Cloud Computing is a way of computing, via the Internet, that broadly shares computer resources instead of using software or hardware on a local premise.  Cloud computing is a by-product and consequence of the ease-of-access to remote computing sites provided by the Internet.  It is a paradigm shift whereby details are abstracted from the users who no longer have need of, expertise in, or control over technology infrastructure “in the cloud” that supports them.  Cloud computing describes a new supplement, consumption and delivery model for IT services based on the Internet, and it typically involves the provision of dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources as a service over the Internet.  -  Wikipedia

Let’s take a breath after reading that.  Essentially “Cloud Computing” describes the process of outsourcing your services while maintaining secure access to them via the Internet.  You may be using these services today and not even know it.  Almost everyone in business is using MS Outlook for their e-mail and most firms have some sort of virus protection software.  But do you know the location of the actual hardware/equipment that houses all your e-mail and virus protection?  Are they in the “cloud”?  Are they provided by a service provider?

Cloud Computing has five essential characteristics: on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity and measured service.  It is for these reasons that companies are deciding to use service providers to deliver these services to locations across Canada.  The most commonly outsourced services are e-mail virus protection, network monitoring and the more mundane, document shredding.  So what’s next?  How about putting the whole telephone system in the cloud and just have telephone sets on your desk (IP Centrex)?  If that sounds too revolutionary, why not start with something with less profile like fax?

Fax is a utility service that is extremely stable and works 99% of the time.  However, today, Fax Service Providers (FSP’s) can offer much more functionality than the traditional fax implementation.  In addition, FSP’s offer higher uptime, scalability and fixed monthly costs giving the firm all the advantages without taxing management resources.

The vast majority of Canadian companies have implemented a centralized in-house fax solution whereby all inbound faxes are directed to a fax room, fax server or a receptionist’s desk where they can be scanned or converted into a soft copy (for the document management system or forwarding).  Faxes are then distributed by self serve, assistant pick up, regular office distribution or re-directed by someone managing the fax server.  Seems like a lot of manual work just to get a fax to the right desk of an employee.  Although these models work, there remain challenges such as how to process a fax during non-business hours, delays in the employee actually getting the fax, missing pages and the management cost of the manual process.

Why not outsource the inbound fax and realize all the benefits of “cloud computing”.  The benefits include personal direct fax numbers to automatically route the fax to the intended party’s e-mail inbox, immediate reception in the employee’s e-mail inbox for viewing (at home, office or on mobile device), monthly fixed cost, quick scalability (no software/hardware investment), the ability to filter out junk faxes and all the cost savings due to off loading the management of the software/hardware.  There is no longer the need to ask a client to scan the signed document and have it e-mailed.

By putting inbound fax reception into the “cloud”, the IT Director quickly realizes savings and frees up resources to concentrate on mission critical projects.  In fact that’s what one babyTEL concluded when they outsourced inbound fax reception to a Fax Service Provider:

“I want to take away the daily management of servers on my premise by outsourcing them to Service Providers that offer me equal or better service, without all the headaches of managing the service (such as software patches, software updates and generating reports).  I want to concentrate on larger projects, so paying a system administrator to re-boot a server on the weekend is a waste of my resources”

- Ben D.

For a medium and large sized companies, the savings are immediate.  The cost of supporting a centralized fax server model can be calculated similar to the example below based on a 60 employee firm:

Assumptions

60 employees receiving 8 faxes per month each

Manual receive/open/scan and forward the fax to correct recipient is 2 minutes per fax

Cost of Admin person to perform the manual forwarding is roughly $22.00 per hour

Cost of software/hardware/equipment maintenance contract, management, electricity, telephone lines and space to support in house system is roughly $500 per month

Cost of fax server equipment amortized over 5 years is roughly $200 per month

Calculation of Cost

Total minutes/month re-forwarding faxes = 2 minutes X 60 employees X 8 faxes = 960 minutes = 16 hours

Total cost for manual re-forwarding of faxes = 16 hours X $22.00 per hour = $352 per month

Total cost per year for re-forwarding inbound fax = $352 per month + $700 per month = $1,052 per month or $12,624 per year

Cost of Outsourced Fax service = 60 employees X $12.00 per month X 12 months = $8,640 per year

Total savings per year = $3,984 per year

Outsourcing fax to a Fax Service Provider can provide a 30% savings over the fax server environment commonly used today.  In larger firms with larger fax volume, the savings can even be greater.  In addition to the cost savings, employees using the service appreciate the accessibility of their faxes just like any other e-mail, regardless of where they are working:

“Lawyers in my firm appreciate the instantaneous delivery of the fax and that it can be accessed any day and any hour at the office, at home or on the road by Blackberry, iPhone or computer”

- Nancy L.

In conclusion, cloud computing now offers companies a seamless, reliable and scalable route to cost savings and higher functionality.  IT departments can now deploy their resources more efficiently knowing that the fax experts are managing the service 24/7.  Employees can now enjoy the prestige and utmost confidentiality of having a direct fax number to go along with their direct-in-dial number, direct extension numbers and individual mobile number.  The employee receives his faxes immediately, just like e-mail, and doesn’t need to wait for additional intervention.  Fax can now be moved from the capital budget to the operating budget, providing the firm much more flexibility by adopting even newer technology to serve their clients even more efficiently.  Fax can now become a communication tool that can best be provided by a Fax Service Provider.  It’s time to put fax in the Cloud.

It is not necessary to use the same redundancy mode for handling incoming traffic as outgoing traffic. For example, you may want incoming traffic to be load balanced between two end points but use an active/passive mode for outgoing traffic, where outcalls are done though the active end-point but switch to the other if that one fails to service the request.

To implement an inbound load balancing solution with disjoint end-points you need a load balancing strategy that eliminates the possibility of a race condition, where two end-points could end up answering the same call, while ensuring traffic is handled by the first available end point. Fortunately SIP provides a very simple solution to this problem by making it possible for more than one end-point to register to receive calls on the same SIP account. With such a setup two end-points register with the SIP Trunk service provider indicating that they are both ready to receive calls. When an incoming call arrives the service provider will generate an INVITE to both registered end-points. The service provider gives the call to the first end-point that accepts the INVITE and sends a CANCEL message to the other end-point.

To implement an inbound active/passive redundancy solution you can either make use of the registration mechanism, where only the active end-point registers to receive calls and if it fails the passive one takes over, or use a call forwarding scheme, where each end-point registers for its own SIP account and have the account associated with the primary end-point call forward to the account associated with the passive end point on no-answer or if the primary fails to register. The first approach, where only the active end-point registers, requires that the passive device incorporates some sort of watchdog that detects when the active has stopped working and automatically switches roles so the active takes over the passive role and registers. If your end-point device does not support this watchdog functionality, then you can use the second approach, where each end-point is assigned its own SIP account.

Redundancy for outbound traffic is also possible but how it is implemented depends heavily on the capabilities of your device and how you configure it. In all cases, the SIP Trunk service provider should allow you to make calls from any number of devices provided they are using the correct SIP credentials. The device need not register for incoming calls with the SIP service provider in order to be able to make out-calls.

As an example of a redundant outbound setup, two Fax Servers, where end-users submit their faxes by email, may both receive requests, using the DNS MX records to have each Fax Server act as an alternate to the other and to present fax traffic to them in a load balanced way. In this scenario whichever server receives an email-to-fax request will be able to call using the SIP account credentials it is configured with. If one server fails to accept an email the sender would automatically re-direct that email to the alternate by making use of the DNS MX records. If a server fails to process requests but is still able to accept emails then a watchdog that can detect this condition can be used to force it to no longer be able to accept emails.

The above example demonstrates that outbound redundancy is clearly supported at the SIP Trunking level and it is only a matter of determining how it can be accomplished with the particular device, application and setup used for a particular customer.

Service providers are among the most susceptible to this problem. Most are not technology developers, so they must invest in third party technology whose vendors can be quite good at selling their bill of goods, regardless of whether the goods fit the buyer’s bill or not! Inevitably, both the manufacturer and the service providers who buy their technology tend to believe they invest in technologies that consumers want. This however is not always the case!

Despite talk to the effect that we know consumers have control and the final say, very few take that to heart. If they did, they would realize that technology, no matter how great, is not what motivates consumers. For example, the greatest virtual assistant service in the world won’t convince a consumer to sign up if they don’t value a virtual assistant. The same could be said for a myriad other technologies! By the way; whatever happened to Google Wave and its amazing real-time messaging capability? Oh, well… that’s a topic for another discussion!

Every technology company that is launching new capabilities struggles to justify the investment. Whether they succeed or not has a lot to do with how careful they are in prioritizing consumer needs and getting customers engaged ahead of their own interest in exploiting technology to drive return.

Mobile Carriers services will undergo a radical change over the next few years evolving from voice calls and SMS to mVoIP over the data connection.

The benefits of using Mobile VoIP are substantial:

• It provides a low cost mVoIP phone that travels in the pocket or purse of the user.
• Works over 3G, 4G, or Wi-Fi.
• It works in harmony with or replaces the home phone. (A user’s Mobile VoIP number can be the same number as the VoIP home phone number.)
• The user can have a business VoIP number and a personal phone number on the same mobile device.
• The user can have their home or business number wherever they are in the world.
• Roaming charges from anywhere in Canada or the U.S. are eliminated as are long distance charges.
• There are competitive low cost VoIP long distance charges to international locations.
• The user can turn an Apple or Android tablet into a fully-functional phone.

babyTEL is pleased to be a leader in this exciting revolution.

San Jose, CA – December 9, 2010 – Dialogic Inc. (NASDAQ: DLGC), a leading provider of communications technologies that power advanced networks, and babyTEL Inc., a leading provider of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) solutions, today announced the successful completion of interoperability testing between Dialogic® Brooktrout® SR140 Fax Software and babyTEL’s open Internet Fax over IP (FoIP) SIP Trunking service. The two companies can now provide for reliable fax transmission over the Internet on SIP trunks by supplying enterprises and hosted service providers with end-to-end support for the T.38 FoIP protocol.

This exciting news as Fax Server owners can now significantly reduce their monthly connectivity costs by using babyTEL T.38 trunks instead of Digital PRI, Analog or MPLS. Total cost of ownership is also reduced as Fax Server owners can move to the boardless IP faxing solutions.

“When phone companies, cellular companies become more inflexible and their customer service seem to be deteriorating, Babytel gives you more service, more impeccable customer service and Babytel ROCKS….. Maybe it is time to send more invitations to the good folks I know who forgot about one of Canada’s telephony best kept secrets!”

As always, we thank all our customers for their continued support and trust in allowing us to provide cutting edge VOIP telecom services.

“We are very excited to receive the Cisco Select Partner certification,” said Nicolas Rossignol, Vice President, Sales. “This is validation from a major networking equipment provider that we understand and support IP Telephony solutions for SMB customers. Customers can now rely on babyTEL to provide and support high quality SIP trunking solutions that work reliably across the Cisco SMB product line.”

babyTEL provides high quality Enterprise VoIP Telephony services which offer greater flexibility, more features and significant cost savings over traditional corporate telephony installations. Enterprise customers can use their existing Internet connection to connect to IP-PBX’s, thus reducing the requirement for traditional costly “land lines”.

“Being recognized by Cisco is a welcomed endorsement,” said Steve Dorsey, President & CEO of babyTEL. “Cisco and babyTEL both share a commitment to high standards and this certification is a natural evolution derived from our reputation for excellence in the enterprise market.”

Anderson’s theory goes like this – create a free service that becomes wildly popular. Then, introduce a premium version of your service that 5% of your users are willing to pay for. The cost of providing free service to the other 95% of your users has to be so low that the 5% who pay cover the cost of providing the free and premium services combined, and allow you to make a profit in the processs.

In order for this plan to succeed, the premium, paid-for service needs to have the greatest reliability, highest quality and best human interface because the users are paying hard cash. The free service can be built to a lower standard because it’s free – and if it were just as good, why would people pay for it?

If only this were so.

The reality is somewhat counter-intuitive. It is the free service, not the paid service that needs to be designed to perfection. Sure, the paid service should also be perfect as well, but ironically, paying users demand less. How is this possible?

The answer is that paying users have “bought in” and now they are in it for the long haul. It is because paying users have made an investment with their time and with their money, and therefore are committed to “making it work.” They will spend the time experimenting, getting tech support by phone, email or chat. They have the incentive to stay with the service because they paid for it.
On the flipside, with a free service, every aspect and every details needs to be intuitive and attractive to the user. The user has no commitment, so any lack of clarity, any temporary frustration and –click- they just move on. For us at babyTEL, we have found that our free Telephone service for Facebook has to be tested over and over again with a broad cross-section of users at varying levels of computer skills. Only once nearly all the users have an easy time using Telephone is a new feature ready to be released.

So “free” cannot just be a synonym for half-baked. A free service has to be just as good as a paid offering, or even better, to keep users on board so it will grow virally. Getting users to buy in when a service is free can be as big a challenge as getting them to buy a service that is not free.