What You Need To Know Now…

IT Resellers, Customers Could Profit From ‘Relationship Coaching’
With IT products and services on almost every operator’s front burner, the new CompTIA Telecom Advisory Council has been tasked with coming up with strategic insight and vendor-neutral guidance when it comes to relationships between agents reselling services and IT firms focusing on data needs. These partnerships could be profitable, the group adds, citing a 2012 study by Channel Partners and CompTIA that found some companies earn as much as 75 percent of their annual revenues from such strategic and tactical collaborations. However, pitfalls include poor communications, no rules of engagement and failure to understand each other’s business models. The advisory council is tackling these points, and it will meet at the CompTIA Annual Member Meeting, set for March 12-13 in Chicago. Members so far include Scott Levy, AOTMP, co-chair; Mike Saxby, Communications Management Services, co-chair; Meggin Sawyer, Adtran; and Richard Williams, Verizon.

Harris’ Plans To Turn Platinum Into Gold
Harris Broadcast is crowing about Platinum IP3 router, purported to be the only machine that can handle separate video, audio and data paths within the same frame. The company also says the gear is the first to scale to multiframe configurations for very large media operations by using a common architecture, thus making installation easier and helping to cut down on cabling/components costs. While shipping now, the router won’t make its official debut until the CABSAT 2013 show in Dubai next month. More specs: multiformat signal routing to 576×1024 in a single 28RU frame; scaling to at least 2048×2048 in multiframe configurations without external distribution amps or combiners; and perhaps the most important feature – stations don’t have to go dark as they scale into multiple frame systems.