INTERNET TELEPHONY — December 2015

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Business today moves at a rapid pace. Customer requirements and market dynamics are constantly changing, so businesses are working hard to keep up or, preferably, stay ahead of the curve ... More>>>

Departments

Wireless

DAS & Small Cell Crowd Shifts Focus to the Middleprise
One of the highlights of this summer's DAS and Small Cells Congress was a notable shift in conversation and focus from traditional tier one venues such as stadiums to the middleprise, a new industry term for the enterprise market that defines venues with 100,000 to 500,000 square feet and where neither conventional DAS nor small cells are optimal solutions.

Wireless

FCC Lays Out Dates, Valuations for Upcoming Spectrum Auctions
The Federal Communications Commission in mid October, as this issue was heading to press, provided new details about the upcoming spectrum auctions, which will provide cellular service providers and others with the ability to acquire more spectrum by offering to take this valuable asset off the hands of broadcasters. The auctions will consist of both a reverse auction, in which broadcasters will be able to sell their spectrum to the FCC, and a forward auction, in which all comers will be invited to bid for that newly available spectrum.

Special Focus

TMC, INTERNET TELEPHONY Announce Skype for Business Award Winners
As discussed in another article in this issue, Microsoft Lync has been renamed to Skype for Business. And Skype for Business brings together the familiar look and feel of Skype, and the enterprise features of Lync. With this offering, Microsoft is offering via a single interface a cornucopia of communications modalities, including chat, meetings, video, voice, and more. Given the fact that Microsoft essentially owns the desktop, that's a pretty powerful business solution.

Unified Communications

What's the Best Approach to Unifying UC? BroadSoft's New Offerings, and Some of the Other Contenders
Employees now have a wealth of productivity applications at their fingertips due to the smartphone and app store revolution. At the same time, many workers spend a lot of their time in particular applications such as Google Apps for Work, Office 365, and Salesforce. Meanwhile, businesses are doing their best both to manage the bring-your-own-device trend, and drive up worker productivity, while keeping down their own costs.

Unified Communications

Activist Hedge Fund Billionaire Pushes for Mitel, Polycom Combination
Rumor has it that Elliott Associates, whose parent company has holdings in a wide array of tech companies, is pushing for a combination of Mitel and Polycom.

Storage Gets Speedier
Flash-based storage is moving forward at an accelerated pace. That's good news, since data continues to move forward at an even faster pace. There is an estimated 5 ZB of data out there today, and that's expected to reach 44 ZB within a decade.

Channel

Why the Channel is High on the Cloud (And What It Can Do to Sustain That Feeling)
Players in the channel are generally optimistic about their future in the next several years, CompTIA's Fifth Annual State of the Channel study indicates. The channel association, which released the study in October, says those surveyed chalk up this optimism to such factors as the new opportunities cloud computing is creating, growing demand for managed services, and the fact that more companies are likely to turn to trusted advisors in the channel to help them sort through growing complexity in selecting and implementing new solutions.

Roundup

Orchestration
You may have noticed that we're hearing the word orchestration a lot lately. Indeed, a wide array of companies now offer and have been promoting their orchestration systems and discussing how they address important new trends and technologies like network functions virtualization and software-defined networking.

Unified Communications

Microsoft Educates ITEXPO Attendees on Skype for Business
Microsoft stirred up a lot of excitement a while back when it purchased online meeting company Skype, and surprised a lot of people a little later when it changed the name of Lync to Skype for Business. At the recent ITEXPO, Microsoft's Skip Chilcott explained why the company made those moves, what they mean for customers, how it continues to improve the offering, and some of its key partners that can help ensure its customers' Skype for Business implementations are a success.

Integrating Acquisitions

Avaya, with Esna Now Under Its Wing, Meets Customers Where They Are
Avaya in May completed the acquisition of real-time collaboration and communications business Esna Technologies Inc. At October's ITEXPO in Anaheim, Calif., the former head of Esna told the story of how the newly combined companies are delivering frictionless unified communications experiences.

On Rad's Radar

On Rad's Radar: The Reality of SLAs
An SLA is a funny creature. It is not a guarantee. It is an agreement about the level of service delivery. If service does not meet this level, these specifications, then the customer must call the vendor on it - and chase the credits.

Network Infrastructure

WebRTC & SIP Telephony Usage is More Than the IMS Gateway
Gateways between WebRTC and SIP (the protocol nowadays used for the telephony network) is an obvious component and seen by the IMS/VoLTE/RCS/Joyn multimedia telephony providers as a way to stretch their application-specific networks to Internet and OTT clients. However, more general and extended WebRTC and SIP gateways open up for Internet and OTT telephony usage directly at the user end, both enterprise and private.

Network Infrastructure

The Real Deal on IPv6 Migration
When the American Registry for Internet Numbers depleted its IPv4 free pool on Sept. 24, 2015, the news quickly spread across the trade press: IPv4 is gone, and the time to transition to IPv6 is now.

Unified Communications

VoLTE: A Reality Check on Its Availability and How Carriers Could Take It to the Next Level
Alido Di Giovanni thinks it's shocking that people today can't get mobile messages on their laptops. Now that cellular service providers have established a base for VoLTE, however, they are ready to address such multidevice solutions, he says. And he adds that IMS can enable that.

Channel

NTT America Channel Heads Offer New Program Update
IDC has named the company a leader in the worldwide telecom service provider and enterprise WAN data service provider arenas, noting its significant investments in upgrading its network and cloud networking capabilities with network functions virtualization and software-defined networking technologies; its delivery of the first commercial multilayer private cloud service based on SDN; the first global DCI service targeting multinational corporations; and its aggressive posture in adopting hybrid WAN services, Internet-based WAN alternatives, usage-based pricing, cloud IT, and secure access.

Security

Credential, Party of Three: Virginia's New Identity Law and the Slow Rise of Third-Party Identity Credentials
On July 1, in an effort to limit identity theft, data breaches and other cyberattacks that are most often successful due to compromised passwords, Virginia officially became the first state to enact a law focused on digital identities. The new law recognizes the evolving role of digital identity and establishes a legal framework to support the use of stronger third-party credentials in place of weak and vulnerable passwords.

Cloud & Data Center

Datos IO Distributed Versioning Platform Addresses Trend Toward Scale-Out Databases
The cloud, mobile, and social networking have transformed the requirements of data centers and databases, says Tarun Thakur, CEO and co-founder of Datos IO. Traditional relational databases, for which users need to set up schemas at the outset, are not a good match for this new, more dynamic, world, he says. A look at what's happened with Informatica, Riverbed, and Veritas - all of which recently went private, eliminating $12 billion in market cap from this product category - illustrates that fact, he says, as does the rise of a new breed of database solutions like Amazon Aurora, Apache, Hadoop, SAP Hana, and talend, among many others.

Special Focus

UC Excellence Awards
TMC and INTERNET TELEPHONY magazine are happy to announce the winners of the UC Excellence Awards.

Roundup

SIP Phones
TMC Writer Paula Bernier delivers our roundup of the SIP phone market.

Strategic Solutions Series

The Pursuit of Perfect Sound: Sennheiser Trumpets Its Message of Great Value
Sennheiser used to be the best-kept secret in the headset space. Now the secret is out. The company's headset business, Sennheiser Communications, has had three especially strong years in which it experienced rapid growth, and made new investments in marketing, people, and product development. All of the above have helped increased its profile, says William J. Whearty.

Wireless

How to Boost Indoor Coverage
Delivering consistent indoor coverage for cellular devices continues to be a top priority for mobile operators. Regardless of the pervasiveness of cellular towers in any given region, our study shows that more than 50 percent of mobile subscribers continue to experience poor quality signal, dropped calls, or dead zones for a variety of reasons, from construction materials to local topography. Remote regions present an even bigger challenge as distances between towers increase.

On Rad's Radar

The IT Shop Partner Profile
Parks Associates' study on IT support spending for small business finds that small businesses (those will less than 250 employees) spend only $150 per month for IT services. That number seems low unless you do some math. A small IT shop has about 150 to 250 customers from talking with potential VoIP partners. At 150 accounts billing $120 per month, the revenue is $216,000. After expenses and hardware, it would be reasonable for a one-man shop.