Hyperconnectivity and particularly mobility is largely enabled or encumbered by battery power. Help is at hand from an unlikely source.
Something called Wireless Resonant Energy Link (WREL), a concept championed by MIT.
Intel Corp. recently demonstrated this technology at their Developer Forum. WREL can power various mobility devices without wires. Continue Reading...
This just in from a friend, JohnT, who is a Technical Director at a UK SI.
"Last night I tried to attend the Cisco Collaboration Summit. Just to be clear, this was a Web conference run by one of the world's biggest conferencing vendor using their own in-house Webex conferencing service to announce enhancements to their UC and conference offerings. We had to pre-register so you would think that they could plan for it to go smoothly. Well, when I first tried to join I got a message saying "Close your browser" (what, all of my sessions?) "and restart in 1 min 23 secs" (...and counting). Continue Reading...
UC without effective presence and IM is like telephony without dial-tone.
So here we have Cisco spending your contributions (remember the Cisco Energy Tax) to acquire Jabber to give them IM for their un-unified UC story. Does this result in a 41st server to deliver UC?
UC has to unify both the end user experience AND the underlying infrastructure, and I don't see Jabber moving Cisco towards the latter objective.
The EnergySmart Hospitals Initiative was launched last July and aims to help improve efficiency in existing buildings by 20%! This is a laudable objective, since more than 50% of institutions reported double digit energy cost increases... and lights out operation is not an option.
Part of that saving can be achieved by switching to Nortel healthcare solutions, which use 40% less energy, while delivering 7x the resilience of those from Cisco.
This is a win-win for energy conscious hospitals who also demand clinical-grade networks.
In a recent blog, John Roese, Nortel CTO, highlighted the IT infrastructure behind CERN's Large Haldron Collider, 'the single largest machine ever built and the biggest scientific experiment ever conducted on the planet'. This 'grid' will distribute, process and analyze some 15 petabytes each year.
What John failed to mention is that the primary network behind CERN is not based on core routers, as is done in the Internet at large and in conventional research and education networks. Networking researchers concluded that core routers just couldn't meet the latency demands for the huge files that needed to be shipped around and for the grid computing applications (i.e. packet segmentation was one major culprit).
Instead, the network is based on lightpaths, 10Gbps lambdas and SONET/SDH pipes, between computing facilities. Continue Reading...
The challenges of Hyperconnectivity are clear: lower personal productivity and unsatisfied employees .... ineffective distributed teams and missed milestones and/or poorer quality of deliverables ..... on-hold business processes, slowed down by not being able to reach decision makers in a timely fashion ..... connectivity mayhem with a plethora of network attached devices .... Continue Reading...
The 2008 Paralympics are going strong in Beijing. And you can watch the highlights on the ParalympicsSport TV network on YouTube.
Watching these athletes is inspirational to say the least, but it can be tiring on the body, since your PC may not be where your couch is.
How about this ergonomically designed chair from which to watch wheel chair basketball? You could even shoot some stationary baskets!
Good to see the Paralympics is accessible to the Hyperconnected!
"Business executives are extremely concerned (and rightly so) that their organization may be the next publicly disclosed data breach story in the Wall Street Journal." That's how I led off a recent article, co-authored with Jon Oltsik of the Enterprise Strategy Group, on network access control (aka secure network access).
Secure network access authenticates users wanting to access the network, performs endpoint health checks, and authorizes network and application access based on role-based policies.
Network access control tied to one vendor's switching platform has been used as part of a lock-in strategy by network vendors. In a hyperconnected world, the last thing you want is a 'closed' access control strategy. Continue Reading...
If UC is in your future, you may be interested in this book and associated certification program.
It is targeted at IT professionals and decision makers in organizations considering UC deployments. It focuses on how UC deployments must be designed from a business process perspective, rather than as driven from a technology perspective.
The information provided is generic and applies to whatever supplier you have or are considering
You can review the first three chapters on-line, including a Forward by Nora Freedman of IDC.
If you go down the UC certification path, you will tangibly show increased value as an IT professional.
You may have seen our recent ads on, for example, CNN.
Nicknamed the 'Nortel Piles' and 'Nortel Holes' commercials, these ads talk to the piles of money enterprises are wasting on the Cisco Energy Tax, and on the leakage of IT budget through the holes created by the Cisco Energy Tax.
They are clever and get the message across: You can save 40% on your energy bill by moving from Cisco to Nortel.
The commercials are not just clever marketing, but reflect the facts as verified by the Tolly Group.
In fact, enterprises around the world have collectively spent an estimated $6.1 billion more on energy expenses in the last five years than they needed to. And the environmental impacts are huge.
So how much are you paying? You can now work it out yourself.
A recent Wainhouse survey suggests that UC has shifted from being a strategic imperative to becoming a tactical challenge.
Two ways of reading this.
One is that when viewed solely from the perspective of raising personal productivity, then, UC is no more strategic than unified messaging was.
The other is that CXOs have business problems to solve and technology alone is seldom the answer. A key challenge for CXOs is how to improve and/or innovate new business processes, which implicitly drives a closer alignment between IT investments and business objectives.
The notion that UC is communications integrated to optimize business processes, elevates UC to being a strategic opportunity: improving customer service, accelerating business process, enhancing collaboration across the virtual enterprises, even contributing to Green initiatives through travel reduction. Continue Reading...
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