Since the Terry Childs and San Francisco story has been making headlines in the IT industry these days, I believe it's important to discuss why such an event took place. As more of this story unravels, it appears that Childs was in fact very dissatisfied with how San Francisco's IT department (DTIS) was run. Was this simply a ploy by Childs to get attention to the matter?

With increased demand, shrinking budgets, and discouraged workforces, the "IT market" in general can be a difficult place to spend every day at work. We're sometimes taken for granted, under-appreciated, and under-compensated for the level of complex and demanding work that organizational leaders demand.

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With the US economy in a constant state of 'flux', organizations, companies, and even entire industries are obviously looking for opportunities to save money and increase innovation. Those who follow the news are no stranger to the current state of the air travel industry. With constantly shifting demand and load factors, decreased routes, and constant variation in fuel prices, the industry is looking to squeeze the last ounce out of every dollar.

I recently spent quite a bit of last week at various airports while traveling on vacation. As a true telecom geek, I'm always curious about how organizations and entities are utilizing technology to aid in their daily operations. At a specific regional airport in the southeast US, the use of converged telephony was in full force.

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When I think of enterprise-wide deployments of VoIP, especially IP-PBX systems, I think of lots and lots of wired IP endpoints, with a small variety of wireless handsets deployed over the organization's wireless network. Still, it seems as though the major "endpoint focus" of organizations is towards wired terminals. Sure, we have SpectraLink (now Polycom), Cisco's wireless 802.11-compliant phones, etc. But, what the market has yet to see is a true "dual-mode" cellphone + VoIP endpoint combination.

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Continuing with yesterday's theme of VoIP spam, and the previous posts on telecom security, it's time to analyze ANI, or Automatic Number Identification. ANI, CLID (Calling Line ID, or Caller ID) and CPN (Calling Party Number) all have similar meanings.

With the advent of VoIP, especially IP trunking, I feel that a major re-work of the PSTN is needed to more or less "authenticate" calls to ensure identity. As I mentioned yesterday in my post about VoIP spam, the time has come for technical advances to be made in how our PSTN validates and identifies calls on the network.

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As you well know, spam infiltrates, clogs, and slows down email servers worldwide. In my organization, spam accounts for nearly 89% of all inbound and outbound messages. Yet, we’ve been accustomed to the use of filters, quarantines, and junk email folders. Spam detection is not a perfect science, and has taken years to develop effective strategies for combating email spam.

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As if managing the day-to-day operations of your telecommunications infrastructure isn't difficult enough, then consider compliance. SOX, HIPAA... you know the drill. Modern-day regulations designed to improve security, confidentiality, and authenticity can mean major headaches for IT managers, especially telecom managers!

Today, we'll focus on how SOX can impact your day-to-day telecommunications operations, and what to expect.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act was created and enacted into law to minimize corporate and accounting scandals, similar to Enron, Tyco, and WorldCom. Within SOX, there are 11 compliance "titles" that effectively act as an oversight mechanism. So, how does SOX affect telecom managers? Simple answer: in many ways.

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Telecom security often goes unnoticed. It's not that security isn't important in PBXes, media gateways, access servers, and other equipment, but security in the Convergence field can be forgotten. Here are 5 Tips For Better Telecom Security:

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Security, in any sense, is an ever-evolving subject. At any "piece" of the puzzle, security standards, practices, and strategies rarely stay the same. When it comes to Unified Communications, Convergence, and VoIP, the same is true. In the last few years, much has obviously evolved.

When introducing voice applications and services, those of which are obviously critical, moved to an IP environment, a Pandora's Box of sorts was opened. Telecom managers that were used to operating "closed" TDM and analog voice infrastructures were forced to change, and fast. In the midst of feature deployment, massive endpoint rollouts, and new system management functions, security can easily be forgotten.

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When we think of telephony, we often think of hardware solutions: physical switches, terminals, phones, and the miles and miles of copper cable that support the infrastructure. While stable and powerful hardware is still vitally important to any telecommunications infrastructure, the software which actually runs the platform has taken center-stage.

Intuitive, intelligent, and customizable software and applications that run on top of telecom hardware are becoming the focus for convergence, and rightfully so. Be it a vendor that develops and runs their applications on a closed (or non-open-source) platform, such as the Cisco CallManager, or other systems that utilize commodity hardware, application development is vitally important.

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It's not uncommon to find most articles and features about the entire convergence market to be focused on the business environment. However, there has been a slow but steady revolution as convergence-like technologies such as VoIP, IP-PBXs, IP trunking, etc. are introduced into the residential markets.

Vonage was probably defined as the market pioneer in bringing carrier-grade VoIP service to the masses. Since then, technologies have been pushed to the residential market more and more. This trend will likely continue, and for good reason.

Yes, I still have a landline. What purpose does it serve? It's simply ready for me to dial 911 as a guaranteed route to my local PSAP. For all of my other calls, I personally utilize three different providers that are purely IP based.

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Jim Duffy of NetworkWorld recently wrote an article that piqued my interest, in reference to determining the value of Unified Communications. Commenting on a recent survey by Forrester, Jim's analysis of the confusion of convergence, VoIP, and Unified Communications absolutely makes sense.

We're bombarded with lots of advertising, white papers, and documentation in general pertaining to the possible "solutions" to organizational communication problems. There are obviously a plethora of products available in the communications market, period.


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Throughout the last few months, we've discussed quite a bit about convergence, VoIP, IP-PBXes, and the like. What's been increasingly interesting, however, is to chart the "spread" of convergence technologies from industry to industry.

Today, let's focus on the hotel/hospitality market, and their shift away from traditional telephony. As with any new technology, some examples in the "market" are quicker to adopt new technology earlier than others. What drives this interest and migration to new technology? It's usually competition.

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There are many reasons to get excited about the future of IP telephony. For me, it's the development and release of new products that will revolutionize the industry. After a recent blog post (Appliances Run Amok) on the emerging market of VoIP & IP-PBX appliances, it appears that Digium, "The Asterisk Company", is pulling ahead of the competition with their recently updated Switchvox appliance line.

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With the beginning of summer, it's important to refresh our memories on Telecommunications Disaster Recovery. Here are some tips I've prepared on how to plan for, react to, and prevent telecommunications "disasters".

1) Conduct Frequent "Disaster Drills"

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I want to say a big thanks to the recent comments on my recent post, "Why Skype Doesn't Scale." In the interest of continuing the discussion, I have a few more ideas and viewpoints to share about the subject.

First of all, it's very important to consider the entire telecommunications landscape in today's world. Indeed, the telecom "culture" has been moving in the way of mobile communications, namely cell phones. However, the business environment has not simply dropped their existing telecom infrastructures (PBXs, etc) in adaptation to the "cell phone culture." Instead, we've seen the integration of mobile devices into the existing infrastructures. Now, we have features such as mobile twinning, enterprise mobility, etc.

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In a recent blog post, I discussed the importance of integration between telephony platforms and systems that integrate directly with the business model:

http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/28178

In "Is It True Integration?," the focus about integrating these telephony applications with other business systems was to provide services and integration that the user directly sees. But, what about valuable integration on the back-end.

BI, or Business Intelligence, is a buzzword that will likely be around for awhile, and rightfully so. BI focuses on organized repositories, commonly referred to as the "data warehouse." How does this integrate with telecom, you say?

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I like Skype, I really do. When I'm traveling and need to keep in contact with friends and family, Skype can really be a lifesaver. Where Skype doesn't scale, however, is in the business world. Within the last few months, even years, Skype has marketed their communications solution to businesses, offering unlimited calling to Skype peers and landlines for a very low monthly rate.

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There is never an end to the ongoing slew of vendor news and product announcements to keep up with. What does this mean? Innovation, of course! There isn't a day that goes by where I don't spend a few minutes at the end of the day to keep tabs on new products and offerings. As a systems integrator and architect, nothing can lower my blood pressure at the end of the workday other than discovering what new technologies are aimed at making my work life easier.

However, with this, comes volume. Now, we're concerned about market "over-saturation", where there are simply too many products and solutions for a single market. This poses an interesting question: Is The Convergence Market Over-Saturated?

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I've been asking myself the following question lately: What defines a "good" convergence platform these days? Of course, the definition of good is highly subjective, and I've found that many organizations want and need different things out of their communications network.

We've reached the time when simply providing dialtone and voicemail doesn't suffice. Now, we're charged with providing advanced IVR systems that automate business functions and provide advanced workflow features for both front-office and back-office systems and users. Convergence is ultimately about successful and intuitive integration, right?

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I recently discussed a vulnerability that was discovered within Debian's implementation of OpenSSL. This vulnerability poses a significant risk to users who generated unknowingly "weak" keys, and could potentially affect thousands and thousands of systems.

In a recent bold press release, VeriSign announced a program allowing users to reissue SSL certificates free of charge, for 30 days. It is extremely important to note that the vulnerability was not related in any way to VeriSign's technology, however, citing corporate citizenship as the cause for the offer.

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While most "proprietary-like" vendors have extensive wireless mobility solutions, the standards-based SIP protocol has recently been lacking in the availability of quality wireless SIP endpoints. However, the competition seems to be increasing as German developer and manufacturer, Snom, introduced the "m3" to the North American market, a wireless SIP handset that uses DECT to communicate to an IP base station.

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So, you're running a production or even testing VoIP environment on Debian or Ubuntu? Forget VoIP for the moment, if you have ANY outward facing Debian or Ubuntu systems out there, then you may potentially have a large problem on your hands. It's time to regenerate ALL of your certificates and keys - ASAP!

If you're using key-based SSH authentication, a new exploit could potentially brute force your server and cause a major problem. Even more, all cryptographic material residing on these servers may also be easily compromised as well.

For more information, please follow this link to the SANS Internet Storm Center: http://isc.sans.org/

So, it appears that the popular trend for IT is to "go green." Hardware that consumes less resources, in a smaller space, seems to be the future. With this comes the ever-popular topic of virtualization.

Virtualization in the telephony environment isn't as simple as it's application server counterparts, however. Timing is everything, especially in telephony. With shared compute resources, it's hard to scale any type of large production environment on a virutalized system.

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It's an incredibly interesting dual-life that exists in today's "world" of IT. It's the difference between what is taught in the classroom, and what actually is taught in the "real-world". As an undergrad student myself, it's something that I'm reminded of every day.

Let's face it, convergence is a relatively new thing. Ten years ago, we were just beginning to talk about integrating voice and video onto the IP network. Like all new technologies, it is difficult for institutions to adapt and introduce every bleeding-edge technology into their curriculum. But, ten years later, the idea of convergence should be more than a topic of discussion.

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CDRs, or Call Detail Records, are a truly vital part of the logging and auditing systems that most mid-to-large organizations utilize on their telecom switches and systems. While CDR databases may seem alike from one vendor's implementation to another, the shortfalls of "bad CDRs" can make you look like an incompetent telecom manager or engineer.

Perhaps the first problem with CDR systems or other telecom auditing policies, is the ignorance that they actually exist. For instance, CDR logging is such a mundane and autonomous process, that it's easy to forget to monitor and verify the integrity of the data. As I've said before, garbage in, garbage out!

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I once was quite interested in a company named "Citel", whose main business focus was producing products that were designed to smooth the transition from a TDM-based PBX or Digital Centrex system, to SIP. After buying a few companies that made similar devices, Citel revised it's product line, promoting the Portico line of TDM-to-IP telephone adapters.

However, in the last five years, I have never seen an actual installation of such a device. Companies transitioning to VoIP, especially SIP-based systems, always tend to just "bite the bullet" and buy the SIP handsets to begin with. In fact, rip and replace is likely just as cost effective as buying such an adapter.

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At the end of the day, it's all about delivering services and solutions that support a business model - isn't that what a "converged network" aims to do? Often, the developers who spend painstaking hours, days, months, and years, to deliver integration between systems, are often forgotten.

On the communications server forefront, there are multitudes of companies that develop software for literally any brand and model of system. Whether it's IVR and ERP integration, to LDAP directory integration, etc., there's usually an integration piece that will fill the void.

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Backing up your switch, or any convergence server for that matter, is a mundane process. However, I was surprised to find out that most organizations forget about their PBXs when planning backup and disaster recovery strategies. Imagine all of those hours of painstaking programming lost when something goes belly-up.

The backup and restoration process differs for every type and model of server. Some Linux-based systems allow CRON jobs to be scheduled and run, while other vendors utilize proprietary methods of backup and restore.

How frequently do you backup your server, switch, or voicemail systems? Do you do it manually, or have you configured automatic processes that do the job for you?

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Oddly enough, in the recent spike in gasoline prices across the nation, my mind wandered to the dependencies that converged networks rely on for "unified communication." I recently explored a facet of this issue in my post, Throughout Every Layer (http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/26576). However, we as users of public IP networks utilize the vast array of network peering resources and transports to build our networks upon. As mentioned before, except for the minuscule percent of infrastructure that we actually own, we have very little control over what happens from Point A to Point B.

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Any type of change to an existing communications solution requires a lot of planning and coordination. While this usually goes without saying, it's quite easy to get wrapped up in the technical details of an upgrade or deployment, and forget about the most important part: the users!

Throughout the last few years, I've been lightly involved with a large VoIP deployment and testing phase here at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville. Up until six months ago, the campus functioned strictly on Centrex, and consisted of a few thousand-pair cables that ran back to the CO. Now, with a Nortel CS1000E in place, the times are slowly changing.

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