QoS based Routing in Virtual Call Center

As you guys might remember, I had blogged earlier about how QoS based routing would be very useful in a Call Center environment and I had ended the post by saying that I was going to check out Unleash Networks‘ Unsniff product.

After couple of discussions over phone and a fruitful meeting at Barista, Vivek and I have agreed upon a common framework on which we will get this working. Vivek has been kind enough to tweak Unsniff for this purpose and it is great that he has decided to accommodate us in his busy schedule ( There were a couple of important software releases from Unleash last week).

Vivek also pointed me to Cisco’s Unified Service Manager solution that essentially calculates MoS on a per call basis( kind of what we would need to do a QoS based routing). But from what I read from the specification, it looks like these details are passed to Cisco’s ‘Monitor’ application through proprietary messaging and these details cannot be obtained by a third party application through open APIs. I believe this solution is used more for reporting (raise a flag for corrective action to be taken) rather than for quality assurance. So unsniff as of now looks like the best bet to seamlessly work with our application.

Vivek and I hope to get some kind of integration/testing ( of my application and unsniff) done in our labs pretty soon and I will update you guys as it happens. These are exciting times!!!!

How important is a business plan?

Web Worker daily has an interesting piece which talks about the importance(or not) of writing a business plan.

Personally, if I were to form my own company, I would a have a business plan, if not for anything else, just to write down what I feel. I have an habit of writing down all the stuff I need to do ( personal/official) and I would use my business plan more as a reminder than as a bible that I would strictly adhere to. And hey, that is the first thing what the VCs want to see even though they probably never take a look at that 🙂

Security Compliance!

TechRepublic has published different tools that help an IT/ITES company become security compliant. As part of this article it has given links to a few products from Symantec, McAfee and Sophos. I got a chance to take a look at the offerings and my initial reaction was that Cisco’s suite of products were better. The reason being, even though individually the products of the above mentioned companies are good, they don’t have the whole solution and this is where Cisco has the advantage.

I have blogged about the different security compliant solutions from Cisco before and you can check them out here.

Second Blog

I wanted to create a blogger account as well and so went ahead and created my second blog. Both blogspot and wordpress have their advantages and disadvantages. For example you can’t add adsense code in a wordpress blog whereas it is so easy in a blogger account.The statistics in wordpress is awesome whereas it is not so great in blogger ( We need to add extra widgets to get it working)

Anyway the news is, I will be maintaining two blogs. This blog will remain as the primary technology blog whereas the blogspot one will be a combination of technology and other lighter stuff as well. So all the posts in this blog will be simultaneously posted in the other one as well.

I will be in a better position in the next few days to compare these two and give a verdict as to which one I like the most.

Taking on Cisco?

Avaya has become cozy  with Google in what I see as a major blow to Cisco. The announcement talks about combining Google Apps with Avaya’s IP telephony. This combo would affect Cisco’s share in the SMB market.

Cisco is getting hit on all sides when it comes to the enterprise market. First Nortel-Microsoft partnership and now this. If the trend continues, the big enterprises would go with Nortel telephony and the smaller ones would go with Avaya’s IPT and Cisco would be left to service nobody. Cisco, I assume, would have to strike up some impacting alliances or would be terribly disadvantaged.

Even at the time of Microsoft-Nortel partnership, I had thought that Cisco would probably team up with Google, but that looks out of question as of now. My hunch is Cisco would go with IBM. That would be kind of ironical. Apple on one side and IBM on the other. But hey, if Apple could get cozy with Microsoft, why not with IBM? What about Adobe? They are doing some neat stuff in IPT  stuff and it might not be a bad thing to team up with them as well?

What do you think?  Who do you think Cisco will go with?

Terror Strikes Second Life

Just when you thought that you have seen everything in Second life, news about an online nuclear attack has surfaced. Looks like my plan of leaving this life and permanently settling down in the peaceful world of second life has taken a beating 🙂

Maybe I should start “third life” . Lucky cats. They don’t have this problem. They have nine lives to choose from 🙂

Curing Stewie!!!

In case you are wondering who Stewie is, it’s my personal Sony laptop whom I named after the crazy kid from the cartoon show Family Guy. I always thought my laptop was Machiavellian and ready to take over the world and hence the christening.

But of late, poor stewie has been very sick. It all started when I borrowed a USB stick from my brother (damn him!!!) . Looks like it was infested with the AGOBOT.LH worm and Stewie was hit. The symptoms were like this. Every time I booted up Stewie, there wouldbe a glaring popup that said “There are no disks in the external drive”. And I had to manually cancel that dialog. I have Trend Micro running as well, and it reported that there were six or seven files infected.

If it was just some annoying popup message, I would not have cared too much. But there was more. The CPU was always at 100% and when I ran the taskmanager there was a process called NETSVCS.exe that took 99%. (Sometimes this process did not even allow me to view the taskmanager and I had to reboot it a few times to get that working.) On killing that, Stewie would be temporarily ok but then when I restart, I had to do the same procedure all over again. ( Again there was no guarantee that Iwould get the TaskManager on every reboot)

I thought there would an easy fix and a simple google search would give me the answers. And it did. Symantec presumably had a fix  and I ran it. But no, AGOBOT was so infatuated with Stewie that it just refused to go away. Note * : I was furious with Trend Micro for letting Stewie down in the first place.

Did more googling and found a neat site which threw a lot of light on this Virus and gave a link to guess what; Trend Micro’s site where they have given a fix for this. Truth be told, I was pretty cynical that the fix would work, but hey it just did and now Stewie is back to normal,  thinking of ways to dominate the world 🙂

My faith in Trend Micro has re-blossomed and they are a notch higher in my ranking list over Symantec. I thank you all on behalf of Stewie for the good wishes ( ok, there were none 🙂 )

Cisco 7940 exposed

Russell has blogged about security flaws in the 7940 Cisco ip phone series. An interesting read for people who deploy/implement Cisco’s UC (Unified Communnications) solutions across the world.

More thought needs to be given when access lists are configured and I have seen quite a few implementations where there are no access lists configured at all. Very curious to know whether Cisco’s UC implementation manual even talks about it. If not, that is something they need to work on pretty fast.

Cisco-Apple Partnership

I had taken a guess on the different avenues where Cisco and Apple could collaborate and ZDNET has a very interesting post on the same.

I had blogged about Cisco’s NAC solution a couple of month ago and the above post by Ryan makes a lot of sense. My only contention is that it might just not be the NAC solution that they would work together on. I believe they would interop on the MARS ((Monitoring,Analysis and Response System) dashboard system as well. If you recall MARS can monitor nodes in the network (need not be a Cisco device) and helps the administrator make decisions on whether there are any non-compliance issues in any of the nodes that is being monitored.

Also, if there are any real-time attacks, MARS has the flexibility to correct the problem if possible or worst case scenario isolate the device. This would work like a charm for Apple which recently faced quite some criticism related to MOAB. Security is a key area for both Cisco and Apple and this surely is one area where we can see some synergies between the two.

Hello y’all

The last two or three days, there has been quite some activity on my blog and though my Blog Stats show that the hits on my site are almost the same, my feed stats shows a huge increase. For people who are not familiar, Feed Stats in wordpress tells you how many persons are subscribed to your blog through feeds.

The number of hits statistics is what most people look at, but I am more curious about the people who are subscribed to this blog. They are the regulars. I am very curious to know who are you and do you find the information in this blog useful and can I do anything to make this better? Please drop in a comment whoever you are ( I will not approve the comment if you wish your identity needs to be kept private. Are you really that ashamed to let the world know that you are reading my blogs? 🙂 ).  As Frasier would say “I am listening..”