INTERNET TELEPHONY — May 2012

Cloud Security: Users May Not Be Clear on Who is Responsible for What

Cloud service providers typically are very clear about what they secure for customers, and what cloud customers themselves must look to secure. But that point is sometimes lost in translation. However, with better education, new tools and related services, things are likely to improve on this front over time. At least that's what INTERNET TELEPHONY is hearing from the handful of sources it interviewed for this article....

Profile

Sangoma Revs Up Growth via Turnkey Solutions, Global Expansion
Sangoma Technologies Corp. is undergoing an extreme makeover in an effort to supply more customers with more innovative products more quickly. Building on its reputation for product quality, excellent service from highly competent engineering teams, and strong relationships with partners and customers, the company aims to drive renewed growth. The makeover was initiated by industry veteran Bill Wignall when he joined Sangoma as president and CEO in late 2010.

Getting Vertical

Third Time's a Charm: Successful Mobile Strategies in the Retail Vertical
Retail strategies related to mobile communications have been a mixed bag. Using wireless technology as a means with which to alleviate specific customer pain points, however, has been very successful for select brands like Starbucks, Tesco and Walgreen's. Meanwhile, Macy's is rocking the wireless opportunity via its Backstage Pass promotion.

Study Reveals Retailers' Top Priorities for 2012
A new report from the NRF Foundation and KPMG LLP called Retail Horizons: Benchmarks for 2011, Forecasts for 2012 looks at retailers' top strategic initiatives for 2012.

Departments

Unified Communications

Dispelling Myths about Unified Communications
Over the last decade, there has been an incredible amount of excitement and hype around unified communications. UC was the darling of the technology industry for a long period of time, promising to streamline communications effectively in our fast-paced work environment by allowing people to select easily the mode of communications that best suits their needs at any given time. As the excitement for UC reached a fevered pitch, more and more vendors jumped on the proverbial UC bandwagon, and customers were faced with differentiating across a huge selection of UC offerings available.

Measuring the Success of UC
Unified communications solutions can provide significant business benefits for many organizations. However, most organizations neither have the planning skills nor the discipline to prove that a previous investment in UC is yielding organizational dividends. I think it is time we commit to measuring the impact and results of UC solutions.

Open Source

Feature Flipping
Developers at 99designs use agile and lean startup methodologies, but as our development team gets bigger, deployments happen more frequently. This volume of change brings increased risk for the stability of our site. It can also be quite a challenge to measure the success of a single new feature on a rapidly changing website with multiple new features operating at any given time. In our earlier days, we'd demo new features on a staging server, but as 99designs has grown, using several staging servers to demo all our new features at once has become clunky. So how do we solve these issues? Feature flipping.

Network Infrastructure

Strengthening the Core: Cisco, Juniper Compete to Improve Network Performance, Efficiency
Networks operators, namely the telcos, in recent years have moved more intelligence to and begun to support more services on the edge. As a result, core networking has fallen out of the spotlight. But core network infrastructure recently has seen renewed interest in light of the success of these edge networking strategies, which are creating greater capacity requirements within the core.

The Channel
On RAD's Radar

How Did You Pick a CLEC?
In the days of Integrated T1's, how did you pick a CLEC to sell? Was it due to the company delivered service in your region? Was it due to a relationship with a channel manager? Did one CLEC have better network or branding? Did a CLEC have a special sauce, some benefit that others did not? Did a CLEC just cost less and pay better? Did a CLEC have better support or was just easier to do business with?

Axia Expands Channel Software Initiative
Axia, a provider of converged IP services, recently launched Axia Channel Services. INTERNET TELEPHONY interviewed Judd Heredos, director of operations at Axia Technology Partners, about the company and this news.

Security

Analyzing the RSA Security Breach
For readers who may have overlooked the saga, the attack compromised RSA Security's network of about 40 million tokens and involved the use of stolen SecurID information to launch an attack on a key RSA Security customer, Lockheed Martin, the U.S. defense contractor. The sophisticated multi-pronged attack that struck RSA Security a year ago March has resulted in the high profile IT security vendor overhauling the manufacturing and distribution of its SecurID tokens.

Threat Intelligence: What to Share?
IT is a fast-moving field. Ideas arise, reach prototype, and go to market quicker than it takes for the average clinical trial to be cleared; yet this one concept within information security - that defense requires greater visibility than can be obtained from any single network and to have a fighting chance we should reciprocally distribute data on the attacks and attackers we identify - remains an unresolved debate.

Video

Thinking Outside the (Set-top) Box
You had Motorola, and you had Scientific Atlanta. And, for the most part, that was it. These companies, and a few smaller names, sold boxes that gave consumers access to a variety of standard and premium broadcast and on-demand programming. And, for the most part, that was about as exciting as these things got.

Wireless

Rebtel Makes Mobile VoIP Pay Off
When it comes to VoIP services, Skype seems to get lots of attention. But a company called Rebtel is attacking VoIP from a mobile perspective, and its mobile VoIP services are ringing up average revenues per user of $23 to $24 a month. That's much higher than Skype's ARPU, which is around $8, Rebtel CEO Andreas Bernstrom tells INTERNET TELEPHONY.

HSPA Makes Its Mark in Wireless Broadband
AT&T is employing HSPA as part of its LTE mobile strategy here in the U.S. The company has deployed HSPA+ to virtually 100 percent of its network, an AT&T spokeswoman tells INTERNET TELEPHONY.

DigiMo Offers Non-NFC Mobile Payments Solution
Most mobile payment solutions rely on near field communications, and less than 1 percent of mobile phones and point-of-sale terminals contain NFC chips. Gartner forecasts indicate that it will cost on the order of $40 billion to make all terminals in the U.S. NFC-compliant, and that it could take five to 10 years to do so.