NetGen Channel Newsletter April 2014

Welcome

The Telephony Channel and the Long Tail

Coming Soon to Smart ATA

Are you a VAR/Reseller/Solution Provider/MSP?

Welcome

Welcome to the inaugural issue of the NetGen Channel. Previously, we had included NetGen-related articles in the Commetrex Outlook, but NetGen’s growth and soon-to-expand product portfolio demands its own newsletter.
If you’ve been following NetGen and its Smart ATA®, you know the success of Smart ATA’s launch has been driven by Smart FoIP, NetGen’s patent-pending technology that eliminates the two most-common reasons for a failed FoIP transaction: late T.30 reInvites and PCM clock-sync problems. And, in case you’ve never seen our way-cool videos of Angie, our tech-geek reseller, we thought we’d reintroduce them here since she does such a great job of explaining Smart FoIP, the secret sauce in Smart ATA that gives it PSTN-like FoIP success rates.

The Telephony Channel and the Long Tail

In his 1980 book The Third Wave, Alvin Toffler predicted that technology would allow society to transition to the post-industrial age where Henry Ford’s “You can have it in any color you like, as long as it’s black,” is replaced by Toffler’s “demassification” or “mass customization.” In a 2004 Wired article entitled The Long Tail, Chris Anderson, physicist and editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine from 2001-2012, introduced the term “long tail” as applied to business and marketing channels. Anderson’s “long tail” describes the effects of demassification/mass customization on markets and distribution channels.

In traditional brick-and-mortar retailing, it only pays to inventory the most popular (highest volume) products (the red area, below). But in “scale-free” marketing channels (or those approaching it), the total market can be doubled by selling small volumes of low-demand items. For example, a traditional music store might carry thousands of titles, but Apple’s iTunes can carry hundreds of thousands, satisfying the unique music tastes of millions. A Wikipedia article quoted an Amazon employee describing the long tail: “We sold more books today that didn’t sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday.” These long-tail products are shown in the orange area under the curve, below. Anderson says in the subtitle of his 2006 book, The Long Tail: “The Future of Business is Selling Less of More”.

So, why is this in a NetGen Communications newsletter? Because there are hundreds…perhaps thousands of telephony applications that are not in high enough demand to attract the attention of the traditional PBX vendors. But if the cost of delivering these custom applications were low enough, the telephony reseller channel could meet this long-tail demand, revolutionizing the market for telephony business systems and doubling its size.
NetGen is developing products that allow the channel – you, the solution provider – to cost-effectively solve your customer’s unique problems, addressing the telephony “long tail”.

Coming Soon to Smart ATA

Smart ATA®, as the only ATA with Smart FoIP®, has always been able to achieve PSTN-like FoIP transaction-completion rates. (Yes, it often takes figuring out and using FoIP-friendly call routes.) But there are some management, networking, and security features we’ve needed, and with the next GA, slated for later this month, we’ll have them.

Here’s a partial list just to whet your appetite:

• Support for HTTP Option 66. This is in the current firmware, but it’s worth mentioning here due to its importance in configuration for large-scale deployments.
• Support for VLAN with GUI configuration.
• Support for RFC 6913. This is the new RFC that defines the SIP.Fax media tag that enables service providers and carriers to selectively route FoIP calls and for fax-capable endpoints to register as such. We plan to work with as many routing- and policy-server vendors as we can to help make the global network more FoIP intelligent.
• DNS SRV provides a way for SIP endpoints to locate their outbound proxy, registrar, etc. and for foreign SIP domains to determine how to relay SIP requests to your SIP domain (see RFC 3263).
• T.38 over RTP/SRTP. Without it, an unauthorized actor can intercept and/or redirect the conversations (voice or fax) that take place via the Smart ATA.
• SIPS and SRTP. Another obvious security improvement.
• The ability to disable the local HTTP management GUI will give you the ability to guard against the occasional vulnerabilities that pop up in network daemons, including HTTP-based management interfaces, in spite of its being password-protected.
• SSL on HTTP management (HTTPS).

Are you a VAR/Reseller/Solution Provider/MSP?

If you are, we should talk about your becoming a NetGen Authorized Reseller (NAR). Our NAR program is designed to put you on the front lines of our battle to make FoIP work in carrier networks while at the same time giving you one of the industry’s best voice-fax ATAs – the only one that allows you to deliver PSTN-like FoIP call-completion rates with industry-standard real-time (not store-and-forward) FoIP. As a Smart ATA reseller you will be in the business of making your customers happy as you virtually eliminate FoIP trouble tickets, lower your costs, and improve your top line.

How do we do it? Well, Smart ATA is the only ATA with patent-pending Smart FoIP® technology from Commetrex. Smart FoIP eliminates the two most-common problems in FoIP, giving you a compelling sales proposition: With Smart ATA, you will no longer have to say to your customer: “Keep your POTS for fax.”

While Smart ATA is necessary to make FoIP work in carrier networks, what truly sets it apart is NetGen’s amazing support. You see, we do more than support Smart ATA since it’s just one element in the local and wide-area networks. We work with you to identify bad behavior by your carrier partners, and work with you and them to arrive at FoIP call routes that work.

• Are you a telecom channel partner?
• Are you willing to take a web-based training course?
• Are you willing to provide first-level support?
• Are you willing to recognize NetGen as a partner on your website?

If so, let’s work together. Just send us an email or give us a call and we’ll take it from there. Click Here to contact us!