may have previously been arranged or offered. “We touch on over 100 categories on IT and IT adjacent spend,” adds Wetzel.

In this podcast, Wetzel walks us through the process, including a very thorough assessment, done for free. AIQ discovers what the contractual obligations are, looks at the way the firm is spending, looks at the operation of the firm, including mission critical services. AIQ holds reverse auctions every week and Is experienced in holding a competitive auction process that results in getting needed services delivered for less.

Wetzel sees this as not only an inviting process for the enterprise readers, but also a channel opportunity. A channel can bring a cost savings story to a client without having to do the actual vendor development. All this is done while the channel retains their connection as the valued advisor- in this case the value advisor who saved the company, the client, on significant recurring costs.

Visit https://www.aiq.co/

https://youtu.be/zpJ30RK7lpA

In this episode of the podcast, Doug is joined by Sriram Sampath, Vice President - CX Management & Collaboration Platforms at Tata Communications, a global digital ecosystem enabler, to discuss the changing landscape of hybrid work.

Is hybrid work an advantage or a disruption? Sriram explores how businesses have taken this opportunity to adapt and evolve their technology solutions to support remote and hybrid work. Enterprise technology has boosted productivity for virtual teams through high-speed connections, availability of smart devices, cloud services, and improved network security and collaboration services. However, there is a challenge too. While collaboration services and tools make it easier for people to work from anywhere, employees tend to be isolated, and a distance grows with how managers work with their teams.

Sriram provides insights into Tata Communications' role as a CommTech player to power enterprises with remote and hybrid work adoption. He also offers a forward-looking perspective on the direction of hybrid work, emphasizing the importance for businesses to stay ahead of the tech-driven and ever-evolving workforce trends. Click here to know more about Tata Communications offerings for Unified Communications and Business Collaboration.