IoT Trends

By: Ohad Amir

2019 should be a very good year for operators. Fearless forecasts reveal the potential IoT revenue profit that awaits. The Internet of Things is driving the connected living phenomenon, and top research firms predict anywhere from 20 to 50 or more billion IoT devices will be in use by 2020. But where is the path to profit? It lies not so much in selling and integrating hardware once or even offering a growing number of compatible devices as with operators creating value to enable recurring revenue…

» read this article

---

Essentials-as-a-Service: Taking Transformation to The Next Level

By: Stephen Vandegriff

As part of your strategy to digitally transform your organization, you’ve made the decision to move key applications—even mission-critical parts of your business—to the cloud…for all the right reasons. Doing so is key to creating a more agile, responsive and competitive IT organization, a highly efficient and effective environment where finite resources are able to focus more on creating new business capabilities and less on maintaining IT operations. But what about all the remaining mundane, keep-the-lights-on operational tasks that are ‘essential’ to supporting the always-available, 24/7 expectations of the business? If the care and feeding of your office applications have been moved to Office 365 or Google apps, and the most critical business apps are now being delivered aaS, what about the remaining physical infrastructure that connects users when they are in the office or their physical devices, such as desktops, laptops, tablets and phones? What about the care and feeding of those end-user devices that consume a tremendous amount of cycles to configure, track and deploy, as well as the service desk functions that are ‘essential’ to delivering availability, uptime and an exceptional experience to your user community? What’s key to optimizing your ability to meet these sorts of demands?  Essentials as a Service (EaaS) In 2019, IT leaders and CIOs will want to consider Essentials as a Service (EaaS), which involves offloading the remaining operational aspects of support to IT infrastructure experts to further drive agility and efficiencies throughout their organizations…

» read this article

---

How Financial Services Companies Can Rest Assured of Their Network's Resiliency

By: Roy Hilliard

Network downtime isn’t so much a question of if, but when, and the financial costs to businesses can be overwhelming, to say nothing of the adverse effects on productivity and brand reputation. According to a recent report by IHS Inc. (NYSE: IHS), network outages experienced by North American organizations alone result in revenue losses of $700 billion per year.Even if a company’s applications, servers and devices remain operational, when the network is down they no longer can communicate with one another…

» read this article

---

SD-PON: Transforming the Fixed Network

By: Rishi Raj Maulick

The telecom industry is undergoing a massive transformation as service providers across the board seek to transition their networks from proprietary closed box solutions to more open SDN and NFVI-based architectures. The goal of these network transformations is to reap the benefits associated with economies of scale, reduced CapEx and OpEx, as well as gain the agilities of service introduction. As part of this effort, broadband service providers are turning to new software-centric technologies to redefine their network architectures and achieve these benefits…

» read this article

---

A Holistic Approach to the Future of Cybersecurity

By: Stewart Collier

For many people, mentioning the term cybersecurity typically conjures up the Hollywood vision of an individual in a dark room running sophisticated code and typing furiously on a keyboard to access critical government data or to steal money from big financial institutions. This vision, though, is not reality. The truth is that cyberattacks come in a variety of shapes and sizes, from highly sophisticated and potentially state-sponsored initiatives like Stuxnet or NotPetya to arbitrary probing done by individuals with limited resources…

» read this article

---

Solving Transport Complexity

By: Dean Campbell, Brandon Peyton

Thirty-five years after it first came to life, today’s Internet comprises thousands of public and private networks, across which more than 4.7 zettabytes of IP traffic have flowed globally, according to the Cisco Visual Networking Index. To put that figure into perspective, that traffic is equal to all the movies ever produced crossing the world’s IP networks in less than a minute. The Cisco report projects that by 2022, 60 percent of the global population, or 4.8 billion people, will be Internet users, up from 3…

» read this article

---

2019 Trends & The Threat of Digitalization

By: John Brooks

Everywhere we turn, there is constant industry chatter around the leap to 5G, or the paradigm shift to Software Defined Networks (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV), or even the explosive growth in the Internet of Things (IoT). These are all valid issues facing operators, yet they aren’t the issues that will have the largest, most significant impact on their bottom lines. Impacts are measured in revenue stability, decline, or preferably, growth. These issues have a far greater chance of causing revenue declines if not adopted and implemented properly; in fact, they may fuel little, if any, revenue growth…

» read this article

---

The State of Robocalls And What's Next For Carriers

By: Jim Tyrrell

Robocalling, spamming, scamming, spoofing. Whatever you want to call it, these unwanted calls invade consumers' phones. This scenario is one that plays out for consumers multiple times a week—if not every day—given that robocalls remain the number-one complaint by volume to the FTC and FCC. In fact, an FTC report indicates that the agency received 4.5 million robocall complaints in 2017, up from 3.4 million the prior year. Subscriber frustration with robocalls is also not lost on telecom carriers…

» read this article

---

Letter from the Editor

By: Scott St. John - Pipeline

Transformation is a messy thing. But, it can also be beautiful. Transformation is more than change, it's about creatively melding the new and old—separate and disparate things—to create something truly unique. Transformation is a delicate art.  Do it well and you create a masterpiece. And like art, if you do it poorly you do nothing other than create a grey goop and get paint on your hands.As we look back on 2018 and ahead to the New Year, swirls of innovation clearly emerge. Trends become more defined, more resolute and begin to converge into a tapestry of possibilities…

» read this article

---

Telecom Industry News

By: Scott St. John - Pipeline

From FCC rulings to lifting the lid on Victorian-era manhole covers, the last weeks have brought a crop of interesting news stories on network evolution, the road to 5G, and IoT. As is fitting for this time of year, a host of 2018 end-of-year summaries as well as forward-looking 2019 predictions came in, including the ten top consumer trends of the year as reported by Ericsson’s ConsumerLab report, now in its eighth year. Top innovation award winners from Microsoft’s M12 venture fund, the Nokia Open Innovation Challenge, and the Nokia Bell Labs Prize were also announced…

» read this article

---