Connected devices such as smartphones and tablets have changed the way work is done today - in the office and beyond. An ever-expanding mobile workforce has prompted enterprises to come up with friendly BOYD policies, boosting enterprise-wide collaboration and ultimately leading to better efficiency and improved bottom line. This has also contributed to the growth of unified communications market worldwide. Unified Communications solutions are designed to unify voice, video, data, and mobile app...

There is a common issue I deal with when speaking to end users trying to monitor applications. This confusion is partially created by vendors who would like to position themselves in the hot APM market, yet they clearly don’t enable performance monitoring. These vendors are slowly starting to correct the messaging, but many have poor market understanding, and continue to confuse buyers. There are two types of monitoring technologies, one is availability monitoring and the other performance monit...

The Company A worldwide technology company operating in more than 170 countries is focused on helping people apply technology in meaningful ways to their businesses, personal lives and communities. With R&D investments of almost a billion US dollars, the company is able to offer a complete technology product portfolio to the market. The ultimate goal of this market leader is to offer products, services and solutions that are high tech, low cost and deliver the best customer experience. The c...

Canada’s Competition Bureau has announced that, following a review by its Mergers Branch, Bragg Communications – which trades as Eastlink – and Bruce Telecom have terminated their previously announced merger agreement. Both companies are facilities-based providers of telecoms services, including wireline telephone, broadband internet and television, within Bruce County, Ontario. The Bureau’s review concluded that, had Eastlink’s acquisition of Bruce Telecom proceeded as proposed, it would have l...

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is perhaps the most profound paradigm shift facing the networking industry. In carrier networks, proven functions such as switching, routing, firewall, and other security elements migrate from proven hardware platforms to unproven virtualized servers controlled by software to gain efficiency and flexibility. Carriers worldwide agree on the need and vision for virtualization, but may still struggle to quantify the benefits, understand practical migration ste...

Application intelligence (the ability to monitor packets based on application type and usage) is the next evolution in network visibility. It can be used to dynamically identify all applications running on a network. Distinct signatures for known and unknown applications can be identified, captured, and passed on to specialized monitoring tools in order to provide network managers a complete view of their network. In addition, well-designed visibility solutions will gather additional (contextual...

“IQ Services really made it easy. I learned all sorts of things about my routing tables that really caught me by surprise" It was essential for a major player in the mobile & computing devices industry to know for certain its three contact centers could handle full calling volumes during an upcoming shopping season. The company turned to IQ Services for an answer to the question “How can we be sure our self-service and contact center solutions will really work when we need them?” 7000+ Ports...

 If you are like the average network professional, Wireshark is probably a part of your   regular troubleshooting arsenal. And, why not? It's the tool by which you learned       network analysis. Its flexibility in licensing, no-cost download, and familiarity, make it a logical choice to deploy to capture and analyze packets. But, what might your network team be missing, if it depends solely on Wireshark for network monitoring? We'll look at a two-solution appr...

Telus Corp, one of Canada’s largest telecommunications companies, reported a 33 per cent jump in second-quarter profit on Thursday, helped by the combination of growth in its wireless and fixed-line businesses. Telus said it signed up 78,000 net contract wireless subscribers, who typically pay more to use high-end smartphones. By comparison, BCE Inc’s Bell and Rogers Communications Inc signed up 66,186 and 38,000 customers, respectively, in the same period. Vancouver-based Telus competes against...

Good Decisions Reduce Risk The financial industry is at the forefront of network technology. The traditional image of bankers and financial traders is really an anachronism. The reality is that the financial industry, from retail banking to high speed trading, is at the cutting edge of network innovation – for better or for worse. Whether adopting new technologies to allow customers broad-based mobile access, squeezing out the last few nanoseconds of latency, or providing air-tight security, net...

The practice of network availability monitoring can range from simple standalone up/down monitoring of individual devices to complex, highly customized and automated approaches that fully integrate into broader management systems architectures. ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES® (EMA™) analysts define the term "Enterprise Network Availability Monitoring System" (ENAMS) to include network-centric monitoring solutions that are used by enterprise network operations and engineering teams to discover,...

Canadian cableco Shaw Communications yesterday agreed to purchase US-based data centre provider ViaWest for USD830 million plus USD370 million debt from private equity firm Oak Hill Capital Partners, the Wall Street Journal reports. Shaw’s CEO Brad Shaw, explaining the motivation for the cross-border purchase, said: ‘Demand [for data centres] continues to outstrip supply,’ and he added that Shaw sees opportunities to connect its existing data centres in Alberta with ViaWest sites to cross-sell s...

US-based private equity firm Providence is said to be considering acquiring a stake in Canadian cellco Globalive Wireless (Wind Mobile), Bloomberg reports, quoting sources with knowledge of the matter, who requested anonymity due to the information being private. Wind – which is Canada’s fourth largest mobile operator by customers yet has less than a 3% share of the market – is looking to attract a new owner or merger partner, as its main backer, Russian-controlled Vimpelcom, has drastically sca...

Business networks continue to respond to user and business demands, such as, access to more data, bring your own device (BYOD), virtualisation and the continued growth of the Internet of Things. Historically much of the traffic that runs through these networks has been known to network administrators but access to application and user data remains lacking. Application intelligence - the ability to monitor application flows based on application type - provides the insight that is desperately requ...

The following are four reasons why you should utilize Application Performance Management (APM) tools: 1. INCREASED REVENUE AND PROFITABILITY APM products ensure that bottom line costs are controlled through monitoring and discovery. APM technology also allows business to maximize the efficiency per employee by reducing downtime and increasing productivity per employee, which translates into retaining customers, better quality of service and improved brand positioning amongst potential customers....

The cost and efficiency benefits promised in business VoIP have led to widespread adoption among small businesses and enterprises alike. While advancements have been made in this technology area, there are still obstacles to quality of service (QoS) in the delivery of business VoIP. Here, we’ll take a look at a few of these obstacles and best practices for breaking through these barriers to improve overall quality. According to an Internet Evolution article, the main obstacles to QoS in business...

Canadian telecoms group Bell Canada Enterprises (BCE) announced yesterday that it has decided to buy out public minority shareholders in its associated subsidiary telco Bell Aliant for a total consideration of approximately CAD3.95 billion (USD3.68 billion); the minority shareholders will receive cash and BCE common equity for a combined value of CAD31 per share in a transaction which the company said was ‘unanimously recommended by independent Bell Aliant directors’. Following the deal, BCE say...

A visibility architecture is essential for security, network and integrated, service-oriented operations teams to establish and maintain a continuous awareness of activity, health, and performance of applications and infrastructure. Such awareness is only possible with continuous, reliable network visibility. But this is not an easy task when network and security professionals must ensure security and proactively meet performance expectations in dynamic, virtualized environments with increasingl...

Canada’s government yesterday (22 July 2014) invited rural and remote communities that lack high speed internet access to submit claims for a portion of the CAD305 million (USD284 million) broadband access rollout funding it has set aside over the next three years under the ‘Connecting Canadians’ programme. The government is aiming to extend internet access at connection speeds of at least 5Mbps – via fixed or wireless networks – to 280,000 households that it calculates currently lack access to ...

Bell Aliant has reported that it is investing around CAD70 million (USD65 million) to expand its ‘FibreOP’ fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) network to 125,000 additional premises in seven Quebec communities, offering very high speed internet and high definition IPTV alongside home phone service initially in Alma, Saguenay (including Chicoutimi, Jonquiere and La Baie), Saint-Felicien, Thetford Mines and Victoriaville, with additional communities including Riviere-du-Loup and Roberval to be added by year-...