Out-of-band access to distributed IT equipment has been crucial for enterprise customers to eliminate the need for onsite remote IT staff to handle outages. Not only does this save travel costs, but out-of-band access also reduces recovery time in the event of unplanned outages to ensure remote site productivity.

Traditionally, out-of-band access to remote sites during unplanned network outages has been accomplished using analog modem connections. This solution is secure, robust and still widely deployed throughout the world. As technology changes, the overhead for maintaining analog modem banks at a central location has become an issue for IT management. In addition, most modern laptops lack internal modems to allow for IT staff on the road or working from home to connect easily to remote sites. The cost of provisioning analog lines at both host and remote locations has increased in part due to the advent of VOIP technologies. This also creates a paradigm where remote sites rely on core switching to provide VoIP analog line access. These same core switches are the gateway for VoIP analog lines which rules out analog modem connectivity during an outage.

Managed Service Providers (MSPs) offer an array of service offerings to their customers that include: monitoring, management, control, security, and the maintenance of their customer’s network, applications, and operating environments that are located in either hosted, co-location or remote customer sites.

As the customers’ demand for additional and unique industry-specific services, high availability, superior performance, services to geographically distributed networks and multiple remote locations grows, MSPs must be ready to meet the challenges and provide solutions to their customers in a timely, cost-effective manner.

There will be a number of complex challenges for MSPs to deliver these extensive services in such a competitive environment, while simultaneously expanding their current service offerings and positioning them as a complete solution to their customers.

Co-location centers (colos) offer an array of services that include rental of data center facilities, network connectivity, and real-time monitoring and support by specialist staff. Tiered services offer customers varying degrees of control over and responsibility for co-located infrastructure, from hosted-only to fully managed.

Co-location has many benefits in today's business environment, making it a popular choice for customers wanting to reduce operating expenditure by leveraging economies of scale, increase physical security, availability and network performance, and allow their staff to focus on delivering value, rather than the logistics and means of delivery.

Service providers are faced with a need to reinvent themselves to capture new opportunities in this era of mobile data. One prospect for the service providers is to address their subscribers demand for more personalized services. Other promising opportunities lie in business services and the Machine-to-Machine (M2M) requirements. To capture these emerging opportunities service providers will need to deploy a next-generation Policy and Charging Rules Function (PCRF) that is easy-to-use, flexible, scalable and offers high performance even for highly complex use cases.

As mobile network infrastructures evolve from time division multiplexing (TDM) to IP, and with the shift in radio technology from 2G/3G to LTE and beyond, the ability to extend IP/MPLS networking out to the furthest reaches of the mobile backhaul network delivers real operational value. In locations where fiber is unavailable or not economic to deploy, microwave access is a well-proven and commonly deployed alternative. As it becomes increasingly common to deploy both IP routing and microwave access to locations within the backhaul network, a need for truly integrated IP/MPLS and microwave equipment has emerged.

WebRTC has been the biggest topic of conversation in the telecommunications industry for a couple of years now. Not surprisingly everyone is trying to figure out what it means to them and where it can be used to improve user experiences and extend the use of the value creation capabilities that exist in todays Service Networks. This paper offers a perspective on how WebRTC will evolve to interwork with and extend Service Networks today.

The contact center is becoming increasingly complex. The days of simple telephony interactions are long gone. Managers struggle to contain costs while handling multi-channel communications with customers and prospects who expect speedy resolution and instant gratification. Traditional live agents alone just can’t meet the demands of today’s contact center. Fortunately, advances in artificial intelligence are offering an ideal solution to this escalating issue. Virtual call agents can deliver the speed and precision of an automated technology, along with the good manners and problem-solving capabilities of a human agent. The valuable time of human agents can be reserved for the more challenging, complicated issues while virtual call agents deal with the more straightforward, repetitive queries. This approach not only cuts costs drastically, but is also proven to enhance customer satisfaction and boost employee morale.

Download this white paper, authored by chief analyst Dick Bucci from Pelorus Associates, to learn about:

• The top benefits and many inbound and outbound uses of virtual call agents
• How virtual call agents help significantly reduce costs while improving customer satisfaction
• How virtual call agents help ensure PCI-DSS and HIPAA compliance
• An ROI comparison of virtual call agents vs. other self-service and contact center technologies

If you’re looking to improve customer lifetime value the best place to start is with your agent experience and productivity. Most organizations are stuck in the old paradigm of contact center technology where best of breed systems force agents to toggle back and forth between multiple windows resulting in frustration for the agent and a poor experience for the customer.

The connection between agent experience and customer experience and its bottom-line impact has been inferred over the years, but a new study conducted by LiveOps and Dr. Natalie Petouhoff’s Customer Experience Research Group looked more closely at this impact on both operational costs and revenue generation in the contact center. Click here to download this compelling whitepaper and learn how technology affects agent happiness and productivity and can result in increased subscriber revenues and better customer lifetime value.

The evolution of customer communications from telephony to multichannel interactions, including IM and chat, SMS, email, and social media, have created a new era in the relationship between businesses and customers, once which is based upon each customer’s preferred communications modality. This evolution of the call center into a multichannel Customer Engagement Center necessitates a shift in not only engagement strategy to meet customers on the engagement medium of choice, but also an assessment of their communications technologies and CRM software, which must both be able to manage this new customer service model. This Gartner report analyzes the current CEC vendor landscape and the degree to which the market has responded to the social-mobile customer.

As service providers face rapidly increasing bandwidth demand from consumers, businesses and governments, they are recognizing the need for immediate access to faster speeds. New technologies, such as Very High Speed Digital Subscriber Line 2 (VDSL2) vectoring and VDSL2 bonding accelerate the existing copper plant to help service providers get to fast, faster. This paper explores VDSL2 vectoring and VDSL2 bonding technology and the benefits they deliver. It compares the speed gains and investment requirements of these innovations with other technology options. This paper also provides a complete overview of the requirements for swift and successful deployments based on Alcatel-Lucent real-world experience.