INTERNET TELEPHONY — April 2014

Super Telco: How Service Providers and Their Suppliers Are Recreating Themselves

Carriers are scrambling as they see over-the-top services such as Skype and WhatsApp eating into their revenues. Indeed, OTT players have captured 30 percent of voice traffic in....More>>>

Departments

The Channel

The 3 Reasons to Shift
Every channel chief in the U.S. is parroting Gartner's Tiffany Bova to tell channel partners to shift their business model - or perish. It's tiring to hear it repeated - like Chinese water torture. Here are the three reasons to start the shift now.

Cloud & Data Center

Backup Comes to the Cloud Front
With the rapid influx of complex information and data increasing exponentially in both sophistication and volume, ensuring business continuity through a holistic data management strategy is critical to survival. Business continuity goals are best achieved by implementing a strategy that encompasses data storage, backup, access requirements, retention and the ability to apply recovery point and recovery time objectives in granular detail. The ever-increasing reliance on storing information electronically makes implementation of a reliable backup solution more important than ever before. The right strategy will save enterprises time, money, and peace of mind.

Network Infrastructure

Telecom Industry Success Hinges on Compliance with Carrier Ethernet Standards
As Carrier Ethernet continues to ascend into the mainstream, the Metro Ethernet Forum's Five Attributes of Carrier Ethernet - standardized services, scalability, reliability, quality of service, and service management - have evolved into more clearly defined standards. The MEF has laid out a clear path for the telecommunications industry to adopt Carrier Ethernet 2.0 and associated best practices, providing a more structured framework for communications service providers to better deploy services and meet customer expectations. Despite this, confusion exists, specifically when it comes to Carrier Ethernet 2.0 performance management standards.

Unified Communications

AudioCodes Helps Lync Scale
A little more than a year ago AudioCodes launched its One Voice initiative after coming to the conclusion that the Microsoft Lync ecosystem was just too complex and contained too many vendors for most IT managers to comfortably navigate. The idea was to bring a wide variety of solutions under one umbrella to create a one-stop shop for Lync and, essentially, to give customers one throat to choke.

Assessing the Costs and Savings of Lync
Dell sponsored this research to illustrate the need for tools like its recently released MessageStats for Lync. The solution delivers a variety of functions, including a chargeback feature so users can assign estimated costs of Lync and its various features, Johnstone explains. It's also integrated with ActiveDirectory, so users can roll those costs up at an organizational level.

Text Appeal: Answering the Call for Customer Chat
The phone may still be the most used (and, sadly for contact centers, the most expensive) channel in customer care, but demand for web chat has grown significantly. In 2013, Forrester reported a 24 percent rise in chat usage over the previous three years. And according research by BoldChat, after using live chat for the first time, more than two-thirds of consumers actively look for websites that offer chat as an option.

WebRTC Roundup
Already, WebRTC is supported on more than 1 billion endpoints, says Google, one of a raft of important tech companies driving this new technology. And Disruptive Analysis expects that to grow to 3.9 billion by 2016.

Wireless

The Great Indoors
Seventy to 80 percent of mobile data is generated indoors. This is a refrain we're hearing more and more lately from companies in the wireless infrastructure arena as they introduce new solutions to help service providers better address the in-building opportunity, which ABI Research says will be worth $4 billion in 2018.

Machine-to-Machine Communications: The M2M Space is Poised for Big Things, But Faces Key Challenges
Global M2M cellular connections are forecast to hit the 374.9 million mark by 2017, expanding at a compound annual growth rate of 26.5 percent from 91.4 million in 2011, according to research firm IHS. Berg Insight, meanwhile, forecasts that M2M devices with cellular connectivity will increase by 22 percent this year to reach 164.5 million in emerging markets, and estimates that M2M connections will grow at a CAGR of 24.4 percent with 489.9 million connections in 2018. And Analysys Mason says the M2M market will be worth $88 billion in the next 10 years.

Video

WebRTC Fuels Surge in Telehealth Services
The other factor is mobile. Tablets and smartphones are the devices on which patients expect their digital experiences to be delivered on. Today, a telehealth service that wants to embed video chat into a native mobile app can do it by relying on a WebRTC platform such as Weemo. This is how MediSprout (disclaimer: MediSprout uses Weemo for its telehealth solution) provides both a web and a native telehealth experience.