Network Noise: June 2010 Archives

Cheerio for now!

By Alex Scroxton on June 16, 2010 4:00 PM | No Comments

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I'm bowing out for a few weeks of (very well-deserved) holiday so this will likely be the last post on Network Noise until early July.

I know we've not been at this 'ere blogging lark for very long, but already it looks we're getting some repeat customers and even some spam comments, so thanks for reading along.

I'd love to get any feedback you may have on where we're going and the sort of stories and blogs you would like to see here, and you can always feel free to either comment below or email me on alex.scroxton@rbi.co.uk with ideas, constructive criticism or even a juicy tip-off.

In the meantime, for now I will leave you in the capable hands of my colleagues here at MicroScope, who are blogging for your pleasure and cocking a wry snook at the goings on in this most interesting of industries at Quicke off the Mark and Reseller Radar.

'Til then, enjoy the World Cup, enjoy Wimbledon, and I'll catch up with you all in July.

Orange scores own goal with iPhone 4 plans

By Alex Scroxton on June 16, 2010 12:10 PM | No Comments

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Following the news last week that O2 is to can unlimited mobile data plans on the iPhone, Orange has revealed its pricing plans for the iPhone 4, reducing its fair use data limit to 750MB across its business and consumer price plans, with only the most expensive 'Infinity' business plan exempted.

This discrepancy demonstrates outstanding ignorance of how smartphones are used and is exactly why I left Orange when I upgraded to my first smartphone earlier this year.

Okay, I get that data loads on mobile networks are becoming unsustainable; O2 is frequently unusable in London and T-Mobile has its iffy moments as well. Something needs to be done.

But advertising 750MB as an "unlimited" plan is taking the mickey and I think Orange is in dodgy legal territory by making such a claim.

An enterprise business customer claiming his monthly bill back on expenses is not going to care about going over his limit, but for ordinary users and small businesses the extra charges will quickly mount up.

The mobile networks are trying to shut the stable door after the data horse has bolted, and smartphone users should rightfully be up in arms.

What is needed is not arbitrary limits that stifle the full business potential of smartphones, but investment in network infrastructure that will enable these game-changing devices to be used as their makers intended.

Mobile porn growing threat to corporate networks

By Alex Scroxton on June 15, 2010 11:35 AM | No Comments

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Most IT departments have long had policies in place that have largely wiped out the problem of pornographic websites being viewed over the corporate network.

However, according to research from Damovo when it comes to mobile device policies we still seem to be living in the Wild West.

A poll of 200 UK IT directors at firms with over 1,000 heads found that many workers were using work-issued mobile devices for personal browsing.

Two thirds of directors said they found enforcing mobile usage policies difficult and 88% said that they would like better visibility of their employees' mobile usage.

"Sophisticated mobile devices are becoming the de-facto tool of choice for business users, yet it is clear that this is also brining a whole raft of security and productivity concerns," said Damovo UK portfolio manager Alex Donnelly.

"Without properly provisioning and having an effective mobile device management strategy in place, organisations are going to incur increased support costs and risk losing the visibility and security they had created in the fixed desktop environment," he warned.

IT directors also cited social networks, mobile gaming and mobile TV as threats, with 92% saying that as the number of mobile devices in use on their network increased so did the number of threats presenting themselves, but it is the problem of pornography on corporate networks which raises the most concern.

Aside from the offence that may be caused, x-rated websites frequently harbour spyware, adware and viruses, and many use shady tricks to pass traffic to 'affiliate' websites that make it hard for the hapless user to extricate himself, according to this recent report by the BBC.

It is a cornerstone of our civil liberties that as long as it is not illegal, whatever content people choose to view in their own time is entirely up to them.

However there is no excuse for accessing porn on a corporate network and it is shocking to learn that even though the risks are well known, employees are still prepared to take such blatant risks with both the security of work-provided equipment and their own careers.

Damovo's research also highlights the need for tighter procurement policies in the enterprise world - many mobile devices are bought on a departmental level rather than through IT and 81% of IT directors said it was harder to manage and secure devices procured on the fly.

This also means that organisations are left with different devices running different software versions with differing levels of protection.

Out of the 200 surveyed, 82% said that inconsistent upgrade cycles were leading to increased security concerns.

This is where the channel can best take action to assist their customers in safeguarding their networks and sparing end-users the embarrassment of being caught out.

HP must come clean over Palm

By Alex Scroxton on June 11, 2010 11:05 AM | No Comments

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As the assimilation of mobility vendor Palm into the Hewlett-Packard empire nears, several key members of Palm's webOS dev team have jumped ship. The beneficiaries? Palm's rivals Android and Apple.

Palm has already lost its veep of human interface and user experience, Matias Duarte, to Google, where he has become Android's director of user experience, and it has now emerged that user interface design architect Rich Dellinger left Palm at the start of the month and returned to his former employers, Apple.

Earlier in the month Mark Hurd said HP did not buy Palm to get into the smartphone business, and although this statement came too late to affect the departure of Duarte or Dellinger, it sends a bad message to Palm employees.

I think it's not necessarily the fact that these guys don't fancy working for HP much, and more the fact that HP has given the appearance of dithering over Palm's future.

After all, in the acquisition announcement, HP's Todd Bradley said the vendor intended to be a leader in the mobility space.

Okay, it can have a go at that with tablet PCs. But surely it makes so much sense to leverage smartphone devices as well, since it now has them.

Maybe Hurd's remarks should never have been taken to mean that HP will close or sell Palm's smartphone business. He didn't buy Palm to get into smartphones, but he can still sell them, just as I didn't buy a car so I could have a new radio, but I still listen to it.

But whatever he meant, it's how the remarks sounded that's important. HP may not actually have ever flip-flopped, but frankly, it looks and sounds like a duck.

HP is in danger of inadvertently damaging the assets it bought and must clarify its intentions once and for all.

Nortel's name will live on

By Alex Scroxton on June 10, 2010 3:39 PM | No Comments

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In the last eighteen months, MicroScope has been following the sad demise of Nortel closer than any other UK tech publication, and in that time the vendor's other business units have all found new homes

The sale of its businesses has meant Nortel has even returned to profit in recent quarters.

It was heartening to see network infrastructure provider Ciena release its quarterly results yesterday, with the firm demonstrating in no uncertain terms the impact on its topline numbers of the Metro Ethernet networking business that it bought from Nortel.

Radware, which bought Nortel's Alteon business last year, has also seen a huge positive impact on its sales figures.

Some of the firm's best minds have also started popping up elsewhere in the channel, with John McHugh and Joel Hackney taking new senior roles at Brocade and Avaya respectively.

Closer to home, former Nortel European channel leader Amanda Giddins has also been with Brocade for about a year, developing the vendor's new channel strategy as it builds its own networking proposition.

The performance of Nortel's various business units under their new owners and the presence of its people in high profile positions throughout the industry is, to me, a worthy testament to the quality of Nortel's technology and the thousands of people around the world who developed, built, marketed and sold it.

The history of Nortel is reaching its end, with little left to sell save remaining intellectual property and patents, but the legacy of this venerable networking vendor will live on for years to come.

Snail mail still rules up north

By Alex Scroxton on June 10, 2010 11:38 AM | No Comments

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This will probably come as no surprise to the average Mancunian, Scouser or Geordie, but it turns out that people in the north would rather take things slowly and have a friendly face-to-face meeting and have little truck with any of that poncy video-conferencing malarkey.

A poll of 5,000 UK firms commissioned by ISP Virgin Business Media has highlighted the existence of a north-south divide in the communications market.

Organisations up north (pictured) seem to prefer to make direct phone calls from their land-line or schedule a personal meeting, while businesses down south were spearheading more digital ways of keeping in touch.

The desk phone is still seen as the most important communications channel in the North, where 71% of firms rated it as critical, while 67% said human contact mattered most.

Meanwhile, keeping in touch with colleagues and customers through social networks was found to be most popular in London - which has the most Twitter users in the country - and lowest in Northern Ireland.

Londoners also had a lower opinion of the humble postie, with just 11% of firms in the capital saying snail mail was essential to them, while in Yorkshire, this rose to 37%.

Virgin Media Business commercial director Andrew McGrath (possibly Scottish) said that the evolution in communications that has gripped the business world in the last few years had been far more pronounced in the south, where many firms are almost entirely dependent on emails and mobile technology to get thing done.

But, he continued, there was still a case to be made for taking things easy.

"It's vital that organisations don't completely dismiss traditional comms channels in favour of trendy online tools. Companies must take a multi-channel approach to their communications, as this will allow them to build strong relationships through human contact, whilst benefiting from the mobility that modern tools allow," said McGrath.

I have to agree with the sentiment. Great as we have found tools like Twitter to be in our work, for a journalist as much as anybody else there is still always something to be said for getting out there and meeting people. I'm a born-and-bred Londoner but I'll definitely be taking a tip from our friends in the north.

Avaya adds a bit of Mojo to its line-up

By Alex Scroxton on June 8, 2010 10:50 AM | No Comments

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Interest and, dare I say it, a little excitement, is mounting over the imminent debut of an Avaya tablet device after the firm passed a device referred to as a 'Tablet PC' through the FCC.

The photo obtained by WirelessGoodness shows what is pretty self-evidently an Avaya-branded iPad-style device that appears to have been built with some assistance from high-end audio kit builder Harman-Kardon.

But a bit of digging on the subject reveals that MicroScope's sister publication ComputerWeekly.com was first to confirm the existence of the long-talked about device back in March when it landed an exclusive chat with Avaya EMEA heavyweight Michael Bayer.

So, it's called Mojo, and it's a Java-based, touchscreen, wi-fi enabled device that will assume a distinct "personality" based on what applications are loaded.

Mojo is not an executive toy, according to Bayer, but rather a "soft" machine suitable for various working environments.

At the time it already had software clients for voice, video, session management as well as third party apps developed for the hospitality sector.

What it won't do, however, is support mobile telephony, as Avaya wants to remain an open system and mobile capabilities would scupper that aim. But then the iPad isn't a mobile phone either and none of the early adopters seem to be complaining about that...

CW.com suggested that this product would help Avaya gain ground against its biggest rivals, Microsoft on desktop apps and Cisco on network apps.

So, the lines are now being drawn for what now appears to be an incontrovertible enterprise-tablet war among the vendor heavyweights; we know HP is likely ramping up its tablet project having bought Palm, and in April there was even talk that Cisco was sniffing around the concept.

But in this world of cost cuts, hosted services and recurring revenues, it will be interesting to learn how the channel will be able to make the case for investment in such devices.

Hurd to blogosphere; no HP smartphone

By Alex Scroxton on June 3, 2010 9:48 AM | No Comments

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Well, it looks like pretty much everybody called that one wrong. There won't be an HP smartphone anytime soon.

Speaking candidly at a Merril Lynch tech event this week, HP supremo Mark Hurd laid the facts down in no uncertain terms, saying it "doesn't in any way make sense" for HP to get into the smartphone market.

Actually, Hurd said, there was one reason alone that HP bought Palm at the end of April and that was for its intellectual property.

In a widely-quoted statement, Hurd said: "The WebOS is one of the two ground-up pieces of software that is built as a web operating environment.... We have tens of millions of HP small form factor web-connected devices [iPaqs, etc].... Now imagine that being a web-connected environment where now you can get a common look and feel and a common set of services laid against that environment. That is a very value [sic] proposition."

Although this statement leaves owners and resellers of Palm devices facing an uncertain future, this news would seem to indicate that HP is going to put WebOS on some kind of tablet device in the near future.

HP has already pledged a major round of investment in Palm's R&D operation and its head of IR, Jim Burns, also dropped a monster hint when he said: "So we are going to be taking this platform, which today exists in smartphones and taking it much broader than that."

So based on this it looks like HP sees the future of mobile business computing as being on iPad style devices.

And it's pretty much curtains for the Microsoft relationship.

England vs Slovenia will be litmus test for SMB networks

By Alex Scroxton on June 2, 2010 11:27 AM | No Comments

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As the countdown to the World Cup in South Africa reaches fever pitch, commercial SME ISP Easynet Connect is warning that demand for HD video streaming during games that fall in business hours could knock SMEs on low-end business or consumer plans offline.

On 23 June at 3pm England will take to the pitch against Slovenia and business networks could see their biggest load ever.

According to Easynet boss Chris Stening, a single HD connection to the BBC iPlayer service requires a connection running at 1.5Mbps. If five people within an office connect at once, this will rise to 8Mbps, while if 20 go online, businesses will need a stable connection of 30Mbps, and that's without taking into account the bandwidth that other business apps will require at the same time.

As a nation we were already pretty dependent on the Internet during the last World Cup in 2006, but in the last four years the world wide web has become even more crucial to even more businesses, and Stening believes that as legions of fans will attempt to find a way to follow the game anyway, SMEs should rush to audit their bandwidth requirements and if they can't stop people logging on, at least try and manage the impact with help from their ISP.

Failing that, buy a telly.

Opal staff take over Red Cross stores

By Alex Scroxton on June 1, 2010 3:20 PM | No Comments

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Opal Telecom employees have been out and about raising cash for the firm's first annual charity drive, with staff from its various UK offices pitted against each other in a brutal Apprentice-style 'Store Wars' game that may well yet be sold as the next big reality TV format.

Staff including MD Paul Lawton (pictured) occupied British Red Cross charity shops across the country and competed in a deadly battle royale to see who could raise the most cash.

Others pitched in to raise money for 27 separate charities including Barnardo's and the Prince's Trust, with other staff painting chicken sheds in Milton Keynes, reorganising an audio library for the blind in Aylesbury and presenting on a community radio station in Warrington to raise a grand total of over £3,000.

Opal said it lost 1,500 man-hours to the scourge of fundraising during its charity week, which will no doubt form the basis of a business continuity case study any day now.

June 2010 Archives

Cheerio for now!

Orange scores own goal with iPhone 4 plans

Mobile porn growing threat to corporate networks

HP must come clean over Palm

Nortel's name will live on

Snail mail still rules up north

Avaya adds a bit of Mojo to its line-up

Hurd to blogosphere; no HP smartphone

England vs Slovenia will be litmus test for SMB networks

Opal staff take over Red Cross stores

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