Masters of Borderless Networks: Sponsored by Cisco
How Crucial is Control?
Control. It’s something humans gravitate toward in all walks of life. We want control of our finances, our kids, our relationships, our success, our futures. The list goes on.
To what extent do you want control of what you can access in cyberspace? Or, another way to look at it: To what extent do you want someone else to control what you access? And yet a third way to look at it: To what extent do you want to control what someone else accesses? Read more
Telepresence, VNOC Services Key to Keeping Connected
Sometimes it takes unfortunate events to truly value technology. The volcano in Iceland froze air travel in Europe in the past week, affecting people all over the world who wanted to get into or out of Europe.
Several technologies helped. People used mobile phones to call colleagues and families; laptops with wireless Internet access to book hotel rooms, conduct desktop video conferences, or simply to work; and indeed, business suites to conduct immersive telepresence sessions. Read more
Securing the Unknown
During our current round of interviews with enterprise IT folks, I have had the opportunity to discuss many aspects of the emerging virtualized enterprise. One of the most important changes is divorcing access from place: making the ability to reach and use systems location independent. Many companies have gone a long way toward making all of their enterprise systems and applications accessible, whether by expanding terminal services, creating virtual desktop environments, shifting to web front-ends for services, or using SaaS for key services. Read more
High-Definition Matters—and will Increase in Importance
When most little girls get birthday money, they want to run to the store and spend it on clothes, toys, dolls, or jewelry. Breaking from the norm as usual, my daughter decided to spend a large chunk of her 10th birthday money on Wrestlemania, a pay-per-view event broadcast live from Phoenix and attended by 75,000 people. Read more
SMBs Turn to Managed Services
It’s a challenging time for anyone responsible for providing IT services, regardless of company size. IT budgets have been slashed across the board. Business leaders are mandating that all groups tighten their budgets, requiring IT leaders to do more with less staff, budget and internal expertise. This can be quite a challenge, especially for small to midsize (SMBs) businesses that often work with already minimal IT staffs. Deployment of new, complex technologies, especially unified communications and collaboration tools, only exacerbates the problem. Read more
UC Support Options
Growing UC adoption creates a challenge for IT, as applications often exist in isolation, deployed and managed separately. Add end-users’ high expectations of application performance, regardless of where they work, when, or from which device—and with no concern for increased complexity or shrinking staffs. To meet growing demands, organizations increasingly are evaluating their UC application deployment, monitoring and management options. Read more
Video Conferencing Interoperability a Goal
A slew of recent interoperability and cross-company video service announcements from Avaya, BT, Cisco, HP, LifeSize, Polycom, Reliance Globalcom, and Vidtel all serve to underscore the growing momentum behind expanding video conferencing beyond vendor and enterprise boundaries. Read more
Collaboration Improving Productivity
As the number of distributed locations continues to grow, often we’ll see the number of collaboration tools an organization deploys grow as well. More than half of Nemertes research participants are deploying applications, such as Web conferencing and instant messaging, to meet their collaboration requirements. Organizations increasingly are quantifying the value to the organization of their investments in collaboration. Read more
Framework for the Borderless Network
Cisco Systems has been touting the idea of “borderless” networking for several months now, and last week, the vendor put some substance behind the architecture. Read more
Cisco Borderless Announcement Highlights Security, Sustainability, Multimedia
The recent announcement by Cisco Systems of Cisco Borderless Access highlights enhancements to the company's switching portfolio that are aimed at improving security, sustainability, and support for multimedia applications. All three issues are top-of-mind for many enterprise organizations: The number of companies that say they have a strategic security vendor has risen by 38% in 2009; 47.5% of organizations say they have a green/sustainability initiative (most launched within the past 18 months); and the use of videoconferencing has increased dramatically over the past 12 months. Read more
UC in Healthcare On the Rise
At last week’s HIMSS conference, both privately held Avaya and Cisco launched new healthcare-focused UC products to improve patient care, hospital operations, and expand the use of video conferencing for telemedicine. UC adoption in healthcare has lagged behind the overall market, with only 27% of healthcare organizations deploying versus 47% of all industries. Read more
Video Integration Should be a Key Part of Your Strategy
The majority of companies are doing something with video conferencing, whether desktop, room-based, or fully immersive telepresence—or some combination of the three.
So far, though, most companies are implementing these types of video conferencing in silos and often without enough attention to the network supporting them. Integration will become more important moving forward, not only of the equipment, but of the networks that support video conferencing both within and outside the boundaries of a company. Read more
Cloud Security is Top of Mind
At the annual security RSA Conference, the focus was all things cloud. Forget for a moment that definitions of "cloud" are still in flux, or that aside from SaaS, the adoption rate is still in the margin-of-error range (just 2% of benchmark participants told Nemertes in 2009 they were currently deploying cloud services). Indicators point to strong enterprise interest---and this time, the security industry is not waiting for the horse to leave the stable. Read more
Hosted VOIP Needs QoS
MegaPath, Inc. announced the release of its Duet hosted IP-PBX. The offering, aimed at SMBs (both single and multiple locations) is delivered over its fully managed MPLS Virtual Private Network (VPN). It includes either T1 or Symmetric Digital Subscriber Line (SDSL) access service, with Ethernet coming soon. Solutions such as this help customers avoid having to add access capacity, as hosted solutions delivered over a managed MPLS network, offer important QoS and security features not found with "bring your own bandwidth" solutions. Read more
Microsoft Shifts Gears
While most of the excitement in the media surrounds the iPhone, there's still a large group of enterprises who have deployed Windows Mobile to their employees. But Microsoft has always struggled to gain marketshare and momentum against the likes of Blackberry, and more recently Apple. Microsoft went back to the drawing board for its mobile operating system, announcing Windows Mobile 7 as its next iteration. But because Microsoft wiped the slate clean, devices running previous versions of Windows Mobile will not have an upgrade path. Read more
Remember Security In Your Mobile Plans
Cisco announced AnyConnect Secure Mobility to provide encryption and authentication for a wide range of devices: Desktops, laptops, netbooks, smartphones and their operating systems. As an enhanced virtual private network (VPN), AnyConnect offers web application security, single sign-on for software as a service (SaaS) and session persistence. Nemertes notes that mobile spending has survived the recession, rising 16% in 2009, but mobility plans are often hampareed by security concerns especially as device options proliferate. Read more
IT in Healthcare: Lagging or Innovating?
In the 1990s, I used to write practice management pieces for the American Medical News. Often, I explored ways information technology could make medical practices and healthcare, in general, more efficient.
While interviewing physicians and administrators, it was clear healthcare was significantly behind all other industries in its use of IT. Caregivers and administrators were set in their ways. Electronic Medical Records, the Internet, and in some cases, even using computer systems would only add to their complexity—or so they thought. Read more
Co-lo Highlights Power Density Issue
Verne Global is building a data center in Iceland to provide co-location services. Situating in Iceland provides a power cost of $0.04 per Kilowatt-hour – one-fourth to one-fifth the power cost in New York and London – and plenty of it. Verne Global will provide power density to support 20 to 60 KW/rack. Currently, about 87 percent of enterprise data centers support a power density less than 11 KW/rack. This is an issue as virtualization drives higher density servers replacing lower density servers. Read more
Salesforce.com's Chatter Underscores Growth of Social Computing
Salesforce.com launched a private beta of its “Chatter” social networking hosted service, giving customers the opportunity to leverage a private Facebook-style environment to collaborate. With Chatter, Salesforce enters the enterprise social software market competing against the likes of Cisco, IBM Lotus, Microsoft, and a host of smaller vendors. Chatter’s introduction reflects a growing interest among collaboration managers in leveraging social network concepts such as following, tagging, and sharing in a manner consistent with security and governance requirements. Read more
Number Crunching
We’re knee-deep in our latest round of research here at Nemertes, which mean we’re having fascinating, in-depth conversations with about 200 IT professionals on everything IT strategies on everything from virtualization to WANs to wireless to data centers to unified communications. One of the interesting early trends is how employees are slowly shifting their preferred methods of—and their tolerance for—voice communications. Read more
- About Masters of Borderless Networks
Robin Gareiss is Executive Vice President and Senior Founding Partner for Nemertes Research, where she oversees research projects and direction, conducts strategic seminars, develops cost models, and advises leading enterprises, vendors, and carriers. She currently serves as chief financial officer, as well.
For the past 18 years, Robin Gareiss has worked closely with hundreds of senior IT executives, analyzing their use of technology and capturing best practices. Ms. Gareiss is a widely recognized expert in voice over IP, convergence, collaboration, carrier services, IP networking, and branch-office technologies. She is a sought-after speaker at conferences and trade shows, including Interop, where she serves as chairperson for the Branch Offices track, VoiceCon, Mobile Business Expo, Supercomm, Telecom, and CeBit America. She also writes the Branch Offices Best Practices column for Network World.
Ms. Gareiss also has personal experience managing operations and developing new product offerings. Her entrepreneurial experience includes co-founding and overseeing marketing and business development for American Eco-Systems, a water-purification business in Illinois. She also served as president of Living Hope Lutheran Church, and ran several successful fundraisers for children’s cancer and other charities.
Before joining Nemertes, Ms. Gareiss shaped technology and business coverage as Senior News Editor of InformationWeek, a leading business-technology publication with 440,000 readers owned by the $359 million organization CMP Media. Prior to joining InformationWeek, Ms. Gareiss served in a variety of capacities at Data Communications magazine, where helped set strategic direction, oversaw reader surveys, and provided quantitative and statistical analysis. At these organizations Ms. Gareiss also helped develop, organize, and operate Web sites, TV, and print coverage of major trade shows. She has won numerous, prestigous awards for her in-depth analyses of business-technology issues.
Ms. Gareiss also taught ethics at the Poynter Institute for Advanced Media Studies. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Newsweek, and American Medical News. Ms. Gareiss has a BS in journalism and a minor in education, with honors, from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She lives in Illinois with her husband and four daughters.
About Robin Gareiss
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