Tag Archives: UCC

Seven Reasons To Get Your Head In The Cloud

head-in-the-cloudBusinesses speak up about how they’re flying thanks to cloud computing

Imagine if Frank Sinatra was an entrepreneur.

If he was in business, besides being effortlessly cool, he’d be totally nuts about cloud computing. Why? Because he’s the man who once sung: “Come fly with me”.

And not just that, he also sung in “I saw your face in a cloud”.

Jokes apart though, there are many good things that could happen if you take Sinatra’s example and fly away into cloud computing.

We asked businesses to tell us how cloud has been able to impact their balance sheets:

1. Battersea luxury floor business Harvey Maria: “We can act like a big firm even though we only three staff”

Owner Mark Findlay says:

“Back in the mid-late noughties we realised we needed to completely rethink and structure our business. Moving all of our operating systems to the cloud was a big part of this transformation and we chose NetSuite’s cloud-based SuiteCommerce solution to drive this change.

“Essentially, operating in the cloud allows us to have the profile of a big company, but operate like a lean, small company. With just three full-time members of staff, we use this software to outsource everything to keep staffing costs down. The solution also integrates accounting, CRM B2B and B2C eCommerce, including shopping cart management and check-out, which makes managing our outsourced processes really easy.

“Our annual turnover is increasing by 50% year on year and since doing so SuiteCommerce has been integral to our success, enabling us to easily sell and ship internationally. The technology automates the whole process taking into account currency exchange rates and delivery costs. Moving to the cloud for us was also the natural choice as it’s scalable as well which prevents any IT headaches when you want to grow.”

2. Martial arts equipment retailer Blitz Sport: Cloud helped us double our turnover and increase international sales tenfold

Chris Geast, Blitz Sport head of IT says:

“We run all of our commerce processes through the cloud. Prior to this, we had a number of systems running different parts of the business, including separate software for mail order management and B2C and B2B eCommerce inventory management as well as delivery. As we grew managing these disjointed systems became a struggle. We couldn’t see a real-time view of stock levels across our different retail channels, resulting in customer orders being processed for out-of-stock items.

“Our main reason for choosing cloud over on-premise solutions was cost. We use NetSuite to run so many parts of the business without a dedicated IT staff and we don’t need to buy and maintain any hardware on-site.

“Since installing NetSuite our overall turnover has doubled. Its easy integration processes have allowed us to increase international sales tenfold. We use it to automatically create local regional websites with the right currency and adhering to local compliance and retailing laws, which saves us hours of time.”

3. Luxury accommodation providers Boutique London Lets: “We’ve trebled in size every year since getting cloud”

MD Derek Gallimore:

“Although based in London, we’re now an international company with 90% of our trade coming from overseas bookings across all different time zones. To ensure we can handle all these queries and provide great customer service, we provide a 24/7 phone and email support service with staff based in the Philippines, London, the US and Australia.

“With such a global spread of employees, we simply couldn’t exist without the cloud. We’re able to share documents, and access information wherever we are, on whatever device, or using cloud tools such as Google Groups for quick online discussions to answer customer queries as quickly as possible. Storing all essential documents in the cloud means we can also respond much quicker to email enquiries as multiple employees can access template responses instead of having to wait to receive large files over email across different time zones.

“And because the cloud is by its nature so easily scalable it’s enabled us to grow quickly too, without any of the usual problems and expense you get when you try and upscale traditional IT. In fact, since 2009, when moving to Google Apps we’ve trebled in size every year for four years, and the cloud has certainly played a huge part in enabling that.”

4. Accountants Charlie Carne & Co: “Cloud has saved time, money and allowed more flexible working”

Founder Charlie Carne says:

“Cloud-based bookkeeping has revolutionised the way we work. Now I can access a client’s records in real time, wherever I am, and ultimately provide a quicker, more responsive service to clients. Pretty much all my client data now gets filed electronically and sits securely in the cloud, saving me valuable filing space, time and money previously spent on posting out documents.

“The fact that cloud-based software such as QuickBooks Online is so accessible means I’ve been able to employ more flexible working practices, employing more work-at-home parents and saving a huge amount of time and money previously spent travelling to see my clients and access their accounts.”

5. Ethical bag-makers ElephantBranded: “Cloud is our virtual office on the move”

Founder James Boon:

“We’re often travelling and trying to keep on top of complex projects, so we’ve really taken to the Basecamp application. It is now our virtual office, and allows us to run ElephantBranded from our phones anywhere in the world. Without it, our way of doing business would not be possible!”

6. Business consultancy firm It’s a Glorious Day: “We can keep track of all our projects quicker”

Laurence Coen, founder, whose clients include Vodafone, TUI Travel, KPMG, says:

“Our business has been transformed by using cloud computing. We have two main offices – one in London and one in Budapest, plus various mobile workers moving around Europe at all times. As you can imagine, before the move to cloud computing we faced a challenge to keep track of work projects.

“Before we used Dropbox, I could never find e-mail attachments when I wanted them and was in constant upheaval on the road. Now everything is ordered logically and can be accessed instantly wherever I am in the world.

“We use Basecamp as a collaborative based working system so that all of the team can chip in on projects. It means that everyone gets their say in real time as thoughts are recorded and processes worked through logically. We also use ‘Tick Time’ for time sheets – it adds up each of our hours and drops them into the right client invoice automatically. That’s a no-brainer.

“We have found that one of the benefits of having a wealth of cloud computing tools at our disposal is that different team members prefer different methods of communication. It’s just human nature because our brains are all wired differently and we process information in a variety of ways.

“So our creatives might prefer to draw a diagram and post it on Basecamp, whereas members of the admin team might prefer to use video conferencing or IM for example. Everyone has their ‘preferred’ way of being contacted too, so we know how to get hold of them at a moment’s notice.

“By combining a varied swathe of Cloud-based systems – it gives scope for each of us to participate on a project in our own individual way.”

7. IT firm Postcode Anywhere: “Cloud helped us become of the UK’s fastest growing IT companies”

CTO Jamie Turner says

“We became one of the UK’s fastest-growing IT companies by investing heavily in innovative cloud computing, which makes it far more cost effective to deliver business software and services.

“The internet provides an ideal medium for managing data between distributed systems compared to traditional EDI [electronic data interchange] methods. This allows data to be more easily moved between different systems and platforms at a much lower cost than has historically been the case.

“We’ve seen the cloud evolve over the last 10 years and realised from an early stage that the use of web technologies makes it easier to access different systems. One of our core focuses has always been delivering data anywhere – to any software on any device anywhere in the world. We started with postal data but we realised that the same technology can be used by our customers to make their own data available anywhere and, crucially, make it easy to share and move it around.”

Author: Asa Bennett
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Making The Call On Enterprise VoIP

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IP telephony encompasses a set of technologies enabling voice, data and video over existing IP-based LANS, WANs and the internet. Using voice over IP (VoIP) as the enabling technology to transport phone calls allows firms to eliminate legacy circuit-switched (TDM) systems and lower equipment costs by converging applications onto a single infrastructure, while browser-based interfaces can simplify system management. Software upgrades are also much easier to implement, as are adds, moves and changes (AMCs).

At the same time, convergence allows the introduction of a wide-range of value-added applications via unified communications (UC). As such, many IP telephony and VoIP projects now form part of broader UC strategies, which might encompass any combination of instant messaging, presence, conferencing (Web, audio, video), unified messaging, social networking and other applications. Although the UC market remains nascent, the technology promises to increase productivity and teamwork, as well as customer responsiveness by integrating IP telephony with instant messaging and presence, or by extending call history and directories to mobile devices, for example.

Despite these benefits, independent research firm Nemartes found that in 2010, only 17% of companies had fully deployed VoIP technology. The bulk of those were small and mid-sized businesses as larger firms continue to scrutinize the business case and deploy the technology in a tactical manner – e.g. to replace TDM systems that have reached end-of-life, equip new ‘greenfield’ locations, or to meet the needs of specific job functions or applications. It also found that many firms fail to budget for voice quality management and monitoring tools, and often have to spend more on the LAN upgrade than they originally budgeted for. This is either because they didn’t evaluate the LAN at all or because they didn’t run the appropriate baseline network assessments to determine the actual upgrades required.

Preparing for VoIP

Making the transition from traditional voice communications equipment, or POTS (plain old telephony service), to a converged infrastructure supporting IP telephony is a complex task. Legacy communications infrastructure is focused on transporting data from one point to another successfully and, to a certain degree, in light of response times – i.e. how quickly the user receives the information they need. With IP telephony however, the question is whether the network is capable of handling VoIP traffic and delivering the quality of experience the end user demands.

It is therefore common practice to rollout VoIP to a small subset of the organization first in order to understand whether the required call quality can be delivered. To provide a numerical indication of the perceived quality of the media (e.g. voice or video) during live testing, IT operations teams use Mean Opinion Score (MOS) and R-value score calculations. Historically, both have been quite subjective as they are based on the quality as perceived by the end user. As such, IP SLA and Proxy Ping are two logical tests that are used to measure response time from an end user perspective. As the MOS ratings for codecs and other transmission impairments are now more well known, estimated MOS values can be computed and displayed based on measured impairments (delay and packet loss).

The estimated MOS value is designated as ‘MOS-CQE’ (Mean Opinion Score; Conversational Quality, Estimated) by the ITU. IP SLA tests use this computation to provide MOS and R-Value metrics. In addition to call quality metrics, response time tests help show the readiness of the network to support an application with little tolerance for latency and jitter, while 90th and 95th percentile reports can also be run to ensure that a VoIP rollout goes smoothly.

It is also important to assess whether the network is sized properly in respect of accommodating rising volumes of voice traffic and how it might impact traffic relating to other business applications. This is achieved either by adding more IP phones or employing call generators (aka ‘probes’) to increase call loads and then monitoring the network for changes in performance. It is likely that quality of service (QoS) parameters will need to be adjusted – e.g. by increasing QoS queues – to ensure that all the different types of applications running over the network have the appropriate amounts of bandwidth associated with them, while more bandwidth may be required for specific sections of the network.

Establishing baselines

Reporting and having the visibility to test, monitor and validate current infrastructure performance as VoIP is rolled out is essential to long-term success. Reporting on performance, utilization and capacity enables IT operations teams to baseline their current network performance with IPSLA testing employed to assess the impact of VoIP. Having established a baseline of ‘normal’ performance levels, it is then possible to dynamically set accurate thresholds and implement alerts that are issued the moment (or even before) performance degrades or deviates from normal.

Scheduled and on-demand reporting delivers the key performance indicators (KPIs) that, when combined with call quality metrics, provide visibility of the impact of VoIP on both business-application and network performance. For IP telephony, the critical measurements relating to network performance are:

· Packet loss – the discarding of data packets in a network when a device is overloaded and cannot accept any incoming data at a given moment

· Latency – a measure of time delay experienced in a system

· Jitter –a measure of the variability over time of the packet latency

Any increase in latency, jitter, or packet loss will be noticed almost immediately by the caller in the form of static, echo or intermittent sound. In the worst case, the call will drop out altogether. In addition, CDR (call data record) and RTCP (Real-time Transport Control Protocol) based reports can deliver rich statistics for each completed call leg, again enabling call quality measurements to be compared against baselines, and threshold-based alerts issued accordingly.

Maintaining full visibility

Once a full-scale VoIP rollout is live, IT operations teams will continue to need full visibility into both the performance of the IP telephony infrastructure, and that of the network and the other business applications being supported. This means collecting data including network KPIs such as QoS queue utilization, key statistics for the call manager server, implementing IP SLA tests to measure end to end latency, and gather call data via RTCP to understand actual call MOS, Jitter and latency.

Having the ability to link and graph IP telephony call quality metrics with key network performance indicators and then reporting on key call manager statistics for example, means it is possible to see CPU performance, memory usage, interface performance, call per second, number of registered phones, call manager heart beat, as well as the current call for today with MOS scoring, jitter and latency.

With all of this data in one place, normalized and consistent, IT operations teams can easily recognize when call manager performance suffers and assess the impact on call quality and success. When a sudden spike in data traffic impacts on call quality, full visibility ensures that the IT operations team is able to instantly identify the application consuming bandwidth and resolve the issue accordingly. For example, by determining that a user is streaming a non-business related video and hogging bandwidth, the IT manager can quickly contact the user and ask them to discontinue or block access.

Why an appliance makes sense

In a converged network environment supporting IP telephony and UC applications, IT operations teams must collate an ever-increasing volume of performance data – such as server metrics, application flows, network metrics and voice and video quality metrics – from a burgeoning number of network elements if they are to gain an understanding of how key services are performing.

Given the limited scalability of legacy performance management tools, an appliance-based solution is recommended because it eliminates the need for additional software, hardware, or external databases, and can be used in standalone or peered configurations in order to quickly provide reports on any indicator, device, or application to be monitored. Furthermore, the proprietary or technology-specific performance management tools available today are unable to deliver the required level of visibility because data must be acquired manually and cannot be overlaid to gain a single view.

The ability to analyze both network and VoIP performance from one system enables faster troubleshooting and problem resolution, and better coordination between network operations teams and telephony teams. Crucially, the ability to troubleshoot issues effectively before they impact on service or network performance means quality of experience and network availability can be assured for all services.

Author: Peter Cruz
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UC Spending Bubble Belies Uncertainty

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Unified communications is entering its own hype cycle, like that of cloud computing, virtualization, and color TV before it, as vendors tout their “me-too” solutions in a familiar history repeating itself pattern.

UC brings together such capabilities as voice, videoconferencing, instant messaging, email, document sharing, and more into one user interface so employees of one company, their partners, and even customers can collaborate with each other across the corporate campus or across oceans. A recently released survey shows that enterprises are in a hurry to catch the UC train, even if they don’t quite know where it’s going.

IT industry trade association CompTIA reported Monday that a March survey (of about 600 IT end users in big and small organizations) revealed that 49% of respondents expect growth in spending on UC to exceed the growth of their overall IT spending over the next 12 months. For large business with 500 or more employees, the bet on UC is greater, with 65% saying UC spending increases will be greater than overall IT increases, versus just 35% taking that stand in small businesses of under 50 employees. But here’s the kicker: Some respondents expressed concerns that they’re not sure what they’re getting into.

About a third (32%) of respondents told CompTIA they had “a general lack of understanding of unified communications products and services.” Other worries were about price sensitivity (39%), reliability (36%), security (34%), and quantifying a return on investment (34%).

As a practical matter, these concerns are similar to those of other new phases in technological innovation. When open source software came on the scene, those unfamiliar with it worried that if they used it, someone would sue them for patent infringement. When virtualization came on the scene, it was only used in software test and development, not in production. In fact, when the light bulb first came out more than a century ago, some feared that if the bulb broke, the electricity would spray out into the room.

Complicating adoption of UC is that some features of it are already in wide adoption, Tim Herbert, VP of research at CompTIA, told me. Email, for instance, is ubiquitous, with voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) telephony quickly becoming mainstream. Videoconferencing is becoming more popular, even if it’s with relatively simple technology like Skype rather than high-end systems like Cisco TelePresence or Polycom.

At the same time, businesses are dabbling in use of social media in the context of UC and in collaboration technologies such as document sharing in platforms like Microsoft’s SharePoint.

In essence, when it comes to UC (or UCC when you add collaboration to the acronym), what businesses don’t understand is that they’re already doing it.

“The market is still sorting itself out,” said Herbert. “I think many customers are really trying to digest some of the options.”

If businesses are perplexed about what UC is and what their strategy should be, the issue is not what technology to buy, but what your company wants to achieve. Think of unified communications, not as an IT budget item but as an element of corporate culture, a declaration of how your organization collaborates with employees, partners, customers, and others to achieve business goals.

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