I was recently reading an article in TechCrunch titled “The Problem With The Internet Of Things,” where the author lamented how bad design or rollout of good ideas can kill promising markets. In his example, he discussed how turning on the lights in a room, through the Internet of Things (IoT), became a five step process rather than the simple one step process we currently use (the light switch). This illustrates the problem between the grand idea, and the practicality of the market: it’s awesom...

Today, most B2C interactions involve some form of contact center technology. With the exception of in-store purchases, contact center technology is responsible for providing the vast majority of brand impressions that customers have through experiences with toll-free numbers, self-service IVR, and CTI screen pop—and that’s just one of the channels. There are also self-service websites, apps, social media scrapers, blended queuing processes, and more. SERVICE DELIVERED VS. SERVICE INTENDED VOC pr...

Ottawa Regional Contact Centre Association Presents: Embracing Change in Contact Centres June 11, 2015: Kanata Recreation Complex100 Walter Baker Place, Ottawa1:30 to 4:00 pm People naturally resist change. In this Change Management session hosted by ORCCA, you will discover that there are predictable reactions to change and that resistance can be reduced if it is identified and addressed before it sets in. How can your team embrace the changes required to improve? Managers and frontline staff m...

Supervising and managing a large facility is no walk in the park, especially when you begin to list the countless efforts that must all come together unceremoniously to make sure operations of the facility run efficiently. Large facilities, like hospitals, schools and universities, or businesses, need numerous amounts of these tasks to all come together. Many little things that people take for granted, such as waste management and maintenance work are vital to daily operations. Perhaps one of th...

Trying to detect intrusions in your network and extracting data from your network is a tricky business. Deep insight requires a deep understanding of the context of your network traffic—where are connections coming from, where are they going, and what are the specific applications in use. Without this breadth of insight, you can’t take action to stop and remediate attacks, especially from Advanced Persistent Threats (APT). To see how Ixia helps its customers gain this actionable insight into the...

The Federal Court of Appeal has rejected a bid by Canada’s main mobile operators to delay the full implementation of the country’s ‘wireless code of conduct’, the Financial Post reports. The code was introduced by regulator CRTC in June 2013 to provide better consumer protection against high mobile roaming charges and wireless contract cancellation fees. A group of cellcos including the three nationwide network operators Rogers, Telus and Bell (BCE Inc) launched legal action last July after rais...

Each and every day, the bold men and women of IT risk it all to deliver critical applications and services. Their stories are unique. Their triumphs inspire. Learn how the US Air Force applies the intelligence gained from the Observer Platform in field testing applications, before deployment, to ensure peak performance on the battlefield and how it could do the same for you. Hiding in Plain Sight Nestled in the Florida panhandle, Eglin Air Force Base is about 100 miles from the Mississippi borde...

End user experience & QoS are consistently ranked at the top of priorities for Network Management teams today. According to research over 60% of companies today say that VoIP is present in a significant amount of their networks, this is the same case with streaming media within the organization. As you can see having effective end user experience testing is vital to any business. If you have a service model, whether you’re an actual service provider like a 3rd party or you’re a corporation w...

The Future of Network Performance Management: How to take advantage of Automation, Cloud and IoT!Join Dr. Stefan Köhler, CEO Infosim and a leading authority in the network management field for a Webinar on The Future of Network Performance Management. This Webinar will provide insight into: Next Generation Automated Fault Management How to fix your network issues fast and efficiently using automation? How to get to the next level of Root Cause Analysis (RCA) with Dynamic Rule Gene...

Canada’s Industry Minister James Moore yesterday (12 May 2015) announced the list of provisional licence winners in the Broadband Radio Service (BRS) spectrum auction in the 2500-2690MHz (‘2500MHz’) band. 302 of 318 licences on offer in 61 areas across Canada were awarded to nine companies, with a total value of CAD755.37 million (USD626.49 million), after eleven participants were qualified to bid in the auction which opened on 14 April. The 2500MHz band licensing was particularly aimed at provi...

Network administrators can streamline the troubleshooting process by deploying automated monitoring systems. With automated monitoring in place, admins can get early warnings about emerging problems and address them before the adverse effects continue for too long. In addition, automated monitoring can help maintain up to date information about network configuration and devices on the network that can be essential for diagnosing network performance problems. An automated network monitoring regim...

When chasing security or performance issues in a data center, the last thing you need is packet loss in your visibility fabric. In this blog post I will focus on the importance of how to deal with multiple tools with different but overlapping needs. Dealing with overlapping filters is critical, in both small and large visibility fabrics. Lost packets occur when filter overlaps are not properly considered. Ixia’s NTO is the only visibility platform that dynamically deals with all overlaps to ensu...

NetFlow Auditor is a complete and flexible toolkit for flow based network analysis, which includes real-time analysis, long-term trending and base-lining. NetFlow Auditor uses NetFlow based analysis as opposed to the traditional network analysis products which focus on the health of network gateway devices with basic information and overview trends. Netflow analysis looks at end-to-end performance using a technological approach that is largely independent of the underlying network infrastructure...

Canada’s Competition Bureau has approved a transaction under which Bell Canada Enterprises (BCE) and its national quadruple-play telecoms rival Rogers Communications will take 50% equity each in retailer Glentel (Canada), following the latter’s acquisition by BCE which is set for completion on 20 May. Glentel will continue to sell mobile products from both operators at its 494 retail locations across Canada (which are run under names including WirelessWave, Tbooth wireless, Wireless Etc and Targ...

Sapling Time Zone Clocks feature 5 to 7 clocks corresponding to different locations’ time zones, adjacent to one and other on a lightweight aluminum extrusion. Both digital clocks and analog clocks are available options. It is possible to mix and match digital and analog clocks within a single Time Zone Clock System. The Time Zone Clocks are available with the Sapling Wired Clock System, Wireless Clock System, IP Clock System, and Talkback Wireless Clock System. It is advantageous for any busine...

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has issued its final decisions on wholesale wireless roaming, following a lengthy consultation period. With the regulator having found that, under current market conditions, competition in the wireless market is ‘likely not sustainable’, it will therefore regulate the wholesale roaming rates charged by the national cellular network operating companies, Rogers Communications, Bell Mobility and Telus Communications. In light of...

IVR. In many customers’ minds, this three-letter acronym is a four-letter word. It’s not uncommon for callers to mutter a diverse range of other forbidden words whenever interacting – or trying to interact – with a contact center’s IVR system. But IVR is not deserving of such hatred. IVR systems are not inherently flawed or evil, nor are the companies that use an IVR to front-end their contact centers. The reason why the general public’s perception of IVR is so negative is that so few of the sys...

As IT departments see the increasing value of network monitoring, sometimes there is confusion as to how to deploy monitoring switches – from an organizational point of view. There are two common deployment scenarios. The first is where the IT operations department owns the network monitoring switch, also known as a network packet broker (NPB). This group then centralizes control and access to the NPB so that multiple IT groups can use the same NPB. The second is where the core networking group ...

In the eyes of many customers, self-service is not a compound word but rather a four-letter one. It’s not that there’s anything inherently bad about IVR or web self-service applications – it’s that there’s something bad about most contact centers’ efforts to make such apps good. Relatively few contact centers extend their quality assurance (QA) practices to self-service applications. Most centers tend to monitor and evaluate only those contacts that involve an interaction with a live agent – i.e...

When it comes to IT services, business value and user satisfaction are both dependent upon the server, network, and applications all working together seamlessly. Failure to adequately monitor each of these and their interactions, means that you could be flying blind – susceptible to degraded service levels. While application and network monitoring receive a lot of the attention, it is important to also understand what’s going on with the server. Virtualization changes the face of service deliver...