Recently TMC's CEO, Rich Tehrani had the opportunity to sit down and interview Alex Henthorn-Iwane, Vice President of Marketing at Packet Design, which is a network management company focused on helping clients understand the complex dynamics of their IP networks.

 

The aggregation of media, specifically more real time media, such as video and voice, has made the company's services "more critical," he said. "The wave of video and interactive media made business and consumer communications more real time, more critical."
 
If you're a retail provider you realize data is more sensitive and you have to build more redundant networks to get the data there, but that makes them more complex to manage and understand," he pointed out.

 

Henthorn-Iwane further noted that the company is seeing trends that tend to increase network complexity. The move to MPLS, from a management position, is a thorn in their side, he said. It's been going on for over a decade, and now that companies have outsourced their WAN to Verizon or to AT&T or whoever, "they don't have insight into their networks, they can't tell how things are working."

 

Read more here.

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As the title of a good white paper from Pace Harmon issued in Aug. puts it, "Cloud Computing: Where does it fit within your Enterprise IT plans?"

 

The paper has a good overall discussion of the topic, and lists some good reasons why you would -- and why you wouldn't -- use cloud computing. First, the pro:

 

Cost Effectiveness. Providing the business immediate and economic access to enterprise- class IT services. In a traditional model, access to these resources would require significant capital investment (or large ongoing financial commitments).

 

Scalability. An ability to respond rapidly to peaks and troughs in demand for IT resources and to pay for only the needed resources when they are needed. In a traditional model, systems need to be architected to support peaks in utilization, leaving costly resources sitting idle for most of the time.

 

Read more here.

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Recently the senior vice president for SME volume and ecosystem marketing for SAP, Jeff Stiles sat down for an interview with TMC's CEO, Rich Tehrani. Stiles works with customers of SAP who may have as few as ten users, which is not what one thinks of as far as a typical SAP deployment.

 

"It's one of the best-kept secrets" of SAP, Stiles said, "which I need to turn into one of the best-known facts, that three-quarters of our customers are small to mid-size companies. And ninety percent of those are in the lower mid-market."

 

Speaking to trends he sees in the industry now, Stiles said that buying expectations have really changed. "They need affordable products that are fast in time to value, they can't afford a nine-month implementation, they're looking for weeks."

 

Read more here.

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ROI Networks has recently issued an interesting integration case study concerning their adaption of Skype Connect.

ROI Networks is a systems integrator based in southern Calif., and they faced a challenge recently when one of their long-time multi-national customers in the semiconductor industry asked them to address their costly conferencing expenses.

 

The company already owned an Avaya SIP Enablement Server and Meeting Exchange systems, which enabled in-house conferencing, but their satellite employees and customers around the world still incurred significant costs to dial into the Meeting Exchange system via standard PSTN-based or mobile telephones.

 

So ROI Networks checked into Skype Connect, which allows businesses to use their existing PBX or IP-PBX systems to communicate with Skype users around the world at a more affordable rate.

 

Skype Connect also allows businesses to have local telephone access numbers in 25 major countries - which is important if you want to expand your footprint.

 

To accomplish this transition, ROI Networks chose the AudioCodes Mediant 1000 MSBG with enterprise session border controller features. The Mediant 1000 MSBG provides both a WAN interface and LAN interface, allowing for IP-to-IP configurations.

 

Read more here.