Wondering what your options are when one of your traditional communications vendors suggests you rip out your legacy Nortel infrastructure so you can replace one proprietary platform with another? Why spend more money to be vendor-locked, have to retrain your team, and disrupt your end-users lives with a new expensive plastic phone that they didn’t request?

Last week in Las Vegas I had the very proud opportunity to participate in the 13th Women in the Channel (WiC) Networking Event as part of the Channel Partners Conference & Expo.

Spring finally sprung in London last week with sunny days and temperatures in the 20s (70s).  It almost seems a shame to ask sun-starved Londoners to head indoors this week for one of the year’s biggest unified communications (UC) events, UC EXPO.  On the plus side, the good weather should ensure a busy event.  GENBAND will be showing off our UC and WebRTC solutions and will be supporting our newest

Over-the-Top (OTT) service providers, like Skype, Google, WhatsApp and Netflix are riding on top of Communications Service Providers (CSPs) capex-intensive infrastructure by delivering Web and mobile competitive offers either directly (pure OTT VoIP applications) or indirectly (embedding voice, video and messaging into social, mobile, or gaming apps).  

At the end of the day, it’s all about the bottom-line. As partners look at managing their business to increase profitability and making decision on which line-cards to carry, which services to offer, workforce management and which growth areas to drive to solidify the monthly recurring revenue (MRC) streams. However, it’s important as you look at your business to also understand what vendor partner ecosystem are you in.

Wow.  I can honestly say that I haven’t experienced too many days like GENBAND Day 2014.  GENBAND Day is a once a year holiday we give to our employees and encourage them to then give that time back to their communities. 

The public switched telephone network (PSTN), is arguably the largest legacy network in the world. While the Internet has grown, and a significant portion of voice calls today travel over the Internet, the importance of the PSTN is still very real and there remains a need to connect people with the quality voice services they’ve come to rely on. In fact, more than one billion people globally and the majority of all businesses still rely on the PSTN.

Every couple of decades or so, the telecommunications industry goes through a technology transition – analog to digital, for example – that profoundly impacts the way services are created and delivered, as well as the business models behind them. The ongoing and steady distillation of communications functions and features into pure software, which can be executed on generic and elastic hardware resources, is one of those industry-altering transitions.

In just a few short years, the communications industry has been turned on its head. While traditional telecom operators often defined the manner in which subscribers would communicate – voice or SMS, for the most part – end users are now much more influential in calling the shots.

In the post-Supercomm world, tradeshows in North America have become focused on specific technology areas, rather than diffused across multiple segments of the industry. The WebRTC Conference & Expo in Atlanta, conducted at the end of June, was no exception. It’s hard to think of a hotter topic careening through the corridors of the communications industry these days than the rise of browser-based unified-communications.