New Developments in Network Virtualization, SDN: NTT's Enterprise Cloud Goes Global, Major TEMs Reveal SDN Strategies
In the March issue of INTERNET TELEPHONY, we talked about the flurry of activity - and acquisitions around - software-defined networking. In the April issue, TMC leader Rich Tehrani asked: Are You Ready to be a Software Telco? And now, in this issue, we look at the most recent developments on the SDN front, which includes new data on the level of deployment of SDN, an update on NTT's commercial SDN-based service, and the strategies of several leading telecom equipment vendors.

Telarix Makes Intercarrier Interactions More Efficient
The process to place orders and handle settlements among different telecom service providers traditionally has been a manual one, involving faxed forms or e-mail communications, says Vic Bozzo, senior vice president of sales at Telarix Inc. That, he says, is like a bank executing a wire transfer by having a guy write a check and run down the street to deliver it.

What Oracle Is Doing with Its Tekelec Acquisition
In February Oracle bought Acme Packet. And in early March it picked up Nimbula, a startup specializing in private cloud infrastructure management software. As of late March, when this issue of INTERNET TELEPHONY was getting ready to head out the door, Oracle had done it again -- swooping in to snap up Tekelec, which only a short time ago had decided to take itself private.

A Look at the VAR World
The bottom 20 percent will drop out of the VAR space. Why? The VAR space is a lot like the ISP space. Most of the ISP owners were techies who just wanted to create themselves a job that would be fun. They liked the tech side of the business and did not want to sell or market or worry about the financials. Even talking with Harry Belsford, we can agree that up to 25 percent of the VARs will not survive.

WebRTC Will Deliver a Seamless Customer Experience
Organizations tend to have a website group and a contact center group. But, in the future, it is very likely that many companies will move to integrate the two in an effort to deliver a better customer experience while at the same time lowering their costs. WebRTC is expected to be a linchpin in bringing all this together.

In the Wrong Hands: How Bad Practices Can Leave SSH Networks At Risk & What to Do About It
The secure shell data-in-transit protocol has been deployed millions of times by organizations of all kinds and sizes since its inception nearly 20 years ago. Today, it is recognized as an industry gold standard, capable both of securely moving data from one machine to another and providing remote administrator access. Linux, Unix, and Mac OS all ship a version of SSH with every version of their software, and SSH is gaining momentum in the Windows market as well.

Making Connections: Manufacturer Wilson Hurd Pulls Things Together with Esna Cloudlink
Founded in 1904 in Wisconsin, Wilson Hurd is a leading manufacturer of custom metal nameplates, plastic overlays, POP display components and electronic control products. About a year ago, the company began looking for ways to reduce IT cost levels and support time. Executive leadership reviewed various cloud and virtualization technologies that could help them reach these goals and, as a result, the company decided to move away from using Microsoft Exchange for enterprise e-mail to a more cost-effective Google Apps solution that included Gmail.

Preventing Costly Mistakes When Installing Enterprise-Wide Communications Solutions
First, it is extremely important that IT evaluate how all UC services (voice, video, instant messaging, collaboration, and mobile) are used in the organization. This requires due diligence and a thorough understanding of the business and its operations. Do you have to support a mobile workforce? What are the geographical demands for the solution - regionally, countrywide, and globally? These and other issues need to be thoroughly vetted before going too far down the deployment path.

Unified Office Introduces Total Connect Now
Unified Office is a new service provider on the scene that aims to make the kind of UC solutions that were once only available to the largest companies accessible to the small and medium business set. The company this spring formally unveiled it services, called Total Connect Now, which is a private cloud-based managed service that addresses worker mobility and the bring-your-own-device trend.

Timing-Aware Ethernet Backhaul Helps Carriers Survive the Wireless Multimedia Explosion
According to a recent Reuters article, the cable industry is losing subscribers who opt for less expensive and more targeted broadband services, which deliver streaming multimedia from both from the carrier's content partners and third-party over-the-top services. Typical of this trend is Comcast, which reportedly lost 117,000 video customers in the third quarter of 2012. While revenues from traditional media services continue to erode, some carriers are going on the offensive by offering premium-level services capable of supporting multiple channels of streaming multimedia, a strategy that requires nearly all carriers to upgrade their infrastructures.

Evolution Platform for Enterprise Lets Content Run Everywhere
The HTML5-based product offers what UIEvolution says is an efficient and economical solution for delivering cross-platform applications across screens - whether those screens are on a mobile phone, a tablet, a TV or within a vehicle. That enables simple, cross-platform experiences for end users, and allows for more affordable and efficient application creation, because software developers can write once and run their apps anywhere with UIEvolution.

Protecting Enterprises Against Software Audit Risks
Beyond the increasing likelihood of out-of-compliance software usage, a difficult economy and decreasing new license revenue have led providers to conduct more frequent audits. While audits previously occurred in response to whistleblowers or suspicious licensing behaviors, many providers now proactively audit all or most of their customers. For Fortune 500 companies, this can potentially result in multi-million dollar liabilities so it is critical to manage this growing area of risk with specific steps at each stage in the software lifecycle - during initial license acquisition, throughout the period of software usage, and in response to a provider audit.

Emerging Trends in Cloud Telephony for 2013
Cloud telephony - among the most important recent innovations in telecommunications - is poised for a banner year in 2013, thanks in part of the role so-called big data will play in improving the quality and depth of analytics and telecom applications.

USF Reform Relief for Rural Rate-of-Return Carriers
In late 2011, the Federal Communications Commission issued the Universal Services Reform Order and created the Connect America Fund to transition approximately $4.5 billion a year of federal subsidies to enable the build out of broadband services to rural communities. Last year, the CAF got off to a rocky start as it unintentionally delayed carriers' investment in broadband infrastructure as a result of the FCC over-rotating on rules and safeguards against spending abuse. The FCC allocated $300 million in the 2012 CAF Phase 1 funding for Tier 1 and Tier 2 price-cap carriers, but the FCC rules and obligations resulted in only $115 million of these funds being claimed -- leaving nearly $2 out of every $3 of this funding on the table.

Tekelec Introduces ThinkingNetworks Vision
The company has been rolling out product and messaging around various parts of this strategy over time, notes John Lenns, associate vice president of product management for Tekelec's policy management solutions. At Mobile World Congress earlier this year Tekelec introduced the ThinkingNetworks piece. Tekelec defines ThinkingNetworks as the phase at which networks become self-aware and automatically adjusting to the needs of services and applications.

Why LTE Needs Diameter Signaling Management
As LTE networks are rolling out worldwide, there are many discussions going on about the critical need to manage signaling, in particular Diameter signaling. There are also discussions, and it's even fair to say some controversy, over the different methods to manage and control Diameter signaling in the most effective way.

Distributed Denial of Service Attacks: Arbor Networks Highlights the Challenges
It used to be that distributed denial of service attacks - for which the bad guys overwhelmed company servers with messages, thereby bringing web viewing and transactional capabilities to a grinding halt - were more major nuisance than possible long-term threat to enterprises.

Run, FIDO, Run: Alliance Works on Non-Proprietary Authentication
The goals of the FIDO Alliance are to define and promote protocols to enable a broad range of strong authentication options across all end user devices; enable stronger authentication and better user experience; support the international standardization of the FIDO protocols by a recognized standards body; work with existing standards not replace them; and make the protocol stack ubiquitously available on client devices.

InfoVista Helps Expedite LTE Network Builds
InfoVista got its start in MPLS performance management and service assurance, but is expanding into mobile. The acquisition of privately-owned Mentum, which InfoVista announced and closed in late November, strengthened InfoVista's play in the radio access space.

Small Cells Await Their Big Debut
Small cells remain a hot topic in the wireless industry, and this area of interest certainly got its share of attention at the recent Mobile World Congress. But while expectations remain high for small cells, and some major wireless service providers have made public their plans to deploy large numbers of these network elements, the extent to which small cells actually have been implemented to date is quite limited. And one source tells INTERNET TELEPHONY that femtocells, an indoor mostly residential version of small cells, have been less than a success for service providers.

Shango Establishes a Common Service Orchestration Platform for Unified Communications
There's no doubt that while IP communications is still very much in its evolutionary days, it has disrupted the very way that carriers and service providers offer up and deliver voice and data communications and network services.

The Top Hosted VoIP Companies in the U.S.
The largest provider of business hosted PBX is Comcast. With its acquisition of NGT and the retention of the smartest person in this space, Comcast has been growing steadily. I estimate that the company has more than 325,000 seats and about $150 million in sales. It should be available throughout Comcast regions by the end of the quarter and rolled out to the channel by the second quarter. If the company can scale the sales process, it could be amazing.

Batchbook to Expand Social CRM Availability, Integrations
Batchbook is opening its social CRM service to a broader swath of users' employees, bringing blogger comments into its tool, and integrating with a wide variety of other business solutions. Ray Bonachea, Batchbook's vice president of marketing, at ITEXPO Miami told INTERNET TELEPHONY that the company plans to come out with new pricing to enable small business users to make its CRM tools available to as many of their employees as they wish.

Firespotter Labs Aims to Spark Innovation in the Voice Space
A little startup called Firespotter Labs has some major backers and big ambitions in the voice space. The company was at ITEXPO Miami earlier this year telling its story. And its CEO, Craig Walker (founder of Google Voice and Dialpad), was among the judges at the colocated event, StartupCamp 7.

This Call May Be Recorded for Quality Assurance Purposes...The Cost of Not Complying with State Privacy Laws
Providing quality customer service often depends on a business's ability to evaluate customer communications by monitoring and recording telephone calls. However, recording or monitoring calls in violation of state privacy laws may expose companies to legal liability, costing hundreds of millions of dollars.

How to Overcome WebRTC's Scalability and Firewall Issues
The demand for a simple and accessible mechanism to communicate via text and video has grown with the use of third-party videoconferencing technologies like Skype, Google and Watchitoo. Naturally, the buzz surrounding WebRTC, and its promise that users can now connect using video and audio directly through the browser, has been building to a fever pitch. And all the hype is for good reason.

Mobidia Aims to Leverage Mobile Data Usage for Carrier Promotions
In the world of all-you-can-eat mobile broadband, no one much new - or cared - how much wireless data they consumed. But as wireless service providers begin to alter their data package options and these same carriers look to find new sources of revenue, many people are becoming keenly interested in mobile data usage in terms of bandwidth used and media type consumed.

Zurmo Spices Up the Open Source CRM Game
Zurmo this spring is bringing out a commercial version of its open source CRM solution to address the needs of medium-sized businesses with 50 or more users. Release 1.5 will include enhanced mobile integration, gamification features, reporting, various e-mail integrations, and workflow capabilities.

Why 2013 is a Pivotal Year for Enterprise Video
Many of the technologies we rely on in business today reached their current penetration levels through a hockey stick adoption curve - starting slowly, growing steadily for some time, and then rapidly accelerating due to a combination of technology advancements, IT capacity and customer demand. The rise of mobile phones followed this pattern, with measured growth in the early 2000s being eclipsed by the influx of iOS and Android devices in the past few years.

An Architecture for the Application Age: SDN Turns Networking Upside Down
SDN is considered by many to be one of the most important, and potentially disruptive, developments in networking since the rise of the Internet. To date, networks and connectivity have come first, and applications have followed. The software-defined network turns this model on its head, approaching networking from an application- and services-first standpoint.

Strong Upside Remains for SBCs
Session border controllers have been around for a long time, but there's still ample opportunity for them related to SIP trunking, among other potential applications such as unified communications normalization. Indeed, Oracle Corp.'s recent move to purchase SBC company, Acme Packet, for $2.1 billion emphasized the value of the session border controller and the fact that these products still have a long runway ahead of them.

Troubleshooting VoIP Problems in the Call Center: How to Get to the Root of the Problem Fast
Ahh, VoIP - the miracle technology that helps businesses streamline call center operations and deliver better customer support. It's a dream, right? So why all the frustration when most of today's call center equipment and applications have built-in management software and tools to help you see and fix problems?

Six Strategies to Positively Impact Enterprise Storage in 2013
In 2012, we saw the rise of a number of new technologies and a number of new players across the IT spectrum. While 2012 was packed with technology innovation and developments, 2013 will see even greater changes likely to impact the enterprise storage industry.

Cloud Brokerage Will Shape Future Cloud Business Models
Service providers are faced with a number of challenges in fast moving, difficult times. The cloud is often billed as the answer to everything. It offers countless possibilities, from increased agility and reduced operational costs, to a new revenue saviour for service providers as they take their first steps to becoming a cloud broker.

How the Cloud is Changing Cisco's Relationship with its Channel Partners
The enterprise technology landscape is evolving at all levels of the supply chain. Based on 2012 year-end revenue reports for both Cisco and its channel partners, trends indicate that profitability is an ever-changing dynamic between products and services.

AudioCodes Puts Together One Voice for Lync
AudioCodes recently launched One Voice for Lync program, and separately, announced its relationship with Voxbone. The AudioCodes One Voice for Lync puts all of the company's voice-based UC hardware, as well as professional services and support, under one umbrella, Alan Percy, director of market development, explained at the recent ITEXPO Miami.

On Rad's Radar: The Four Ingredients for Channel Success
In my many roles - agent, blogger, consultant, TCA board member - I get to speak with a lot of companies about their pain. The main pain right now is sales.

INTERNET TELEPHONY Reveals Product of the Year Award Winners
TMC is proud to announce the winners of the 2012 INTERNET TELEPHONY Product of the Year Awards. Recipients of the 15th Annual Product of the Year Awards represent the year's most innovative new products.

ActionPacked! Network Visualization Tool Now Supports 1M Flows Per Second
The typical flow rate offered by competing products is less than 100,000 flows per second (he said he can think of three products that offer performance in this range) or, more likely, less than 50,000 flows per second.

Plugging in with Phone Power
Phone Power was recently recognized as a top growth company by Deloitte. INTERNET TELEPHONY recently touched base with Phone Power President Jim Murphy to learn more about him, his company and its recent designation.

Integra Telecom Aims to Take Growth to the Next Level
2013 truly will be a year of new beginnings for Integra Telecom. The Portland, Ore.-based competitive services provider has a new strategic investor, and is readying to introduce a new brand and website to better reflect the company's strategy.

Windows 8 - Many Flavors, One Cohesive State-of-the-Art Ecosystem
When Steven Sinofsky (formerly the guy who ran the Windows team and now the latest guy out of Microsoft) and his teams set out to build the next version of Windows, Microsoft had some very ambitious plans on the table for the future, and one enormously pressing need: backwards compatibility with all things Windows 7. Lots of people speak about the decline of Windows from the perspective of units sold, but in fact Windows 7 has been a huge success for Microsoft. It is everywhere, and it is enormously stable.

High-End Audio Outfit Lowers TCO with West's Hosted UC Solution
When it comes to audio, D+M Group knows its stuff. The $1-billion, Mahwah, N.J.-based company is a manufacturer and distributor of high-end audio equipment for use in commercial applications, the home and in vehicles.

ShoreTel Lays Out its Plans for UC Domination
ShoreTel has seen a lot of change in the past few months. And as they say, change is good - at least it seems to be in this case. Armed with a new cloud strategy; a spate of recent high-level hires; and revved up marketing, sales and product release efforts, ShoreTel in November reminded its partners gathered in Orlando that it is working on something big. The company aims to make itself into a communications powerhouse.

Telecom Industry Taking Longer Than Expected to Implement DNS Security Measures
The telecom industry is always a central figure in discussions of DNS security because it is responsible for such a large portion of the world's DNS servers, which serve as the phone book of the Internet by mapping names to IP addresses. One of the most fundamental vulnerabilities of the DNS protocols is that one cannot necessarily trust the answers that the DNS provides, making it possible for attackers to redirect users to false web sites in order to conduct fraud.

AdvaTel's UC Solution Gets New Traction with Top-Tier TEMs
The article originally appeared in the Jan./Feb. edition of INTERNET TELEPHONY. Many advances in technology arise not from the companies' whose names appear on particular products, but from organizations that develop solutions that live under the hoods of those solutions.

Next Stop: Multi-mode Devices
The turning point came when the number of deployed 3G femtocells surpassed the number of 3G macrocells. So what is next for small cells? Well, as the mobile industry transitions from legacy 2G/3G architectures to LTE, there is an immediate need for dual-mode or multi-mode small cell devices that enable operators to continue to deliver the best user experience as they support their existing 3G users while planning for an LTE rollout.

Mayo Clinic Makes Connections with Telestroke, Teleconcussion
Mayo Clinic has created what it calls the Telestroke Network, which connects the Phoenix facility with 12 rural hospitals in Arizona and Missouri. That includes facilities in Bisbee, Casa Grande, Cottonwood, Flagstaff, Globe, Kingman, Parker, Show Low, Tuba City, Phoenix, and Yuma, Ariz., as well as one in St. Joseph, Mo.

New Cameras Will Prompt Home Life Narrowcasting
Sixty years ago when television began entering nearly every home, the model was for a TV station or network to create content and push it to your TV for your entertainment. Your choice of what to watch on any given night was limited to a few stations. You were forced to watch what someone, most likely in Hollywood, had decided would entertain you. Most people watched the same shows as their neighbors, and if there was nothing on that they liked, they turned off their TVs.

Cross-Selling for Survival
Each carrier has a different service they want pushed. That service is the new metric that the C-suite examines. Agents should start thinking of ways to sell that new service, especially for carriers that the agent has a lot of business with. Going forward - as cloud, apps, managed services take a bigger spotlight - less emphasis will be put on transport and T1.

Engage at Every Stage: This is the New Mobile Marketing Mandate
The mobile phone has come to represent the most pervasive channel of communications and targeted engagement on the planet with nearly 90 percent of the world's population reached. Portia Research projects over 6.5 billion mobile subscribers worldwide by the end of 2012; annual handset shipments of over 2.15 billion by 2016; and a global market projected to generate total service revenue of nearly $8 trillion over the next five years.

VDSL2 Vectoring: The Next Thing in Copper Access
Just when you think the telcos have squeezed all the bandwidth they can out of existing copper, along comes the next big thing in DSL to push the capacity of twisted pair to the next level. Such is the case with a relatively new technology known as VDSL2 vectoring.

VoloMetrix Aims to Drive Productivity by Mining Interaction Data
A startup called VoloMetrix wants to make your business smarter in how it uses communications and collaboration. It offers what it calls a social enterprise intelligence tool, which is aimed at enabling businesses to leverage data inside existing communications and collaboration tools like calendars, e-mail, IM and social platforms to address top priorities more quickly and to understand how employees and teams work and interact.

Fine-Tuning Your Channels for Success
As someone who's been in the telecom business for a long time, I've seen trends in hardware, software and applications ebb and flow like the tides. I've studied endless reports and white papers where pundits predict, analysts test and engineers introduce industry breakthroughs that all offer game-changing possibilities.

Addressing Mobile Backhaul with Small Cells in Mind
Small cells are expected to multiply rapidly in the coming months and years as wireless service providers seek to strengthen mobile bandwidth capacity and fill in coverage gaps. Some wireless service providers may use as many as 10 new small cell sites for each macro cell site, according to Alcatel-Lucent, which has already deployed more than 200 mobile backhaul networks for operators around the world, and holds the No. 1 spot in terms of market share in this space, per ABI Research.

M&A Continues in Network Performance Space
The network performance space has seen a fair amount of M&A action recently, with NetScout Systems, Inc. being the latest to make a move on this front. NetScout in late October announced it had purchased ONPATH Technologies. The value of the deal, completed Oct. 1, was not disclosed.

The BYOD Network: Five Strategic Moves to Ready Your Business for Next-Generation Mobility
Today, the "bring your own device' (BYOD) phenomenon is on the rise and quickly becoming a business standard. A recent study by the Aberdeen Group shows that more than seven out of 10 organizations are permitting the use of employee-owned devices for business purposes, and more are joining them every day.

Overcoming the Challenges of Fiber Deployment in Multi-Dwelling Units
The worldwide market for fiber-to-the-premises is estimated at more than 600 million living units. Given population density and economies of scale, the MDU category of housing has long been identified as an important growth opportunity for communication service providers.

Phone.com to Use VoodooVox Analytics Platform to Help Small Businesses Drive Sales
It is no secret that one of the attractions of cloud-based telephony for small to medium-sized businesses, particularly the exploding small office/home office sector - a.k.a. micro businesses/entrepreneurs - is the ability to use features and functionality that larger enterprises enjoy without the need to support an IT staff. This is particularly true for entities desirous of having sophisticated customer interaction analytics, but that have been hesitant to invest in them for a variety of cost-related reasons.

A New Aspect
Aspect is a global provider of customer contact and workforce optimization solutions, and many of its customers have been with the company for decades. Over time, the company has grown a fair amount and also has moved from a hardware-focused to a software-centric posture.

The Insurance Lesson
There's a lot of talk about insurance in this political season. Insurance companies decide who they'll cover, like in-home owners' insurance in Florida. In health insurance, the insurance company decided not only who they'll cover, but what they'll cover. This maximizes profits for the insurance companies.

New Mexico Utility Rolls out Smart Grid Infrastructure
Drought is a major concern in the American southwest, especially in the summer months. When it comes to water conservation, The Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority saw the importance of deploying a smart grid infrastructure, while also taking a customer education approach.

Smart Grid Means Business: Evolving Utility Needs Match IP network Offerings
With the power industry set to spend substantial amounts of money to modernize the grid over coming decades, a parallel opportunity is arising for telcos to expand their involvement in smarter grids.

What to Expect in the Next Generation of Virtual Assistants
Today, whether we're aware of it or not, we are using elements of Artificial Intelligence while on our mobile devices. Beta versions of artificial intelligence tools such as Siri and Google Now offer us recommendations, automatic notifications and schedule meetings we tell them to. But, what does the next version of AI look like for our daily lives? And what lies beyond these command-based and simpler notification services?

The Enterprise Cloud Adoption Framework
In the silly season of the late '90s, while sock puppets and trading exchanges dominated the headlines, a quiet revolution transformed our global supply chains. We now remember it as an era of dubious distinction that embodies the irrational exuberance of the time. But it did teach us a great deal about agile value chains, and it now informs our most successful business models.

Talking Customer Experience with Radialpoint
INTERNET TELEPHONY talks with Jordan Socran, vice president of business development-North America at Radialpoint about enhancing the customer experience in the world of broadband access and beyond.

IVR Myths Busted: No Standard Exists for Measuring IVR Utilization
This is the first in a series of articles that breaks down popular myths associated with IVR systems and offers tips for increasing utilization. The other two pieces of this series can be found at www.tmcnet.com. The specific URLs are http://tmcnet.com/59204.1 and http://tmcnet.com/59205.1.

Ensuring UC Lives Up to Its Promise
Many organizations are spending big bucks on UC rollouts ¬- whether we're talking about full-featured unified communications solutions, all or parts of Microsoft Lync functionality, desktop video, telepresence, or other communications, conferencing and collaboration tools. But performance monitoring tends to be an afterthought. That's unfortunate, as it can lead to UC implementations failing to live up to their promise.

How to Lessen the Likelihood of Password Security Breaches
So far this year, millions of passwords and password hashes have been leaked from high-profile companies including eHarmony, LinkedIn, and Yahoo. At the end of 2011, Stratfor also fell victim to a password security breach when the hacktivist group Anonymous released more than 800,000 password hashes along with personal information and credit card numbers for its users.

Toolkit on Environmental Sustainability for the ICT Sector
For the past several years the ICT industry has heeded the call that it needs to develop technology that is more sustainable, more energy efficient and in general much kinder to the environment than what it developed in the past.

It's the User Experience, Stupid
It's all about UX - the user experience. Carriers have a tendency to talk about value and solutions out of the side of their mouths. I say that they talk about it, but that's as far as that goes. No differentiation. It is total commoditization of me-too services to which they expect the channel to add value.

INTERNET TELEPHONY Congratulates Winners of the UC Excellence Awards
With the rise and snowballing expansion of mobile networks and applications, communications, connectivity and collaboration seem to be everywhere. Unified communications solutions that intelligently bring together real-time and recorded voice, IM, presence, audio and video conferencing, and other capabilities continue to improve and become available to a broader cross section of the populace.

The Elephant in the Room: What's the Scoop on Hadoop
Conventional wisdom would lead you to believe that the more data and data types are involved, the more expensive and complex it is to analyze data. But that's not necessarily so, says Jack Norris, vice president of marketing at MapR.

Cloud Continues to Gain Strength
Cory von Wallenstein, chief technology officer at Dyn, in a recent interview with this magazine noted that no one is afraid of using Salesforce or other cloud-based solutions, and that cloud technology will only continue to go deeper in the market as time moves on. North Bridge Venture Partners in June unveiled new research in which 50 percent of respondents stated their belief that the cloud makes sense even for their most important business applications.

Understanding the Challenges and Opportunities of Next-gen Firewalls
Next-generation firewalls have come a long way in a relatively short period of time, building on the evolution of application firewalls, which have started to feature ever-more complex rule sets for standard services, such as sharing services. The next-gen firewalls have the advantage of supporting application firewall features that rely on mandatory access control (MAC), also referred to as sand boxing, in order to protect vulnerable services.

BYOD & IPv6: The Secret to Providing a Secure Network
Some network security engineers are already calling BYOD, "bring your own disaster." With the proliferation of Internet-connected mobile devices that consumers and employees alike use to access public and private networks every day, the bring-your-own-device trend definitely affects the data center in unforeseen and potentially very damaging ways.

The Cloud, Mobile, New Database Technology & VoIP Offer Business Added Reliability
Whether you're talking about a database or a voice system, keeping such critical systems up and running at your business is obviously of key importance. The good news is that new models and technologies on both the database and voice fronts are enabling organizations to better ensure that their information and employees are accessible even in the event of environmental, technical or other issues.

Four Trends and Revenue Opportunities to Monetize through Mobility
Beyond developing innovative, differentiated products, the number-one challenge today for software makers globally is finding new sustainable sources of revenue. For most, mobilizing their products offers significant new monetization opportunities.

Ethernet and Small Cell Solutions Relieve the Spectrum Crunch
Digital-content consumption is on a steep incline with more consumers downloading large amounts of data via smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices. Consider these sobering facts: By 2015 there will be 15 billion network connections, the number of mobile devices will be two times the world's population, app downloads will reach 47 billion per year, and one million minutes of video will cross the Internet every second.

Getting the Most out of Managed Services
Cloud services, mobility, security - these trends pose some of the most significant challenges facing IT departments today. For enterprises looking to effectively and efficiently navigate this complex and changing landscape, turning to a managed services provider may very well be a strategic choice.

Cicero's Garner Offers Wealth of Knowledge about the Evolving Customer Experience
IP-based communications, social media and mobile communications are changing the face of the contact center and the customer experience at large. To learn more about the changing tide, INTERNET TELEPHONY recently spoke with Mike Garner, chief customer officer with Cicero, Inc.

Security Awareness - Once is Never Enough
Unless IT security is a core element of someone's job, it's not necessarily considered an ongoing development need. All too often employees get just an initial presentation from the IT department when they start, and are expected to remember it, keep up to speed with changes, and adhere to ever-changing IT security policies and procedures.

One for the Records: Call Recording Captures Value for the Contact Center
In discussing call recording, the first thing that typically comes up in my interviews is how it helps companies comply with various regulations. But call recording offers a wide variety of other benefits, from helping lower call center employee turnover, to improving contact service rep training, to allowing for the capture and usability of information that can drive sales and customer satisfaction.

On Rad's Radar: A Brief History of Telecom Disruption
Telcos were making billions every year on TDM services - POTS, T1, PRI and long distance. In 1986, Sprint's pin drop commercials were launched. This signaled the race to the bottom for LD for the big three IXCs - Ma Bell, Sprint and MCI - declining from over a dollar per minute to a nickel per minute in about six years.

Mobile Backhaul Networks - The Next Generation
Mobile network operators across the globe are experiencing enormous growth - although voice communications are growing in a linear fashion, the demand for data services is increasing exponentially, with consumers increasingly opting for bandwidth-hungry mobile services such as Internet access, photo sharing and music downloads.

Carrier Ethernet Catches Mobile Backhaul Wave
The explosion of mobile data and the subsequent challenges of connecting a growing number of towers to the mobile core are well known by mobile network operators and wholesalers responsible for mobile backhaul networks.

London 2012 Olympics: Assuring the Connected Experience
With an estimated one billion smart devices and seven million inbound roamers, the London 2012 Olympics was the biggest test in the history of mobile operators as it centered on the most subscribed-to, intensely connected mobile communication ecosystem ever to wrap itself round one single event. Mobile operators were challenged and also provided with the best opportunity they have ever had to learn how to assure the connected experience for subscribers - not only those at the games, but the millions of others who expected life and business to carry on as usual.

TMC Congratulates 2012 INTERNET TELEPHONY Excellence Awards Winners
TMC, the parent of INTERNET TELEPHONY and a global, integrated media company helping clients build communities in print, in person, and online, is proud to announce the winners of the 2012 INTERNET TELEPHONY Excellence Awards.

Telco Depot Caters to VARs with it Turnkey Telecom Solutions
When it comes to providing telecom solutions to VARs and their customers, Telco Depot thinks outside the box. Not only does the company outfit its partners with a range of communications gear, Telco Depot also brings to the table years of experience.

The Future of Asset Tracking
Asset tracking solutions have been around for many years in the machine-to-machine space. These solutions, which incorporate wireless RFID, GPS, and other auto-ID sensors, location-based services, and real-time reporting, have allowed companies to remotely monitor and manage distributed assets and improve customer service levels. While these solutions have a deep history in the M2M space and have promised to revolutionize enterprise asset tracking, the true business benefits they have provided have been somewhat difficult to quantify, and actual business value has been a challenge to realize.

Detecting Botnets in Service Provider Networks: The Impact of CSRIC's U.S. Anti-Bot Code of Conduct
In March of this year, the Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council Working Group 7 accepted the first of three reports containing recommendations to the FCC titled "U.S. Anti-Bot Code of Conduct for ISPs." The report - simply referred to as the "ABCs for ISPs" - describes the methodologies and motivations for ISPs in addressing bot activity in broadband networks.

Why DevCon5 is Not about Apple iOS
That is a pretty strong statement, and the fact the web is migrating this way has huge implications for everyone's business models. At our show, DevCon5, we have seen WebGL provide 3D-like and video-like rendering that would make every special effects artist wonder. We have also seen animation come from everywhere in the triumph of HTML5 software - from the canvas media call out, the CSS3 style sheet and the Java script programming.

Making the Grade: Strategic Testing Reduces Defects, Improves Customer Experience, Creates Savings
Savvy telco providers understand the importance of testing applications to identify performance issues before they occur. However, the vast range of services, plans and options available creates an unprecedented and exponential set of application test cases. As a result, it is nearly impossible to test manually each individual application. By implementing a strategic testing approach that pragmatically applies test automation across business processes tests and working with an outside specialist, telcos can reduce application defects, improve the customer experience and save on costs.

ITEXPO: A Teaser on the Keynotes
Keynote speakers at ITEXPO West include Chris Hummel, chief commercial officer with Siemens Enterprise Communications, and David Tucker, vice president and general manager of the Small Business Unit at Cisco, both of whom will give afternoon addresses on Oct. 3, as well as Robert B. Carter, executive vice president of information services and CIO with FedEx, and Raymond P. Dolan, president and CEO at Sonus Networks, who are scheduled for Oct. 4.

Asking the Right Questions: Other Disciplines Can Help Us Gain More from Big Data
The security industry has realized that log data is an incredibly rich source of information for detecting security intrusions, and has since developed a taste for more and more logs.

Twelve Proven Tips to a Prosperous Master Agent Partnership
Being a telecom agent doesn't mean going it alone in the job of providing clients with dependable carrier relationships and protecting your own financial success. In fact, partnering with a master telecom agent has become an attractive and strategic move for independent agents.

The Fight in the Channel
The channel is in flux as it tries to move away from commodity items like POTS, DSL and T1. As the carriers migrate to cloud, data centers, MPLS and SIP, they are hoping that the channel will shift with it. In that effort, the carriers have been in search of the new partner that will get cloud and sell cloud, without much hand holding. In that effort, everyone in the last 18 months has been chasing VARs.

Communications Solutions 2011 Product of the Year Award Winners Announced
Norwalk, CT (August 1, 2012) - TMC, a global, integrated media company helping clients build communities in print, in person and online, announced today winners of its 2011 Communications Solutions Product of the Year Award.

Small Cell Security: How to Protect Traffic on New-Generation Wireless and Backhaul Networks
Wi-Fi and small cells represent new opportunities for mobile operators, but also come with new security risks that must be addressed. Given the extraordinary uptick in data consumption via 3G- and 4G-enabled devices such as smartphones and tablets, operators are investing in the next generation of small cells to enhance the benefits provided by microcells deployed in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

A Spectrum Crisis Still Looms
In 2010, the FCC's National Broadband Plan predicted a "looming spectrum crisis" would begin to affect mobile broadband networks by 2013 unless the government took action to reallocate spectrum from legacy applications to commercial networks. Analysts cognizant of the growth in demand for mobile bandwidth brought about the rise of the iPhone and the slow pace of advances in wireless efficiency agreed that action was warranted.

Datamart Receives ShoreTel Customer Satisfaction Award

Proposed Consent Decree, Clean Air Act Citizen Suit

Sonus Networks to Participate in Cowen and Company 41st Annual Technology, Media & Telecom Conference

AudioCodes Launches Lync Migration Resource Center

Summer is '#Awesummer' with Slurpee®

Revisions to the California State Implementation Plan, South Coast Air Quality Management District

LIVELOVESHOPLA.COM (tm) Launches an Innovation in Communication

AdvanTel Networks Expands West Coast Operations