INTERNET TELEPHONY — July 2014

Votacall Brings Its Unique Flavor to Cloud-Based Communications

Votacall is a communications solution provider with a full suite of business VoIP and cloud-based managed voice solutions in a... More>>>

Departments

An Interview with Schmooze Com Inc. CEO Tony Lewis
Most of the direct competitors to FreePBX are closed source or proprietary solutions; however, over the years there have been various open source competitors that have come and gone. Most alternatives you find will likely be underdeveloped or focused on a different objective or component of telephony, or not primarily designed as a PBX. Most do not have the luxury of a corporate sponsorship or a dedicated development staff. You will find that some of the more impressive and vibrant alternatives are not actually open source, and are only available through commercial license. Developing a project like FreePBX is not a trivial task, it has taken us a decade of work to get where we are today.

Special Focus

INTERNET TELEPHONY Reveals TMC Labs Innovation Award Winners
Welcome to the 15th annual INTERNET TELEPHONY magazine TMC Labs Innovation Awards where we honor innovative technologies. This year we had some interesting applicants, including HD videoconferencing, a virtual SBC, cloud-based Wi-Fi, mobility solutions, security applications, and more. TMC Labs has enjoyed discovering and testing innovative products and services within the communications industry for many years, and one of the things we enjoy most is giving TMC Labs Innovation Awards to innovative technology products.

Unified Communications

Is Your Company's Software Underused?
Think about all the different kinds of software that your organization uses to conduct business - from general applications like Microsoft Word, Outlook, and Excel, to more specialized platforms like Salesforce.com, Hubspot, and even Adobe's suite of creative products.

Security

Five Ways to Help Enterprises Secure Applications and Customer Data
As reports of companies suffering data breaches continue to roll in with alarming frequency, concern about data security has moved beyond the realm of IT pros and into the mainstream. Security breaches at a wide range of companies, from brick-and-mortar institutions like Target, which allowed hackers to access data on as many as 100 million customers in December, to web-based platforms like Kickstarter, whose site was breached in February, have shown that no organization is beyond reach the reach of persistent attackers. While each company faces different security challenges, there are several specific measures that web-based application providers should take to keep customer data safe.

Wireless

What's New in the Satellite Orbit
The FCC's planned Incentive Auction, growth in the Internet of Things, LTE build outs, and Wi-Fi proliferation have been grabbing a lot of headlines lately in the wireless sphere. But another hot area of wireless expansion these days is satellite.

Wireless

BYOD: An Ongoing Challenge
For all the talk in recent years and months about the bring-your-own-device trend, you'd think businesses would have this situation well in hand. But, in fact, BYOD continues to be one of the issues that keep company executives awake at night and has them considering strategies to completely lock everything down in an effort to limit corporate and personal liability, and keep their organizations safe from a data breach. However, whole managers are feeling the heat from BYOD concerns, employees could not be more chill about it.

Wireless

An IoT Booster:CEO Explains Why This Signal Technology is Coming Out of the Shadows
For more than 10 years, technology vendors have been creating signal boosters to address the issue of poor indoor cellular coverage and dropped calls. Until recently however, carriers outlawed boosters due to network interference. But finally, the tide is changing and the market has come of age. The timing is ideal given the groundswell in the Internet of Things.

Cloud & Data Center

Saving on Reverse Proxy Server Runtime: Public Cloud, Nginx, Docker and VNS3 Can Do the Job
Cloud providers have invested heavily in cloud infrastructure facilities and equipment, making it easy to distribute resources across the globe. Despite the global reach, users hoping to run additional network services like Nginx, HAproxy, or Snort have to use additional VMs and servers. Adding VMs to the network can get very expensive and quickly complicate a network topology.

Cloud & Data Center

Fiber Mountain Helps Data Centers Scale Affordably
INTERNET TELEPHONY magazine recently interviewed M. H. Raza, founder and CEO of Fiber Mountain Inc., about how the company is leveraging data center infrastructure management, software-defined networking, and virtualization to take data centers to the next level.

The Channel

On Rad's Radar: Is It an Overcrowded Market?
The week I wrote this column two master agencies announced agreements with two different hosted VoIP providers. Each agency now has an agreement with 20 service providers that offer Hosted VoIP. 20.

Roundup

Billing Solutions
Trends in billing continue to change and shift. For example, IDC's recently unveiled 2014 Consumer Payments Survey indicates there's recently been a small decline in online bill payment, but that mobile payments have increased slightly.

Strategic Solutions Series

The Future of Networking is Now: Alcatel-Lucent Can Show You How
The telecom industry is famous for generating acronyms and corresponding technologies. Gartner refers to the flurry of excitement that often surrounds this exercise as the hype cycle. But the recognition that our industry is susceptible to hype can be counter productive, causing the more cautious types among us to take a wait-and-see attitude when new opportunities present themselves.

FreePBX World Supplement

The Billion Dollar Game Changer: Keynoter to Tell the Story of the Open Source Telephony Revolution
Open source communications platforms powered by FreePBX and Asterisk have been under continuous development for more than 10 years. Today both of these account for millions of installations worldwide, contributing billions of dollars in hardware, software, and services sales.

Feature Story

A Little Background on FreePBX
FreePBX, the world's most popular open source PBX platform, like many technology powerhouses, had humble beginnings a decade ago as a hobbyist PBX platform. FreePBX has continued to grow into a fully evolved ecosystem and is now in use in millions of production systems in more than 210 countries and territories across the world. Today there is no other OSS PBX platform that even approaches its adoption. With this success an entire industry was reborn, as FreePBX now contributes to billions of dollars in hardware, software, and services sales globally.

Feature Story

FreePBX World: An Event Addressing IP Phone Solutions
Schmooze Com Inc. will bring FreePBX World to ITEXPO Las Vegas, the leading business technology event, which will take place Aug.11-14, 2014, at The Rio in Las Vegas. FreePBX World is an event for all parties interested in selling, installing, or using VoIP phone systems. Whether on premises or in the cloud, FreePBX has a solution to cater to the needs of SMBs, large enterprises, service providers, and others looking to leverage advanced IP communications. Schmooze Com is also a Diamond Sponsor of ITEXPO, with all event attendees having complete access to FreePBX World programming and events.

Feature Story

What You Need to Know about Schmooze Com Inc.
Schmooze Com Inc. is a global telephony software development business based in Neenah, Wisc., and a Diamond Sponsor of this year's ITEXPO in Las Vegas. Schmooze's flagship product, FreePBX, was initially released a decade ago, and is in use on millions of production systems in 210 countries and territories, making it the most prevalent open source PBX platform in the world.