Get Ready for ITEXPO

INTERNET TELEPHONY — January 2011

Get Ready for ITEXPO

The event offers a bustling trade show floor as well as an educational program that teaches resellers, enterprises, SMBs, and government agencies how to select IP-based voice, video, fax, and unified communications to purchase or resell. The program also helps service provides most effectively select, deliver and support new revenue-generating services. It's also a great place to network and close the deal…

Cover Story Articles

The SIP Tutorial - Way Beyond 2.0
Based on HTML, SIP started off as an easy to read telecommunications protocol that was aimed at supporting telecom-like services. However, at its core it was about the Internet.

VIPeering Conference Preview
The global mass migration from PSTN to IP architectures is well under way. On the carrier and mobile side, engineers are replacing increasingly obsolete Class 4/5 circuit switches with smaller and faster softswitches and sophisticated session border controllers. Enterprises are replacing old PBXs with unified communications systems.

ITEXPO Collocated Event to Delve into Corporate Video Issues
This is a maxim that we frequently mention in our research work at Interactive Media Strategies as we try to convey the inevitability of video communications adoption in the corporate sector.

A Bridge to Convergence
Ever since the emergence of IP telephony, folks have spent considerable amounts of time deliberating and debating over which indirect channel would be in the best position once the dust of disruption had settled and legacy systems were left behind. Would it be traditional telecom agents and master agencies, born in the days of long-distance resale? Or would integrator and equipment value-added reseller types rooted in the IT department have the leg up?

Asterisk: Building for the Future in 2011
2010 was a banner year for Digium, the Asterisk project and the vibrant community that supports its development. Asterisk 1.8 long term support was released with four years of support in October of 2010 and brought with it a substantial number of new features including secure real-time transport protocol support, IPv6 support, calendaring integration, enhanced call logging, and much more.

Get Charged Up About the Smart Grid Summit 2011
As many of us settle deep into winter, there's another allure for Miami besides the beach in February. Miami has become the steady site for the East edition of ITEXPO, and with that, our Smart Grid Summit. Regular TMC readers will know that ITEXPO has broadened its scope, and under that tent, the Smart Grid Summit has grown steadily into one of ITEXPO's most popular specialty events.

4GWE, M2M Evolution & SuperWiFi Summit Address Wireless Evolution
In Miami on Feb. 2 through 4 will be the event that brings the discussion to a new stage in the 4G wireless evolution process. 4GWE, M2M and SuperWiFi are sister events all aimed at looking at the future of communication. They are programs designed for anyone involved in rolling out services and solutions that is looking for the right partners and products for the future.

White Space Is Open for Business: Will This Deliver a Broadband Alternative?
White space is now open for business. That means free spectrum, just like Wi-Fi's 2.4gHz.

StartupCamp Returns to Miami
To be fair, entrepreneurship is raging across all technology sectors. It's altogether the new cool. The same university graduates that once knocked on Fortune 500 company doors in search of trainee jobs are now launching companies of their own. And, unlike earlier times, this phenomenon is not relegated to the Bay Area. New York, Boulder, Austin, Montreal and many other cities around the globe have become hotbeds for startups.

Touch Down for The Cloud Communications Summit
First, cloud communications applications use the network as their platform, instead of traditional platforms like programmable switches or SDPs. Also, cloud communications applications are heavy with Internet protocols and approaches, and are light on traditional protocols like SIP or SS7.

Q & A

Latitude and Longitude: Interactive Intelligence Continues Vertical M&A Strategy
Interactive Intelligence sells unified business communications solutions for contact center automation, enterprise IP telephony, and business process automation. This fall it purchased Global Software Services Inc., which does business under the name of Latitude Software, for approximately $14 million. Latitude sells software and services that aid in debt collection.

Editorial Series, sponsored by AudioCodes, the Enterprise SBC Experts

What is an Enterprise Session Border Controller?
For years, session border controllers have been about the need for connectivity and security in service provider networks. More recently, however, enterprise networks have begun to closely resemble service provider networks, including their need for multivendor interoperability and security, creating a parallel market for Enterprise SBCs.

Feature Story

The Enterprise Session Border Controller - More Than Just a SIP Trunk Solution
Session border controllers made their name by acting as gatekeepers at connection points between different service providers' networks. They're still commonly used for this application, but SBCs also increasingly are making an appearance at business customer sites to enable service providers to control SIP traffic. And E-SBCs, as this second group of solutions is known, could be used by service providers to support other business applications - namely, videoconferencing - as well, says Steven Johnson, president of Ingate Systems.

Departments

Getting Vertical — Nonprofits

Non-Profit Organization Simplifies Its Communications with ShoreTel
Rustan Williams, vice president and CIO of The Evangelical Lutheran Good Samaritan Society, says the charitable, non-profit long-term care organization - which provides more than 243 locations and 20,000 residents in 24 states with a variety of assistance including skilled nursing, assisted living, senior housing and home health - used to have a legacy telecommunications platform.

The Channel
On RAD's Radar

Things That Make Me Go "Huh"
Letting more and more people go. All the telcos are doing it. To their detriment. It continues to be a struggle to use the AT&T portals to order anything. It's challenging to get an update, to get circuits installed and turned up properly.