Buzzword Lexicon

Business services management (BSM)

• How do you plan to incorporate business process monitoring into your software?
• Is change and configuration management part of your software stack?
• What experience do you have in business management consulting that would let you help me adequately identify business processes?
• What are you doing to make integration of multiple BSM tools easier for me?
• What are you doing to make integration between BSM tools and the back-end data sources easier for me?

De-perimeterization

• In what ways – and at what levels – do you support encryption? In transit? While stored?
• Which authentication standards, such as 802.1X, do you support?
• How can I use this product to enforce security policies at various levels, network access and individual rights?
• How granular is the above policy enforcement features?
• How can this product be used to secure access or enforce policies over the extended enterprise?
• Once you know who and what is accessing your network, can you assign policies based on their individual roles?
• How difficult or easy is it to manage down to the individual level?
• Can policies also be applied to network abstracts, such as VLANs or subnets?
• What technologies or strategies do you offer to keep the network secure while we wait for perimeter-less networking to emerge ­ and how difficult are they to manage?

Grid middleware

• What parts of the grid management process do your product automate?
• What standards does it support?
• Which standards bodies do you belong to?
• What is your opinion on the merging of Web services standards with grid standards?

Infranet

• Are you a member of the Infranet Initiative group? If not, do you intend to join the group or support its efforts?
• What is the status of MPLS technology within your backbone? Does the provider of your MPLS gear belong to the Infranet Initiative group?
• Do you currently interconnect your MPLS backbone with another carrier’s MPLS net?
• Do you offer MPLS services? If so, can I use them to run multiple applications at different priorities – with different QoS parameters associated with each priority ­ across the same connection?

Linux on the desktop

• What apps do you support with your Linux distribution?
• What type of support services do you offer? (The vendor’s support staff can be a critical lifeline as your own staff adjusts to the change.)
• What cost savings can I anticipate ­ and will those be genuine or short-lived?

Managed VoIP

• What QoS features do you offer? And if not already, when will you provide end-to-end QoS?
• What premises gear to we get with the managed VoIP package?
• Can we use any vendor’s IP telephone handsets?
• Can we handle our own moves, adds and changes? Can users program their own handsets?
• What can we expect to spend per seat to get all of the following services: local calling, long-distance, Internet access, follow me/find me, unified messaging and audioconferencing?
• What interface do you offer for monitoring the health of broadband links and the WAN performance?

Message archiving

• Is this a stand-alone product or must it be purchased as a suite?
• How well does it scale?
• How must it be included in a disaster-recovery plan?
• How can it be used to search messages?
• How can a corporate compliance administrator use this tool to verify e-mail policy compliance?

Multicore processor servers

• Which software vendors 32-bit products have been certified to run on this 64-bit server?
• What are the benefits of buying a multi-core system?
• Why should I buy this instead of a multi-processor system?

Product information management

• Is the underlying engine a database, search engine, document management or workflow engine?
• What integration standards are supported?
• What output methods are supported?
• How does the product designate “gold” sources of data?
• How does the product ensure version control of all data?

Storage grids

• Which vendors’ storage products and which server operating systems will work with your grid storage strategy?
• How soon will grid storage be available?
• Does the strategy require the rip and replace of existing file systems?
• Does the strategy require the deployment of new servers to host file namespace services?
• Will specialized agents need to be deployed on all client systems?
• What WAN bandwidth is required to make a distributed approach viable?
• Which standards does it support and who else supports those standards?
• What management tools will the vendor provide?
• How will storage allocation and de-allocation be handled?
• How does the solution detect and respond to application demands for storage resources or file access?
• How will file system metadata be managed? Is there a special agent architecture, a replacement file system or some sort of communication between storage platforms themselves?
• What time delays will occur in file directory data in geographically distributed environments?
• How will security will be preserved in a universally accessible storage environment?

Wireless data services

Questions to ask vendors:

• How can I supplement my existing cell service with support for EV-DO? And how much will that cost?
• Where do you provide coverage, and what’s your projected build-out plans?
• What average throughput speeds can I expect, and will you guarantee those in writing?
• Are you offering incentives for early contractual commitments?

• How much can I expect to pay for a base station and card?
• Will you assist with a site survey to help determine antenna placement, or do you provide tools for such?
• With line of sight, how much distance coverage can I expect? And without line of sight?
• How do you handle channel parsing?
• Do you plan on supporting mobile Wi-Max as well and, if so, when?

Wireless security

• How do I integrate 802.11i security with older methods of security?
• What is involved in upgrading my existing WLAN gear to 802.11i?
• Have you been tested by the Wi-Fi Alliance for compliance?
• Which products are have been tested to be interoperable with yours?