One of the few perks that I have always enjoyed from this travel-intensive job is to wake up at the crack of dawn, open my hotel room door, and find a freshly delivered newspaper within arm’s reach. I know what you are thinking, but yes, this technology evangelist still enjoys catching up with world events the old fashioned way, with a cup of chai tea and the feel of soft newspaper in my hands. During one recent trip, I read an article in USA Today by Adam Sylvain titled “State laws let telephone companies end land-line services,” [...]
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This week saw the 2012 installment of the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Most of the buzz is obviously around consumer facing products, but there is some crossover into the unified communications and/or contact center space. At CES big players in the tech space try to grab daily headlines. Sometimes good buzz around innovative products, other times hilarious buzz around certain speeches. Anyone remember Ballmer as Mr. Monkey Boy? If not there’s a nice blog post to refresh your memory. Anyway, there were a few interesting UC and contact center items I found in all the [...] I begin by thanking all of you for the tremendous response to my previous video blog titled Hear Me Out. Based on your feedback I decided to follow up with a sequel picture blog which will introduce us to a variety of tools used to help identify and mitigate VoIP audio issues. As before, in keeping with the brief nature of this picture blog I will let the pictures do the talking and I will provide short explanations where necessary. Please note that the screen shots of the tools I have used are one of many ways [...] So, is it still good to talk? New research from a popular price comparison website shows that 58% of the British make less than one mobile call a day and 44% make less than one call a day on their home landline. So is the art of conversation really dead, or with the rising popularity of SMS, email and, of course, social media, are we just finding new ways to talk? There are over 74 million mobile phones in use in the UK, which is higher than the current population, but rather than [...] Even though I work primarily on the Pre-Sales side designing and architecting customer solutions, it is not uncommon for me to help with Post-Sales support. I will usually become involved at that juncture when a customer voices concerns about poor audio quality, and I need to troubleshoot. However, there is frequently a communication barrier when the end user generically summarizes the symptomotology as “crappy audio” or a similar unscientific description of the actual problem. A medical doctor has to run multiple diagnostic tests when a patient has a broad or ambiguous set of symptoms in order to narrow down [...] As with most of you, a major portion of my career and life in general revolves around technology. Whether it be my iPhone apps, iPad Apps, Microsoft Lync or self-service applications provided by my bank, broker or other companies I do business with. With the explosion of mobile devices we have all seen this trend toward self-service exploding and along with it a precipitous decline in opportunities to truly touch in a human way those that are providing you the service. While technology is a wondrous tool it does not hold all the answers, sometimes old-school touchy feely is [...] The Rise & Rise of Video Conferencing So, this week, I‘ve been at a Trade Show in the UK (www.ucexpo.co.uk), and from previous years attendance at this show, I’ve noticed a distinct rise in the number of companies promoting video conferencing services, from either a software or hardware viewpoint. Companies that you may never have heard of such as Lifesize, Vidyo, SMB Solutions were all prominent, as well as the known names such as NEC, Microsoft and Polycom – all with shiny and bright video offerings. Argyle and Cook (1976) have written the classic on this topic, Gaze and [...] 2011 is already meeting up to the various industry analysts’ forecasts: it sure is getting cloudy. That is evident with the amount of new architectures that I am designing for my prospective customers. From an architecture design perspective, I always believed that hosted solutions evolved directly from the datacenter-centric architectures which we systems engineers have been designing since early 2005. I always operated under the assumption that from a potential customer viewpoint, the primary reason why some customers are moving to Communications as a Software Service (CAAS) is due to the typical benefits they derived such [...] The Internet currently uses IP version four (IPv4) addressing format that is now almost thirty years old… So, the range of internet addresses within the IPv4 realm is expected to run out sometime in November 2011… The upper limit of addresses possible with IPv4 is 4,294,967,296. This seems massive, but for a variety of reasons, 14% of this total is currently unallocated (and will never be used…) Some bright spark has calculated that the IPv6 address space can handle about 340 trillion, trillion, trillion addresses. That’s enough for everyone on the planet to have trillions of IP addresses without [...] Back in October we presented an upcoming new product (Interaction Analyzer) with a feature called ‘Real Time Speech Analytics’, at our annual gathering of partners, consultants and analysts. We did a live demo and had a focus session that generated quite a few questions, and created a lot of discussion in the weeks after the conference. During the tail end of the last quarter we briefed several customers individually and also presented a session on speech analytics at a regional end user forum held for our New York/New Jersey customers. While the partners and consultants saw the broad value [...] |
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