INTERNET TELEPHONY — March 2013

Move & Changes: ANPI Expands to the Enterprise

The world of communications is changing, and ANPI is changing along with it. And the service provider wants to help its traditional base of customers (independent local exchange carriers), and an entirely set of new ones (enterprises and SMBs), respond to and benefit from recent technological advances, regulatory changes, and workplace trends as well...

Departments

The Channel
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.

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.

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.

CLOUD & DATA CENTER

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.

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.

Network Infrastructure

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?

Unified Communications

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.

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.

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.

OPEN SOURCE

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.

VIDEO

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.

Wireless

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.

SPECIAL FEATURE

TMC Announces UC Award Winners
Unifying voice, video, wireless, presence and other communications technologies, can results in more efficient communications and improved employee productivity. But unified communications solutions come in many forms.