INTERNET TELEPHONY — May 2016

Revisiting Facebook's Open Compute Project Effort

Publicly Facebook has talked a lot about FBOSS, Linux-based software it developed that runs on its top-of-rack Wedge data center switches, he said. The company introduced FBOSS and Wedge in June of 2014. These two solutions were among the first to separate the hardware and software ... More>>>

Departments

Enterprise Communications

UCC: Where Do We Go From Here?
These are just some examples of how NEC's new approach to UC&C is delivering on the promise of its Smart Enterprise initiative by helping companies work smarter and be more efficient and move UCC in a direction of network accountability that enterprises are demanding.

Enterprise Briefs
BroadSoft has announced a pair of mobile-first unified communications applications designed for the dispersed, millennial workforce. UC-One Connect is one of them. It's a messaging application with call settings like Forwarding and DND, individual and group chat, integration with the enterprise directory, presence, and voice calling.

Developer Tools & Open Source

Hortonworks Unveils Big Data Solutions with Greater Scale
Hortonworks recently announced a flurry of news, including what the company's leader called the "first set of connected data platforms that allow you to derive actual intelligence from that platform." Those solutions include the Hortonworks Data Platform 2.4 and the Hortonworks DataFlow 1.2.

Developer & Open Source Briefs
Microsoft is buying Xamarin, a mobile app development platform provider out of San Francisco. "Xamarin's approach enables developers to take advantage of the productivity and power of .NET to build mobile apps, and to use C# to write to the full set of native APIs and mobile capabilities provided by each device platform," Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of the cloud and enterprise group at Microsoft, wrote in a Feb. 24 blog. "This enables developers to easily share common app code across their iOS, Android and Windows apps while still delivering fully native experiences for each of the platforms." More than 15,000 customers and more than 1.3 million developers use the Xamarin platform.

Networks

VoIP User Complaints? - Here Are Three Hidden Causes of VoIP Quality Issues
VoIP has seen rapid adoption in the enterprise world, particularly in the last few years. According to analyst firm Infonetics, VoIP and its related unified communications applications market will grow to $88 billion by 2018.

Network Briefs
Optical transport has traditionally served static applications. That's no longer the case. Today's customers want, and communications service providers need to deliver, services that can be turned up fast and on an as-needed basis. That means networks need to be more elastic and automated, and that optical networks require the capacity to scale up quickly. To enable that, Nokia has enhanced its 1830 Photonic Service Switches.

Recognition

TMC Announces 2016 WebRTC Product of the Year Award Winners
INTERNET TELEPHONY and the magazine's parent company, TMC, are happy to announce the recipients of the 2016 WebRTC Product of the Year Awards. These awards honor solutions that support applications leveraging WebRTC for voice calling, video chat, and P2P file sharing without the need of either internal or external plug-ins. This award recognizes vendors that are advancing the WebRTC industry one solution at a time.

Wireless

Major Trends in the RAN: An Analysis of What Service Providers Need to Consider
The radio access network lies at the heart of your subscribers' network experience, and for better or worse, is the basis of how satisfied they are with your mobile service. In this year's State of the RAN report we looked at the impact of the dramatic increase in data usage and the emergence of major trends that service providers must be aware of and prepare for.

The IoT of Beer: Brewing Industry Employs the Internet of Things to Make Beer Better
The STX3 chipset from Globalstar Europe Satellite Services Ltd. has been tapped to power the world's first IoT craft beer monitoring solution.

Wheeler Offers Update on Spectrum Policy
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler in late March delivered an address touching on wireless spectrum to the U.S. House of Representatives' Subcommittee on Communications and Technology. Here's an excerpt of his comments.

Wireless Briefs
The Federal Communications Commission in March announced a settlement regarding the Verizon Wireless cookie case that began in December of 2014. This effort targeted the service provider's practice of inserting unique identifier headers, or supercookies, on its customers' mobile internet traffic without their knowledge or consent. Verizon Wireless as part of the settlement was ordered to pay a $1,350,000 fine and adopt a three-year compliance plan.

Security

Security Briefs
President Obama was at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, this spring offering details on his position that Apple should help the government access the data on the San Bernardino shooter's iPhone. "If, technologically, it is possible to make an impenetrable device or system, where the encryption is so strong that there is no key, there is no door at all, then how do we apprehend the child pornographer?" Obama said. "How do we disrupt a terrorist plot?" (The government has since been able to access the data on that iPhone, and without the help of Apple.)

Case Study

How ComResource & Its Customers are Benefitting from Patton's SBCs
ComResource is a 25-year-old company that provides IT and telecommunications related services to business customers. It began selling VoIP solutions about a decade ago, but since then ComResource has been moving upmarket with those services. As the company began selling VoIP to larger clients, it realized a need for session border controllers to ensure high call quality and security, and to support its multi-location customers. Having already had a good experience working with Patton, ComResource tapped the company for its SBCs as well.

Video

Video Briefs
Frost & Sullivan named LogMeIn's join.me collaboration tool a global web conferencing market disruptor. The research firm said "join.me has been successful at targeting SMBs as well as enterprise users that are looking for easy to use and affordable cloud collaboration, and has built a solid brand presence in the web." Companies are increasingly looking for SaaS solutions like join.me because they are easy to install, use, and license, according to Frost & Sullivan.

Channel

Channel Briefs
Some channel partners and small and medium businesses that use Windstream services can expect rate increases for accounts that are unprofitable or low margin for the carrier, CRN reports. The company is providing the option for those customers to move to other carriers without penalty. As Peter Radizeski, founder and president of RAD-INFO Inc. and a standing INTERNET TELEPHONY magazine columnist, commented, 2 percent of Windstream's SMB business is underwater. But, as he also noted, it's not the fault of these businesses that Windstream allowed its services to be sold to these SMBs at a loss.

The Struggle for Relevance
There are a number of providers struggling to be relevant today. In the unified communications and collaboration space, many providers are trying to figure IT out. That being, why is Slack so hot? Why aren't our users adopting our features? Why don't our partners sell our stuff?

Nectar Channel Leader Talks Training, International Strategy
Nectar provides monitoring and diagnostics software solution for unified communication services so IT and operation organizations can ensure a positive end user experience. Nectar's flagship offering, the Unified Communications Management Platform, allows for that by improving visibility across integrated voice, video and data application solutions. The company's solution is used for monitoring and diagnostics related to millions of enterprise endpoints for more than 1,200 enterprises in over 86 countries, including some of the largest global banking, health care, manufacturing, search engine, and service provider organizations in the world.