I just returned from the 13th annual KM World conference this week and listened to a really interesting keynote from Andrew McAfee (the "king of Enterprise 2.0" according to KM guru Tom Davenport). McAfee summed up his talk with a list of basically how to get it Enterprise 2.0 wrong: Read more
In the jostling to grab the headlines for next-gen 100Gbps Ethernet, Juniper this week unveiled its second offering: a 10x10G Ethernet physical interface card (PIC) for its T1600 core router. Read more
Google's IPv6 development team has built support for next-generation Internet standards into the Chrome operating system and the Android platform for mobile devices. Now the team has set its sights on YouTube, which is its top priority. Read more
In January 2008, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) instituted a security initiative called the Federal Desktop Core Configuration or FDCC. FDCC is comprised of about 300 settings on Windows PCs. The objective is to create a standard federal desktop configuration that eases operations and improves security. All Federal agencies were required to implement FDCC settings by February 4, 2008.
Two more “gotchas” for SIP trunking adoption: Lack of usable fax services and E-911. Fax over IP has always been the thorn in the side of VOIP. While standards such as the International Telecommunications Union T.38 enable fax over IP between IP enabled fax machines and PSTN gateways, support for fax has not yet materialized in the SIP trunking market. Even though fax volumes continue to decline, fax is still a key requirement for contracts. Read more
Cisco's recent introduction of WebEx Mail, a Software-as-a-Service offering meant to replace on-premise Microsoft Exchange servers highlights the continued momentum behind hosted applications to reduce operating costs and complexity. Sixty percent of companies are adopting some form of SaaS, with customer resource management leading the way. IT leaders are also increasingly looking at SaaS-based offerings for computing platforms, disaster recovery, application performance and management, and security and data leak prevention. Read more
Colleague Ellen Messmer has a story this week on a new iPhone application from Cisco that can be used to receive more than a dozen security-related information feeds pertaining to Cisco products and general security topics. The application is free too, Messmer reports. Read more
The Cisco Unified Phone Designer is a downloadable Cisco Unified Communications widget that I will discuss in this blog. Read more
In court the Federal Communications Commission has charged 26 people with defrauding the agency of "tens of millions of dollars" from its program that lets people with hearing disabilities to communicate with hearing individuals through the use of interpreters and Web cameras. Read more
Lately, I've been trying to put into perspective the "dollar amount success" for 2 of Cisco's much ballyhooed products, the Flip video camcorder and the Cisco TelePresence video solution. Since I don't have any inside information on which to make dollar amount conclusions, I've had to rely totally on what Cisco has made available to the public, for instance, during Cisco's F1Q10 earnings call, John Chambers boasted:
"To give you some additional color on our progress in this area, we talked earlier about tele-presence revenues once again growing in excess of 100% year over year, a proof point that our customers truly understand productivity and value that video delivers internally and with their own customers and partners. Other product areas that may be of interest to you from a revenue perspective including tele-presence had increases over 100% and we added approximately 85 new customers in Q1. Pure Digital’s [Lift] had revenues of approximately $50 million and CRS revenue was up approximately 7% year over year."
Interestingly (at least to me), I think I may have hit "pay dirt" with Cisco's latest Form 10-Q filed with the SEC earlier this week (page 38), which, if not offering absolute numbers, finally allows me to place some sort of "dollar amount success" on the Flip video camcorder and Cisco TelePresence products:
"While we did experience a sequential revenue increase in many of our product categories, our net product sales declined year over year across almost all of our product categories in the first quarter of fiscal 2010, except for sales of our products under the category of other, which reflected positive year-over-year revenue growth as well as positive sequential revenue growth. The year-over-year and sequential revenue increase in that category was driven by sales of Flip video cameras from our fiscal 2009 acquisition of Pure Digital Technologies, Inc. ('Pure Digital'), and increased sales of Cisco TelePresence systems."
Cisco's 1st Quarter Other Product Revenue By Fiscal Year:
F1Q10 - $481 million (page 35) +$42 million increase
F1Q09 - $439 million (page 35) -$71 million decrease
F1Q08 - $510 million (page 40) +$55 million increase
F1Q07 - $455 million (page 33)
So according to Cisco's F1Q10 earnings call and latest SEC Form 10-Q filing, Flip video camcorder revenue combined with a stunning 100% increase in Cisco TelePresence revenue produced a mind-boggling $42 million increase in Cisco revenue. All of this points out that even though Cisco makes a lot of noise about the possibilities of videoconferencing, relatively speaking, it's still a tiny business for Cisco -- so small that they bury it in the "other" category, along with the Flip, optical (which appears to be closing down) and who knows what else. Read more
News of a leak about Microsoft’s Windows 8 sure has stirred something over the Internet. Some say Windows 8 won't happen until Windows 7 is perfected and others say that Microsoft has already begun recruiting employees to help build Windows 8. Read more
With Cyber Monday approaching, we here in the news business are being inundated as usual with offers of "expert advice" for us to pass along to readers/online shoppers so that they may better protect themselves against identity theft.
Most of it we -- and you -- have read a hundred times already. Read more
When The Little App Factory received a legal letter from Apple requesting that they change the name of their popular Mac app, "iPodRip", CEO John Devor decided to pen a heartfelt email to Apple CEO Steve Jobs himself. iPodRip, in case you're unaware, is a nifty little Mac app that enables users to copy songs from their iPhone or iPod back to their Mac. The app has been around since 2003 and is must-have if you experience any kind of data loss on your Mac. To date, it has been downloaded over 5 million times. Read more
Several media reports this week say that Cisco will unveil a Wi-Fi-enabled Flip video camera early next year. The device might be the first to feature Cisco technology; Cisco bought Flip maker Pure Digital earlier this year. Read more
To the surprise of no one, Cisco is the leading vendor of 10G Ethernet to data centers and everybody else. Yet it's 10G data center deployments that accounted for the second consecutive quarter of growth for the Ethernet switch market in Q3, according to Dell'Oro Group. Read more
As part of my job as an industry analyst, I end up reading a lot of content produced by technology vendors. A lot of it isn't very good -- either blatant advertorial schlock or poorly written hyperbole.
Coming up with the right business model for your mobile application can be tricky. Here are some of the key questions any good mobile application business plan should answer.
What kind of mobile application am I building and why should people buy it? Read more
At least they aren't making any excuses.
From a story on StorefrontBacktalk:
Leaving online shoppers out in the cold with no warnings or explanations (or coats, if that's what they wanted to buy), Burlington Coat Factory took its Web site offline all day Wednesday (Nov. 18)-plus at least four hours-for a planned outage as the $3.5 billion clothing retailer performed an extensive hardware and database upgrade. Read more
I'm live blogging while the Chrome OS Webcast is occurring. Today, Google has released the code to Chrome OS for open source developers. You can download it here: http://src.chromium.org/
Google is explaining how the OS is really a souped up browser (Chrome) and how this will speed it, improve security and eliminate the need for applications on a hard drive. Read more
SIP trunking raises a few security concerns that IT planners must address. SIP trunking creates a new vector for attacking enterprise phone systems. In most VOIP architectures the PSTN serves as a firebreak between the enterprise phone system and the rest of the world. Risk of attack from the Internet is low as the VOIP system is physically and potentially logically isolated from the outside. Introducing SIP trunking changes this, as the enterprise phone system is now vulnerable to IP-based attacks via the SIP trunk. Read more
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