INTERNET TELEPHONY — September 2011

IBM Exec to Offer ITEXPO West Attendees New Perspective on the Cloud

Before many of us had even heard the phrase cloud services, IBM was hard at work researching this concept and engaging with select customers to discover and define the potential benefits and challenges of cloud solutions..

Feature Articles

Vitelity Launches New Marketing Campaign, Unveils Cloud Service
Vitelity LLC is well known in open source circles. Now it's moving to raise its profile with those that aren't already familiar with its solutions and its work in the open source community. Chris Hall, CEO of Vitelity, recently spoke with INTERNET TELEPHONY about the company, its new marketing campaign, and its recent move into cloud services.

Cloud-based Managed Business Communications for SMBs
We live in a connected and agile world. With fuel prices escalating and commutes becoming longer and longer, companies can no longer maintain a traditional "cubiclesque" work environment if they want to compete for the best talent and provide outstanding customer service. This is forcing employers and employees to focus on results in the workplace vs. using physical presence as a measure of success. As a result, new business models and work environments are emerging, and business communications are proving to be pivotal tools in this transformation.

INTERNET TELEPHONY Congratulates TMC Labs Innovation Award Winners
TMC (News - Alert) Labs has enjoyed discovering new and truly unique and innovative products and services within the VoIP industry for several years and awarding them a TMC Labs Innovation Award. Our 12th annual TMC Labs Innovation Awards was certainly no exception. TMC Labs has been testing, examining, and reviewing products since 1994, and one of the best parts of the job is seeing unique and innovative products for the first time.

Making Profits from Mobile Broadband
Broadband is the means for profitable growth in mobile communications. It is expanding the market with web access, applications downloads and streaming. It offsets terminal decline in the voice services cash cow. Mobile broadband will soon connect most of the population and a large proportion of things worldwide.

Audio Over IP and the SIP Environment
The network-everywhere methodology has infiltrated our lives. Most of us are attempting to negotiate a network connection at some point every day. This is the very nature of session initiation protocol, or SIP as we fondly know it, which primarily exists for the purpose of negotiating a voice or video connection between two or more points.

Business Continuity - You Need More Than Just a Plan
Stop for a moment and take a look around you - IT isn't just the computer on your desk, the laptop in your bag, or the mobile in your pocket. The truth is it is controlling who is and isn't entering your building, virtually and physically, and how and where your customers are being dealt with. It's driving your production line. And it even has a part to play in how your coffee is produced. IT is no longer confined to a small back office, possibly in the basement, staffed with geeks all speaking their own language. IT keeps you open for business, but if you're not careful it can close you down for good.

Departments

Unified Communcations

UC in the Cloud UC in the Cloud: Understanding the Benefits and Challenges
UC in the Cloud: Understanding the Benefits and Challenges is the subject of a panel at ITEXPO (News - Alert) West, which is being held this month in Austin, Texas.

Enterprise Mobility: Dual-Mode Mobility
UC in the Cloud: Understanding the Benefits and Challenges is the subject of a panel at ITEXPO (News - Alert) West, which is being held this month in Austin, Texas.

UC Unplugged: The More Things Change...The More They Stay the Same
It’s hard to believe that more than three years have passed since I started sharing my thoughts and experiences with you. During this time, unified communications has changed from a poorly understood term to a well understood cost saver for the CIO. And unified communications combined with collaboration provide even greater savings but, perhaps more importantly, productivity improvements for workers across the Internet.

The Channel
On RAD's Radar

Top 3 Ways to Improve
We all need to get a little better, especially with all the changes happening in the channel. We have to do more and more to get the same result, it seems. Here are three ways to see marked improvement.

Wondershare Seeks Channel Partners
Wondershare – which sells photo, video, PDF and PC utility software – is seeing “explosive growth” and it’s looking for some good channel partners with which it can share the wealth.

Open Source

Adobe Labs Discusses Its HTML5 Initiatives
Adobe last month took the wraps off a new HTML5-based tool for creating interactive and animated web content. Called Adobe Edge, the product initially will be free for download, during which time the company will collect feedback on it.

Testing with Tom

Elfiq LB-800E Delivers Robust Link Balancing
We all know data is critical to just about any business. The real question is how to handle business continuity in the event a data connection is lost. While there are myriad ways of handling the loss of a data connection, the simplest method is the usage of a link balancer. A link balancer is a network-based appliance that proactively manages bandwidth from multiple ISP or private links. Should one or more links go down, the link balancer can automatically switch the traffic to the available ISP link(s) until the troubled link returns to normal.