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NATD in the news
Avaya
Book review
Cisco
MACs
NEC
Nortel equipment
Partnership
snom
Speech

NATD in the news

Carousel Industries announces acquisition of Daycom Systems
Carousel Industries, Inc., premier technology solutions provider and Avaya's top business partner, has acquired Daycom Systems, a telecommunications company based in San Diego, California. Started in 1992 by Richard Day, "Daycom has proudly served customers in our region," said Day, Daycom CEO and president. "Through this acquisition, we are able to expand our technology solutions, offer national service delivery and a greater pool of resources for our customers." The acquisition of Daycom makes a strong contribution to Carousel's overall growth strategy and will employ more than 550 people. "This acquisition represents a tremendous opportunity for Daycom and Carousel. Given our nation's current economic struggles, this acquisition reinforces that Carousel is here to stay for the long haul. We continue to grow our company so that we are properly positioned to support all of our customers nationally," states Carousel CEO Jeff Gardner. "Daycom has a great reputation in the industry and a strong customer base. Like Carousel, they have built a culture around taking care of customers."
Visit www.carouselindustries.com or www.daycom.com.



ScanSource Security kicks off 2009 IP workshops
ScanSource Security, a sales unit of ScanSource, Inc. and leading distributor of physical security solutions, has kicked off the 2009 edition of its very successful IP Workshop series.  The workshops were developed to train and educate dealers on the benefits of offering IP-based physical security solutions to their end-user customers.  More than 320 resellers attended the workshops in 2008, where ScanSource Security introduced a wireless component to select workshops and, due to high demand and interest, has incorporated wireless education into each workshop in 2009.  What’s more, ScanSource Security’s manufacturer partners have realized the great benefit the workshop offers to dealers and, therefore, the 2009 series will include the technologies of 14 of its industry-leading partners, including Alvarion, Axis Communications, Cisco, DigiOp, dotworkz, HID, IQinVision, Keri Systems, OnSSI, Panasonic Systems Solutions, Quadrox, Ruckus Wireless, Sony and Tropos Networks. The remaining workshops are:

Visit www.scansourcesecurity.com/ipworkshops.
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Avaya

Avaya’s UC product migration
Avaya’s migration to Unified Communications includes the addition of a new Intelligent Presence Server, which aggregates presence information via collectors from various presence sources, in conjunction with Avaya one-X and third-party clients. The new one-X Communicator client can operate as a standalone H.323 or SIP client that provides basic telephony functions or as a UC client integrated with one-X Portal for presence information. It brings together control of telephony (Avaya Communication Manager), conferencing (Avaya Meeting Exchange Enterprise), and messaging (Avaya Modular Messaging with the Avaya Message Storage Server). Avaya one-X Portal allows users to administer Extension to Cellular settings and phone numbers, and access the corporate LDAP directory and personal contacts thru a secure VPN SSL Web client. Avaya one-X Speech adds new functionality to existing enterprise applications with voice activated calling and conferencing, including Modular Messaging and email environments. Avaya Unified Communications All Inclusive combines voice and video telephony software and unified communications applications in a single flexible package that's easy to acquire, deploy, manage and use.
Visit www.avaya.com.
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Book review

Telecom for Non-Engineers

Telecommunications, by its very nature, is a technical field, but you shouldn’t have to be a degreed engineer to make sense of it. Telecommunications and Data Communications Handbook by Ray Horak is the one book you’ll need to understand the entire telecom landscape, from copper to fiber, wireline to wireless, LANs to MANs to WANs, TDM to IP, from AAL to Zigbee and everything in between. Written in a plain-English, commonsense style by an authority on the subject, this critically acclaimed book is at just the right level for the serious professional who wants to get at the whole truth—without the math.

Author: Ray Horak
Publisher: Wiley-Interscience (July 2008)
ISBN-10: 0470396075
ISBN-13: 978-0470396070
List Price: $99.95
Digital Guru Price: $79.96Back To Top

Cisco

Cisco Unified Contact Center portfolio update
Cisco continues its leadership in evolving the industry to Unified Communications (UC) via Unified Communications Manager (UCM) 7.0(1). For contact centers, there are various components required for assisted-service and self-service applications depending on the implementation. Cisco has three target markets: Unified Contact Center Hosted for Service Providers; Unified Contact Center Enterprise (Unified CCE); and Unified Contact Center Express (Unified CCX) for Small-Medium Businesses (SMBs).  

Unified Contact Center Hosted and Enterprise 7.5(4) brings full multi-channel contact routing with universal queue for inbound voice, web chat (single-session and multi-session), web call back, web collaboration, e-mail and outbound voice all under control of a single routing engine that has full redundancy and is designed for fault tolerance. Cisco is extending the contact center with presence integration via its Cisco Unified Expert Advisor option, which extends the contact center by allowing presence-enabled experts to handle certain incoming contacts. Cisco Unified Customer Voice Portal (Unified CVP) 7.0(2) is a Voice Extensible Markup Language (VXML) 2.1 compliant platform providing comprehensive IVR capabilities. Unified CVP takes advantage of the integrated browser built into Cisco IOS, allowing callers to interact with menus, scripts and self-service applications. Calls do not have to be brought to a central “IVR Farm” to provide services. Calls can be kept local to save on carrier transfer charges, leveraging VoIP for toll-bypass.
Visit www.cisco.com.
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Moves, adds & changes

Amcom Software acquires SDC Solutions
Amcom Software announced the acquisition of SDC Solutions, Inc. of Manchester, N.H. The combined companies further strengthen Amcom's leadership position in the market for call center and emergency management software, dramatically increasing their customer base and expanding the solutions available to the growing company's clients. This acquisition comes at a time when demand is increasing for mission-critical communications solutions for small to mid-sized organizations, especially in the healthcare and hospitality markets. SDC Solutions' products run communications at some of the most prestigious healthcare, hospitality, higher education, government and corporate organizations in the United States. Also prompting this acquisition was a growing number of requests from SDC Solutions customers to extend their mission-critical software solutions to help manage problems related to 911 call management, incident management, and critical paging infrastructure.
Visit www.amcomsoftware.com or www.sdcsolutions.com.
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NEC

NEC introduces communications solution for hospitality
NEC Unified Solutions, Inc. (NEC) launched an affordable, pure software-based IP communications solution designed to provide hotels with basic and advanced communication solutions that support hotel staff efficiency and productivity while enabling self-service voice applications to the guests they serve. UNIVERGE Sphericall for Hospitality, a 100-percent software-based solution built on the Sphericall enterprise softswitch platform, offers substantial ownership cost savings and productivity benefits.  In addition, Sphericall for Hospitality allows for the integration of advanced features seldom made available in an economical and cost-effective communications solution for small- and medium-sized hotels. The solution integrates out-of-the-box with many existing Property Management Systems (PMS) and third-party hospitality in-room telephone handsets providers, and provides a rich, service-oriented architecture to integrate to a broad range of business applications. 
Visit www.necunified.com.
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Nortel equipment

Nectar: Nortel customers – don’t scrap old equipment
Hey, Nortel customers ... leave that gear alone. That’s the message from IP communications service provider Nectar Services Corp. Nectar says it’s not feasible for many companies to just scrap or sell their old Nortel equipment for cheap if they’re looking to dump it during these difficult times for the bankrupt company. Nectar has unveiled what it calls the "anti-buy back program," leveraging the Nectar Enterprise Session Management platform to breathe life into existing Nortel systems, deliver immediate cost savings and institute a vendor-agnostic transition strategy.

"There has been a tremendous amount of attention focused on the fate of Nortel and their customers," said Joseph T. Fuccillo, chief technology officer for Nectar. "In response, manufacturers have launched incentives to buy back and replace a customer's Nortel equipment. But for many companies, that's just not a realistic approach." Fuccillo says Nortel customers are more likely to embrace a strategy that incorporates their existing Nortel equipment. "Simply put, we can reduce a company's telecommunications expenses without costly upgrades, and we can future proof their architecture by instituting a transition strategy that isn't manufacturer-based." With nectar/ESM, Fuccillo says companies benefit from carrier-class routing and session management functionality that is completely vendor agnostic. A signaling trunk is created to nectar/ESM which enables PBXs to peer automatically to gain the full benefits of an all-IP architecture.
Visit www.nectarnetworks.com.
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Partnership

Unimax partners with AVST to deliver enterprise-wide single point of administration
Unimax Systems Corporation announced that it has entered into a partnership agreement with Applied Voice & Speech Technologies, Inc. (AVST).  AVST will leverage Unimax's flagship product, 2nd Nature, to provide administrators with an interface for single point of administration to manage CallXpress, their PBXs and other critical business systems. This enhances AVST's CallXpress Unified Communications platform with centralized administration functionality, which is a growing requirement for users in the enterprise communications marketplace. AVST customers can leverage the 2nd Nature product to unify the management of important administrative functions such as moves, adds and changes; password resets (assisted and self-service); automated provisioning; automated voicemail list management; transaction auditing; reporting and many others. 2nd Nature also enables integration between leading PBX systems and critical business systems such as Active Directory, HR, call accounting, E-911 and more.
Visit www.unimax.com or www.avst.com.
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snom

snom introduces new VoIP conference speaker phone
snom technology AG introduced the snom MeetingPoint, a SIP-based conference phone for the North American enterprise and small and medium-sized business (SMB) markets, at VoiceCon Orlando 2009. Designed for both medium to large size meeting rooms, the snom MeetingPoint features Konftel’s OmniSound 2.0 audio conferencing technology with advanced noise suppression and high fidelity wideband audio and offers a host of powerful conferencing capabilities.  Featuring snom’s fourth generation SIP technology, the snom MeetingPoint provides enterprise and SMB businesses with the same advanced SIP calling features and broad compatibility with standards-based IP PBX, hosted VoIP and unified communications solutions as snom’s 820 and 3XX series desktop VoIP phones.
Visit www.snom.com
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Speech

TelStrat’s Engage Suite now understands speech analytics
TelStrat announced Engage Analyze, the latest addition to its industry-leading contact center solution suite. Engage Analyze provides advanced speech analytics that equip organizations to transform voice calls into knowledge that can help them improve efficiency, increase compliance and gain the competitive advantage. Engage Analyze indexes and audio mines words and phrases buried in calls using a patented Phonetic Audio Search and Recognition Engine. Unlike older, less efficient speech-to-text approaches, phonetic speech search is not dependent on finite dictionary and grammar models which require constant maintenance. This makes it easy to accurately search for new competitors, product names, slang and other dynamically changing terms. Phonetic search technology also makes Engage Analyze fast – much faster than speech-to-text systems. Pre-processing or indexing of content is typically 60-80 times faster than real time, more than an order of magnitude faster than Large Vocabulary Conversational Speech Recognition (LVCSR) speech-to-text systems. Subsequent searches for words or phrases are incredibly quick, averaging over 30,000 times faster than real time and reaching rates up to 80,000 times faster.
Visit www.telstrat.com.
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