Hal Steger
Vice President of Worldwide Marketing at Funambol. 20+ years of marketing & product management experience at high-growth, innovative global software companies.
| This blog is about personal cloud solutions, technology, trends and market developments. Its scope is to comment on and discuss several aspects of personal clouds.
Proactive Care Puts Operators One Step Ahead
By Thomas Fuerst, Senior Director, Multimedia Solutions MarketingAlcatel-Lucent
Monitoring and analyzing network data proactively saves operators time, money, and customers.
When a network service fails, it makes headlines, ticks off customers, and costs that network operator money. When a failure is headed off in advance, on the other hand, there might not be praise-laden headlines, but it's newsworthy nonetheless.
The traditional approach to customer care has typically been: a disgruntled customer calls customer service and complains of a service interruption or problem; the rep, learning of it for the first time, sends out a technician the next day, and eventually finds a resolution. Often, customers are left feeling put out, and the operator has spent significant time and money resolving the problem. Even worse is the customer who doesn’t call and just feels this is ‘typical’ of their network experience. That is a customer at risk of leaving.
Proactive care flips this dynamic on its head by using predictive analytics to identify potential outages or errors in the network and stop them before they occur. It consists of three main parts: one, constantly monitoring and measuring data on the network; two, real-time analysis of the data; and three, the most important, acting on that analysis to fix the problem.
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10 Lessons from Volleyball
I've played volleyball for over 25 years. I have traveled around the US to watch the pros live - both indoor...
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Emerging Threats Combats a Million Plus Pieces of New Malware a Week
There are 250,000 plus new pieces of malware being produced each day equating to one piece per person in the US in...
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NFV-Based Software Telcos Need OSS/BSS Interoperability
One of the goals of ETSI NFV is to allow new entrants to provide solutions to carriers based on software instead of...
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SysAid's Lifshitz: The Cloud Will Dominate ITSM Market
Cloud computing has really become a household word with mainstream media outlets running stories on television about the growth in the space...
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Avaya Takes Networking Lead in SPB
At Interop Las Vegas 2013 Avaya was demonstrating their real-world Shortest Path Bridging (SPB) solutions and while interoperating with Spirent, HP and...
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Alianza Wants to Host Your Software Telco
The software telco(r)evolution representing the move from hardware to software is perhaps the biggest trend in the world of carrier telecom this...
Full Story »Personal Cloud Market Map 2013
May 21, 2013My company spends a lot of time talking to people about the personal cloud space, including industry analysts, executives, users and many others. A common question is, "what is the personal cloud market, exactly?". For people who do not follow the industry closely, it can be confusing, given the multitude of companies and offerings in the market.
To simplify things, we often draw a 'market map' that resembles the following:
Operator Clouds: It's The User Experience...
May 2, 2013At the risk of dating myself as well as using a semi-crass word, one phrase comes to mind in light of the recent launch of a major U.S. carrier cloud.
"It's the economy, stupid"
Except in this case, it would be:
Personal Cloud Video: Sync or Swim (aka progressive downloading vs. streaming)
April 29, 2013Market research as well as experience with customer deployments globally show that personal cloud and mobile video use is on the rise. As part of this, more people prefer to stream content than download it. This is somewhat akin to the difference between renting and owning content, the former is less expensive and comes with the expectation that video can be watched instantly instead of waiting for a potentially long download. On the other hand, if you need offline use, streaming won't cut it.
Separation of Mobile Cloud Church and State (aka Personal and Work Data): A Double-Edged Sword
April 23, 2013An important challenge, as well as opportunity, facing providers of personal cloud services is the separation of personal and work data. This has cropped up in mainstream media lately with articles such as this on NBCNews: Use your personal phone for work email? Your company might take it.
As a company that has wirelessly stored and synced people's 'personal information management' data (aka PIM data -- contacts, calendars, tasks and notes) for 10+ years, and synced files and rich media for several more, this topic has come to our attention many times, but it is now more pertinent than ever.
Personal Cloud Tipping Point?
March 4, 2013I've seen signs in February that indicate that personal clouds are nearing a tipping point -- consider:
1. Gartner Personal Cloud Report. Gartner published a report in February entitled, 'Market Trends: CSPs Face Competition From OTT Providers in the Personal Cloud'.
Monetizing Personal Clouds -- You Get What You Pay For
January 29, 2013Personal cloud services that primarily offer storage are quickly becoming a dime a dozen. Further, as the cost of storage continues to drop, providers are giving away more free storage. While a typical amount of free storage is now 5G, in a few rare cases, companies offer 50G. It would not be surprising if the typical amount of free storage significantly increases soon as the battle for users intensifies.
The Real Potential of Personal Clouds, circa 2013
January 3, 2013I considered titling this, the 'Time Value of Content', but decided against it as I thought it might be good if someone actually read it
Over the holidays, I reflected on the true potential of personal clouds. Often, when you work with something every day, you take it for granted and get too close so that you stop viewing things as most people would. When this happens, it is often good to take a step back for a fresh look.
Carrier Cloud Trends in 2013
January 2, 2013As 2013 dawns with the world still spinning and the U.S. not falling off a cliff, this is an opportune time to take a fresh look at the future of personal clouds A few trends have emerged recently that are setting the stage for carrier cloud adoption in 2013.
Types of Carriers Offering Personal Clouds
A leading mobile analyst recently predicted that many operators in 2013 must choose between being a 'digital lifestyle' or a low cost provider.
The 3 Ps of Personal Clouds: Promises, Pitfalls and Problems
November 20, 2012In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I learned three interesting things this week about personal clouds that I thought were worth sharing.
First, I saw the results of a recent PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) survey of consumers on their views towards personal clouds. Here is a summary of the key results from my perspective:
Although this survey focused more on storing commercial content (such as music and movies) in a personal cloud rather than user generated content, its results were very consistent with a similar survey that we conducted earlier this year (that was more about user generated content).
The ABCs (and Ds) of Personal Clouds (and some tips for Halloween)
October 27, 2012In discussing personal clouds with many people for awhile, it's become clear to me that a lot of people still do not really 'get' them.
For example, I often ask iPhone users if they use iCloud. This is typically met with a quizzical look and a response such as, 'I think I have iCloud, it's on my phone, it's for backup, right?'.
iCloud does backup but it also does a lot more.
