By: Shannon Lucas
Innovate. It’s a word that is thrown around quite often in today’s business world. It’s a term people use to describe what organizations need to do to stay relevant. And, it’s true value is
often clouded by the flurry of new products with the word “innovative” attached; but, no matter how we look at it, innovation needs to be a part of today’s business objectives. As an innovation
leader at Vodafone, I define innovation as business transformation. While everyone approaches the concept differently, at the end of the day, it all comes down to how you can find new ideas and
ways to truly transform your business…
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By: Margaret Rea
The Year of the Seller: PE Fund managers scramble to build strong portfolios Middle market companies – those with $25M to $1B in annual revenue – are the entrepreneurial fuel powering the
American economy. But many of these companies are running on fumes. According to The National Center for the Middle Market, nearly seven in 10 middle market firms reported a
year-over-year increase in revenue in Q1 2016, and about a third plan to expand into new markets over the next 12 months[1]…
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By: Tim Young
Presentation matters. And I’m not just talking about a Tiffany blue box or an Apple Store. I’m not talking about pure aesthetics, though those never, ever hurt. However, I’m talking about
business intelligence, and the path that turns data into something useful in the C-suite and the other corners of the business not occupied by engineers. And this presentation—this translation of
esoteric data into meaningful, well-modeled, visually interesting and intuitive formats—is something that we’ve gotten much better at in recent years, both in the integrated communications and
entertainment (ICE) technology space and in the world at large…
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By: Calvin Chai, Alexander Jeffries
In addition to higher and higher bandwidth, broadband service customers increasingly want the ability to tailor services to their specific needs. For example, a company might want to ramp up
bandwidth for overnight backups, going from 10 Gbps to 100 Gbps, but only between the hours of midnight to 4:00 am. Another company might want to apply a firewall filter and QoS policy for a
company-wide streaming broadcast, but only for an hour between 10:00 and 11:00 a.m. on a specific day. This type of service customization is difficult or impossible to accomplish with traditional
networking technology, but SDN and OpenFlow point the way to policy-driven networks where such customer-driven changes are commonplace…
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By: Joseph Sulistyo
Service providers are turning to software-centric architectures with the principles of Software-defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) to unlock their constrained
and disjointed network infrastructure. They are seeking to transition from a closed architecture with complex control and interoperability to a more open and efficient software-driven network and
service architecture running on open, commodity platforms. This approach is driven by service providers’ requirements for their networks to enable an agile service-driven environment that can
dynamically respond to real-time subscriber demands…
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By: Wedge Greene
Some decisions are both absolutely necessary to make and critical to success. With some few, the outcome of the decision might even impact the continued existence of an ICT company. How will
this new technology impact my business? What can I do about these new market entrants that have started grabbing our traditional territory? Which is the best approach to satisfying my demanding
customers? Most of what Pipeline publishes examines the problems and opportunities associated with many of these decisions…
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By: Wedge Greene, Trevor Hayes
The legend is that Almon Strowger invented automatic telephone switching in order to stop human operators deliberately or accidentally misdirecting phone calls. This was an early (patented
1891) example of using machinery to improve security and reliability in the telecommunications network. However, it was primarily the need to manage growth that drove automation of the phone
system. And since then, through various stages of electromechanical, electronic and computer driven developments, the telecommunications networks of the world have benefited from increasingly high
levels of automation…
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By: Wedge Greene
Episode 7 concludes the beginning of IoT Noir, Pipeline’s science fiction serial set some fifteen years from now. Recapping episodes 1 through 6: Jonathon Blake, the CEO of
International Widget waged a cyber-attack on the IoT water control company of Kiko-Lyn’s aunt, Rachael Greg. During this attack, Black Hat hackers sabotaged Rachael’s smart home and attempted to
kill her. Her young niece Kiko-Lyn independently set out to find evidence Jonathon Blake was behind the attack. Kiko-Lyn met up with a new contact in Hong Kong, Dawn the human rights blogger, to
investigate Blake’s Hong Kong holdings…
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By: Tim Young
“There’s a way to do it better: Find it!”- Thomas Edison (…maybe)If you’re a relentless quote verifier, you may rightly note that the above quote, usually attributed to Edison, may or may
not have ever passed his lips. And if you’re a member of Team Tesla (the inventor, not the car), you might say that Edison was less interested in the best way of doing things and more
interested in what he could sell.In any case, there’s no denying that the pursuit of a better way—a cheaper way, a cleaner way, a more efficient way—of doing things is at the heart of
innovation…
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By: Jim Schakenbach
The pace of news slowed just a bit during May as if the telecommunications industry was skipping spring and settling in for a long, hot summer. Here’s a look at what went on. FCC activities The
FCC considered a few major issues this month, such as reforming and modernizing the 45 billion dollar business data services market, also known as special access, in an effort to boost competition
among carriers. Business data services are critical in the day-to-day life of consumers, business and industry, and are integral to the competitiveness of the U…
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