Google Cloud has announced a new 10-year strategic partnership with the Canadian telecommunications company Telus. The two companies plan to work together on developing new services and products for several key industries, including healthcare, agriculture, security and connected homes. Through this partnership, Telus will accelerate the adoption of its public cloud on the Google Cloud enterprise platform to ensure greater interoperability across its IT backbone and network infrastructure. Google Cloud will also become one of Telus’ partners in providing 5G services and Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC), which uses the Google Cloud-powered application platform Anthos. Telus and Google Cloud will prioritize collaboration to improve their Canadian customers’ social, economic, environmental and health performance, and at the same time, work to reduce their carbon footprint. Telus will also use Google Cloud Contact Center AI to improve customer interaction and reduce costs. One of the main areas of focus of…
Telecommunications giant Telefónica has expanded its long-standing technology partnership with IBM and announced the release of Cloud Garden 2.0, the next step in Telefonica’s cloud services platform to accelerate application modernization. Cloud Garden 2.0 is supported on IBM Cloud Pak and Red Hat OpenShift. The first iteration of Cloud Garden, launched in 2019, was originally based on IBM Cloud Private technology. However, Cloud Garden 2.0 switched to the hybrid Red Hat OpenShift cloud Kubernetes platform and the IBM Cloud Pak for Application. Telefónica customers can now run their applications on containers on premises or in the cloud environment of their choice, along with the simplification and speeding up when launching new solutions. Cloud Garden 2.0 is hosted through Telefonica’s Virtual Data Center in Spain, helping its customers experience low latency and better uptime for managing their applications. Andrés López Hedoire, de Enterprise Product Marketing Director, Telefónica España, commented:…
The international telecommunications company, Colt Technology Services Group, has announced that it is releasing its Cloud Session Border Controller (SBC) in partnership with AudioCodes. This cloud-based voice solution provides Direct Routing as a Service to quickly enable PSTN calls for Microsoft Teams. The Colt Cloud SBC provides an important step towards speeding up and simplifying the implementation of PSTN calling in Teams. With Direct Routing as-a-service, provided by the cloud-based voice solution, users do not require on-premises hardware or hardware in a data center. According to the company, the new service provided more efficiency for both large and small businesses, as onboarding was completed in less than a week. Developed in collaboration with AudioCodes, a leading provider of smart voice networks, this new offering is an extension of Colt’s Intelligent Communications offering that was launched in 2019. The power of Microsoft 365 and Teams, along with Colt’s voice and…
Microsoft is expanding in the communications market with the introduction of their Azure Communication Services. This new service is a fully managed communication platform for integrating calls, chats and SMS into business organizations and their applications. Azure Communication Services allows users to develop new communication solutions or integrate them into existing applications, avoiding high costs, complexity, or time wastage. Voice and video calling, as well as chat services will be available immediately, while SMS and phone numbers will be released in October. Over the past few years, Microsoft has gained a wealth of experience in this area, thanks to the large success of their Teams service. Azure Communication Services also uses the same secure platform that runs Microsoft Teams and is built natively on Azure. Scott Van Vliet, corporate vice president for Intelligent Communication at the company, commented: “Azure Communication Services is built natively on top of…
Zoom, the communications technology company that provides video telephony and online chat services through a cloud-based software platform, has announced the expansion of its Zoom Phone coverage. Cloud phone services are now available in 40-plus countries and the company has also simplified the telephone service plan for international companies. Zoom Phone now covers more than 40 countries and territories across Europe, North America, Latin America and the Asia-Pacific region. The newly added countries and territories to Zoom Phone support are: Argentina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, Columbia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Czech Republic, Ecuador, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hong Kong SAR, Hungary, Lithuania, Luxemburg, Mexico, Norway, Panama, Peru, Poland, Romania, Singapore, Slovakia and Slovenia. Under the Global Select plan, a company can employ local calling in more than 40 countries and territories where Zoom provides Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) services, supporting outbound and inbound calls with integrated telephony features that allow…
IPFone, a provider of cloud-based business unified communications and telephony services, together with Ribbon Communications Inc., a global provider of real time communications software and network solutions to service providers, enterprises and critical infrastructure sectors, announced that they are making use of Ribbon‘s Intelligent Edge portfolio to ensure that their customers are able to seamlessly work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Ribbon‘s EdgeMarc 2900, deployed at several IPFone sites in various states, helps support IPFone’s business customers as the company experiences an increase in its network usage. EdgeMarc devices are located at the edges of the customer network to ensure the successful deployment of IP-based communications services that improve voice quality, security and visibility on the customer network. Also, the EdgeMarc 2900 allows IPFone to easily adapt to the smallest or largest customer installations, while providing secure service delivery capabilities. This architecture enables the company to proactively keep…
The US technology company Ribbon Communications has introduced its new EdgeMarc 300 Series to provide small businesses, home office and branch office customers that currently have analog voice infrastructure, with an easy and cost-effective way to capitalize on IP-based voice services. The cloud solutions provider said that the EdgeMarc 300 is part of the recently launched cloud-based Ribbon Next Generation Intelligent Edge portfolio, which securely connects and enhances enterprise voice and data applications, including Microsoft Teams. This portfolio of edge solutions delivers service assurance, advanced analytics, security, policy and routing functionalities for cloud communications applications. Ribbon’s EdgeMarc 300 is a survivable branch office solution that supports the integration of analog endpoints and the public switched telephone network (PSTN), as well as Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) calls. This gateway provides connectivity between analog and SIP devices, enabling branch offices to rapidly migrate analog phones to a SIP-based network and communicate seamlessly with…
Audian, a Unified Communications (UC) solutions provider seeking to redefine the telecom industry, and Xarios Technologies, an independent software vendor and developer of advanced telephony applications, have entered into a strategic alliance agreement to bring the next generation of real-time call analytics and business insights to VoIP telecommunications systems. These leading companies in the telecom environment will help their end customers with new applications and provide integration between platforms that facilitate in-depth information and data-driven business solutions. Brandon Bazemore, CEO of Audian, said, “We pride ourselves on maximizing our customers’ Telecompetence by leveraging the latest in software and technology to simplify the complexities once associated with telecom, giving our customers back time and energy to focus on growing their business. Our partnership with Xarios only extends our dedication to these principles, and we look forward to learning from and utilizing their approach to call analytics and reporting to deliver performance…
Juniper Network, a provider of high-performance networking and cybersecurity solutions, has been selected by the UK’s telecoms giant British Telecommunications (BT) to deliver its Network Cloud infrastructure initiative. This arrangement will help support the rollout of BT’s upcoming unified cloud networking platform, which will integrate the company’s networks, including 5G, Wi-Fi and fixed-line, into one virtualized service and enable more efficient infrastructure management and implementation. This new and more flexible network infrastructure will also generate a range of innovative applications that support services such as Internet access, TV and business network functions, improved voice and video delivery, and scalability. The Network Cloud platform will be built according to a common framework, and shared across BT’s offices throughout the UK and globally. “This move to a single cloud-driven network infrastructure will enable BT to offer a wider range of services, faster and more efficiently to customers in the UK…
NTT Communications Corporation (NTT Com), the ICT solutions and international communications business within the NTT Group, is promoting the expansion and development of its European data center platform with the launch of their Amsterdam 1 Data Center (AMS1). The group’s first data center in the Netherlands has been opened by NTT Com’s subsidiary E-Shelter, which provides secure environments for housing and connectivity of IT and network systems. Tetsuya Shoji, President and CEO of NTT Com, said in his official opening speech: “I am delighted to open our latest state-of-the-art data center campus located in Amsterdam, one of the key internet hubs in Europe”. The carrier-neutral E-Shelter’s AMS1 data center will have a capacity of up to 40 MW IT load spread over a 16,000 square meter campus and, as NTT’s 21st data center in Europe, will leverage more than 400 MVA power capacity across the continent, with plans…