INTERNET TELEPHONY — July/August 2016

Bringing Things Together: Why Companies Are Revving Up Their API Strategies

Businesses, as we all by now know, are undergoing a digital transformation. The recent news that Ford has invested more than $182 million in Pivotal Software is further evidence of this trend... More>>>

Real-Time Web Solutions Supplement

Creating a Great User Experience in the Real-Time Web
Indeed, technology can be changed. The user experience rapidly gains adherents as well as haters. How often is a company like Facebook or LinkedIn castigated when it changes an existing user experience, even if the new experience is much better?

The Internet Is Today's Real-Time Network
Today, nearly 3.4 billion people, 46 percent of the world's population, are connected to the internet, according to InternetStats, and enterprises of all sizes rely increasingly on the internet, as well as on their private IP networks, for every moment of their business activity. Interestingly, according to Ericsson's latest Mobility Report, there are also 3.4 billion smartphones in the world; that will grow to 6.4 billion over the next six years.

How Real-Time Communications Can Be Transformative for Business
Indeed, CRM giant Salesforce recently introduced Service Cloud Lightning Snap-ins to help companies provide connected, personalized service across any device. As a result, organizations can quickly deploy a contextual, modern service experience by just snapping in capabilities such as live chat and tap-to-call to their mobile and web apps. Additionally, the Salesforce SOS Snap-in now has two-way video chat, empowering agents to quickly see and resolve customer issues.

Development and Delivery of a Real-Time Web Solution
Delivering solutions in the traditional telephony world was a fairly easy concept. Very few people would start out to develop their own PBX from scratch. However, the new real-time web technologies like WebRTC, combined with the simplicity and power of JavaScript programming and the new features and capabilities of both HTML5 and native mobile operating systems have opened the door to developers creating a complete real-time solution from scratch.

Communications Innovation: A Real-Time Balancing Act
Essentially, the RTC paradigm should be focused around getting the business to work faster, more efficiently, and less expensively - all while keeping the needs of the user firmly in mind.

Business Goals for the Real-Time Web
In talking with a range of website and mobile application owners, I often hear that real time is not part of their offer. This is often true even if they have a chat agent on their site. Part of the reason is that, today, much of human interaction is still in a call center, running on 100-year-old telephony solutions. In fact, even more websites see real time as something they do not need.

Introducing Real-Time Web Solutions
The challenge with real time is that it is not a simple area. There are challenges from inception through implementation, delivery, and operations. And a successful real-time integration needs to operate virtually flawlessly. So assuring that your solution is both well engineered and deployed is critical.

Departments

DEVELOPER TOOLS & OPEN SOURCE

What's the Hold Up? How to Meet Application Development Demands
Below are four ways businesses can meet development demands and four ways they can make the development process more efficient, all of which help prevent the mobile application development bottleneck.

Special Focus

Yeastar S100 Deemed an 'Incredible Value'
The S100 phone system from Yeastar Information Technologies is the next evolution of the company's PBX platform and with this release, the company aims to go way upmarket. This solution, and the S-Series as a whole, provides an array of components and new features that should help Yeastar differentiate itself in the marketplace to win more and larger customers.

Recognition

TMCnet's Mobility Tech Zone Names Product of the Year Award Winners Channel Program Excellence Awards
TMC and INTERNET TELEPHONY are proud to announce the winners of our Channel Excellence Awards. This marks the third iteration of this award program, for which the number of applications and award categories continue to multiply.

Networks

Network Briefs
AT&T Delivers Network Functions on Demand AT&T has launched a new solution that lets businesses easily and flexibly manage their network services. AT&T Network Functions on Demand is now available in 76 countries and territories. With it, businesses can deploy a single universal piece of equipment, choose virtualized functions, and deploy them in different countries simultaneously. (Virtual routers from Cisco and Juniper Networks, Fortinet virtual security, and the Riverbed virtual WAN accelerator are the first solutions to be supported under AT&T Network Functions on Demand.)

The ABCs of Selling the Cloud to SMBs
When it comes to selling cloud services, VARs should not overlook the enormous market potential small to mid-sized businesses have to offer. Main Street requires the same storage, processing, and security as Wall Street, and they're much easier to approach.

Corsa Introduces Virtualized Hardware Solution with Ease of Access
Corsa Technology has come out with a new product called the DP2000 that marks the introduction of virtualized hardware. You read that right folks, hardware virtualization, in a product designed for use in metro networks.

How to Ready Your Network for Video
In today's ultra-connected world, enterprises are increasingly relying on video to communicate, inform, and educate their workers. According to a recent report, 50 percent of the Fortune 100 companies have their own corporate YouTube channels, and many organizations have installed their own media centers, enabling them to produce professional quality videos in house.

The Ethernet-Infini Band Convergence: A Patent Law Perspective
The past few years have seen fascinating developments in the evolution of the InfiniBand and Ethernet protocols, and in particular, a convergence of the two at the physical link level, if not also arguably at the market level. Intellectual property issues, and most prominently patent rights, are typically intertwined with technological developments. The Ethernet-InfiniBand convergence is no exception, and some of the potential patent implications merit careful consideration by developers, vendors, and users of these interconnect solutions.

Video

Emerging Enterprise Streaming Platforms Open the Door to User-Centric Solutions
The world of enterprise streaming video is changing right before our eyes. As an analyst tracking this tiny little hamlet of the technology landscape for more than a decade, I can readily admit that change is not always a word that has been closely associated with purveyors of business streaming solutions.

Case Study

How LTE Can Help Address Growing Transportation Requirements
"Cities have been the world's economic dynamos for centuries, attracting skilled workers and productive businesses and benefiting from economies of scale," notes McKinsey Global Institute in a 2012 report. "Urbanization and per capita GDP tend to move in close synch as countries develop. But what is different about today's wave of mass urbanization is its unprecedented speed and scale. It is not hyperbole to say that we are observing the most significant shift in the earth's economic center of gravity in history."

Enterprise Communications

The Power of Natural Language Generation
For years, scientists have been heralding the artificial intelligence revolution. We've been able to program robots and vacuums, play chess, and even win at Jeopardy. But, before now, technology has not been able to produce artificial intelligence that can do one of the most fundamental human skills: communicate. The emergence of natural language generation is changing all of that.

Workato Brings Enterprise Apps Together
Workato for the past two years has been offering a cloud automation service that bridges various enterprise applications. It enables different enterprise applications to sync data and prevents users from having to jump from one application to another to do their work.

Channel

Channel Briefs
Ayscom, Procera Partner Procera Networks Inc. has a new partner. Ayscom has joined the Procera Premier Partner Program. Ayscom provides test and monitoring solutions in Spain and Portugal. "Service providers are constantly looking for the best virtualized analytics tools to drive their big data projects," said Federico Hornillos, engineering director at Ayscom. "Being part of Procera's Premier Partner Program, and having access to its eVolution technology, gives Ayscom the ability to offer more comprehensive network and subscriber intelligence for our service provider and enterprise customers."

On Rad's Radar: How to Sell Cloud Services
The struggle is real for direct and indirect salespeople to transition to selling cloud services. Network is so much easier because it is transactional and replacement services. Cloud, however, is about selling change. Certainly you can sell hosted VoIP as cheap dial-tone replacement. Good luck with that. It is a disservice to the customer and yourselves.

Telax Pairs Up with Metaswitch, CSPs to Reach Business Customers
Communications services providers today are challenged with finding new revenue sources. Much of this discussion centers on tier 1 CSPs, but more medium-sized and small service providers are in the same boat. One new revenue source they may not have seriously considered is delivering contact center capabilities. But some of the CSPs that have already moved forward with cloud-based contact center solutions recommend taking the plunge. And three of them recently spoke about how Metaswitch and Telax have helped them do that.