If you're interested in "Creating an Effective Mobile Advertising Ecosystem," you're in luck -- Alcatel-Lucent has recently produced an excellent study of the subject.

 

"The mobile advertising space is poised for growth," the study finds, adding that however, "the promise of significant revenues has predictably caused a meteoric rise in the number of companies jockeying for position, muddying the waters and making it increasingly difficult for companies across this emerging business ecosystem to work together to achieve positive results."

 

The study finds that meeting each stakeholder's needs is absolutely crucial. It identifies the key stakeholders, and gives useful advice in meeting their needs, observing that "an effective mobile advertising solution serves the needs of three distinct groups: mobile operators; brands, marketers, media buyers and sellers; and subscribers."

 

Mobile operators. Most mobile advertising is delivered over the top of their networks by application and content providers (market rivals including Google and Apple). As a result, mobile operators are providing the pipes (for advertisers to communicate with their subscribers), but not getting a great return on that investment.

 

Read more here.

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A recent white paper from Alcatel-Lucent takes a fine, in-depth look at the issue of, as the title would suggest, "Improving Business Operations with Unified Video Communications." The entire paper is well worth a read, it goes into useful detail on this complex topic.

 

Basically, Medium and large enterprises are finding new opportunities to reduce costs and improve team collaboration and customer service by deploying the latest enterprise video solutions. Unified video communications can help, as these products bring UC and video collaboration together.

 

The paper identifies four key benefits:

 

Build trust. Businesses need trust. Trust between teams in an enterprise and between business partners is the key to a smooth and effective working relationship. High-quality video communication is the next best option to a face-to-face meeting when it comes to building trust.

Reduce costs. Replacing face-to-face meetings with unified video communications can reduce travel costs drastically.

 

In addition to reducing the need for travel to meet with colleagues and customers, a unified video communications solution can also help employees be more efficient by re-allocating the time they would spend in airplanes, cars or trains to other business tasks.

 

Read more here.

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Single-Chip Control/Data-Plane Processor technology is being deployed today, mainly in low-end applications. As semiconductor processes improve, it will inevitably move into higher-speed designs.

Industry analyst Linley Gwennap has recently published a study which examines this trend towards combining control-plane and data-plane processing on a single chip.

 

Linley focuses on two areas of deployment, excerpts follow:

 

At the low end of the networking market, such as equipment for consumer or SOHO (small office/home office) use, data throughput is typically less than 10Mbps. At these rates, both the control plane and data plane can be handled in software on a CPU running at less than 400MHz.

 

This type of low-cost CPU can be licensed from several sources and integrated into a system-on-a-chip (SoC) device to form the core of a low- cost router or broadband gateway. We do not consider these devices to be SCDP because they do not integrate any data-plane functions, other than perhaps an encryption offload engine.

 

Read more here.

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Ipswitch'sNetwork Management Division has recently published a fine study on licensing practices in IT management -- coincidentally enough, titled "Licensing Practices in IT Management."

 

Licensing is an integral part of the software business as vendors typically sell customers the right to use their technology, the study finds, adding that "the intellectual property continues to remain vested with the vendor."

 

The goal, then, "is to develop a balanced approach where the software vendor can maximize economic gain, while delivering equivalent value to the customer at the price point offered... In order to accomplish this - vendors need to be creative about how they license their software."

 

There are two licensing models the paper looks at. Perpetual licensing models "typically include a one-time fixed cost to acquire a base product and then additional pricing for higher levels of usage - or what can be termed as the 'scale factor'. Often the scale factor is already worked into the cost of the base product through tiered pricing - allowing its use up to a certain number of licensing units."

 

In this model, then, the annual maintenance charges pay for the cost of technical support and also provide access to new version releases without additional license payments, as the study explains.

 

Read more here.