At first glance, it might seem oxymoronic that IoT and real-time communications would converge.  I mean, IoT is all about sensors reporting information right?  I would say yes, mostly right.  But with millions or even potentially billions of things connected to the internet, it would make some kind of logical sense that these things would want to communicate via voice/video to a person. 

I come across many business plans that utilize the Cisco VNI, and these business plans and business often speak of it as gospel.  I’ve even seen other analyst reports refer to the Cisco VNI as well.  The Cisco VNI has been a great tool for many of us in the industry, and I have been reading it for as long as it’s been available, which is at least 10 years running.  And it’s a great tool for sure, one of the best. 

But is it right? 

I’m sure many of you do a lot of travel for work and like me, you likely have your own “routine” as to what you take along during your travels.  Laptop, phone, headset, cables, and chargers usually fill my backpack, allowing for communications virtually anywhere.  Over the holiday break, my family celebrated my wife and my 30^th anniversary with a two-week trip to the Galapagos Islands, a remote collection of rocky islands off the coast of Ecuador made famous by Darwin and his scientific observations on evolution.  The remoteness of this type of travel brings a whole new challenge to communicating with family, friends, and work.

A few observations and suggestions:

'The Third Wave' by Steve Case is a good read from a discernibly credible individual (AOL being a key disrupter of its time) where he analyzes the evolution of the internet and how companies wanting to do business in today's connected world need to adapt and re-think where & how it is done. This got me thinking about where & how the media processing has evolved over the years and has rode its own 'waves' to where we are today.

WebRTC and Cognitive Computing are two technologies that are undoubtedly transforming industries but perhaps the velocity of change comes from how easy it is to integrate these two technologies. Cloud-Platforms-as-a-Service (CPaaS) companies like Telestax are enabling web developers to easily add real-time communications to any application through their rapid service creation environment RestComm. Then Cognition-as-a-Service companies like IBM Watson continue to push what artificial intelligence can achieve and provide an easy RESTFul based interface. Combine these two elements and get a cognitive communications that can be used in almost any vertical. From emotional analysis in the contact center to ensure customers are satisfied after every call to smartbot agents capable of handling customer inquiries via SMS - it's all possible with cognitive communications.

This 'how-to' will be a step-by-step guide on building a WebRTC service that interacts with IBM Watson.

While OPNFV and Openstack provide a convenient virtualized environment for deploying and running network-oriented applications, there is another whole dimension to what may be done with it. With conventional computing, you need to wheel in another box, install things, and then modify your networked environment to take the new hardware into account. With a virtualization, you avoid dealing with hardware each time you need to increase an application’s capacity, and can “spin up” additional virtual machines and then configure the environment accordingly. And, in a well-designed OPNFV environment, all of this can be done automatically.

This is my third blog on Self-Service Optimization and the final one in this series.  In part one of my three-part blog, I discussed how in the Personalization Act, the strategy should focus on enhancing the customer experience by making the frequent customer feel known, welcome, and appreciated by personalizing their experience.  In part two, the Steering Act, I discussed how the strategy should aim at shortening the duration of the interaction, thereby leading to an increased potential for repeat business.  In this blog, the Post Contact Act, I will discuss the importance of measuring customer satisfaction (or loyalty or NPS), as well as how customer satisfaction can be measured and improved at the end of the call (performance and quality assurance).

Our good friends at Quobis wanted to give insight into how they’re working with Dialogic. This is a guest blog from Santiago Troncoso, Product Manager at Quobis, on his experience with PowerMedia XMS.

So by now, you must be wondering what sort of differences we found in deploying OPNFV in a blade server environment? To be honest, not a lot. Some initial ’issues” stemmed from some unfamiliarity with blade servers and their storage and networking environments. We first did the OPNFV deployment on individual rack mount servers (RMS) [I should note that OPNFV at that point was the 1.0 Arno release, and it was a little green]. In parallel, we familiarized ourselves with the blade environment in general – setting up, partitioning, and mounting storage arrays, basic blade switch and network setup, and remote system management. For the grand finale, we successfully combined the blades and the more stable OPNFV 2.0 Brahmaputra release.

The most important difference between the two environments was network setup.

Can you teach an old dog new tricks?

The process of developing communications applications is in the midst of a long, over-due update, moving from complex legacy APIs and programming languages to easy-to-understand script and drag-and-drop GUI programming.  A number of Communications Platforms as a Service (CPaaS) providers have sprung to life, based on easy-to-use HTML-like syntax and APIs.  The most significant benefit is bringing application development within the skillset of a huge number of web developers and those without experience in software development.