The 10 Fastest Growing Telecome Solution Providers 2018

www.insightssuccess.com September 2018

The 10 Fastest Growing Providers To Watch 2018

Into the ‘clouds’

Cloud Computing – Revamping the Technology for the Next Generation

E d i t o r ’s C h o i c e The Universality of IoT Technology

Iñigo García del Cerro Prieto CEO

Delivering Global Connectivity

Editor’s Note

www.insightssuccess.com September 2018

Telecom Industry: A Promising and Technologically Advancing Future

The 10 Fastest Growing Providers To Watch 2018

Into the ‘clouds’

Cloud Computing – Revamping the Technology for the Next Generation

E d i t o r ’s C h o i c e The Universality of IoT Technology

Iñigo García del Cerro Prieto

CEO

Delivering Global Connectivity

I

n today’s rapidly evolving marketplace ecosystem, the telecommunications industry is witnessing evident technological improvements. The industry has transformed into an ever disrupting, inventive and keenly contested space with an unprecedented growth in high-speed mobile internet traffic, particularly with respect to wireless data and video streaming. Additionally, the wireless operators are quickly moving towards digital media platform offering online TV streaming services, resulting in innovative product differentiation on the part of wireless carriers. On the other hand, these operators are taking a more dynamic approach towards simplification, instead of going after costs.

Apart from this, certain growing competitors have catered to these expectations with massive investments to compete in this industry and expand the capacity of both wireless and wired networks as well as to facilitate the expected streak in high-speed data transmission. Currently, it continues to be a critical force for growth, innovation, and disruption across multiple industries.

Broadcast communication, being a part of the telecommunication industry is now making businesses more unique and fascinating. With its extended horizons, there are different openings for the forthcoming applicants. Through servicing the world’s ever-growing telephone and wireless connection needs, the telecommunication solution providers are continuing to expand their operations on a global level. More importantly, even individuals in emerging markets are signing up for telephone and Internet contracts, while new telecommunication technologies in developed nations are expanding providers’ pre-existing customer base.

So far, the telecommunication industry has witnessed overnight drastic changes due to technological breakthroughs. At the end of this decade, it is expected that these advancing technologies might carry new

challenges as well as vast opportunities for the telecommunications industry. According to independent research reports, the global telecom industry will be massive in size and scale by 2020, with approximately 5.6 billion unique subscribers, 5.8 billion smartphones and operator revenue increases to $ 1.2 trillion from $ 1.1 trillion in 2015.

For the next 10 years, the communication service providers will be stimulated to transform the upcoming trends into a platform of opportunities, harnessing the five digital forces like Mobility & Computing, Big Data Analytics, Social Media, Cloud Computing, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics to realign their business processes, products, and services. Further, the telecommunications ecosystem expects IoT to become a critical engine for future growth.

So, with a great enthusiasm, Insights Success has shortlisted, The 10 Fastest Growing Telecom Solution Providers to Watch 2018.

Featuring as our cover story is UFFINET, which is a neutral fiber optic operator in the wholesale telecommunications market.

The magazine listing also includes, Britannic Technologies, a company which is transforming the business through Telecom technologies; C3NTRO, which is the operator of choice for advanced international Voice, SMS and Data connectivity with more than 300 direct interconnects and incountry partners worldwide; iSymplify, who helps enterprise clients identify and implement carrierneutral, cloud-based infrastructure and connectivity solutions that optimize and improve business; Tango Networks, who works to maximize the reach, impact and value of their communications systems by extending their applications to any mobile device. It offers communication solutions to carriers to deliver mobile UC to large enterprises and small to mid-sized businesses; ViciDial, which provides an array of professional products and services to the rapidly growing national and international Vicidial user community; WireIE International Holdings Inc., whichis an industry leader that delivers purpose built business networks, bridging the digital divide across Canada and the Americas.

Also, make sure to flip through our articles, written by our in-house editorial team as well as CXO standpoints from notable industry personalities to have a brief taste of the sector.

Happy Reading!

Kaustav Roy

CONTENTS Tech-Know Insights Minimize Risk of Digital Transformation Failure

16 Smart in Vision

34

Be Smart – or Vanish Why Utilities need to actively develop smart Micro-Grids

Tech Revolution Putting the Sec in DevOps with Automated Tools

46

08

Cover Story

Delivering Global Connectivity

Britannic Technologies: Taking Customers on a Digital Transformation Journey

C3NTRO Telecom:

18

A Synonym with World-Class Telecom Solution

22 iSymplify: An Expert in the Process of Technology Simplication

Tango Networks:

28

Enabling mobilerst enterprises

32 ViciDial: A Remarkable Open Source Contact Center Solution

WireIE:

38

Bridging the Digital Divide Across Canada and the Americas

44 Articles Into the ‘clouds’

24

The Emerging Cloud Security Solutions and Challenges Ahead

Editor’s Choice

40

The Universality of IoT Technology

Editor-in-Chief Senior Editor Managing Editor Executive Editors

Pooja M. Bansal Anish Miller Kaustav Roy Jenny Fernandes Kedar Kulkarni

Assistant Editors Brian Smith Bhavithiran Murugan Visualiser David King Art & Design Director Amol Kamble Associate Designer Kushagra Gupta Co-designer Priyanka Rajage Art & Picture Editor Paul Belin Jayant Khanna Senior Sales Manager Passi D. Business Development Manager Peter Collins Marketing Manager John Matthew Business Development Executives Steve, Joe, Alan, Tushar Sales Executives David, Kevin, Mark, Vijay Technical Head Jacob Smile Technical Specialist Amar, Pratiksha Digital Marketing Manager Marry D’Souza Online Marketing Strategist Alina Sege, Shubham Mahadik, Vaibhav K SME-SMO Executives Prashant Chauhan, Uma Dhenge, Gemson, Irfan Research Analyst Chidiebere Moses Circulation Manager Robert, Tanaji Database Management Stella Andrew Technology Consultant David Stokes sales@insightssuccess.com

August, 2018 Corporate Ofces: Insights Success Media Tech LLC 555 Metro Place North, Suite 100, Dublin, OH 43017, United States Phone - (614)-602-1754 Email: info@insightssuccess.com For Subscription: www.insightssuccess.com

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Delivering Global Connectivity

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UFINET is your true business partner. Neutral, Reliable and Customer Oriented.

Cover Story

Iñigo García del Cerro Prieto CEO

The

Fastest Gr wing

Providers to Watch 2018

U

FINET is a neutral fiber optic operator in the wholesale telecommunications market. It provides its services and connectivity through fiber optic in America. The organization was born in 1998 as the telecommunications department of a Spanish multinational company named Union Fenosa, which had been managing the telecom services necessary for the electric exploitation.

In the year 2000, UFINET began its period of expansion throughout Latin America, amalgamating with the electricity distribution companies that were acquired at that time by Union Fenosa. Currently, UFINET is one of the largest fiber optic operators in Latin America, with nearly 50,000 kilometers of fiber distributed in 17 countries and more than 20 years of experience.

The company’s commendable expansion and growth is currently focused on Latin America, with rapid growth of optical fiber deployment, and presence among three Points of Presence in the United States: at the Network Access Points of the America in Miami, Florida, Los Angeles and 60th Hudson in New York.

A Passion-Driven Leader Iñigo García del Cerro Prieto is the CEO of UFINET. He is a Telecommunications Engineer graduated from the Polytechnic University of Madrid, an economist at the Autonomous University of Madrid, and also holds a Master’s Degree in Business Administration from IESE Business School, Spain.

Prior to becoming the CEO, Mr. García del Cerro was the VP of UFINET’s business development which was primarily focused on Spanish and Latin American markets. The main result of his career progress has been the exponential growth of the company itself, particularly in Central America, with a significant deployment of an important optical fiber network and a presence in over 17 countries.

Global responsibility for strategic definition, development and international expansion, implementation of the business plan, design of strategic partnerships as well as agreements and relationships with local partners, are the key roles and responsibilities catered by Mr. García del Cerro.

Enabling Digital Empowerment UFINET provides high bandwidth connections in fiber optic for fast and secure Capacity connectivity to deliver backbone and access network services,

Our VSAT satellite network access offers a wide coverage through all satellites with which we operate.

The company provides the Dark Fiber cable and the customer illuminates it according to its needs and with its own equipment. UFINET’s laying of dark fiber has a permanent maintenance, in a preventive and routine approach, as well as in the face of a breakdown.

UFINET connects its customers to the world through IP transit services retaining its robust optical fiber transportation network, and connections with major submarine cables and neutral points of America.

The organization’s satellite communication services allow bidirectional remote access to rural sites through connections with high availability and minimal latency. Its technology can endure critical services with low latency and traffic requirements as well as services with high bandwidth or Internet access.

As a complimentary part of UFINET’s Capacity and connectivity services, it offers customers with Co-location services in various countries Central, South and North America. This service is intended to facilitate the interconnection between operators and/or system integrators, speeding up the enablement of new links and offering high levels of availability and protection of the equipment and services installed.

backhaul and local loop, and national and international connections. All Capacity connectivity is delivered through more than 49,200kms of fiber optic network deployed with more than 200 communicated nodes distributed throughout America.

The company provides remote access services to customers’ equipment through its specialists and performs configuration tasks, problem resolution and maintenance. In addition, it offers Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) for equipment inventory management or spare parts required by the client.

UFINET’s optical fiber cable network has a full infrastructure ready for customers who need to rent a single, a pair or more strands of fiber optic cable, either for small, medium or long-distance requests. This type of service is more convenient for customers requiring very high bandwidth connectivity.

When the Vision is to be Neutral Telecommunications Infrastructure Operator UFINET’s primary vision is to be the neutral telecommunications infrastructure operator of reference worldwide, and the organization is working towards the goal much more intensely in last three years. The

Our high bandwidth connectivity network allows us to transport circuits over fiber optic in an easy and safe manner, providing our customers with secure end-to-end optical fiber connections.

company has significantly increased its internationalization through add-on acquisitions and organic growth with a significant global investment in fiber optics that has surpassed the $200 million mark.

In 2017 the organization was awarded by the MEF as the best wholesale operator in the CALA region (Caribbean and Latin America), which fills UFINET with pride and satisfaction to continue working hard to improve the services it provides to the Clients. In 2018, the organization was awarded by Global Carrier Community as Latam Regional Operator of the year 2018, as well as awarded by Frost & Sullivan as Latin America Fiber Optic Wholesale Network Services Company of 2018.

An Immaculate Game Plan UFINET’s strategy from 2000 to 2014 was to grow and consolidate Central America and Colombia, as a region of fundamental development. However, in the last three years it has focused on promoting and developing the territory of South America, to turn it into an important lever of growth due to the growing demands for broadband Capacity, as well as investment in fiber optic networks.

Apart from this, the organization has also carried out several inorganic operations to increase its footprint, in combination with several greenfield projects, which have

resulted in the opening of new UFINET operations in Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Peru, Ecuador and Mexico.

Challenges that can Change the Course of the Industry According to UFINET, like most other industry even the telecom industry is facing few challenges which are, =

=

Pricing – One must provide a value-added service and solution to satisfy its customers’ demands. There are many value propositions that makes UFINET unique, but, for the organization, the most important one is the hard work and commitment of the people. This key factor, undoubtedly, makes the main difference to achieve outstanding results. The staffs of the organization are fully devoted and aligned with its corporate values: Agility, Flexibility, Passion & Commitment, Creativity and Closeness.

Higher bandwidth demand – All IT trends, like IoT and IoE, will require a higher demand on Gbps all around the globe. Telcos must be prepared to provide higher level of connectivity and data flow from the original platform. UFINET’s all fiber network is fully prepared to provide all the band-with needed, already providing nx100Gbps Lambdas. As the organization’s pursuit is to deliver the best quality solutions to the clients, UFINET must and will keep delivering whichever connectivity bandwidth needed. And it is already working to make it

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bigger whenever operators have the need.

Capillarity and global reach – The demand for services and higher bandwidths will become global, and thus the need of denser fibre networks, connecting every customer and every location.

UFINET’s network are very dense, connecting buildings and telecom towers, and at the same time have a global reach in each country, connecting may small cities and towns.

Development of 5G – this goes beyond speed and bandwidth. The challenge in this issue will be to be able to improve the latency issues to provide unique browsing experience. 5G also promises to bring the reliability, scalability, security and universal mobility across the telecommunications industry, which would increase numerous services, directly connected to IoT. But 5G deployments is about fibre and towers, with a need to have 10 times more telecom towers and all of them connected with fibre.

UFINET will definitely play a role in these deployments.

OTT players – Even though Over the Top companies are competing

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with traditional operators in a way, there still is a lot of room for joint venture work for both.

Security and Privacy – Telcos must be on the watch out of security breaches. This feature is seriously considered only after serious incidents occur. Operators must be able to forecast serious safekeeping events.

Ongoing Regulations - The Telcos industry has been facing many regulation challenges because of the nature, rapid transformation

We connect our customers to fiber optic internet with major international ISP’s, Tier 1 category, and local ISP’s nodes in different cities where we operate, via major submarine cables in Latin America and the United States.

and complexity of sector. And they will continue renovating in the years to come.

Key Factors of Victory The entry of the new shareholders in 2014 has invigorated the operation of the organization, with a single focus: Telecommunications. “I think this has been very positive for everyone, because it allows us to concentrate

much more on our business,” states Mr. García del Cerro.

“UFINET is a still young company that is in its voyage of full expansion. The hard work and commitment of its employees, undoubtedly, make the big difference to achieve an alignment with our corporate values of Agility, Flexibility, Passion and Commitment, Creativity and Closeness,” he adds.

Envisaging a Triumphant Future “Continuing the path of success that we have undertaken with a global and massive presence throughout Latin America, and becoming the benchmark as a global Infrastructure Operator,” states Mr. Garcia del Cerro while expressing UFINET’s future endeavors.

The organization will continue to boost the offer of telecommunications services and create neutral environments that translate into better and more affordable services for the general population.

“We are at a turning point, where we are sure that a new and fascinating stage will arrive. We have the vision to be the Neutral Reference Operator worldwide,” asserts Mr. García del Cerro.

The

Fastest Gr wing

Providers to Watch 2018

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The

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Providers to Watch 2018

Company Name

Management

Brief

Allot allot.com

Erez Antebi President & CEO

Allot network-based visibility, control and security solutions are deployed globally by the world’s leading service providers and enterprises to improve network performance, ensure optimal QoE and deliver value added security services.

Britannic Technologies btlnet.co.uk

Richard Dendle Founder & CEO

Britannic is a company which is transforming the business through Telecom technologies.

C3NTRO c3ntro.com

Simon Masri President & Chairman & Abraham Smeke Senior Vice President

C3NTRO Telecom is the operator of choice for advanced international Voice, SMS and Data connectivity with more than 300 direct interconnects and in-country partners worldwide.

iSymplify isymplify.com

Lorie Burkemper CEO

iSymplify helps enterprise clients identify and implement carrier-neutral, cloud-based infrastructure and connectivity solutions that optimize and improve business.

iTel Networks Inc. itel.com

Dan Rink CEO

iTel is a national provider of business services, including voice, connectivity, networking, and cloud.

Qvantel qvantel.com

Ove Anebygd CEO

Qvantel is a pioneer in the field of BSS with over 20 years of experience of successful digital transformations for Telco operators

Andrew Bale General Manager

Tango Networks enterprises to maximize the reach, impact and value of their communications systems by extending their applications to any mobile device. It offers communication solutions to carriers to deliver mobile UC to large enterprises and small to mid-sized businesses.

Iñigo García del Cerro Prieto CEO

UFINET is a neutral fiber optic operator in the wholesale telecommunications market.

ViciDial vicidial.com

Matt Florell Founder & CEO

The ViciDial Group provides an array of professional products and services to the rapidly growing national and international Vicidial user community.

WireIE International Holdings Inc. wireie.com

Rob Barlow President & CEO

WireIE is an industry leader that delivers purpose built business networks, bridging the digital divide across Canada and the Americas.

Tango Networks tango-networks.com

UFINET ufinet.com

Tech-Know Insights

Minimize Risk of Digital Transformation Failure in place to accomplish a successful and smooth delivery on Digital Transformation promise, and to avoid loss of money and prestige. Every kind of transformation project comes across a certain resistance; a mobile application delivered with no issues will minimize this resistance.

Better Application through Continuous Testing Most of our customers in Continuous Software are switching to agile project delivery in order to rapidly evaluate and provide for the internal and external demands.

The traditional test processes, which are done at the end phase of a project, remain insufficient for the agile management. For better quality and a rapid outcome, testing and development has to be a continuous process of DevOps course. Thanks to test automation scripts throughout the whole development process, softwares and applications can be tested before going through end-user tests with minimum amount of problems.

Hakan Turgut Chairman

O

ne of the greatest agonies in test automation is the time and effort spent to continuously testing what has been developed. The simpler and the more straight-forward the mobile applications look to the customer, the more complex they are in the background. As the number of of mobile platforms and devices increases, enterprises need to provide their developers with effective way to test across the platforms — testing fast, verifying the code quickly.

Why is it so important? Because continuous digital transformation is an inevitable part of growing the business.

Often more than 60% of customer interactions happen through the smartphones. What is the number like at your business? Anyway, an effective mobile testing needs to be

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One of the key trends in the market is the increase of native application development, which enables the usage of mobile devices in a broader spectrum. With the increasing demand towards more complex, stronger functionalities and interface, the responsive design techniques are outdated. To provide an optimum result for mobile testing, conducting the tests with actual devices, a device lab, has a large importance. The problem here is how the manual testers and test automation systems will share devices. This is solved by creating a mobile device lab according to producers, models and operating systems.

Renting a device lab on cloud, uploading your scripts and running your tests in a parallel execution costs you serious amount of money. We couldn’t ignore the fact that this method makes our customers’ apps less profitable every minute. If you create an actual device lab by purchasing every kind of smartphones out there, you still ned a web interface to run all those scenarios and scripts to manage your mobile device lab.

Continuous Software developed an interface, where you can run your scripts on different devices with its own cloud |September 2018|

device lab, observe text execution and integrate with source control systems. You can use it with your own mobile device server, or you can connect your device to your mobile lab with client integrations. As a result you’ll be able to observe your text execution in real time with detailed results, clickable stack trace exceptions and screenshots, and see how much of the resources (CPU, Memory, System Logs) your app consumes. No matter which language your scripts were written or no matter which tool was used to write them, by integrating with open source automation servers this interface allows you to include mobile testing to your continuous DevOps process.

Continuous Software Our first business line is application testing. Today we offer a wide range of services such as Manual Sourcing, Test Automation, Performance Testing, Security Testing, Service and Network Virtualization and Mobile Application Testing and Mobile Device Lab Management. Our philosophy lies on the successful implementation of test automation frameworks, enabling the rapid creation of test automation scripts that are stable and easily maintainable. Our scalable test automation framework optimizes every level of application from network to code- speeding up he execution and reducing test maintenance.

Our success comes from working together with organizations to optimize every level of application- from the network to the code. We have solved the complexities of software testing through our unique solutions and helped a multitude of enterprises in accomplishing desired results.

We believe our Mobile Device Lab will be a game changer in the industry.

Case studies One of Top 5 Banks in Turkey This bank has decided to make a transformation project with Mckenzie. Part of the transformation project they found out that one of the biggest bottleneck is Software testing. As they were planning to use Agile project management approach within this initiative; testing was becoming even more critical for the success of the project.

That is why they have decided to implement Test Improvement Project. They have identified 5 areas and Continuous Software has been involved in all these five workgroups which are Functional Test Automation, Performance/Load Testing, Service Virtualization, Test Environment Management and Test Data Management. The project scope covered core banking, alternative channels, international banking and credit cards application suites, they all are in-house developed application based on Java, .NET and IBM Mainframe. This was a teamwork, which we have worked together with the bank’s testing team.

Development team has also participated to the project when it was needed. We have identified sample applications, |September 2018|

designed processes, decided on technologies that will be used and finally implemented the best practice within sample applications to prove the solution. We have guided the bank’s team and prepared documentation for them to continue after project has been finalized. During the project we have used HPE UFT, HPE Loadrunner, IBM Service Virtualization, CA Test Data Management and HPE Codar and OO solutions for respective areas.

One of the Top 10 International Banks Entered to Turkey by acquiring an old bank, which was not able to invest in IT for a long time. After the acquisition, they have been audited by BDDK (Banking Regulation Authority) and BDDK gave them a deadline to resolve their compliance issues. Within a very limited timeframe to implement an end to end automated Devops process which starts from demand collection till deployment of the applications to production environment. The solution had to be fully automated, no human interaction other than development of the application and be traceable on each level of the process. Continuous Software delivered end-toend DevOps project to make sure to have a complete process from demand to production deployment. Created five different pipelines for core baking (oracle forms), alternative channels (java), credit cards (.NET) and ATMs (.NET). Jenkins, SVN, Nexus, HPE Codar, HPE ALM, HPE UFT, HP PM, HP SM are implemented in project scope. Thanks to Continuous Software, this bank passed the audit successfully and avoided to pay a big amount of penalty.

Management Levent Ozalp is a serial entrepreneur and the Founder and CEO of OPTiiM. He created 3 startups in Turkey, 1 in Ireland and 1 in UK from military tech to system integration. Having launched Continuous Software now boasts 100+ employees and customers all over Turkey, Middle East, North Africa and Europe.

Hakan Turgut is the Continuous Software Chairman. His 30 years career span took him to executive positions in IBM, CA and Nortel. He brings maturity and wisdom to the team.

About the Author: Levent Ozalp is a serial entrepreneur. He created 3 startups in Turkey, 1 in Ireland and 1 in UK from military tech to system integration. Having launched OPTiiM now boasts 100+ employees and customers all over Turkey, Middle East, North Africa and Europe.

Hakan Turgut is the OPTiiM Chairman. His 30 years career span took him to executive positions in IBM, CA and Nortel. He brings maturity and wisdom to the team.

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Britannic Technologies Taking Customers on a Digital Transformation Journey Richard Dendle Founder & CEO

A

communication and systems integrator company, Britannic Technologies aims to deliver a seamless transformational digital experience to customers.

The company has a long and enriching heritage of over 33 years’ taking customers on a digital transformation journey from start to finish. Discovering their technology needs, demonstrating technology and designing their roadmap, and helping them to develop at their own pace. Delivering on their promise – we do what we say.

The company focuses on working closely with customers as a strategic partner to understand their technology requirements, ensuring that the technology is aligned with the business’s objectives and strategy.

Britannic’s core strengths are flexibility and being agile enough to provide customers with the choice to develop at their own pace. They provide innovative, leading technology that is ahead of the competition and in some cases even ahead of leading technology vendor’s roadmap.

The Thought Leaders Richard Dendle is the Founder and CEO of Britannic Technologies who has spent his livelihood in Saudi Arabia

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in the early 1980s. During those times, Saudi Arabia was the most advanced country in the world from a telecommunications perspective. Armed with knowledge garnered in Saudi, he identified an opportunity to set up Britannic Telecom Company in 1984. The name was later on changed to Britannic Technologies Limited in 2003 following the acquisition of a development company in 2000. The new name reflects the Voice, Data and Solutions Integration that are core parts of the company’s services today.

Jonathan Sharp is the Director at Britannic Technologies who has earned a glowing reputation in the industry. With over twenty years of experience in IT & Telecoms, Jonathan has a proven ability to lead, develop and motivate teams, execute change, deliver market differentiation and achieve profitable growth. He also focuses on offering end-to-end holistic solutions to the customers in order to maximize their investment in ICT. More importantly, since inception they both regularly attend client meetings and focus on developing relationships with customers. This has led customers to get easy access to Britannic’s services and to working closely with the customers in developing innovative solutions in return. As a

|September 2018|

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result, the company’s leaders have been the catalysts for several groundbreaking developments and are highly prominent in the industry.

Tailored-Customer Services In a rapidly evolving market, Britannic integrates cloud applications and services with phone systems, contact centre, UC solutions and line of business systems. This helps customers gain tailored-made solutions with flexibility, ease of management, swift installation, rapid roll-out of new applications and predictability of costs. The company holds an outstanding reputation in the industry with telecoms, UC and cloud solutions and partner with the world leading technology vendors including Mitel, Avaya, and Microsoft.

We do what we say!

What we promise; we deliver on budget, on time and on spec” Jonathan Sharp, Director, Britannic Technologies.

Unique Strategies Britannic has invested heavily in cloud infrastructure and is well-positioned to guide its customers along their journeys and mitigating risk along the way.

Britannic in-house software development team is known as pioneers of innovation amongst customers and vendors with a long line of successful unique solutions offered in the market. This includes SIP, one of the first to build its own SIP platform in 2004, and the first Mitel partner in Europe to move an on-premise phone system into a virtualized environment. Apart from this, the company is still continuing to identify new technological trends such as WebRTC and conversational artificial intelligence, with a solution called Ami. Being with the market-leading technical capabilities, it recruits the best members. Presently, Britannic has built a team of 80 people who are specialists in communications solutions and highly skilled at selling with a consultative approach. The team excels in being creative, capable and adaptable and works closely with customers to produce bespoke solutions to transform their business.

Britannic focus remains unchanged and will continue to work with its customers as business partners by providing an excellence of service, tailored advice and solutions and world-class technology delivery. The company is planning to leverage the offerings from world-leaders, complemented with innovation from niche application providers and with its in-house capabilities. It is looking forward for opportunities within the market for systems integration skills and end-to-end managed services along with a flexible, agile and innovative approach. This can help its customers to integrate new and emerging technology into their business processes, workflows, digital platforms and customer experience.

Future Roadmap Currently, Britannic is well placed to achieve the continuous growth in the market through its next generation services and cloud architecture. It also succeeded in implementing AI and M2M communication which is underpinned with big data / analytics depending upon the increase in demand.

|September 2018|

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Omnichannel Agent and Customer Engagement Solutions Simplify and personalize the customer experience, empower agents and achieve business success with one workspace for all channel interactions, application integrations, and CX reporting.

C3NTRO Telecom: A Synonym with World-Class Telecom Solution

I

n the ancient times, smoke signals and drums were used to telecommunicate. Talking drums could mimic human tones in loud pitches and were mostly used in South America and Africa. It served as an early form of long distance communication which was used during a war, ceremonial and religious purposes. The telecommunication industry continued evolving ever since. From smoke signals and drums to VoIP Internet Telephony, telecommunication has come a very long way. One company, disrupting the market in the VoIP arena from the time it was formed is C3NTRO Telecom.

C3NTRO Telecom is an international carrier with 20 years of unparalleled experience supplying voice, data and SMS services to the carriers around the world. It is the operator of choice providing an advanced international voice and data connectivity backed by reliable and state-of-the-art global network, with more than 300 direct interconnects and in-country partners worldwide.

C3NTRO Telecom offers guaranteed SLAs and proven business tools backed by a dedicated sales team to ensure an optimal combination of quality and cost-effectiveness to destinations around the world, terminating over six billion international minutes each year.

In addition to this robust portfolio of international carrier services, C3NTRO Telecom is a fully licensed operator in Mexico and has agreements with all the local and regional loop providers. It delivers integrated tailor made solutions for Mexico’s top 1000 enterprises, which includes unified communications, data connectivity, SMS, videoconferencing, Microsoft enterprise solutions and contact center services.

Leaders Echoing Experience C3ntro is backed by two of its pioneers Simon Masri, the

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Simon Masri President & Chairman

President and Chairman and Abraham Smeke, the Senior Vice President.

Simon is a civil engineer and entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience in the telecommunications industry. He deployed the first VoIP gateway in LATAM and today is leading over 10 Telecom Startups that are now integrated under one holding company as C3ntro Telecom.

Abraham, with 15 years of experience, manages all the commercial initiatives and processes in sales, sales support, purchasing, pricing, finance marketing and product. He has created, maintained and executed all sales plans and strategies to achieve annual/quarterly revenue/ targets.

Journey that Speaks more than Words C3NTRO Telecom has been recognized as an exceptional carrier in the industry due to its hard work and perseverance throughout the years. It began as a local wholesale carrier and has continued to grow by innovating its product offering and expanding its reach and knowledge in its data and SMS services. It has a customer base that includes many of the leading mobile operators around the world.

With its reliability, high volume capacity and competitive pricing through its state-of-the art high performance, IP network has made C3NTRO Voice services the top choice.

C3NTRO offerings are customized to meet customers’ needs which include several cutting-edge tools for billing, reporting and monitoring. Some of the Tier 1 customers outsource their traffic to the company which they manage |September 2018|

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through its switching platform. The company provides proactive and preventive fraud detection based on human behavior information which is compiled through Big Data analytics for optimal results.

Accomplishments that have shaped the Journey C3NTRO Telecom has become an alternative word for a world-class network and substantial growth. Backed by its reliable state-of-the-art infrastructure, real-time reports and automated routing, the company has become the carrier for the new era that will spearhead the future of the Telecom industry.

Growth and achievements seen in the last few years includes: = = = = = = =

= =

16 billion VOIP Minutes per year Market leader in international long distance Sales representation in 10 countries Top 12 IP-Transit providers 800+ Managed IP/MPLS metro circuits 700+ VM Servers 700+ Managed Networks (LAN, WAN, WI-FI, Security) 200+ million SMS per month Leaders in Fraud detection services for Tier 1

Fiber innovation to help transform the Industry With a multimillion dollar investment since last year C3ntro

Communications Made Simple. began deploying the newest and most advanced fiber optic nnetwork in Mexico. It is confident about its next step in order to provide the customers with its own network ultimately propelling their country and prospectively its southern neighbors, to a faster and more reliable communication platform.

In addition to investing in fiber, C3NTRO has also successfully launched its own Cloud Connectivity program, with strategic partnerships with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Express route and the remaining top 10 Cloud providers in the world - l Tier 1 Carriers. This has been a major investment for the company as it has become a pioneer in Cloud connectivity services projecting from Mexico.

Collaborating with Microsoft as one of its strategic partners and both companies’ ardent efforts, C3NTRO has successfully extended the Microsoft Top Partner status into LATAM. The company believes that it is a huge achievement that will not only be beneficial to each party but more importantly to the various enterprises in the region.

Mission and Foresight in the Upcoming Years C3NTRO is a carrier genuinely devoted to the customer satisfaction by adding value through the provision of its services and solutions. It is earning the trust by building long term relationships based on efficiency, honesty and innovation.The most productive new product has been its Value Added Services, where C3ntro manages, Monitors and Report all of a Tier 1 traffic behaviors, as well as managing the Fraud Detection services for several Tier 1 Carriers.

The company’s vision is to establish itself as the top global wholesale carrier centered in value added services, innovative solutions and trustworthy operation in a consolidating industry.

C3NTRO aspires to be recognized as one of the leading carriers in this industry. To further solidify the growth, it has become one of the leading enterprise carriers in Mexico supplying telecommunication services and turn-key solutions to Fortune 1000 Companies.

Abraham Smeke Senior Vice President |September 2018|

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Into the ‘clouds’

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|September 2018|

Cloud The Emerging

Security Solutions and

Challenges Ahead

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n the world of cloud computing, the companies are facing new security challenges every year. The essential principles of the security are secure access, credentials, application usage, anomaly detection, encryption, and storage. Cloud security companies are developing products with prominent security features to tackle these issues. Transition periods for the organizations moving from mainframe systems to cloud systems are reducing sharply. They are operating with on-premise and off-premise devices spread across countries with different security laws.

Such organizations are bringing greater security challenges and hence valuable business for security service providers. The security solutions providers should care for the needs of both security requirements and performance.

Cloud Security Services with High Growth Potential Technologies such as artificial intelligence, the machine learning and the most recent deep learning encompass a number of solutions that can be used for security purposes. Anomalies in the behavior of ‘entities’ within the system can be detected easily with the help of deep learning technology. Machinelearning technologies will help to differentiate between the good and the bad software. This approach will offer a significant tool for security practitioners enabling them to detect the threat in advance and eradicate it.

|September 2018|

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Security hardware, firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems have taken a virtual mode for operations. As more organizations have started using the cloud technology, more kinds of vulnerabilities will emerge and consequently more approaches to security will also be developed. If cloud service providers can also expand their services to emerge as ‘infrastructure-as-a-service’ provider they will be able to offer the high-end data security available even to the small enterprises.

High-performance solutions for the cloud security are available today which enable the governance. The management of sensitive data in a centralized manner for all applications, systems across all platforms with onpremises and partially or fully cloud environments is possible.

Encryption can be an effective technology for data loss prevention. There’s been a lot of security spending over the last several years, and yet the number of records breached is considerably high in recent years. Companies are considering this as the business opportunity to aid in compliance with data privacy and security regulations. It indicates the necessity of sophisticated encryptions and authentication therefore they are considered as emerging security trends for data loss prevention.

• Classification and protection, security assessment and audit, document management and watermarking, and encryption.

• Security-as-a-service platform, cloud discovery, real-time monitoring and blocking, on-demand application and configuration, and Sensitive data discovery.

• Privacy and confidentiality, risk assessments, data loss prevention, tokenization, flexible and granular email security controls, capabilities around user behavior, data loss prevention, and policy restrictions.

• Secure web gateway platforms positioned to capture traffic and see the flow of data to and from SaaS applications with reports of data flow, content, and user activity monitoring.

There are technologies which use big data analytics to identify the anomaly in behavior by a user. System defenders can spot a red alert if they are working with the user behavior analytics (UBA). There is a lot of interest shown in this technology by the enterprises as this can enhance the workforce output also. These technologies offer huge business opportunity. The technique called ‘peeranalysis’ compares how some user is behaving compared to other users with the same manager or same department.

Training can be given to the employees for better security practices and enable them to adhere to the security policies.

Technology can also enhance the security of endpoints like desktops, servers, tablets and laptops using most improved security monitoring, detection of threats and quick response capabilities to incidents.

Chipset within a device can be a part of the authentication process. Apart from passwords, the device acts as a token for security in cloud networks including laptops, desktops and mobile devices. Hardware authentication solutions at processor level can combine a variety of hardwareenhanced factors simultaneously to validate a user’s identity.

Solutions Offered by Cloud Service Companies Clients have got multiple expectations while using the cloud service from providers. They should maintain complete control over their data processing even in multiuser cloud environments. They should be able to retain their efficiency and flexibility according to business objectives and policies. Access to ‘Software as-a-Service’ applications should be as secure as before.

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There are companies specializing in cloud security solutions and providing following services –

Challenges Ahead There is a great service opportunity opening up for creative and innovative solution providers in the area of cloud security solutions but they are equally challenged on various fronts. Organizational level challenges represent those risks that may impact the structure of the organization or the business as an entity. The functional areas that are vulnerable and can be compromised are identified by exploring past business records. These areas represent potential threat or source of failure and needs to be secured on priority. The physical location of the cloud data center can come across a challenge of unauthorized on-site access.

It can be prevented through staff training, physical location security, and network firewalls. Technological Security challenge is related to hardware, and services such as portability, maintenance. Compliance and issues related to the audit, lack of jurisdiction information or changes in jurisdiction and sometimes even illegal clauses in the contract often lead to the legal disputes over information security. Data Security challenges are mainly pertaining to data integrity, confidentiality, and availability. Multiple companies are coming to the market with same approach to deal with the security challenges and have similar solutions to the same problem. Real challenge is creating innovative and proactive solutions which can offer better security and smooth flow of business operations.

|September 2018|

iSymplify: An Expert in the Process of Technology Simplication

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Symplify is a business communications agency which focuses on delivering telecommunications, cloud services, unified communications & mobility solutions.

They educate their clients on the marketplace and technology options while supporting them in making informed business decisions. iSymplify’s primary focus is on customer service – working collaboratively with their clients to guide them through a well-defined methodology to evaluate, negotiate, assess, and procure cloud-based technologies and services in an unbiased manner. Outlining the pros and cons of each option, they guide their clients to the ideal technologies and vendors, while leveraging their partnerships to create a custom-tailored solution.

Since virtually every customer is unique, iSymplify delivers cloud solutions – including public/private/hybrid cloud solutions, cloud-based voice, data and network services to multi-unit, businesses across North America. They have a proven track record of connecting business with technology and have connected tens of thousands of network nodes for global, domestic corporations and state governments during its tenure.

A Strategic Consultant

Lorie Burkemper is the President and Founder, has spent her career helping businesses with strategic technology consulting – including voice & data solutions, UCaaS, CCaaS, SDN & hybrid networking, cloud compute, IT and wireless services.

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Lorie Burkemper Chief Executive Ofcer

Before iSymplify, Lorie played an essential role as Client Development Manager at Cybera – where her responsibilities included lead development, partner recruitment, client consultation and managed data & security options. She also oversaw strategic accounts, funnel management and territory management. After leaving Cybera, she served as an Account Manager at CompuServe Network Services – providing ongoing customer care and implementation support for a number of Fortune 500 companies.

Unbiased Services iSymplify helps businesses perform more efficiently by leveraging cloud services to reduce costs or meet new business challenges. Their clients value their experience, market knowledge, and ongoing support in migrations from traditional networking and on-premise technologies to the cloud. They also help organizations find the right solutions for their business at the right price.

Most importantly, iSymplify supports enterprise organizations navigate their design, proposal and implementation process, while providing an ongoing

|September 2018|

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customer relationship that exceeds expectations. With a deep understanding of a wide range of technologies, they deliver unbiased recommendations regarding telecommunication, mobility, or cloud communications projects customized to the client’s unique business priorities.

Currently, iSymplify supports their clients with projects focused on improving customer experience. They deliver an omnichannel customer experience to re-design business workflows in order to optimize supply chain, asset, and inventory management. It is working on improving data analytics and focusing more on informed business decisions. The technology, services and knowledge base is unprecedented.

We take a client -focused, service rst approach to connect businesses to the cloud.

The Consultative Approach For almost a decade, companies were focusing on the key business and technology trends like cloud enablement, digital business transformation, and customer experiences.

With those trends in mind, iSymplify designed solutions and experiences that facilitated easy migrations that deliver successful business outcomes.

With a technology-agnostic and carrier-neutral approach, the iSymplify’s team of experts works collaboratively with the clients to meet their business needs, often as an extension of its IT team. it is this focus on delivering the best course of action that has proven ideal for both short and long-term solutions.

With over 200 technology partners, iSymplify can assist a wide range of business verticals. With the help of combined relationships, they manage a wide range of technologies such as voice/web collaboration, networking. With the trend of moving from on-premise solutions to cloud-based solutions, iSymplify has spent the last few years helping businesses navigate this often-difficult landscape – particularly in the cloud computing, IoT and AI, disaster recovery, security, and blockchain sectors. From discovery & sourcing to implementation & management, they guide clients through every step necessary.

Further ensuring client success, iSymplify is continuously investing in education so it can offer the go-to resource for CTO’s. With resources being continually stretched thinner, they also support IT teams through education – allowing them to stay up to date with the latest trends and technologies in an unbiased and affordable manner.

Future Planning iSymplify’s long-term plan is to work ‘Arm in Arm’ with its clients to strategically map out technologies that drive execution & adoption while building out their practice to provide additional coverage across the US. They are also rapidly growing their team to provide additional resources in the IoT, data analytics, AI, and cloud managed service sectors – positioning them to help businesses augment teams with these new areas of expertise.

Talking about the processes within the company, Lorie says “We’ve learned that listening and really digging in to find out what our client’s goals and needs are as early as possible is critical to success. We’ve developed our process to make sure we can uncover those business needs and challenges – then stay engaged throughout the entire process.” |September 2018|

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Tango Networks: Enabling mobile-rst enterprises

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s the use of mobile handheld devices continues to rise worldwide, the need for businesses to work mobility into their operations has become of absolute importance. Mobile technology is a key driver of innovation for almost all businesses, from improving customer experiences to creating modern, flexible work environments for employees.

An innovative solution provider that offers superior enterprise mobile communications products and services is Tango Networks. Its groundbreaking mobility platform provides simple, flexible adaptation of enterprise communications for the mobile workforce, even in multivendor environments.

In an interview with Insights Success, Andrew Bale, General Manager of Cloud Services for Tango Networks, described the company’s success with raising enterprise mobility to the next level.

Kindly brief us about Tango Networks, its services and solutions.

Almost every business today has a mobile workforce. By that, I mean that employees perform much if not all of their work using mobile phones instead of traditional desk phones.

But there is a critical gap in how the IT department controls these communications compared to other parts of IT. Unlike desk-phone communications, mobile communications are routed and controlled by external mobile service providers.

The enterprise’s IT department can’t manage these communications the same way it can for wire-line communications.

Tango Networks eliminates this IT control gap through our Kinetic Communications Solutions that give the CIO direct control over mobile communications.

With our Kinetic solutions the IT staff can control mobile communications the same way they can the rest of the IT stack, such as wire-line communications, internal messaging, Wi-Fi, networking, Internet access, and so on.

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Andrew Bale General Manager Companies use our products and services for solutions including Mobile Unified Communications, enterprise text messaging, compliant mobile communications, and mobile integration with CRM. One of our newest solutions enables enterprise IT to restrict mobile phone usage by a company driver while his vehicle is in motion, to proactively address the worldwide concern of distracted driving.

How do you diversify your telecom solutions so that they will benefit your customers?

We focus on complementing and enhancing other systems and applications our customers have deployed, not requiring them to rip out and replace a lot of things that are working.

Our Kinetic solutions are unique control middleware interfacing with enterprise calling systems, cloud services, enterprise applications and other parts of enterprise IT. Our solutions mobile-enable these systems, giving employees on mobile phones the same kind of experience that they would have in the office on a desk phone. We offer versions of our enterprise mobility solutions for both cloud and onpremises deployments, which is our Kinetic Communications Platform.

Our cloud-based offering is called Kinetic Cloud. Kinetic Cloud represents a major leap in enterprise mobility technology because it is the industry’s first cloud-powered mobile convergence solution, making integration and management of mobility even simpler. |September 2018|

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Kindly brief us on the achievements that have shaped the journey of Tango Networks.

Tango has been in business more than a decade and the most successful mobility projects the company has seen are those that make the user experience simple and familiar.

For example, our solutions can enable an employee to use the native dialing interface of their smartphone to activate features of the corporate UC system, without the need to search for and launch a special app. As a result, employees do not have to learn some new, clunky interface.

Describe the role of Tango Networks’ innovations in transforming the industry?

We are leading innovators of enterprise communications mobility, with more than 60 patents granted for the underlying technology of mobilized enterprise communications. For years, enterprise mobility was handled as a device management problem, focusing on rudimentary access control and configuration management.

Our solutions are first to provide true control over real-time applications – voice, messaging, collaboration and others – used by a truly mobile workforce.

Where does Tango Networks see itself in the long run?

What are its future goals?

Tango is ushering in a new era of enterprise mobility that puts enterprise IT directly in control of mobility in a manner similar to the control over fixed voice and data communications. In fact, many of our customers are going “Mobile First” and making mobile phones their primary communications devices. Tango is providing the tools, technologies and partnerships to allow our customers to access the mobile capabilities currently locked up within the mobile operator network.

Our approach is complemented by trends like Private LTE, where an enterprise can use a private deployment of LTE to deliver its own wireless services for employees or IoT devices. This exciting trend is directly in line with our philosophy.

Considering the rising number of telecom solution providers, how does Tango Networks stand out from its competitors?

Enterprises have not been well-served with business-class mobile communications services in the past. Basically enterprises have had to choose from the same mobile services offered to consumers.

But enterprises have very different communications needs such as call recording, enterprise application integration, policy enforcement and so on. Unlike the other forms of IT, the enterprise IT staff doesn’t have direct control over mobile communications in order to meet these requirements. |September 2018|

We are leading innovators of enterprise communications mobility, with more than 60 patents granted for the underlying technology of mobilized communications.

Our solutions put enterprise IT in charge of mobile communications just like they are in control of the rest of the IT stack. This is the foundation of the first genuine business-class mobile communications.

Give us an example of your client that accurately highlights Tango Networks’ position in the market.

A good example is the deployment at University Hospitals Birmingham in the UK. The hospitals wanted employees’ phones to operate as dual-line devices. Our solution enables work calls to be identified with the employees’ switchboard extensions, while the employees’ mobile phone numbers are kept private.

For example, a physician can call a patient without giving up the privacy of their mobile phone number. You can learn more by reading the case-studies at our website.

About the Leader Andrew Bale is the General Manager of Cloud Services at Tango Networks. He is an experienced telecommunications professional focused on helping companies to grow through clarity of vision and operational excellence. Currently, he serves the position of General Manager in Tango Networks. He has been honored with various positions such as CEO and Managing Director in other organizations such as Integent, Resilient Networks, and Worldstone.

About the Company Tango Networks delivers market-leading enterprise mobile convergence solutions bringing enterprises and mobile operators together. The world’s Tier 1 operators and global enterprises rely on Tango Networks’ superior workforce mobility solutions, built over a decade of successful innovation. Tango’s Kinetic Communications Solutions include rich Unified Communications on any mobile phone; mobile voice and text recording for compliance; mobile usage control preventing distracted driving; and automatic business application integration.

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Smart in Vision

Be Smart – or Vanish Why Utilities need to actively develop smart Micro-Grids

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he energy market is changing rapidly. This is true not only for the USA and Europe but on a global level. Possibly the most important change is the one towards more decentralized systems. This is challenging the utility industry.

Utilities historically have developed by integrating small microgrids which grew around mills and other small-scale generators (today we would say prosumers). This is why utilities developed along the entire value chain: They integrated these micro distribution grids in a more stable larger (Transport) grid and replaced decentralized generation by more cost-efficient central power plants. This highly efficient centralized system was allowing industrial development as we know it. At its time it was possibly the only way to serve large, strongly energy depending production like steel, paper or the upcoming chemical industry. The centralized energy system did not result from an oligopolistic market, but the industry structure derived from an efficient technical design.

There are several reasons why this formerly beneficiary system is challenged today. Not all apply in all markets but some of them do, so decentralization of energy markets is a global trend. Specifically, in most

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industrial markets the new energy regime is driven by politics favoring small scale, decentral renewable generation. Subsidies on renewables devalue existing large thermic power plants. Even large-scale hydropower plants do not easily pass strict environmental and social feasibility analysis. But independent of any political setting there is another more fundamental reason for the growing competitiveness of a decentralized energy design. While the first phase of industrial development is known for its industrial clusters (often grown close to energy sources like coal or water) which shaped many geographic areas for more than a century, later phases are much more dynamic and do less depend on geographic proximity. Within a dynamic industry setting where businesses are set up and closed or moved somewhere else on a regular basis a static centralized infrastructure loses competitiveness.

In many emerging markets this dynamism as well expands towards those areas which are today not connected to the central grid but offer inexpensive land or new agricultural products which can be sold abroad at high prices. Finally, the political will and the industrial demand for decentralized systems today encounter renewable generation even at small size at competitive costs

compared to large size thermic power plant. For the most prominent renewable technology photovoltaic in the North (with less radiation) this competitiveness is given only as grid parity, meaning central generation plus transport is as expensive as photovoltaic on site. In the Southern hemisphere photovoltaic is already a competitive source empowering decentralized energy infrastructure.

While decentralized generation has caught up with centralized generation plants, distribution systems with a large portion of decentralized renewable generation capacity are often inefficient. There are basically four reasons for this inefficiency: (1) Missing price mechanism supporting grid operations, (2) high costs to operate such a system stable, (3) large amount of excess energy (exported or not being used at all) and (4) sub-utilized interface between microgrid and its feeder system. These are basically the same reasons that in the last century supported the centralization of the grid system. What is needed is an intelligent or smart decentralized distribution system.

An intelligent distribution system with mainly decentralized generation requires more than smart meters and it is different from today popular so |September 2018|

About the Author Dr. Karl Kolmsee the CEO of Smart Hydro Power, studied agricultural and philosophy at the universities of Hamburg and Goettingen, Germany. After his PhD he has spent most of his professional career in the energy business – first as consultant at A.T. Kearney later as manager at E.ON, Europe’s largest private utility, and member of the board at Schmack biogas, one of the pioneers of the biogas market in Europe. In 2009 Karl Kolmsee has been nominated professor for energy management at Applied University of Kufstein, Austria. His main areas of academic work are international energy markets and renewable energy. In 2010 he founded Smart Hydro Power to focus on design and commercialization of kinetic pico hydro power systems with main focus on rural electrification for emerging markets like India, Latin America and Eastern Africa. Today Smart Hydro Power offers complete solutions for off grid solutions and micro grids.

|September 2018|

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called smart home or home storage solutions. These offer photovoltaic, battery and basic load management for the individual household. Some providers of home storage solutions integrate customers in a community model to allow exchange of autogenerated electricity. But these communities are barely more than contract partners within a fixed price net metering model. Individual home solutions – even within sales-and-purchase communities – do not solve any inefficiency issues decentralization faces. These systems are either completely self-sufficient – in this case they are expensive – or they rely on central grid services like a parasite of its host. Sustainable decentralization requires an intelligent control and steering mechanism between the households which build a microgrid.

While there are possibly different steering mechanisms, establishing a local market with the price as variable that guides demand and supply according to the aggregated demand function and the aggregated cost functions seems promising. Technically this does require a dynamic forecasting and load management (at least for major loads which are used in a price-sensitive manner).

At first glance a market model would solve the four major issues shown above. It would set a price for photovoltaic and battery storage which would control demand and thereby reduce necessary installed reserve storage and generation capacity. This mechanism would

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as well be consistent with the functioning of the feeder grid and could therefore supply itself services to this grid which would be valued with the same “currency”.

Technically this steering mechanism might be completely decentralized based on individual processors in each household like the blockchain technology (once necessary processing capacity comes down to acceptable limits) or it might work between a central unit and individual processors. In either way it steers the local market place towards an efficient optimum given generation, demand and battery storage capacity at a defined point in time.

Micro grids do open (within a given legal framework) a possibility for traditional utilities to re-define their role using some of their traditional strengths. But new entrants can equally well enter this space and perform wherever the incumbent does not adapt. This gives room to numerous co-operations between new entrants or between new companies and the incumbent offering their services or developing new business models along the value chain. Incumbent utilities may be smart – or vanish.

|September 2018|

ViciDial: A Remarkable Open Source Contact Center Solution Matt Florell Founder & Chief Executive Ofcer

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ustomer experience is one of the important factors that affect customer retention. Almost every organization has its own contact center to deal with customer issues. The positive feedback and satisfactory customer service is a key to gain new customers and retain the existing ones. Hence, to serve the dynamic customer needs and provide a complete customer experience organizations are shifting their focus towards adopting of avant-grade contact center software.

Powered with vision to provide holistic customer experience the ViciDial Group provides an array of professional products and services to the rapidly growing national and international VICIdial user community.

Launched in 2007, VICIdial software offers an enterprise class, open source, contact center solution with predictive dialer capabilities. This software is implemented to handle inbound, outbound, and blended phone calls, as well as inbound email and customer website chat, all within the same agent’s device screen.

The Trailblazer Prime innovator, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Matt Florell created VICIdial back in 2003 and still

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oversees the entire development task within VICIdial to this day. Matt has extensive experience in this vertical and is particularly enthusiastic about IT management, VOIP (IP Telephony), software development, project management, Linux, web development, and executive management.

He has received BS degree from Carroll University of the U.S. state of Wisconsin. Matt has been a speaker and advisor in several industry conferences over the years which includes it360 Toronto Conference 2007, 2008 and 2010, ClueCon 2010, Amoocon 2009 IP Telephony Conference, and Florida Linux Show 2008 to name a few.

Since the free release of the VICIdial software, Matt has a notable influence on the entire telecom industry. He has even presented numerous projects at the U.S. Astricon conference and has been awarded a ‘Fellow of Astricon’ for ten consecutive years.

Under his leadership, the company offers the VICIdial open source call center solution which is a fully featured call center suite with inbound, outbound and blended call handling. The software has been adopted by thousands of companies around the world with over 14,000 new system |September 2018|

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installations in more than 100 countries and has been translated in 16 different languages as well.

Best-in-class Open-Source Software ViciDial was introduced to the industry as one of the first free and open-source software solution. This has generated a dramatic effect on the contact center industry as a whole, and has even pushed other solution providers to offer better services to maintain the customers they have.

VICIdial can be installed to the hardware by the customer’s own hand or else they can even contact the company for the hostage service. A large VICIdial installation can handle over two million phone calls per day, with over eight hundred agents handling calls and internet communications from customers. There are also over two thousand settings and configuration options, allowing easy customization of distinct call flows, agent permissions and other settings.

This solution is available as a hosted service which is extremely flexible & scalable, and it can be installed on customer premise hardware as well.

On the hosted contact center platform, VICIdial Group adapts blended telecom and internet services from multiple carriers to offer a robust and fault-tolerant solution for its clients. The company’s blended tier-3 hosted internet infrastructure has proven to be an optimal solution and has been able to serve clients with numerous users in multiple countries spread across the world.

Some of the other exclusive features that also offered to its hosted clients for free are like custom built VICIdial servers optimized for call centers, cellphone number scrubbing, agent audio soundboards and high-level data encryption, the features which are known for its real-time assistance.

We offer an innovative open-source telecom solution for contact centers.

Center VO.IP Germany 2nd place for Call Center Applications and Sourceforge.net “Project of the Year” VOIP Projects and so on.

In the upcoming years, ViciDial is planning to offer training regarding the software and envisions demonstrate how power of software can be used for the betterment of the society. The company also believes that this will continue to deliver an edge in the contact center segment of the telecom industry.

Additionally, the ViciHost which is an official hosted and managed solution from ViciDial allows customers to avail the benefit of a private cloud of dedicated, custom-built ViciDial servers with extra services that is not available on the ViciDial open-source platform.

Promising Future Over the last fifteen years, ViciDial professionals has experienced and learned a lot by interacting with clients based worldwide The company ardently recognizes the hardware required for a very large contact center setup. And its perception in providing the solution has been appreciated by many industry leaders.

The company has earned numerous prestigious awards including Internet Telephony East, “Best of Show” Call |September 2018|

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Editor’s Choice

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he gratifying tool for companies to lead ahead IoT Technology” The Internet of things (IoT) is a revolutionary change for many sectors like manufacturing, agriculture, retail, electronic, energy and healthcare which are progressing towards the IoT phenomenon to connect digitally. It has placed an opportunity to build unusual results which increases a company’s compatibility. Enterprises seeking development are focusing on the use of real-time data management and IoT analysis. Many of the companies are adopting this technology to heighten their power of consumption. Companies are mainly concentrating on IoT application from “sensing” instead of “doing” to grow its competitive advantages. This element empowers organizations by allowing them to take the IoT advantage and adopt a more ‘innovative connected approach’.

Infrastructure Management – Optimization of Technology New applications are now enhancing their level of consumption. Likewise, manufacturing sector is also

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|September 2018|

getting engrossed and achieving excellence through IoT Techniques. Applications are liable for monitoring and controlling operations for urban and rural manufactures like bridges, farms, and railway tracks. It is the key features of the applications were IoT infrastructure is also used for monitoring the construction safety and risk management system and operations. This major feature represents the mechanism of IoT application which works under infrastructure management. Benefits of IoT Technology are cost reducing, time reducing, better in quality, and increase productivity. It helps to make fast decisions and save money with real-time analysis. IoT devices help to give prominent results by monitoring and controlling operations used in all infrastructure related area.

Manufacturing Techniques are Growing with IoT Technology In the manufacturing sector, networking and controlling have been used with IoT devices. It provides information about data and operation stability. Network status and the information is collected in the system by tracking IoT device. Manufacturing control process deliver information about industry application and smart manufacturing details receiving form IoT device. IoT intelligent system enables sharing information about product demands, service management, supply chain networks, sensors and control systems together. Small industries can also be integrated with IoT technology that enables real-time optimization, measurements, production compatibility and safety management.

However, intelligent systems are determined as the significant technique that implies user experience and system security which ultimately saves costs.

which land is fertile or which one is dry and predict future fields.

IoT Technology Helps to Optimize Energy Consumption Integrated Sensing and Control system helps to optimize energy consumption. IoT devices are integrated with energy consumption systems in order to maintain balance between power generation and energy usage. IoT devices offer the opportunity to remotely gather information. It enables advance functions like remote controlling and changing light conditions. IoT Technology work for home-based energy system which provide power related information, energy consumption and energy usage at homes. IoT devices set goals to improve efficiency, reliability and sustainability of the energy system.

Monitoring Environment through IoT Technology Environment monitoring application has been involved with sensors to assist information about environment changes by identifying water quantity, atmosphere, air pressure etc. It also has focus on monitoring movements of wildlife and their habitats. Devices connected to the internet also provide statistics about earthquake or tsunami - early warning systems, and also used as an emergency system. IoT device application is used to collect geographic information and majorly instructive information. This device also uses standardized approach to bring wireless sensing technique and gather finest information.

IoT Technology Helps to Sustain Building and Home Automation

IoT Technology brings Innovative Farming Methods The Agriculture sector is one of the industry to implement IoT technology for stability and better performance. IoT technology has become a significant method of farming. It also offers durability and functionality to the whole process. The combination of wireless sensors with agricultural apps and cloud platforms benefits in gathering definite information relating to environmental conditions like, rainfall, temperature, humidity, wind speed etc. Farmers are getting competent results out of it, and are able to find real-time information easily. Linked with farmland, it improves and automates farming techniques like weather information, taking decision on quality and quantity, and minimizes risk and waste. With IoT Tech farmers can find out detailed information of farm and similarly know |September 2018|

With certainty, IoT devices are used to monitor and control the mechanical, electrical and electronic systems.

IoT devices are used in various types of home automation and building automation systems. Control and sensory applications offer unified information. The integration of the internet with building creates an energy management system which will allow prominent energy efficiency.

There have been many ways for IoT technology to expand compatibility in the digital world, and it will be implemented in each sector to work as an important tool, to enhance its affinity. After all, the IoT network makes technology more unified and satisfying, with its tools and applications and IoT will be a step ahead towards numerous opportunities.

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WireIE: Bridging the Digital Divide Across Canada and the Americas

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ommitted to providing best in class business network solutions in underserved regions from Port Hardy, British Columbia to Gander, Newfoundland WireIE Holdings International Inc. is working around the clock. In a brief interview with Insights Success, Rob Barlow, the President & CEO of WireIE speaks to a few of the challenges the organization has faced, and strategies it’s incorporated to ensure WireIE’s standing in the industry.

Let’s have a look at what the leader has to say about his organization.

Give a brief overview of WireIE, its solutions and services?

Rob: WireIE Holdings International Inc. builds, deploys, and operates Broadband network solutions in underserved regions across Canada and the Americas. Our specialty is owning and operating carrier grade Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) certified networks for oil and gas, mining, utilities, healthcare, financial services, retail and government industries.

How do you diversify your Telecom Solutions so that they will benefit all of your customers?

Rob: Agility is key. WireIE is operating in communities that have been leaning on unreliable connectivity – if they even have access at all. We can’t always turn to the sort of solutions most people take for granted in bigger cities.

We’ve diversified our offerings to reflect that. We sell wholesale access to Tier 1 and Tier 2 network operators throughout Canada, and the US. We’ve also helped create small Internet service providers like FirstTEL, an Indigineous business, where we were able to offer a triple play Internet, VoIP and 290 Channels of IP TV. This

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Rob Barlow President & CEO

offering is typically one-tenth the cost of traditional network deployments.

Please describe the experiences, achievements or lessons learnt that have shaped the journey of WireIE? Rob: I started as a lineman with Hydro One 25 years ago.

We were using two-way radios and doing everything on paper. I always knew there had to be a better way. After a decade of doing that I left to work for Clearnet, and later Telus when it acquired Clearnet. It was revolutionary what Clearnet was doing with the Motorola iDEN network at the time. It had always been in the back of my mind during my lineman days, but that got me thinking about how we should be putting more effort into connecting these communities. Even now, all these years later it’s absolutely baffling how many of communities don’t even have adequate broadband infrastructure.

What role do WireIE’s innovations play in transforming the industry?

Rob: I think, above all, we want to have a social impact.

We’re creating channels for voices where there’s a precedence of exclusion and isolation from the digital economy. It’s a digital divide perpetuated by inadequate |September 2018|

The

Fastest Gr wing

Providers to Watch 2018

assessment of needs. The onus is being put on these communities to prove the needed funding incentives for broadband infrastructure, but most of these communities lack the technical talent or resources to assess their highspeed infrastructure, as well as the commercial knowledge and buying power. When they do build infrastructure, they’re often requesting fibre-optics as a fix-all. It’s a business case that is dependant on subsidies for initial infrastructure with no funding for the operational costs that continue to be an ongoing escalating barrier. We’re trying to demonstrate that the typical incentive model isn’t the best solution. There are fourth generation technologies and commercial models capable of delivering reliable broadband connectivity to underserved markets.

We’re creating channels for voices where there’s a precedence of exclusion and isolation from the digital economy.

Please give us a brief explanation regarding your influence towards the industry and the company?

Rob: I’m trying to drive this conversation surrounding the digital divide both through WireIE’s mandate and as a public individual. With WireIE, I’ve spent over a decade laying the groundwork, bringing these underserved communities access to the digital economy and the highspeed broadband infrastructure needed to compete in the 21st century. It’s about inclusion, and that drives most of what we do.

What are WireIE’s future goals?

Rob: Bringing all underserved markets the same service you would get in metropolitan areas is an ongoing longterm strategy. We definitely still have a lot of ground to cover. There’s no reason why more people can’t be empowered with connection. We’d love to see governments at all levels change the conversation and tone of the discussion, recognizing that broadband in relation to underserved markets requires a different approach before incentive programs for capital are utilized. Beyond that, our goal is delivering Industrial Internet of Things networks to remote, heavy industry like liquid natural gas exploration and production facilities.

Considering the rising number of Telecom solution providers, how does WireIE stand out from its competitors?

Rob: Partnering is in our DNA and we utilize these partnerships to get underserved markets connected and give them a voice. There’s strength in what we’ve formed and it’s still in the works. The partnership with Frontline 360 Inc. is a prime example. We’re an exclusive distributor of the Internet Protocol TV (IPTV) VoIP and Internet for Indigenous communities in Canada. This is the sort of technology that is going to give these communities access to the digital economy and close the divide.

|September 2018|

About the Leader Rob Barlow is the President and CEO of WireIE. An entrepreneurial leader by nature, Rob Barlow has been a key force in the introduction of several high profile technologies into the Canadian Telecommunications sector.

Rob brings progressive senior experience in the IT, Wireless Internet, Energy and Telecommunications sectors. He’s held various strategic positions at TELUS and Hydro One. About the Company WireIE is an industry leader that delivers purpose built business networks, bridging the digital divide across Canada and the Americas. WireIE sells wholesale access to Tier 1 and Tier 2 networks operators, and direct to large oil and gas developers. The company specializes in owning and operating carrier grade Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) certified networks to connect the underserved in oil and gas, mining, utilities, healthcare, financial services, retail and government industries. WireIE has become the first carrier worldwide with a focus on underserved region networks to receive the Metro Ethernet Forum Carrier Ethernet 2.0 certification for service operators.

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Tech Revolution

Putting the Sec in DevOps with Automated Tools

T

he pace of software development has kicked into high gear, with new versions being churned out at a breakneck pace. In hopes of shortening the development cycle, organizations are fast adopting the DevOps model which relies far more on automation, new practices, and of course continuous tools to help get the job done.

checks on the code and increasing visibility across teams for better efficiency.

The DevOps model was established to improve coordination between the development and production teams, making the process of getting new software out the door faster and smoother. The rapid release of new updates to applications like we see from companies such as Netflix and Facebook has done a great deal to improve the user experience, providing them with better products, and changing our expectations for how a top notch software house should perform.

There is now an understanding throughout the industry that securing the code should be a core business objective. This has led to DevOps’ evolution into the DevSecOps model that looks to integrate security practices into the DevOps tool chain.

One of the ways that teams working with DevOps have achieved these results stems from a significant amount of “shifting left” various

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While this shift to a more agile methodology has proved to have significant results in getting high quality releases out on tighter schedules, the question moving forward is how to keep the code secure?

Making this shift can be a scary endeavor for many organizations who had never quite succeeded in implementing security even before they moved to the faster DevOps model. Changing practices within your organization, while challenging, can actually help to overcome a number of important challenges, especially as they relate to prioritization.

Reducing Friction Between Development and Security Teams There is already a lot of friction between security teams and developers, with security doing their hardest to get an already stressed engineering staff to address vulnerabilities that they are unable to see as directly affecting their product, and therefore not really worthy of their time and attention.

From the developer’s point of view, their first priority is pushing out a product that performs its basic functions without crashing. Security for them is an added bonus, but more often just an extra pain that slows down their release schedule.

However, in a DevSecOps model that uses the right automated tools, security does not have to come at the expense of sticking to the timeline.

One of the tools that developers depend on for making their tight schedules are open source components. These components, which are written and maintained by the open source community and |September 2018|

identify and alert on open source components with known vulnerabilities. To put it bluntly, they lacked the proper automated tools for the job.

Simply put, if a security team does not know which components they are using, and which ones are vulnerable, then they cannot direct their development team on what to patch or where.

Establishing Facts Based Prioritization Through Adoption of Automated Tools Visibility is key element of DevSecOps and is invaluable for communicating to developers why remediating certain vulnerabilities should be prioritized. This is where automation can cut the amount of friction of having a security team member sitting on the development crew.

Rami Sass CEO

WhiteSource Software

make up between 60-80% of the code base in modern applications, give developers the powerful features that they need for their products without forcing them to reinvent the wheel.

Unfortunately, developers do not have a practical way of manually keeping track of which open source components have known vulnerabilities before they add them to their products or monitoring said products post release when new vulnerabilities are reported. These oversights can have significant effects like we saw in the Equifax breach last September when hackers exploited a vulnerable version of Apache Struts 2 in the company’s web portal to steal the personally identifiable information belonging to over 145.9 million people.

The application security testing tools that they were using help protect their proprietary code were unable to catch this vulnerable component because only Software Composition Analysis (SCA) solutions are able to

|September 2018|

Using the right continuous, automated tools at the earliest, and even later stages of the DevOps tool chain can add improved visibility to the process and make the product’s code significantly more secure. Whether it is helping developers to choose the right components before they even make a pull request from open source repositories, using a selection tool like the Web Advisor to check if the component meets their organization’s policies for security, license compliance, and even quality, can help save time on remediations after the code has already been compiled.

Moreover, technology like WhiteSource’s Effective Usage Analysis can be a game changer for keeping code secure. According to our research into Java, 70% of vulnerable functionalities in open source components are not in fact effective, and therefore do not have a direct impact on their product. Practically, this means a 70% reduction in the scope of alerts that need to be addressed for remediation, making prioritization an easier task.

Automating this process of analyzing the open source components and presenting the data on a platform that is accessible for all participants of the DevSecOps tool chain to see can help to pass on the message of what is most important, providing evidence that remediations are really worth their time and effort.

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