Evolution is such an important word. It’s probably in my top ten list of ‘important’ words with others like ‘belief’, ‘respect’, ‘diversity’. The word evolution is defined by the Cambridge English Dictionary as: “A gradual process of change and development." To add to that, it's the ability to change and develop in conjunction within a time period that is both realistic and achievable. 

In Greek mythology, Icarus and Daedalus attempt to escape from the island of Crete by constructing wings that were held on using wax. Although Daedalus had warned Icarus not to fly too close to the sun, Icarus did not heed the warning, the wax melted, and Icarus perished. To be an "Icarus" or to "fly too close to the sun" is to fail or be destroyed because of lack of caution or excessive ambition. 

For any service provider, moving out of the data center and into the cloud can bring an extensive return on investment – optimizing costs by only paying for what you use has saved some service providers thousands and thousands of dollars each year. If you were perhaps on the fence about the potential cloud return on investment, AWS makes it a point to advertise this savings-promised-land to users whenever possible:

As many in our space will contend, telecom resides in a niche and operates under a different set of (perhaps self-inflicted) rules compared to those web apps that are thriving in the cloud. Telecom apps were born in darkness and molded by the place known as ‘on-prem’ with no thought to the possibility of cloud computing. In contrast, the web apps of today were born in the cloud and built to limitlessly scale (a la web-scale).

Theory is fun and scaling real-time communications in theory is simple – components are generic and square Lego-like building blocks that can get scaled up vertically (adding more power to the engine) and/or horizontally (adding more engines to the pool cluster). Scaling ‘just’ happens with more resources being added when needed and removed when done.

I've lost count on how many Unified Communications (UC) platforms are out there. It seems every week there is an announcement on a new vendor launching its own. It does not surprise me, as per most analysts, UC is a growing market with a market cap that is expanding by multiple billions of dollars year over year. Everyone wants a piece of that!

As in most market segments, in the UC market there are those vendors that took a risk and now are market leaders and others that came later, but by flexing their financial muscle were able to buy market share (you know who they are…). There are also the niche vendors that identified an interesting gap and are capitalizing on it. Independent of the type of vendor, in UC, there are base factors that can contribute to success or failure. One of these factors is audio and video quality. It is quite hard to collaborate when you have a poor experience on audio and video calls and conferences. A UC vendor could have the most advanced APIs or integrate with a multitude of applications, but if audio or video quality is not there and adaptable to different network conditions, then it is destined for failure.

Nerd alert! For a while I’ve postponed my chance to geek out about one of the latest buzz words in the telecom industry. Over the last few years, the telecom industry has been rampant with technical terms such as virtualization, network functions virtualization (NFV), orchestration, and lately containerization. Salespeople throw terms around like there is no tomorrow in hopes of getting prospects engaged and excited about their products. One term that is trending now is microservices architecture (MSA). Now, I did say I was going to geek out, but I promise not to get too technical, so hopefully, you will make it to the end of this blog.

My niece is volunteering in the Peace Corps in West Africa. When her younger sister learned that the 110V hairdryer she wanted to send would not work in the 230V environment in Sierra Leone, she asked an inciteful question, “How come her cellphone works?”. I am a telephony sales engineer by trade, and I was born and raised in South Africa, so naturally she turned to me for an explanation.

As mentioned in my previous DevOps blog, OpenStack is one of the cloud platforms with growing popularity in the market and it’s already supported by the Dialogic® BorderNet® SBC and other Dialogic products. Support for OpenStack often becomes an added-value driver for customer interest in our offerings.

If you are involved in product development, you’ve most likely heard about DevOps, which is a methodology for quickly delivering and improving products in less time than using traditional development methods. One of the main reasons for the adoption of DevOps is the need for software and infrastructure integration and collaboration, gaining the best from both, achieving better performance, and bringing the final product to an optimized level on the fastest track possible. DevOps is a culture backed by endless technologies and tools where the key is “Automate Everything.”

A Session Border Controller (SBC) is a network device that secures voice over IP (VoIP) infrastructures while providing interworking between incompatible signaling messages and media flows (sessions) from end devices or application servers. SBCs are employed in enterprise infrastructures and any carrier network delivering commercial, residential, business, fixed-line, or mobile VoIP services. They are typically deployed at both the network edge and at carrier interconnects, the demarcation points (borders) between their users and other service providers.

There is absolutely no doubt that IoT is on service providers’ minds as a new source of opportunity and revenue, especially as their core services like voice and messaging decline. And with predictions of 1 trillion connected devices by 2025, this new vision is certainly very compelling.

Are you a service provider looking for new revenue streams with a focus on innovation with IoT? If so, then you are reading the right blog! Dialogic has a long legacy of helping major telecom service providers launch unique services, and now we are working with Tier1 service providers around the world to leverage their telecom and digital assets into revenue-generating IoT solutions.