The latest OpenStack Summit has kicked off in Boston, with the Foundation naturally being tooled up with news and announcements for attendees.

Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, spoke of the ‘three Cs’ – capabilities, compliance, and cost – with organisations becoming more sophisticated in their approach to workload placement across public and private clouds.

Each of these Cs was exemplified by a company working with OpenStack in that area. GE Healthcare presented the benefits of their private cloud as a service in partnership with Rackspace for compliance, while the US Army Cyber School was cited for saving money through OpenStack. For capability, Verizon outlined how it was leveraging OpenStack for Virtual Network Solutions, a product which focuses on edge computing and the Internet of Things for compute, network, and storage.

The foundation also announced it had elected China Unicom and FiberHome Telecommunication technologies as gold members. The two companies both ‘demonstrate[d] OpenStack’s strategic value for networking and large-scale service providers’, the company said.

Recent headlines in the press have not been entirely kind to OpenStack. As reported by Fortune last month, Intel cut funding on an OpenStack initiative it launched alongside Rackspace, resulting in job losses for the latter.

Yesterday, Rackspace announced it was collaborating with Dell EMC to deliver OpenStack private clouds with the behemoth conglomerate providing the compute and storage side. Rackspace also took the opportunity to scotch the recent press cuttings in a blog post authored by Scott Crenshaw, SVP strategy and product.

“Clickbait headlines aside, the facts are clear: OpenStack deployments are growing,” he wrote. “It is becoming a standard cloud platform for corporations of all sizes, which are consistently growing their usage of OpenStack. That trend is [borne] out at Rackspace, where we’re seeing dramatic growth in our customers’ usage of OpenStack.”

Crenshaw cited a Forrester Research report from December last year which argued OpenStack had become a ‘de facto standard platform for the private cloud market’. While admitting the initiative had seen a couple of ‘false starts’, he added that those who were willing to take the plunge will reap rewards.

“OpenStack marks the point where open source infrastructure software became too complex to be delivered as traditional software distribution,” he wrote. “To successfully harness the power of open source innovation, the vast majority of users will consume open source infrastructure as a service, which is, after all, the way cloud was meant to be used.

“Some of the vendors who haven’t crossed this chasm are indeed exiting the OpenStack business. Rackspace’s billion server hours of OpenStack operational experience is probably an insurmountable lead,” Crenshaw added.

The negative headlines came amid a recent user survey from the foundation which said OpenStack was capturing 44% more deployments and input from 22% more organisations than one year previously. “Far from being in danger of demise, OpenStack has become the catalyst for a rich and vital transformation in the way the world consumes open source infrastructure,” said Crenshaw.

You can read the full Rackspace post here.

Telephone systems and PBXs (private branch exchange) have historically been a hot potato in a business; an important service for users needing firm ownership and the most obvious bucket thrown into being that of the traditional IT team. This IT team is often frustrated that they do not have the telecoms experience to know what they are dealing with.

Over the years I have lost count of the times the IT team has commented – both from customers and businesses I have worked within – of struggling with the telephony component, lacking skills, experience and understanding of the ethos of this historic comms world. The telco world, its  approaches and components, are very different to the IP based world that traditional IT is used to operating within. Often these historical telephony deployments are also creaking, having through accident and sometimes design, been configured in weird and wonderful ways that now no one is familiar with or has the time to unpick. So, IT are keen to have someone else own the problem, but find there is nowhere else to locate it in the business.

In 2017, a vast number of firms still sit in this camp, faced with the challenges of supporting and maintaining telephony systems, often based on ageing technology and bolted together from varying suppliers to achieve delivery of provisioning, PBX, desktop devices and IP interfaces with today’s modern world of softphones and PC and mobile based technologies.

Often the biggest challenge is when something breaks and the IT team has to circle around, reacting to fix an issue none really has the confidence or experience of. This same team has to maintain, monitor and manage not only telephony, but the breadth of IT services and solutions serving the business.

The challenge with telephony over email services or most typical IT services, for example, is that it is real time and any degradation in packet quality is seen immediately from both ends of the spectrum, caller and recipient.  Send an email that gets delayed and more often than not neither end notices as it is seen as a transient communication method. A phone call is immediate real time two-way communication, where any degradation in service results in packet loss and obvious call quality issues to those on the call.  Thus, have an issue on your PBX and find your breadth of users complaining about mid call line drops, sound quality (hissing or crackling) or issues making or receiving calls.

This situation is exaggerated quickly when you have multiple sites with local PBXs and issues to manage on a wider scale. In today’s demanding world to support customer demand for high quality service and response, and staff’s need for more flexibility to work anytime, anywhere on any device a new approach is essential.

As we have seen in the CRM world, once cloud has proven its disruption it will grow fast

So along came VoiP and cloud telephony to deliver the common benefits of cloud from better resilience (uptime and performance), removal or reduction in capital costs, faster deployment, easier upgrades and scaling of usage.

In today’s world, there is rarely a logical reason to deploy a traditional physical PBX. As we have already seen in the CRM world where now 50% of all new deployments globally are cloud based – and expected to soon reach 70% of all sales – once cloud has proven its disruption it will grow fast.

So with cloud telephony, much of the challenge for the IT team in managing the telecoms for the business is taken away by the cloud provider, except the administration, provisioning and configuration of policies for the business.

The bigger question is: should this even be with the IT team? Take Salesforce as a business application platform. Is this managed by IT? They may have been involved in the initial procurement, providing a security review, a technical approval for fit for the business network and security models, but the day to day management revolves around the business needs.  Provisioning and decommissioning users, configuring data presentation (fields, reports, dashboards), managing business rules, helping users – this falls under a Salesforce Administrator / team.

So is telephony not an extension of this? A business service that should the technical complexity and implications be removed (using a cloud provider) is better placed being owned and managed by a business services admin as opposed to a technical IT support team.

Now take another thought initiative and consider integrating your telephony and CRM, having customer and prospect data supporting the logic of voice interactions.

Imagine being able to inform a sales user that should a key customer be marked as ‘Gold’ category then their calls will automatically be put to the head of inbound call queues. That any new sales opportunity in the CRM over a target threshold value will automatically get priority support during their trial experience and bypass automated call recording triage processes. That if you put an account in your teams name that any of their inbound calls will automatically go to the sales rep allocated and then the call group for your team only.

The business and customer benefits are obvious in this day of a heightened buyer dynamic expecting and demanding high quality customer service.

To enable this should it not be easy and intuitive for the same Salesforce Admin / team to manage the customer telephony in alignment with the CRM system?  Embedding the cloud telephony end to end inside of Salesforce itself is long overdue. This allows the utilisation of the same security model and all rich data to create a non-technically managed, customer centric phone system that is as flexible as Salesforce itself.

Telephony has been in the hands of the technical IT team out of necessity, not choice. Now you can choose to put it where it belongs, in the heart of customer-centricity land aligned with customer service and sales.

Editor’s note: Find out more about Natterbox’s latest announcement with regards to Salesforce here.

Growing a digital business is essential for virtually every enterprise across every industry. Large enterprises and small businesses alike are digitizing their internal and customer-facing processes and services to increase efficiency, scale their businesses, and collect meaningful data. Yet, while many companies have launched digital services to collect data, we haven’t fully tapped into the potential of data analytics—even though studies suggest that digital will be a top differentiator in years to come. Curious how you can get a better handle on digital transformation? Read on to learn why it’s so crucial, plus discover six key ways to digitize your business.

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Digital technology need not fall exclusively in the category of ‘user-facing.’ In fact, any piece of technology, regardless how old it is or where it falls in the enterprise IT environment, is a ‘digital technology’ if it aligns with the customer-centric goal of digital.
From mainframes and middleware to cloud computing and the Internet of Things, all enterprise technology might qualify as digital technology.

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“The world is a vampire.” The words to the Smashing Pumpkins song kept coming to mind as I listened to the discourse of a leading tier one carrier CISO.

I was in New York City attending one of the technical seminars that constantly come up projecting what the new New Thing is going to be. This rendition was on the insecure world of data flowing across networks. I mused that this time there was some fire to go along with the smoke. Snowden had just come on to the world stage and shone light on all that NSA and other nation states could and were doing to gain access to sensitive data, both personal and commercial.

To those of us in the network transmission business, the idea of securing network connections is nothing new. For many years we’ve used industry standard techniques to secure connections as data travels across insecure networks. The disturbing revelations coming out of the Snowden documents were not that data had been hacked but that the tools we had come to rely on for so many years could no longer be guaranteed safe.

Adding to the alarm was the issue that we were moving into the cloud and the traditional castle perimeter of the firewall would no longer exist. In fact, according to the speaker they had become nothing more than yellow police tape around a crime scene.

The cloud offers a lot in savings when it comes to reducing CAPEX, but the trade-off is the OPEX component

I have to admit I don’t know any other lyrics from the song. I just remember it from the TV series Whale Wars. But, one thing’s for sure: the world has become a vampire when it comes to data in flight.

Security for transmitted data is a concern as old as the internet. The name branding changes; it used to be data-in-motion and now it’s data in flight. I guess data-in-flight sounds more perilous. Even back in the days of the granddaddy of the internet, ARPANET, Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet, famously predicted that the growth of connectivity would make security a serious concern. As Metcalfe’s law states, “the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system.” Any CISO that surveys the migration to the cloud will agree.

In the traditional packet network, two standards have been the stalwart tools for data in flight.

Netscape came up with HTTPS as a means to protect the application layer in the early 90s. Originally developed by Netscape for Webpage protection, the technology has evolved from SSL implementations to TSL standards for greater security. Apple announced last year at their World Wide Developer’s conference a requirement that all apps sold on their App Store needed TSLv 1.2.

Born in the 90s, IPsec has become the go-to solution for many data use cases. It’s the cornerstone security for both in VPNs and TSL/SSL. Designed from the beginning to work in the packet network TCP/IP environment, IPsec became the de facto standard for network encryption.

About 10 years ago, a Layer 2 equivalent of IPsec called MACsec was developed with a higher quality of security and better utilization of bandwidth, requiring only about 10% of the bandwidth. MACsec limitations of encrypting and decrypting at each network switch severely limited its use. The benefits though were significant enough that specialized hardware-based Layer 2 encryptors became popular with Fortune 500 companies and governments.

Whether the need is for cloud compute or storage, the cloud has a wide diversity of utility. Ultimately it is a virtual overlay to a technology or business infrastructure. From a network transport perspective, the cloud can offer significant benefits in agility and cost savings. The trade-off is that now many touch points exist outside the traditional designs of firewalls or private networks.

How do traditional security techniques fit into this new technology? Starting at the top of the stack, HTTPS still has a substantial data protection role to play. Applications operate above the network and data link layers. Apps are often the interface to the cloud services. There are a few serious issues with HTTPS.

Whether the need is for cloud compute or storage, the cloud has a wide diversity of utility

At the recent RSA conference in San Francisco, Dave Shackleford of the SANS Institute pointed out that security is now being designed into apps. Software developers are not always going to be knowledgeable about building high-quality security. This seems to be borne out in the 2016 Shadow Data Report which states that less than 95% of cloud applications are not SOC-2 compliant and a full 96% do not meet the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) guidelines. A typical company believes that it has 30-40 cloud apps operating when in fact it has 841.

IPsec has a bigger struggle in the cloud environment. The cloud offers a lot in savings when it comes to reducing CAPEX, but the trade-off is the OPEX component. Bandwidth, such as VPNs are expensive and IPsec will require between 40% and 60% of bandwidth. Latency is another issue with IPsec, although some vendors have moved it into hardware implementation to speed up the processing.

MACsec has evolved to fit nicely into the cloud. Improvements that allow end-to-end connectivity now address its limitations. With very low bandwidth requirements along with low latency, MACsec has become the best method for encrypting across a network. One innovative company, Senetas, has taken its hardware-based Layer 2 encryptor and virtualized it. Network function virtualization (NFV) can now make high-quality, low-cost encryption solutions possible.

How to drive a stake into the heart of the vampire? Encrypt as low in the protocol stack as possible. Take advantage of the new overlay network topology of NFV and use modern techniques to protect data. Encrypting at Layer 3 using IPsec is no longer necessary. A properly designed NFV implementation can take advantage of data center technologies like VXLAN to use MACsec for both Layer 2 and Layer 3 protection. And, by moving away from IPsec, the cost savings in VPN connections can make a significant contribution to upgrading to a virtualized network.

Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) continues to be one of the hottest enterprise apps today, fuelled by the relentless need all companies have to increase sales while delivering customised orders profitably and accurately. Here are a few of the many results CPQ strategies are delivering today:

• Companies relying on CPQ are growing profit margins at a 57% greater rate year-over-year compared to non-adopters.
• 89% improvement in turning Special Pricing Requests (SPRs) into sales by automating them using a cloud-based CPQ system.
• 67% reduction in reworked orders at a leading specialty vehicle manufacturer due to quotes reflecting exactly what customers wanted to buy.
• 23% improvement in upsell and cross-sell revenue by having the CPQ system intelligently recommend the optimal product or service that has the highest probability of purchase and best possible gross margin.
• CPQ strategies excel when they are designed to reach challenging selling, pricing, revenue and operational performance goals versus automating existing selling workflows.

Another factor fueling CPQs’ rapid growth is how quickly results of a pilot can be measured and used for launching a successful company-wide launch.  Pilots often concentrate on quote creation time, quoting accuracy, sales cycle reduction, automating Special Pricing Requests (SPRs), up-sells and cross-sells, perfect order performance, margin improvements and best of all, winning new customers. These are the baseline metrics many companies use to measure their CPQ performance. Throughout 2017 these metrics across industries are accelerating. There is a revolution going on in selling today.

Five ways CPQ is revolutionising selling today

Cloud- and SaaS-based CPQ solutions are quicker to implement, easier to customise to customers’ requirements, and available 24/7 on any Internet-enabled device, anytime. Many are designed to integrate into Salesforce, further accelerating adoption seamlessly.  The following five factors are the primary catalysts revolutionising selling today:

• Designing in excellent user experiences (UX) is the new normal for CPQ apps. CPQ vendors are competing with the quality of user experiences they deliver in 2017, moving beyond packing every feature possible into app releases. This is having a corresponding impact on adoption, increasing the number of sales representatives and entire teams who can get up and running fast with a new CPQ app. The net result is reduced sales cycles, growing pipelines, and more sales reps actively using CPQ apps to increase their selling effectiveness.
• Integrating with legacy CRM, ERP and pricing systems in real-time are using service-oriented frameworks gives sales teams what they need to close deals faster. Legacy CPQ systems in the past often had very precise field mappings to 3rd party legacy CRM, ERP and pricing systems. They were brittle and would break very easily, slowing down sales cycles and making sales reps resort to manually-based approaches from decades before. In 2017 there are service-oriented frameworks that make brittle, easily broken mappings thankfully an integration practice in the past. With a loosely coupled service framework, real-time integration between CRM and ERP systems can be quickly be implemented and sales teams can get out and close more deals. Leaders in the area include enosiX, who are enabling their customers’ sales forces to enter sales orders into SAP directly from Salesforce, saving valuable selling time and increasing order accuracy.
• Competing for deals using Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning and Intelligent Agents are force multipliers driving greater sales. Salesforce’s Einstein is an example of the latest generation of AI applications that are enabling sales reps and teams to gain insights that weren’t available before. Combining customer data with these advanced predictive data analytics technologies yields insights into how selling strategies for different accounts can customize to specific prospect needs. Selling strategies are more effective and focused when AI, machine learning, and Intelligent Agents are designed in to guide quoting, pricing and product configuration in real-time.
• CPQ apps optimized for mobile devices are enabling sales reps to drastically reduce quote creation times, sales cycles and increase sales win rates. For many companies whose sales teams are in the field calling on accounts the majority of the time, mobile-based CPQ apps are how they get the majority of their work done. Salesforce’s Force.com is one of the leading platforms CPQ software companies are relying on to create mobile apps, further capitalizing on the already-established levels of familiarity sales teams have with the Salesforce platform.
• The vision many companies have of synchronizing multichannel and omnichannel selling as part of their CPQ strategies is now attainable. One of the greatest challenges of expanding sales channels is ensuring a consistently high-quality customer experience across each. With on-premise CPQ, CRM and ERP selling systems, this is very challenging as there are often multiple database systems supporting each. This is a breakout year for omnichannel selling as cloud-based CPQ systems and the platforms they are built on can securely scale across all selling channels a company chooses to launch. Being able to track which CPQ deals emanated from which marketing program, and which channels are the most effective in closing sales is now possible.

SYS-CON Events announced today that Interoute, owner-operator of one of Europe’s largest networks and a global cloud services platform, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 20th Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017 at the Javits Center in New York, New York. Interoute is the owner-operator of one of Europe’s largest networks and a global cloud services platform which encompasses 12 data centers, 14 virtual data centers and 31 colocation centers, with connections to 195 additional third-party data centers across Europe. Its full-service Unified ICT platform serves international enterprises and many of the world’s leading service providers, as well as governments and universities.

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