In part one of my three-part blog, the Personalization Act , I discussed how the strategy should be to focus on enhancing the customer experience by making the frequent customer feel known, welcome, and appreciated through personalization.  

For example, being greeted with “Good afternoon Mr. Vahdat (personal greeting), thank you for being our customer for over nine years (personal announcement), are you calling about your credit amount (call prediction)?”of course all in your preferred language (language control), it sets up a call for success.  

In this Steering Act, the strategy should be to shorten the duration of the interaction, thereby leading to an increased potential for repeat business. 

In the previous blog on OPNFV Demystified I described deploying OPNFV on a collection of rack mount servers (RMS) using Fuel as the installer of choice. I want to continue by going over the areas that may need some clarification, traps I fell into, and mention a few things that I really want to emphasize as I went through the deployment process.

The appeal of IoT comes from the idea that many things will be automated. Our homes will take out our garbage for us, streetlights will turn on for us, crops will be watered for us, and perhaps most importantly, data will be collected and analyzed in real-time for us.

But what happens when it fails or the next course of action is something that is not within the capabilities of the machine, device, or sensor? 

Network Functions Virtualization is more than just moving network infrastructure functionality to a virtualized environment. It’s about orchestrating, delivering, and managing end-to-end services by chaining together software-based network functions, and doing this in an automated and programmatic fashion.

This infographic is your GPS to help you map out the route to an evolved IPX on which to offer revenue-ready and customized voice and video applications along with advanced interconnection capabilities. Wholesale carriers and IPX operators can leverage their position as a trusted intermediary with MNOs and fixed line operators to provide secure any-to-any mediation and transcoding services for enabling VoLTE/IMS connectivity.

You may not have, as I did, the luxury of choosing the array of hardware – rack-mount servers (RMS) or Blade servers - to be used for your OPNFV implementation. I’m going to assume you’re not rolling in a rack full of blades, fiber switch fabric, and storage arrays, but have to make do with what you hope are adequate 1U or 2U machines. I’ll mention later some of the interesting twists encountered with a blade setup, but let’s start with RMS’s in the blog.

At this point you may be holding the OPNFV ISO in your sweaty hand, just itching to get it into a DVD drive in a convenient system from whence a fully-formed cloud will quickly spring.

Ummmmm – not so fast. Let’s talk about some things you first really need to have and really need to do.

IPX operators and wholesalers are starting to pivot in their approach to providing value to mobile and fixed network operators. Their dominant customers now, mobile network operators (MNOs), are seeing significant challenges in the market place. Asset monetization has always been a concern for MNOs as they see shrinking ARPU even with increases in investment. They’re actively seeking ways to increase ARPU and figure out how to better monetize their huge investment in LTE technology and support the large amount of data being consumed over their networks. So they are looking for ways to improve their cost/revenue curves and still roll out services more quickly. IPX operators have an opportunity to help.

Have you ever helped a friend with a home improvement or auto repair project and watched as your friend struggled with a screwdriver trying to pry something free?  You think to yourself “gee, a crowbar or pry bar would be the right tool for the job, but since the screw driver is all he has, I guess it will have to do.”  Having the right tool for the job makes all the difference in achieving success without ending up with bloody knuckles.

Back in September 2014, I published what turned out to be a popular blog about “How to Develop a WebRTC Video Conferencing Server Using PowerMedia XMS, Free in An Hour”. As you can imagine, a lot has changed since this blog relative to WebRTC and our PowerMedia XMS media server, so a ‘refresh’ to the content was long overdue.