Contact Centers Get Smarter

Contact centers have evolved consistently over the past two decades and always seem to be utilizing a mix of both old school voice technologies and newer solution elements.  My exposure to contact centers has been as a customer, product manager for related connectivity products and as a contributor to an important SIP-based IETF standard for…

Leveraging Industry Standards for Success – A Case Study

Telecom is an example of an industry that has created national and international standards for communications in ways that benefit companies large and small. As a consultant, I’ve frequently advised companies about specific standards and how they can be aligned with business strategies. Let’s consider an example. During the last 15 years, facsimile communications has…

Business Disruption in Document Communications – What Happened?

In the late 1990s, the Internet and the World Wide Web created massive technical disruption for the worlds of document communications and messaging. Now, nearly twenty years later, business communications looks much different than it did going into the Millennium and once major businesses such as the marketing of enterprise fax machines are deep into…

A Tale of Business Disruption in Document Communications

In the middle of the 1990s, the Internet and its associated IP protocols were like a huge wave that was off the shore of the business world, but poised to come in and cause massive disruption. At that time, I ran a consulting business for telecom clients (Human Communications) and was active on several fronts…

Paradigm Shift: Virtual to the Cloud

We live in a world where communication solutions can be hardware-based, run in a virtual machine on a local server or be situated in the Cloud. The paradigm for communications solutions has been shifting from hardware to software to virtualization as I’ve discussed in my recent posts. Once a solution is virtual, in principle, customers…

Reshaping Enterprise Communications: A Tale of Two Companies

In my last few posts, I’ve described several factors which have encouraged communications solution providers to transition away from hardware and focus on software-based application solutions. Let’s consider two companies and how they adjusted the path of their technical and business models to address these directions. Avaya is an example of a company whose solutions…

How IP Media Changed the Voice Business

This post is about a critical technical development in the history of Voice over IP which had a wide-reaching impact on the development of voice and related communications solutions. I’m referring to IP media, which was introduced early in the 2000s and has been ramping up every since. In my last two posts, we discussed…

Impact of Media Gateways on Voice Solutions

This is the latest in a series of posts on how voice development has been moving from hardware to software centered models. In my last post, we reviewed the classic approach to developing voice-centered solutions, which typically utilized voice boards. In this post, I’ll review how media gateways helped change the model. In the classic…

Voice Development Models: A Journey Begins

During the past three years, I had product management responsibilities for products which covered the spectrum from hardware-centered to software-centered development.  In telecom, there’s been an evolution in development models as solution providers have taken a series of steps to gradually move away from hardware.  However, like many technical trends, there is a long tail…