Although enterprises across the world greatly differ, both culturally and operationally, a commonality they share is the need to connect their disparate workforces. Now more than ever, we’re seeing a sharp, global rise in telecommuting, with 34 percent of business stating that over half of their full-time employees will be working remotely by 2020. While this has benefitted businesses by opening the doors to worldwide talent, it has also created more opportunity for partners to drive new revenue streams from UCaaS.

Failure paves the road to success. The best way to learn is to make mistakes and build off them to ensure they’re not repeated. While this is true, not enough is said about lessons learned from others’ mistakes. Case in point, there is much partners can take away from Amazon’s public cloud outage last month.

As mobile technologies continue to emerge and evolve, businesses will invest more in mobility. According to Citrix, 71 percent of enterprises currently regard internal mobility as a top priority. That should come to no surprise when seeing the benefit it can bring to both employees and employers. Among many other perks, mobility enables employees to access critical apps and data remotely, allowing them to be productive when out of the office.

Many industry experts are saying 2017 will be the year SD-WAN sees mainstream adoption. In fact, an IDC survey of 200 enterprise communications professionals found that 30 percent of participants plan to migrate to SD-WAN by 2018. A rapid growth like this in such a short period of time means one thing: The time to begin positioning SD-WAN is now.

A few weeks ago, the tech world was flipped on its head when Avaya filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Since the turn of the Millennium, the multinational technology company dominated the market with its contact center, Internet telephony, wireless data communications, and CRM software offerings. However, despite making 75 percent of its revenue off software and services in 2016, its tardiness to enter the cloud space has ultimately led to the dire straits it finds itself in today.

In our line of business, it’s nearly impossible to make it through a work day without reading an article about how IT spending on cloud is accelerating or how more workloads are being moved to cloud environments. We all know how great cloud is and the benefits it can bring to a business, but contrary to popular belief, it’s not always the sole answer. In some cases, including colocation is necessary to ensure the best business outcomes for your customers.

Now that we’ve officially ushered in the new year, it’s time to get back to work and focus on winning in 2017. From colossal M&A deals to some of the largest cyber-attacks in history, 2016 brought a lot of excitement to the channel, and we’re expecting more of the same this year. Last January, we made a few forecasts that turned out to be fairly accurate, so we decided to take another stab at it this time around.

As one of the strongest master agents, we’re always racking our brains on what the next big thing in telecom and IT will be. At the start of the year, we made a few predictions on key trends that would shape the channel in 2016, and with the new year right around the corner, we’ve decided to look back at our forecasts to see exactly how accurate we were. 

Massive DDoS attacks have become too common in today’s internet landscape. Just the other week, some of world’s most trafficked websites, including Twitter, Amazon, Reddit, and Netflix, were crippled by a heinous assault on their DNS provider. Three separate influxes of traffic were sent from thousands of connected devices, causing performance issues and outages throughout the day.

From offering seamless scalability to providing best-in-class security, SDN and NFV are driving value into managed services. Discover how these technologies combine to build a simple, more agile infrastructure at a significantly lower cost. 

Suggesting VoIP solutions to companies within healthcare, finance, government, and retail is tricky. Businesses and organizations operating within these verticals are under high levels of legal scrutiny because they frequently transmit sensitive customer and patient data. In order to comply with legislation, they need a hosted voice system that uses strong cryptography and security, such as SSL/TLS or IPsec, to protect data during transmission over public networks and while at rest.

With cybersecurity concerns growing across virtually every industry, it’s critical for you as a consultant to be able to point your customers to best protection. According to the Information Systems Audit and Control Association’s (ISACA) 2015 Global Cybersecurity Status Report, only 38 percent of worldwide organizations claim they are prepared to handle a sophisticated cyberattack, meaning your customers are likely vulnerable.