By: Scott St. John - Pipeline
Historically, customer relationship management (CRM) software has been one of those obscure products used by sales and maybe marketing to manage customer information and, if you were really
sophisticated, to conduct promotional campaigns. Back then, CRM was just another software product, primarily used by lowly sales and marketing folks who hunched over their keyboards as they sat in
their cubicles spending endless hours scanning in business cards and formatting comma delimited files for importā¦
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By: Thomas Vasen
We are told that the cornerstone of commercial success for telcos in these days of next generation services, advanced mobile networks, and interacting devices is agility. It ā agility ā
is even the theme of this current issue of Pipeline magazine. Fast moving, lean, quickly responsive to fine-tuning the customer experience; isnāt agile what youāve got to be if you want to achieve
results? The trouble is, over the roughly two decades since the global deregulation of the industry, telcos have been preoccupied by the pursuit of becoming ābiggerā rather than more agileā¦
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By: Jesse Cryderman
Ubiquity - /yuĖbÉŖkwÉŖti/The state or capacity of being everywheresource: Merriam Webster Dictionary The notion of ubiquity extends back to early theologians who
expounded on the omnipresent nature of their God. Ubiquity was also the name of Roy Ayers funky jazz project, and has certainly been the name of countless tech companies. Our concern, however, is
not deities or music legends or even failed startups, but network ubiquity. For most of history, networks have been walled gardensā¦
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By: Federico Descalzo
The rise of VoIP First introduced around a decade ago, the uptake of VoIP has been relatively slow in comparison to some other telecom trends. In fact, according to experts, despite being
around for ten years or so, VoIP is only just moving from the early adoption stage to gain a more mainstream status. Market research firm In-Stat estimated that, by the end of 2013, there
were 288 million VoIP users, a number which shrinks when compared to the 6.5 billion fixed and mobile phone lines in useā¦
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By: Becky Bracken
Practically every network investment by operators these days is focused around updates that make it quicker, easier, more efficient and more profitable to roll out new services. From marketing
and billing to policy and provisioning, operators and CSPs around the world are taking a hard look at the smartest way to evolve into an organization that can respond in real time to user needs and
demands. The days of the marketing department calling the engineering team to discuss whether a new service was possible are way overā¦
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By: Jesse Cryderman
Now that telecommunications markets are saturated (or super-saturated) in most of the developed world, what is the next move for the agile communication services provider (CSP)? Sure, 4G LTE
still has a ways to go in Europe, there is room for growth in enterprise, and premium-services and data plans will puff up revenues; but in the country each operator calls home, the number of
subscribers and the absolute rate of traditional service growth is finite and constrained. Machine to machine (M2M) connectivity and the Internet of Things (IoT) offer attractive business
propositions, but itās unclear if CSPs can substantially profit from connected humidors and smart parkingā¦
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By: Becky Bracken
To say that network virtualization has been disruptive to the network equipment manufacturers' (NEMs) business, feels a bit paltry. Asking gear makers like Cisco, Oracle, Nokia, Huawei, and
their fellow competitors to suddenly reinvent themselves as software companies is a little like asking Toyota to get into the oil business. SDN, NFV, Cloud and rampant network and data center
virtualization has dealt an irreparable blow to expensive, unwieldy, clunky boxes. Networks are quickly evolving to become little more than sophisticated software running on an open stack and
commerical-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardwareā¦
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By: Jesse Cryderman
The story of power consumption and its relation to computational power is nothing short of astounding. When the first general purpose computer, the ENIAC, was introduced in 1946, it consumed
150 kilowatts of power, cost $6 million (adjusted for inflation), and operated at a pokey 100 kilohertz. Just 50 years later, desktop computers sported 1,000 times the processing power, cost 1,500
times less, and used 5,000 times less energy. In fact, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania fabricated an ENIAC-on-a-chip in 1996, in order to demonstrate the rapid evolution of
computingā¦
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By: Becky Bracken
Interoperability: the future depends on it. Interoperability is the new telecom imperative. Interoperability is transforming the industry in terms of accelerating innovation and helping it
reach beyond straight communications services. Interoperability increase the pace of invention. It helps you build on the work of others and advance beyond it. It allows collaboration and
breeds a general spirit of cooperation and joined resources to tackle a problem. Led by industry disrupting forces of virtualitization including telco cloud, NFV, SDN and the like, the adoption of
open standards including OpenFlow, OpenStack and OpenDaylight, has become the purview of tried and true walled garden puristsā¦
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By: Tim Young
āIt was no small matter to reach that glade. By the beaten paths, which indulge in a thousand teasing zigzags, it required a good quarter of an hour. In a bee-line, through the underbrush,
which is peculiarly dense, very thorny, and very aggressive in that locality, a full half hour was necessary. Boulatruelle committed the error of not comprehending this. He believed in the straight
line; a respectable optical illusion which ruins many a man. The thicket, bristling as it was, struck him as the best roadā¦
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By: Jesse Cryderman
Deep cuts at Microsoft What do you do when you are an aging PC-based company in an era dominated by mobile, cloud, and Internet companies? For 39-year-old Microsoft, the only way to compete
with the Amazons and Googles of the world is to trim the fat; and in this case, it's a lot of fat. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has initiated one of the largest layoffs in tech history on July 17,
according to a report published in Reuters. The company plans to cut a staggering 18,000 jobs as it attempts to re-cast itself as a cloud and mobile companyā¦
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