A recent IDC article stated that “There’s a $100B cloud in our future.” On paper, this looks like a huge opportunity and it’s backed up by big trends such as the distributed enterprise, the proliferation of devices needing to access enterprise networks, IT assets being managed remotely and big data and apps to mention just a few. While these opportunities are obviously real, when service providers try to sell to SMBs, the situation is not that clear-cut.
We’re glad to announce that VoipNow SPE 3.0.5 is here with new features, functionality improvements, important bug fixes, and security enhancements.
VoipNow SPE now allows users to manage calls more easily. If you have an extension with several DIDs, in a Unified API request you can view which of these DIDs was called. This feature can be used in a UnifiedAPI app to customize call flow based on CalledDID.
As you have probably noticed earlier today, a chat service is available on our website. From now on, visitors will be just one chat window away from getting commercial assistance fast and to the point.
Whenever we deal with a product for the first time, we can’t help exploring it. And, in most cases, we jump to it without any technical guidance. Because we’re curious by nature and, oh well, just because we think we know better. 😉 This usually works when we talk about simple products. But things change when dealing with complex software such as VoipNow SPE; it has an extensive feature set and covers so many usage scenarios. Of course, eventually everyone will find their way through, but it’s a lot easier and more straightforward if you use the resources that we have created.
We are students, we may not fight with lightsabers, but we definitely had an internship. A great internship, we might add. 🙂
We’re writing this from the orange open space office, where we worked with the 4PSA team and… we became part of it. Here, we had a great summer, we made friends and learned a lot of cool things. But, more importantly, we felt like we belonged to this large family.
Back in August 2012, when we rolled out the 4PSA Community, we knew this project implied a great deal of responsibility.
Our community brings together people who team up on answers, solutions, and ideas about the products and services they use. Every community member is invited to have his/her say on our products, describing issues they have encountered as accurately as possible, offering guidance, sharing experience and know-how with their peers, tempering conflicts and promoting a collaborative attitude.
Services offload their computationally expensive tasks into workers. Think of software that converts video from its original format to a web standard. This kind of job can be considered long-running, even for state-of-the-art hardware. The web app can’t convert the video, it doesn’t have access to the software and, even if it did, we’d have little control over what ends up on our servers. The service used by the app could convert the video, but it would take valuable processing time shifting though millions of requests.
It is so easy to distinguish an engineer (or an engineer to be) from a non-engineer. When we interview people for a software engineering position, we want to determine how much of an engineer the candidate is. That’s why we ask a fair amount of questions apparently unrelated to software. Real engineers focus on the problem, break it into pieces, and analyze them. They translate the problem into their “own words”, making analogies with common, easy-to-understand processes. Once their solution is challenged, they are able to optimize and explain it.
As we mentioned a while ago, the Stack Team handles the tools and frameworks used by the other Clouders. HubRing, a branch of the fast Redis database, is among the interesting projects we are currently working on. We first used Redis in VoipNow 2, as a caching mechanism. However, due to increasing demands, we had to expand its functionality. As a result, new data types were added. VoipNow 3 and Pinapple brought on some special needs that forced us to diverge from the Vanilla Redis to such an extent that we can consider this project an entirely new product, with a new identity.