As Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) takes hold, which means there are key communications infrastructure nodes running your business that are now out of your physical control because they are running in the cloud, the ability to understand how these nodes are performing is more critical than ever. 

“Data” and its big sister, “Information”, are fast becoming core components of cloud-based services. David Reinsel, Senior VP with IDC, was sharing the state of all things data and pointed out a few interesting predictions at the recent IDC Tech Outlook 2017 in Austin.

To close out 2017, I want to recap and share with you the top 10 blogs published this last year in case you missed them. It's no suprise that WebRTC, AI and IoT dominate the headlines. Enjoy!

As more and more enterprises are turning away from CPE based equipment to cloud-based services, Infrastructure as a Service is becoming more prevalent.  One of the key infrastructure nodes that will be required on these enterprise IP-based virtual networks will be SBCs.  These SBCs will still be required to serve their traditional roles including securing the network border and media transcoding for the cloud-based services, such as Unified Communications, that they support.  

Last year, I refrained from making any telecom predictions.   And no one complained.  And this year I was content to continue down that path.  However, I got an offer I couldn’t refuse regarding making 2018 predictions for the Fast Mode 2018 Trends and Outlook, so I did. The full article is linked below.

A couple of months ago, I had the opportunity to speak at TechXLR8 Asia in Singapore.  It was a dynamic conference covering topics such as 5G and IoT.  I spoke about the convergence of IoT and Real Time Communications, which we’re already starting to see.

Many of us are familiar with the concept of value-added services in communications.  That is, what can enhance a basic voice or video call enough that a subscriber would be willing to spend more on it?  For example, call recording or conferencing or prepaid charging or even getting a daily joke are examples of that.   Or a service provider for example will to spend for ad insertion or codec transcoding.

The same concept of value added services goes for IoT. 

In the past, and some would say in the present, the better-known IP-PBX and Unified Communications (UC) vendors focused on large enterprises. The real profit was in obtaining the most significant number of subscribers per business.

In my first blog post, I talked about how Progressive Web Apps are a perfect fit for Visual IVR. In my mind, any web application being built now must take full advantage of what Progressive Web Apps (PWA) offer:

• Service worker (background JavaScript code that can enable a PWA to run without an internet connection, amongst other things) helps you build PWAs that are less expensive and faster to build and are immediately accessible and updateable through your browser.

Quickly realizing video and WebRTC are becoming “must have” features for applications in IoT, security, customer support, and social applications - Dialogic teamed up with Telestax to launch a free Cloud communications and WebRTC workshop series. The workshop was designed to give developers and non-developers hands on experience with building feature rich real-time communication applications. We traveled the world delivering these workshops to hundreds of individuals, building in hours what in the past took weeks even months. There was only one issue..... You needed to be physically at the workshop in order to participate. Until now!

Machine learning (ML) is a type of Artificial intelligence (AI) that allows software applications to become more accurate in predicting outcomes without being explicitly programmed. In other words, machine learning receives input data and uses statistical analysis to predict an output value.