Business VoIP

Gartner Predicts BYOD Boom by 2018

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In a recent report, research organization Gartner predicted that 70% of professionals will conduct their work on personal smart devices by 2018. To translate- Gartner effectively predicted that 70% of employees will be working on their own smartphones or tablets by 2018, a concept generally referred to as BYOD, or Bring Your Own Device.

If BYOD plays out as Gartner predicts than this will be a huge change in the workplace, and one that requires some extensive planning to implement properly, with minimal friction.

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Bandwidth Demand Spikes – Are You Ready?

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VoIP bandwidthWe’ve mentioned a few times on this blog that you need to make sure you adopt the Unified Communications solution that meets your organization’s needs- and part of that preparedness means making sure you provision the bandwidth your organization will require to run its telecommunication systems effectively. If your existing bandwidth supply doesn’t provide the connection speeds and reliability required to handle your organization’s existing needs, then it’s not going to cut it when you upgrade to a VoIP communications network.

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Do Customers Care About Phone Systems?

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It’s easy to think about your organization’s phone system as a purely internal affair, something that impacts your own employees and doesn’t really touch anyone else.

This just isn’t the case. While it’s certainly important to take your organization’s internal operations into consideration when adopting a new communication system, it’s a bad idea to ignore the ways your organization’s communication systems impact everyone else you handle during your day-to-day operations.

Even though these external individuals and the impact of your telecom system on them may not be right in front of your face (the way your employees are), when it comes down to it your organization’s long-term success depends a lot more on having effective telephony systems than you’d likely guess.

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Enterprise VoIP Market Prefers Private Cloud Over Public Cloud (Pt 2)

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As previously stated, enterprise-class organizations are jumping onto the private cloud at much higher rates than the public cloud. Why are they doing this, and will this choice of private-over-public really spell the doom of a whole generation of Chief Information Officers, as some public-cloud boosters argue?

Public vs Private: Defined

The public cloud is the cloud we’ve all heard about, a space of shared storage, of software-as-service, a place where your organization doesn’t have to own any hardware of its own. In fact, the public cloud is sold as a place where your organization doesn’t need to hold any software of its own either, or really much of anything other than a few shipments of smartphones and tablets.

By contrast, the private cloud is a remote-hosted network solution that offers just about all of the streamlined benefits of the public cloud, but with a lot more control and security. In the public cloud the infrastructure hosting your network is shared with a bunch of other organizations. In fact, the infrastructure is shared with as many other organizations as your service provider thinks they can cram on theirs. By contrast, in the private cloud your organization’s data and applications are stored and managed through infrastructure that’s used exclusively by your own organization.

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Enterprise VoIP Market Prefers Private Cloud Over Public Cloud (Pt 1)

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When you hear about virtualized business environments, remote-hosted network solutions and IP telephony services, you might think that all of these terms represent a single monolithic technology. While it’s clear the qualities of these services vary from vendor to vendor, not everyone is aware of the fact there are plenty of different deployment methods for each of these. In fact, the differences between one remote-hosted network deployment and another can be rather dramatic.

One of the biggest divides in the world remote-hosted networks lies between private and public cloud deployment. And while public clouds may be getting all the press, private clouds appear to be the deployment method the enterprise market is jumping to.

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Reliability Concerns in IP Telephony (Pt 1)

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Most people see the benefits associated with IP telephony and feel pretty sold on the technology right off the bat. This isn’t too surprising. After all, it’s pretty natural to hear benefits like “lowered overhead,” “increasing organizational flexibility,” “expanded feature sets,” and to automatically say yes to whatever technology hands them over. But there are some people who feel a little skittish about IP telephony and aren’t completely wooed by the technology’s many benefits. Instead, these people let their concerns over the technology’s performance overwhelm their decision making process and they end up hemming-and-hawing instead of taking the plunge into IP telephony.

Thankfully many of the concerns some organizations feel over adopting IP telephony are unfounded or easy to guard against with proper provisioning. For example, let’s take a minute to look over a common concern related to IP telephony reliability, to see how well it stands up in the light of day.

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Privacy Concerns, Medical Information Breaches and Choosing a Secure VoIP Provider

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When you’re picking an IP telephony provider security needs to sit at the top of your list of concerns, and this is doubly true if you’re going to be signing up for a full remote-hosted networking solution, including any sort of cloud storage. Every organization needs to be extremely concerned about network security, yet organizations in certain fields need to be even more concerned with security breaches than others.

Take the example of the medical community.

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How Far is Too Far When Helping Clients in Tough Economic Times?

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As a service provider offering essential phone service to our clients we need to make a lot of tough decisions regarding how we run our business, and that’s doubly true when our clients experience rough economic times. This is true not only for DLS but for many other smaller companies that develop close, personal relationships with their business clients over the years.

On the one hand service providers can be rather hard-nosed and impersonal with their clients and demand full payment, on time, every time their bill comes up due. Lots of providers take this approach. They don’t listen when their clients experience financial difficulties and they don’t make any overtures to help their partners out when times get tough. This hard-nosed approach is pretty common among larger service providers who tend to be less likely to ever meet their clients half-way.

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Listen to Your VoIP Service Providers Advice

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Infoworld recently posted a great story detailing this exact problem and just how bone-headed IP telephony implementation can go, and how a simple mistake (like mis-calibration) can make an entire technology seem deficient.

In the story a VoIP service provider was called in to an organization to check out their communication system. The organization had been experiencing a lot of crippling problems with their IP PBX. The organization’s employees were experiencing degradation in call quality, dropped calls and busy signals when and where there shouldn’t. In other words this organization’s VoIP deployment has turned into a mess in a manner their old traditional telephony solution never had been.

Turns out they were using an IP PBX that wasn’t nearly powerful enough to meet their current needs.

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