With My Head Up In The Cloud

How many times have you been told this: Is your head in the clouds?!? Usually, it’s not a compliment, but these days that might just change. Of course, it’s about a different Cloud and it would be nice to have your IT services there, not your head. 🙂

I see at least a dozen of articles every day on cloud computing, written by people from various areas of business: IT, marketing, sales, even HR. They debate on cloud definition, advantages and disadvantages, on myths, data security, lock-in degree, and ultimately whether cloud computing really is a new concept or just an over-hyped renaming of the old IaaS, PaaS and SaaS models or even a clever marketing-invented new name for virtualized environments.

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4PSA = For Performance, Scalability and Agility

We are often asked what 4PSA means. Many people living in US heard about PSA and maybe not in the nicest circumstances. For them, this is just a medical term. Well, we are software developers, not doctors 🙂 And even though, if you want to explore the PSA meanings, there are quite a lot of them.

For us, 4PSA is an important part of our culture. It has been our name since day one. I won’t debate whether it’s a good or a bad name, I will only try to explain where it came from and what it means to us.

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Introducing 4PSA Support Zone

Next week 4PSA will be introducing a new online presence, as well as redesigned back-end systems. One of the most important systems that has been completely renewed is the one used to provide technical support to our customers. The new facility, called Support Zone, is the result of an important development effort primarily focused on improving the satisfaction of our customers.

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OpenID, the Quick and Easy Way to Log In

Along with Internet development, some of the traditional actions have been implemented into the virtual space. Nowadays, we do not use paper and pen to send a letter, we email messages; we do not socialize only face to face, we also use Facebook, Twitter or Hi5. We have now access to an extremely fast method of sharing information. For all these technologies we have unique accounts that enable others to recognize our identity. Many accounts mean a lot of user names and passwords that we need to remember in our every day virtual world.

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Grandma’s Got a Robot

It’s that time of the year again. Everybody is trying to finish the projects started along the year or at least bring them close to the end. Meetings, forecasting, budgeting, strategy revision and of course planing. Some people want to try new things, to get new ideas that will eventually improve their business revenue. Others simply want to cut costs and improve efficiency inside their companies.

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How AMQP Is Used by VoipNow’s CallAPI

AMQP is an open standard for messaging middleware. It was developed by a working group interested in creating a standard for business messaging, because in the past only proprietary, expensive solutions existed. AMQP is now used in many software solutions, from Banking Sector to Cloud Computing. Its main advantages as a messaging protocol are its reliability, performance and flexibility. This means that two entities can send messages between them and it is possible to guarantee not only the actual delivery, but also the delivery time.

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SIP Presence Translation Service

SIP presence is a tricky subject, mainly because there are some different ways to achieve the same thing. VoIP users are interested to know if “something” has happened in their network. They don’t care how this is technically done, or how many RFCs describe a simple scenario. The truth is that there are indeed many RFCs that handle various aspects:

  • the message-summary event allows the user to learn about new voice mail messages
  • the dialog event advertises when users are initiating, accepting or terminating voice conversations
  • presence events let users know when the status of a resource has changed

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The Future Started Yesterday

Over 130 years ago, Graham Bell managed to get ahead his competitor Elisha Gray with just a few hours and fill in the paperwork required to patent the telephone. Even then, speed was essential in creating a technical advantage over the competition.

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A Few Pointers about Security

Every now and then I hear questions on how to secure servers and especially how to secure voice traffic. We hear lots of myths from our customers :).

Most people feel more secure if they have a simple firewall installed.

While firewalls are good, having a firewall to protect closed ports usually doesn’t help. I mean for VoipNow you will probably leave opened all ports for VoIP services and close most of the others. My question is: what is the point of doing this at server level, if the ports are closed anyway? This makes sense on a consumer desktop, but on a server it usually does not help much.

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Why Is 4PSA Orange?

I’ve been answering to sales inquires for many years. Most of the questions are of course related either to Unified Communications or to the hosting world and sometimes they can be very funny. For example, a couple of days ago, someone asked me why we’ve chosen orange as our brand color.

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