Cloud infrastructures are nothing new. The likes of Google and Amazon have had virtualized, fully elastic infrastructures that run on commodity servers for more than a decade. Commercial technologies for elasticity have been around since VMware introduced DRS in 2004. Why hasn’t the telecom industry incorporated these technologies to produce cloud-based architectures already?

Understandably, the attributes of lower cost and greater flexibility are what usually cause telecom engineers to look into SIP trunking services. With the prospect of shaving upwards of 28% off monthly TDM access services while adding access to a slew of valuable services not available on their TDM links, who could blame them? But, there is a third reason to consider moving from TDM to SIP trunking services: High availability.

Recently, Disruptive Analysis has been closely watching the evolution of WebRTC standards, products and services. As previously noted, the overall pace of change and early adoption is blisteringly-fast, especially when compared with most telecoms-centric technology innovations.

If you have existing communications infrastructure and want to extend that over the web, the way to do that is with a WebRTC gateway. This is a device that takes the existing communications protocols – usually SIP and RTP – and converts them to WebRTC compliant forms, including ICE, STUN, TURN, SRTP, as well as a signaling protocol of your choice. This element bridges the web provider’s network and communications network, so it usually at the edge of the network, close to the firewall where it can span the web and the communications infrastructure at once.

"Nothing endures but change" - Heraclitus. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus had no idea how his iconic quote would so directly apply to enterprise communications.  The communications landscape continues to evolve.  User and customer expectations are also changing.  When businesses were more local and information workers less mobile, technologies like the business phone system (aka PBX) and e-mail filled the communications gap.   That’s just not the case any longer.  We are a mobile first world.  In fact, the Center for Disease Control (of all organizations to reference in a tech blog) found that more than 35% of US households are mobile only—no landline telephones.  When put in perspective, it’s clear to see that we are an always on, always connected, digital society.  You can say we are Hyperconnected. With advancements in consumer technology, enterprise users and their customers expect to have an equal communications experience, while conducting business, as they do in their personal lives. The challenge for most IT organizations is to keep up with those expectations and to deliver the right experience at the right time across multiple devices, modalities, and applications, all while leveraging investments already made in enterprise communications technology.  Unified communications (UC) is part of the answer, but we’re seeing the real value in unifying communications.  At Acme Packet, we see an inflection point where the right approach will enable enterprise IT to deliver on business demands while delighting their end users and customers. 

I've had a fascination with linguistics throughout my entire academic life. Learning new languages is more than memorizing new vocabularies – it also includes learning new grammar and phraseologies. Specifically, the history and evolution of languages pique my interest, such as the adoption of new words and phrases within a language, as well as their deprecation, produce a very curious lens for viewing a society. My interest was likely instilled in me by my high school Greek and etymology teacher, Professor Krumpe.  He could spend an entire lecture lamenting the passing of words like "wither" and "thither" from conversational English.

Network monitoring is often overlooked by enterprise IT departments. IT organizations would much rather spend their scarce dollars / euros / pounds / yen on a new unified communications (UC) system (like Microsoft Lync), mobile app, or the always-reliable SIP trunk instead of boring monitoring software – but this is old-world thinking. Monitoring software today is evolving into a critical piece of the VoIP and UC landscape, especially as we enter the age of the “Hyper-Connected Enterprise.” In the Hyper-Connected Enterprise, 69% of employees are using smart devices and 43% are accessing corporate apps through those devices.  

Part 1: Easy firewall traversal for mobile VoIP apps: With the advent of Skype, Apple Facetime and iMessage, WhatsApp, Tango, and Viber, over-the-top (OTT) services are thriving and driving revenue losses at mobile service providers, exceeding $13.8 billion in 2011 (Ovum, 2012).

A recent report from the GSMA at Mobile World Congress indicated that mobile data revenue will exceed voice revenue in the United States and United Kingdom by 2014, and has already done so in Argentina. This trend is expected to happen worldwide by 2017.

The good news: as of today nine operators have successfully launched Joyn, and it is finally seeing traction across EMEA, the US, and Asia with SK Telecom recently announcing its 1 million user milestone. The bad news: Rich Communications Services (RCS) has not moved fast enough given that it was conceived in 2007. One major operator made recent news about delay in launching services, putting the broad acceptance of Joyn even further off. The ugly news: Over-the-top (OTT) providers are capitalizing on these delays with inexpensive and compelling communication services and negatively impacting mobile service provider traffic and revenue. Two or three years ago, only geeks knew about the likes of WhatsApp and others, but these applications are now mainstream in Spain, the Netherlands, and other countries – used by teenagers, as well as their teachers and parents.