Plantronics (NYSE: PLT) Tuesday reported lower profit in its third quarter than a year ago, but still beat Wall Street’s expectations, setting UC revenue records along the way.
Net income for the quarter was $30.9 million, or 71 cents a share, down slightly from $31.6 million, or 64 cents a share a year ago. Adjusted net income was 75 cents per share, topping analyst’s forecasts of 68 cents per share, and topping last year’s adjusted income of 66 cents per share. The lower profits were primarily due to Plantronic buying back some 2.1 million shares.
Revenue, meanwhile was $183.2 million, up slightly from $181.6 million during the same period a year ago.
Plantronics said it expected a strong fourth quarter, forecasting revenue of between $175 million and $180 million for the quarter, with net income of 63-68 cents per share. Analysts expected revenue of $1877.6 million and adjusted earnings per share of 67 cents.
During yesterday’s earnings call, Ken Kannappan, Plantronics’ president and chief executive, said the company set a record in the quarter for UC revenue, which saw 90 percent growth due to rapid adoption of UC globally. The company also saw 8 percent growth in office and contact center revenue.
“We continue to see broad adoption of UC across all size of enterprises in all major geographies,” he said. “Our investments in UC continued to yield solid results. And in the first nine months of fiscal 2012, we made good progress in differentiating our product line, as well as making huge strides in our corporate marketing and brand positioning.”
Recently I was approached by a local company to work with them to improve their technical infrastructure.
I have not worked with VOIP systems before. However I have in the past setup Asterisk and was using it successfully as a dialer.
This client is waiting for a VSC VMSx switch. I’m not familiar with it but they are asking for processing/gateway integration and hardware monitoring.
So with that being said here are a few questions:
1. I have searched around for a VMSx API to be add/remove balances from calling cards, however I cannot find one. Can someone point me in the right direction?
2. Hardware monitoring, can that be setup in VMS? For example, to know when all the trunks are being filled to 90% capacity or when there is no more internet, etc.
3. I’m still confused about something. So they have this softswitch sitting in a local data center. They have clients that have gateways setup in their locations. When I worked with Asterisk, we had a switch with all the ip phones plugged into. That switch was connected to asterisk with just one cable to the secondary lan card. If I don’t understand correctly the way it should be setup is.
a. Softphone connects to a switch.
b. The switch to the gateway.
4. What about for those that already have an existing PBX or want a complete PBX setup. From what I understand there is some type of module that you can get which simply extends the PBX to make outgoing calls route through the VMS softswitch in the data center. Is it essentially also a gateway module?
Sorry for the novice questions but I really need to know the answer to these questions :)
Citrix Systems (Nasdaq: CTXS) reported strong earnings this week, but the company plans to increase acquisitions in the coming year and to reorganize its sales force, which prompted the company to issue a lackluster forecast for the coming year.
Revenue across the board saw a steep increase, with the company reporting net revenues of $619.4 million in the quarter, a 17 percent increase from the $530 million it reported a year ago. GAAP net income was $108.7 million, 58 cent per share, up from $94.4 million, 49 cents per share, a year ago. The 66 cents quarterly adjusted EPS beat Wall Street estimated of 65 cents.
“Greater diversity in our products and channel, combined with a compelling vision, is driving more C-level engagement as well as more up-sell and cross-sell opportunities,” said Mark Templeton, president and chief executive officer for Citrix. “As a result, we are seeing more strategic deals, more use of our products as an end-to-end system, and deeper engagement with our customers through services.”
Citrix has worked to roll out more robust mobile, cloud and desktop solutions, and it has begun to pay off.
For the year, Citrix reported record revenue of $2.2 billion. Its desktop solution revenue accounted for $1.3 billion of that, 12.5 percent higher than a year ago, and included 14 percent y-o-y growth in the fourth quarter, with revenue of $369 million. Data center and cloud solutions revenue increased 29.1 percent to $385.5 million, online services revenue rose 18.6 percent to $427.7 million and revenue from other products increase 46.4 percent to $114.3 million.
Citrix said revenue increased in the America’s region by 16 percent, rose in the EMEA region by 12 percent and increased in the Pacific region by 37 percent.
For 2012, Citrix said revenue should be in the range of $2.49 billion to $2.51 billion; GAAP diluted earnings per share is targeted to be in the range of $1.88 to $1.97.
For the first quarter, expect revenue to be in the range of $555 million to $565 million with GAAP diluted earnings per share in the range of 30-31 cents.
The thin first quarter results, said CFO David Henshall, come from the company’s plans to look to make acquisitions, but those deals should become accretive later in the year.
For more: – see this release – see this Motley Foolarticle
If you haven’t read pal Martin Geddes latest post on the Future of Communications entitled Peak Telecom, you are missing something that is likely either something you have likely said, thought, heard someone say in private or really wished you had. It’s a stunningly brilliant piece of writing that leads you to wonder, “what is Martin going to say next” as you read through it.
This post is every bit as important as Alec Saunders 2005 post entitled The Voice 2.0 Manifesto in my opinion as far as laying things out or the famed Pulver Purple Minutes post. It is worthy of your time as it may impact your work or livelihood.
So everyone knows it was Martin who first suggested me and my agency to Nokia back in 2005 to help them decipher “social media” long before many knew what “social media” and blogging was really all about. That led to my development of the Nokia Blogger Relations program, and in turn gave birth to Nokia’s Social Media efforts, something I’m now finally allowed to admit after getting permission recently.
It was Martin’s clear cut thinking back then that foresaw the changing landscape of how media would impact the mobile world. Now in his post he’s laid it all out pinpointing where the changes are coming from, and further pinning the operators into the dumb pipe corner.
Just as we’re seeing Over the Top (OTT) in voice and data service impacting the legacy mobile operators and telcos, there’s also a movement afoot thats going to challenge the legacy video conferencing providers like BT, Verizon, Glowpoint (I’m a shareholder) and the rest who have been in the business of white glove video conferncing services, operating exchanges or hosting bridging services.
Yesterday pal Larry Lisser, who is known in the telecom industry as the person to go to to revive sales, penned a post supportive of disruptive Silicon Valley startup, Vidtel (a Comunicano client) who are playing the channel game to open up the legacy room and desk based video conferncing system users of Polycom, Lifesize, Cisco/Tandberg gear to be able to go what founder and ex VP Marketing at Broadsoft Scott Wharton (who is now blogging) is doing with their “any to any’” video bridging service called MeetMe that is offered at downright disruptive prices that turns the whole market on its side. What Vidtel is doing is addressing the already turned on and tuned in video conferencing user base and making their rooms and desktop video systems easily accessible to CounterPath Bria and Bria mobile users, as well as those who are Skype or GoogleTalk centric.
In the post, that was aimed at getting channel oriented telecom resellers to understand why video is so important to them, Lisser points our reasons and rationale as to why the channel is now meaningful to the video conferencing market, a belief also echoed by client Telesphere who offers VideoConnect through their growing reseller partners to sell in to their enterprise customers. In the case of Telesphere they deliver Broadsoft/Polycom/Glowpoint powered video conferencing service that also offers point to point video calling on a range of devices and over the CounterPath powered Bria 3 for Broadworks softphone.
These are reseller channel sold solutions that show a deep understanding of the how to sell versus how to follow. CounterPath, Telesphere and Vidtel along with the established players in Cisco and Polycom, are all using the sales channel to sell through others, not only direct. This is not far different from how Logitech/Lifesize is taking the LifeSize Connections service, or what I call SightSpeed for Business on steroids, where they combined the best of both SightSpeed and Lifesize to bring a lightweight telepresence offering to market and are making it available through leading telecom vTailer (vertical etailer) VoIP Supply (also a Comunicano client) to reach into an already established customer base.
Larry’s premise is further underscored by ClearOne’s purchase today of Israel based VCon, thus showing the world that Polycom, long the audio turned video conferencing leader will have some new competition. ClearOne already sells through channel with companies like eBuyNow, operators of the Skype shop selling the ClearOne Chat 60, and VoIP Supply pushng both the Skype friendly consumer grade speakerphones and the more robust higher end models. Now they’ll take those same channels and follow LifeSize/Logitech’s lead and seek to propel sales through those vtailers like VoIPSupply and others.
All this leads to disruption. Skype started it, but they’re clearly not the end game any longer. Cisco and Polycom aren’t exactly sitting idle as Vidtel and Vidyo disrupt the market, nor are any executives rolling over and playing dead because of Google Hangouts. Companies like Citrix, with GoToMeeting/HD Faces are making great inroads, selling not so much through channel, but via a very strong direct marketing effort online.
What this all means is the traditional players have to change, adapt or die. It’s survival of not only the fittest any longer, but also of the fast and nimble.
Ok. In my rush to pack for a trip to Cartagena, Columbia for a wedding I forgot to pack my SIM cutter. That meant the ease of finding a micro SIM for the iPhone and iPad would make it an adventure and given I wanted more rest than work these few days before the upcoming trade show and conference onslaught–three in four weeks in February for me, I decided to leave the i devices in the safe or use them on WiFi.
Instead I used the Smsung Google Nexus that’s pentaband and workes very well on Telefonica’s Movistar network here.
Sadly battery life isn’t that great. Still I had connectivity. It was cheap I think I paid less than $20.00 for a weeks worth of data access, and when I needed to, I was able to teather to the Nexus.
I guess that’s the best reason. Gosh I missed the iPhone.
Holiday’s period is the real challenge for VoIP carriers and their softswitches. During the New Year and Christmas holidays people make lots of calls with their greetings and wishes.
However, our customers celebrated with no worry. We are justified in telling you that the MediaCore Softswitch showed 100% positive result during the holidays. The MediaCore users had thousands of active calls. Some of them had about 10 thousand active calls with almost 500 calls attempts per second. All the calls were correctly processed by the system.
Speedflow Communications offers its proprietary softswitch solutions for your business.
MediaCore Class 4 Softswitch for wholesale carriers is designed to handle the high peaks of traffic. It is the unified point of control system which doesn?t require any third-party solutions for successful operation.
CallMax Class 5 Softswitch is designed for providing services for end-users. It is our proprietary Linux-based Softswitch with wide range of features such as calling card platform, call back, residential/hosted IP PBX, call shop, DID support, IVR, etc.
Mail to: natasha@speedflow.com
Natalie Tsyplakova, Software Sales Manager
Skype: natalie_spfl
Yahoo: nataliespeedflow
MSN: natasha@speedflow.com
Tel: + 44 203 0 265 765, ext.: 151
VOIP News writes… Yowie has announced it is now offering enhanced group video chatting for consumers, competing against the likes of Skype, Google Hangouts and Tiny Chat. Yowie, known for connecting fans with celebrity chat hosts such as Colin Farrell, Amy Poehler, Interpol and presidential hopeful Gary Johnson, now compete head to head in hot consumer video chat space.
VOIP News writes… Vidyo announced it has virtualized the first video conferencing infrastructure and delivered an HD video conference on over 100 concurrent lines. To date, virtualization in the video conferencing market has been limited to call control. Vidyo has now virtualized media processing, enabling service providers to offer unlimited multipoint scalability and low latency rate matching capability on demand to accelerate the adoption of high quality, universal video conferencing on any endpoint.
VOIP News writes… LightSquared, a nationwide wireless broadband network, announced that it has signed a multi-year wholesale agreement with VoIP provider VoX Communications. VoX is culminating its strategy to add mobile functionality to its existing IP network platform by launching new mobile services and applications, including voice and video, on LightSquared’s network.
VOIP News writes… Cisco has reported its fourth quarter and fiscal year results for the period ended July 30, 2011. The company reported fourth quarter net sales of $11.2 billion, net income on a GAAP basis of $1.2 billion or $0.22 per share, and non-GAAP net income of $2.2 billion or $0.40 per share.
VOIP News writes… Vonage Holdings announced results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2011. The Company reported record high net income of $22 million and record high adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (“EBITDA”) of $44 million.
VOIP News writes… Telesphere recently announced the launch of VideoConnect, a cloud-based videoconferencing service for businesses of every size. Today the company announced that VideoConnect is the first worldwide commercial deployment of Broadsoft’s BroadCloud Video, an enterprise-grade videoconferencing and telepresence service that incorporates Polycom’s standards-based HDX systems and VVX 1500 business media phones, along with CounterPath’s Bria softclients.
VOIP News writes… Viber, a mobile application that offers users free phone calls and text messaging to other Viber users over 3G and Wi-Fi, announced the official launch of the Android version of the app, bringing Viber to millions of additional users. Viber also announced that it has acquired over 12 million active users (last 30 days) and has an impressive call traffic volume of over one billion minutes of calls per quarter.
VOIP News writes… Cisco Cius, the first Androidtablet aimed at enterprise customers will be launched by Verizon Wireless later this summer. According to Verizon, the company is combining the power of its 4GLTE network with the Cisco Cius to improve “Mobile Enterprise Collaboration.”
VOIP News writes… Cisco introduced AppHQ, an application ecosystem built specifically for Cisco Cius that provides new ways to create, manage and rapidly deploy tablet applications in the enterprise. According to Cisco, with the Cius, organizations can now deliver an optimized tablet with enterprise-grade security, as a natural extension of the enterprise network.
VOIP News writes… fring, the mobile communication service that pioneered mobile video over internet calls across smartphone platforms, now brings the world’s first dedicated group video chat service to the iPad.
VOIP News writes… Logitech is teaming up with GN Netcom to fuel the Unified Communications market. As a first step in their collaboration, the two companies have entered into a distribution agreement under which Logitech will offer select products from the award-winning line of Jabra headsets and speakerphones through distribution channel partners in North America.
VOIP News writes… Although carrier router and switch revenue was down sequentially in Q1 (as it usually is in the first quarter), the market is up year-over-year, and the last three quarters represent the three all-time highest-revenue quarters ever, a good sign that the market is back on track, according to the analysts from Infonetics Research.
VOIP News writes… Speedflow Communications now offers a wide range of carrier-grade software products, including class 4 and class 5 softswitches. The company’s highly innovative VoIP software solutions are designed for VoIP carriers and other IP telephony-related companies.
VOIP News writes… Seven percent of U.S. physicians use online video conferencing to communicate with any of their patients, according the new Taking the Pulse study of physician digital adoption trends from pharmaceutical and healthcare market research company Manhattan Research.
VOIP News writes… Microsoft and Skype have just announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Microsoft will acquire Skype for $8.5 billion in cash from the investor group led by Silver Lake.
VOIP News writes… Voxbone has collaborated with Jajah to develop a value-added telecommunications service, which is said to make international calling “simple and affordable.” The International Favorites service, which Jajah provides for mobile customers of O2 in the United Kingdom, offers a subscriber a virtual overseas number so the users can call at local rates.
VOIP News writes… Telanetix, a communications solutions provider offering voice services and solutions to the business market, reported financial results for its 2010 fourth quarter and full year ended December 31, 2010. The company’s fourth quarter core voice revenue increased 10 percent over the same quarter last year and full-year core revenue grew nearly 16 percent over 2009.
VOIP News writes… Black Diamond Video launched its comprehensive high definition conferencing solution, Sapphire-QHD1, a four-faceted package that offers bi-directional HD video and audio conferencing, unidirectional HD video and audio streaming, HD video recording, and HD image capture. Black Diamond Video’s HIPAA compliant Sapphire-QHD1 can be incorporated into BDV’s popular Integrated Digital Surgical Suite (IDSS) for medical applications or stand alone as a commercial, business, or military conferencing system.
VOIP News writes… Although the on-premise model with its control and security advantages will dominate the enterprise communications market in the immediate future, the revenue share of hosted services is poised to increase significantly, according to Frost & Sullivan. Hosted communications services present an ever more popular alternative for deploying IP telephony and unified communications applications.
VOIP News writes… Unified Communications provider Polycom has announced the acquisition of Accordent Technologies, a provider of video content management and delivery solutions, for approximately $50 million in cash. Polycom expects this acquisition to be neutral to earnings in 2011 and slightly accretive to earnings in 2012.
VOIP News writes…
By Jill Stanek Aside from the controversy over the legality and safety of telemed RU-486 abortions, Iowa Republican Congressman Steve King wants to know if federal tax dollars are financing it. Rep. King is currently circulating a request to colleagues to sign on to a letter he will soon send to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius asking whether taxpayers are underwriting Planned Parenthood’s…
Plantronics (NYSE: PLT) Tuesday reported lower profit in its third quarter than a year ago, but still beat Wall Street’s expectations, setting UC revenue records along the way.
Net income for the quarter was $30.9 million, or 71 cents a share, down slightly from $31.6 million, or 64 cents a share a year ago. Adjusted net income was 75 cents per share, topping analyst’s forecasts of 68 cents per share, and topping last year’s adjusted income of 66 cents per share. The lower profits were primarily due to Plantronic buying back some 2.1 million shares.
Revenue, meanwhile was $183.2 million, up slightly from $181.6 million during the same period a year ago.
Plantronics said it expected a strong fourth quarter, forecasting revenue of between $175 million and $180 million for the quarter, with net income of 63-68 cents per share. Analysts expected revenue of $1877.6 million and adjusted earnings per share of 67 cents.
During yesterday’s earnings call, Ken Kannappan, Plantronics’ president and chief executive, said the company set a record in the quarter for UC revenue, which saw 90 percent growth due to rapid adoption of UC globally. The company also saw 8 percent growth in office and contact center revenue.
“We continue to see broad adoption of UC across all size of enterprises in all major geographies,” he said. “Our investments in UC continued to yield solid results. And in the first nine months of fiscal 2012, we made good progress in differentiating our product line, as well as making huge strides in our corporate marketing and brand positioning.”
Recently I was approached by a local company to work with them to improve their technical infrastructure.
I have not worked with VOIP systems before. However I have in the past setup Asterisk and was using it successfully as a dialer.
This client is waiting for a VSC VMSx switch. I’m not familiar with it but they are asking for processing/gateway integration and hardware monitoring.
So with that being said here are a few questions:
1. I have searched around for a VMSx API to be add/remove balances from calling cards, however I cannot find one. Can someone point me in the right direction?
2. Hardware monitoring, can that be setup in VMS? For example, to know when all the trunks are being filled to 90% capacity or when there is no more internet, etc.
3. I’m still confused about something. So they have this softswitch sitting in a local data center. They have clients that have gateways setup in their locations. When I worked with Asterisk, we had a switch with all the ip phones plugged into. That switch was connected to asterisk with just one cable to the secondary lan card. If I don’t understand correctly the way it should be setup is.
a. Softphone connects to a switch.
b. The switch to the gateway.
4. What about for those that already have an existing PBX or want a complete PBX setup. From what I understand there is some type of module that you can get which simply extends the PBX to make outgoing calls route through the VMS softswitch in the data center. Is it essentially also a gateway module?
Sorry for the novice questions but I really need to know the answer to these questions :)
Citrix Systems (Nasdaq: CTXS) reported strong earnings this week, but the company plans to increase acquisitions in the coming year and to reorganize its sales force, which prompted the company to issue a lackluster forecast for the coming year.
Revenue across the board saw a steep increase, with the company reporting net revenues of $619.4 million in the quarter, a 17 percent increase from the $530 million it reported a year ago. GAAP net income was $108.7 million, 58 cent per share, up from $94.4 million, 49 cents per share, a year ago. The 66 cents quarterly adjusted EPS beat Wall Street estimated of 65 cents.
“Greater diversity in our products and channel, combined with a compelling vision, is driving more C-level engagement as well as more up-sell and cross-sell opportunities,” said Mark Templeton, president and chief executive officer for Citrix. “As a result, we are seeing more strategic deals, more use of our products as an end-to-end system, and deeper engagement with our customers through services.”
Citrix has worked to roll out more robust mobile, cloud and desktop solutions, and it has begun to pay off.
For the year, Citrix reported record revenue of $2.2 billion. Its desktop solution revenue accounted for $1.3 billion of that, 12.5 percent higher than a year ago, and included 14 percent y-o-y growth in the fourth quarter, with revenue of $369 million. Data center and cloud solutions revenue increased 29.1 percent to $385.5 million, online services revenue rose 18.6 percent to $427.7 million and revenue from other products increase 46.4 percent to $114.3 million.
Citrix said revenue increased in the America’s region by 16 percent, rose in the EMEA region by 12 percent and increased in the Pacific region by 37 percent.
For 2012, Citrix said revenue should be in the range of $2.49 billion to $2.51 billion; GAAP diluted earnings per share is targeted to be in the range of $1.88 to $1.97.
For the first quarter, expect revenue to be in the range of $555 million to $565 million with GAAP diluted earnings per share in the range of 30-31 cents.
The thin first quarter results, said CFO David Henshall, come from the company’s plans to look to make acquisitions, but those deals should become accretive later in the year.
For more: – see this release – see this Motley Foolarticle
If you haven’t read pal Martin Geddes latest post on the Future of Communications entitled Peak Telecom, you are missing something that is likely either something you have likely said, thought, heard someone say in private or really wished you had. It’s a stunningly brilliant piece of writing that leads you to wonder, “what is Martin going to say next” as you read through it.
This post is every bit as important as Alec Saunders 2005 post entitled The Voice 2.0 Manifesto in my opinion as far as laying things out or the famed Pulver Purple Minutes post. It is worthy of your time as it may impact your work or livelihood.
So everyone knows it was Martin who first suggested me and my agency to Nokia back in 2005 to help them decipher “social media” long before many knew what “social media” and blogging was really all about. That led to my development of the Nokia Blogger Relations program, and in turn gave birth to Nokia’s Social Media efforts, something I’m now finally allowed to admit after getting permission recently.
It was Martin’s clear cut thinking back then that foresaw the changing landscape of how media would impact the mobile world. Now in his post he’s laid it all out pinpointing where the changes are coming from, and further pinning the operators into the dumb pipe corner.
Just as we’re seeing Over the Top (OTT) in voice and data service impacting the legacy mobile operators and telcos, there’s also a movement afoot thats going to challenge the legacy video conferencing providers like BT, Verizon, Glowpoint (I’m a shareholder) and the rest who have been in the business of white glove video conferncing services, operating exchanges or hosting bridging services.
Yesterday pal Larry Lisser, who is known in the telecom industry as the person to go to to revive sales, penned a post supportive of disruptive Silicon Valley startup, Vidtel (a Comunicano client) who are playing the channel game to open up the legacy room and desk based video conferncing system users of Polycom, Lifesize, Cisco/Tandberg gear to be able to go what founder and ex VP Marketing at Broadsoft Scott Wharton (who is now blogging) is doing with their “any to any’” video bridging service called MeetMe that is offered at downright disruptive prices that turns the whole market on its side. What Vidtel is doing is addressing the already turned on and tuned in video conferencing user base and making their rooms and desktop video systems easily accessible to CounterPath Bria and Bria mobile users, as well as those who are Skype or GoogleTalk centric.
In the post, that was aimed at getting channel oriented telecom resellers to understand why video is so important to them, Lisser points our reasons and rationale as to why the channel is now meaningful to the video conferencing market, a belief also echoed by client Telesphere who offers VideoConnect through their growing reseller partners to sell in to their enterprise customers. In the case of Telesphere they deliver Broadsoft/Polycom/Glowpoint powered video conferencing service that also offers point to point video calling on a range of devices and over the CounterPath powered Bria 3 for Broadworks softphone.
These are reseller channel sold solutions that show a deep understanding of the how to sell versus how to follow. CounterPath, Telesphere and Vidtel along with the established players in Cisco and Polycom, are all using the sales channel to sell through others, not only direct. This is not far different from how Logitech/Lifesize is taking the LifeSize Connections service, or what I call SightSpeed for Business on steroids, where they combined the best of both SightSpeed and Lifesize to bring a lightweight telepresence offering to market and are making it available through leading telecom vTailer (vertical etailer) VoIP Supply (also a Comunicano client) to reach into an already established customer base.
Larry’s premise is further underscored by ClearOne’s purchase today of Israel based VCon, thus showing the world that Polycom, long the audio turned video conferencing leader will have some new competition. ClearOne already sells through channel with companies like eBuyNow, operators of the Skype shop selling the ClearOne Chat 60, and VoIP Supply pushng both the Skype friendly consumer grade speakerphones and the more robust higher end models. Now they’ll take those same channels and follow LifeSize/Logitech’s lead and seek to propel sales through those vtailers like VoIPSupply and others.
All this leads to disruption. Skype started it, but they’re clearly not the end game any longer. Cisco and Polycom aren’t exactly sitting idle as Vidtel and Vidyo disrupt the market, nor are any executives rolling over and playing dead because of Google Hangouts. Companies like Citrix, with GoToMeeting/HD Faces are making great inroads, selling not so much through channel, but via a very strong direct marketing effort online.
What this all means is the traditional players have to change, adapt or die. It’s survival of not only the fittest any longer, but also of the fast and nimble.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
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