Dave Michels – Page 3 – Graves On SOHO Technology

IT Expo West & CloudComm Summit 4

ITEXPO-Logo Let me be blunt, at present I’m just on the periphery of the telecom space. I’m still a user, specifically a home office user. Not being directly involved in the telecom industry I don’t get the opportunity to take part if many of the major industry events. However, when TMC decided to hold IT Expo West 2011 in Austin, TX it proved just too good an opportunity to pass up.

Austin is essentially right in my back yard. “Just over yonder” in local terms. OK, it’s really a two-and-a-half hour drive, but that’s still close compared to its usual location in Los Angeles. When TMC offered a deeply discounted uber-early-bird registration back in February I took the plunge and bought a show pass.

Dave Michels: Capitalizing on the Cloud

Long time telecom guru and advocate for on-premises PBX hardware Dave Michels recently posted an article called, “Capitalizing on the Cloud.” While titled in reference to The Cloud it’s actually a good primer on the underlying logic of capital vs…

Point-CounterPoint: Hosted Voice vs. CPE

March 8, 2010
Michael Graves
VoIP

This post is part of a Point-CounterPoint open debate with fellow telecom blogger Dave Michels. In this new series, we both take extreme positions on a given topic. In combination these two opposed views are designed to provide a more complete perspective of the issue. To read a different perspective on this topic, click here.

Let me get this right out into the open…it seems to me simply insane for a small company buy a PBX. Buying a PBX takes precious capital for something that is often not a strategic asset in the life of the business. It’s at best “a necessary evil.”

We’re a small business, around sixty staff in total. Most of them live out their days in our corporate HQ in Cambridge, UK. But the “we” that I’m describing here is actually the dozen of us who earn our keep in the North American operation.

Point-Counterpoint: An Introduction

March 7, 2010
Michael Graves
VoIP

Journalist. Reporter. Columnist. Writer. Blogger. These are all very different things, yet there’s a lot of commonality to their activities and presentation. Most often, to have some semblance of credibility one must consider both sides of an argument or treatise in addressing a topic. This is done in the name of being “fair and balanced.”

The problem is that being fair and balanced can also lead to a kind of blandness in the writing. We might still convey some useful insight, but without expressing what is truly opinion it’s often difficult conveying a passion for the topic.