CEO SPOTLIGHT

Windham Explains How Digium is Building on Its Asterisk Success
Asterisk became an open source sensation about a decade ago, and as a Digium board member, Danny Windham had a front-row seat to the show. Soon after, Windham was tapped as Digium's CEO, and he and his team have been working to translate the success of Asterisk into a growing business.

Departments

The Channel

Channel Briefs
Gemalto has introduced a customizable portal that addresses the unique software supply chain needs of its customers. Those customers are companies that sell hardware in which software is a key component, or just pure software.

The IoT and KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid)
Think of the IoT like a moving elephant - you are not going to be able to stop it or slow it down, but maybe you can carefully turn it in a direction favorable to your organization.

Weatherly Provides an Update on PGi's Channel Partner Effort
PGi is a 25-year-old company that lays claim to being the largest pure-play collaboration provider. At the moment just under 20 percent of the company's sales come from the channel. But in the next three to four years PGi expects channel partners to account for about half of its revenues.

8x8 Expands Channel Effort, Customer Base
Unified communications as a service leader 8x8 Inc. has doubled down on its commitment to the channel with the introduction, and ongoing support, of what it calls Channel 2.0.

Recognition

INTERNET TELEPHONY Announces TMC Product of the Year Award Winners
It's an exciting time for tech. New and improved products and services come to market every day. Here's a look at some of the solutions deemed the best by our TMC panel of judges.

Security

Ransomware Threat Continues Surge
The ransomware problem is bad, and it's only getting worse. Ransomware is, of course, malware for which the hackers demand payment.

Developer & Open Source

How RAD Platforms Can Move New App Deployment Forward
Rapid application development platforms ¬- the low code and no code tools that have proliferated in the last few years - have given rise to the phenomenon of the citizen developer. A citizen developer is someone who is, or can become, proficient in RAD development, either independently or in support of a professional developer.

Software Licensing and Monetization: Why More Businesses Now Require These Solutions
The digital transformation has begun. Companies and their customers are moving to software-centric solutions and on-demand usage. That calls for an entirely new way of pricing and packaging so the organizations that provide the software can get the best possible return on their product.

Developing Mobile Applications: How to Meet the Challenge of Quality
Based on a survey of the leading sites in the U.S., an average 55.67 percent of traffic in the fourth quarter 2015 came from mobile devices. We can expect this figure to grow steadily over the coming years.

Enterprise Communications

Business Process Management: How Digital Transformation is Prompting its Evolution
The desire to be more agile, the rise of big data, and the advance of communications and networking technologies are shaking up business to its very core - so much so that even the term business process management is evolving. Indeed, Gartner now tracks a category called not BPM, but rather iBPMS.

Don't Forget Voice in the Digital Workplace
In pursuit of ever greater workforce productivity, today's enterprises are adopting myriad digital tools to enable superior team collaboration, customer relationship management, data analytics, and administrative efficiency. And yet, despite this widespread push for a firing digital workplace, one business-critical activity - the conference call - is still struggling to escape its painful, non-digital past.

Unifying an Approach for Today's Growing Distributed Workforce
According to a Global Workplace Analytics study, 3.7 million employees now work remotely at least half the time. This number is expected to grow in the coming years as employers realize the financial and operational benefits of remote work. Evolving workplace realities require both a paradigm shift and new resources. It's becoming business critical for companies to invest in the right technology to support a distributed team's ability to connect, collaborate, and engage.

Wireless

What to Expect from 5G
We've been hearing a lot about 5G lately. But the fact is that this newest iteration of cellular technology has yet to even be defined.

Networks

Innovating Our Way Out of NFV Disillusionment
With more than 200 companies already dedicated to NFV and access to a vibrant open-source community, the issues with NFV are not technical; quite the opposite in fact. We are in danger of creating sub-optimal solutions in an effort to show quick progress. What is needed now for NFV are solutions designed from the ground up specifically to address the overall requirements of NFV. Developing and delivering these solutions will require a collaborative effort between carriers and vendors to not only provide solutions that work, but also to address the bottom line NFV requirements for success.

Google Fiber Goes on Pause, Embarks on Hybrid Broadband Strategy
The future of Google's broadband services business is in question after Craig Barratt, the leader of the effort, announced plans to step down from his CEO role and talked about putting its exploratory fiber activities on hold.

Facebook's Voyager Could Disrupt the Optical Transport Space
Facebook's influence on networking continues to expand. In the most recent evidence of this, the social media giant has come out with an open DWDM transport solution called Voyager that is shaking up the optical networking arena. The company says Voyager is the industry's first white box transponder and routing solution.

How NFV Empowers Network Efficiency and Service Improvement
Traditionally, network functions have been hosted on purpose-built hardware, which is expensive and slow to deploy. Any changes to that functionality must be made by the equipment provider at a substantial cost, which creating a huge barrier to ongoing development. VNFs change this dynamic - they are hosted in data centers, in environments that offer flexibility, that enable rapid adaptation.