September 2010 Archives

It's shaping up to be a busy couple of weeks on the comms gadget front, which is of course just how we like it.

Following the launch of Avaya's Not-A-Tablet tablet earlier in September, BlackBerry-picker RIM weighed in with a now-fulfilled promise to pleasantly surprise everyone, albeit in a thoroughly predictable manner.

Yesterday, moblity expert RIM unveiled its heralded tablet device at its developer conference in San Francisco.

It's called the PlayBook, it's running on a new OS built by recent RIM acquisition QNX. It has 1GB of memory, two cameras to support videoconferencing and with a seven-inch screen, weighs slightly less than a pound, making it both smaller and lighter than the iPad.

In terms of what the PlayBook will do there are no real surprises here that I can see. RIM seems to have pitched it firmly at the business market, providing out-of-the-box enterprise support through BlackBerry Enterprise Server, as well as a development platform for IT departments, according to the blurb.

As predicted it will need to be tethered to a BlackBerry smartphone to access a mobile network. RIM says this is important because the smartphone will store all the data, with the tablet having access only to a temporary cache. The firm claims this will eliminate major questions over mobile enterprise security.

We can expect to see them winging their way across the Atlantic before June 2011.

Meanwhile, this morning an analyst contact tweets with the news that Cisco is inviting reporters to an event, also in San Francisco, next Friday. The invitation promises a "new Cisco consumer experience ... hosted by John Chambers". Now, we know well here what sort of thing John's into, so I expect we'll be talking about home telepresence in a little under a week.

Photo courtesy Research in Motion. All rights reserved 

In our ongoing series of guest blogs on Network Noise, and ahead of the upcoming networking industry knees-up at IP Expo, Adam Malik of event organisers Imago argues that even with the growth in hands-off cloud computing, there is still a place for the dealer community

The growth of cloud computing has made many wonder if vendors still need resellers. After all, why pay someone else to 'hand hold' a customer when the customer never actually unwraps, installs or even touches the technology directly?

However, cloud computing is a double-edged sword for vendors because customers who buy compute power and applications by-the-hour with a credit card aren't tied-in to their technology like those who have pre-paid a 12 month invoice.

When buying decisions take place at the end of a browser, which also gives easy access to all your competitors, it is reassuring to know a partner is also trying to keep your customers happy.

The world of cloud computing is fast-moving; new vendors appear, flourish and are acquired at a frightening rate. This whirlwind of change can be disconcerting for buyers, whatever their size of business.

Juniper CEO Kevin Johnson is anticipating the current flurry of M&A activity will continue, and has stoked speculation that Juniper is looking out for a chance to splash the cash, it was reported today.

Johnson told Bloomberg that as an "innovator and share taker", Juniper saw potential opportunities in the market.

His comments echo similar statements made by Oracle CFO Jeff Epstein, who banged the drum in favour of further hardware and software buys at a similar event yesterday.

At the moment, there seem to be two types of network vendor out there: the traditional nuts and bolts plumbers, with a stable of switches and servers; and the more niche specialists, who play in areas such as WAN optimisation or wireless.

The niche vendors - we're talking companies such as Riverbed and Aruba here - are frequently spoken of as targets for bigger vendors trying to bulk up their networking offering.

Old names such as Colubris and Trapeze, which fell to HP and Belden respectively, are excellent examples of this trend.

But given M&A whizz Mark Hurd's move to Oracle, thoughts are now turning to the possibility of consolidation among more traditional networkers.

The industry will be watching Research In Motion's developer conference in the US next week with bated breath as the vendor is widely tipped to launch a business tablet device.

In the world of enterprise mobility the key mobility and networking players are all drawing up their positions for battle, and what has until now, been a largely phony war will shortly become an all-out struggle for platform and market dominance.

In recent months, we've heard of tablets from Cisco, Dell, Avaya and Samsung among others. Even Hewlett-Packard is donning its flak jacket, with hopes to release a Microsoft-based enterprise tablet and a WebOS-based consumer device in the near future.

The growth in cloud computing and the indispensability of the Internet in our personal and professional lives has made it a bumper year for networkers, according to the latest edition of the Sunday Times Tech Track 100, the annual rundown of the fastest growing UK technology firms.

This year's list of the industry's golden boys was peppered with telecoms, hosting specialists, and even a few Cisco resellers.

Cementing the importance of the web and the growth in cloud computing there were strong showings from IT consultancies and hosting firms, indeed, the bulk of the list was composed of companies with at least a couple of fingers in that particular pie.

Standing out near the top of the pile were managed IT and comms services provider Comtact (13th) and data security and infrastructure provider 365 ITechnology (15th), among many others.

Those providing the nuts and bolts of the business network were well represented, with Cisco partners Celerity and Kelway popping up in 40th and 53rd place respectively.

Meanwhile, more telecoms-focused businesses also made the grade, with names such as Qicomm (28th), Epsilon (37th), Timico (58th) and Entanet (89th) putting in an appearance.

Andrew Dickinson of business comms provider Griffin Internet, which made it to number 76 on the chart, said that the ability to stay a couple of steps ahead of technological development was crucial to inclusion on the list.

"Our partners embraced the ISP in a box concept and sold their own branded broadband as additional monthly revenue streams. When these customers started to demand faster, more secure connectivity we were there with our agile MPLS."

Added Dickinson: "As we see the green shoots of interest in cloud computing and SaaS so we are again ready with virtualised hosting and managed desktop products."

The full list of companies can be found at Fast Track's website.

I was a little surprised this morning to receive a call from a firm that I've been dealing with in a personal capacity, who I'd upset with a Tweet.

This company caused me problems last month after one of their employees went on holiday and important documents were not sent to me in their absence.

Last week a further minor screw up proved the last straw and I took to Twitter with a brief, innocuous grumble, exactly the sort of thing that millions do every day.

But someone within the company spotted this and decided that a minor criticism was too much.

Although my Tweet contained nothing that you wouldn't repeat in front of the children, someone within the company was assigned to call me and express their concerns. In the course of the conversation, I was told the company felt that being called out in a public forum was close to libel.

Well, I understand why Avaya decided to go with Flare and didn't call its tablet the Mojo, as we revealed in June, and to be honest I am very glad it turned out that way.

Can you imagine the headlines if something had gone wrong?

Something about Avaya losing its mojo? You get the picture, I'm sure.

Of course, Avaya doesn't want you calling it a tablet, in fact, the official release yesterday made no mention of the word and at first it was hard to tell if they were talking about what everyone suspected they were talking about.

I can report that they were, but there's a lot about this that, well, I just don't quite get.

So, since the whole thing is at first glance a bit confusing, what are we dealing with here?

In the first of an occasional series of guest blogs on Network Noise, Bob Dalton, managing director of Intact Integrated Services, responds to a recent MicroScope report on network management and the problems that neglecting this vital piece of the puzzle can have on the overall IT strategy.

Kcom's recent survey highlighted how the success of innovative IT projects ultimately depends on the integrity and performance of their underlying networks, writes Dalton.

Worryingly, just 27% of those firms surveyed were actively taking steps to increase their bandwidth.

That's a scary figure when you consider the more modest Internet growth projections, particularly in emerging markets where the number of online participants is expected to double by 2015.

It looks like network neglect is going to become even more of a challenge as our business and personal digital demands increase.

Whether it's business issues such as the real-time connected enterprise, adding social media to call centres, virtualisation or cloud computing - or consumer drivers such as smartphones, iPads, social networking, online movies or streaming music sites - our appetite for bandwidth seems unstoppable.

Good news to report on the broadband front this morning. We are now up and running after an exhaustive trawl of the Virgin Media community forums and a couple of tweets back and forth traced the source of the issue.

Turns out that Netgear's firewall is a bit rubbish, and is blocking connections left right and centre.

In our initial phone call to their customer service team we experienced the tired old: "It's your computer, it's your browser, it's your fault" routine.

However, the online Virgin customer community is dripping with genuine technical expertise, and it didn't take long to figure out what was going on.

I had a press release through from BT yesterday full of yet more FUD. The small Welsh village of Erbistock, near Wrexham, is to receive its first ever broadband service.

After spending more than 12 months thinking about the problem, BT has decided it can deliver a 1Mb/s to 4Mb/s service over, um, copper lines.

This is nice, of course, although I don't really think trumpeting the advent of copper infrastructure based broadband is anything to write to the papers about.

BT said the nasty old media had been accusing it of quoting £500,000 to deliver broadband to the area when really it had "bent over backwards to find a solution" and had several other ideas. Some of them even better!

My Virgin Media installation came and went without a hitch last Friday - evidently somebody got into those blocked ducts with a leaf-blower or something - and since then we've been enjoying the perks of music videos on demand and BBC iPlayer through the TV.

I should add that the ability to pause and rewind live TV came in very handy on Saturday evening when two X Factor contestants started fighting on stage.

Obviously we also have broadband now, which is what the point of this whole exercise has been, and I'm happy to report that Virgin Media's claims on speed are by and large, and taking into account the fact that any network experiences a slow down at peak times, pretty damn accurate.

According to the various speed tests we've run, our 10Mbit/s service does pretty much exactly what it says on the tin.

This is all well and good, but not everything is quite right yet and I am by no means a happy camper. A speedy connection is all well and good, but if you can't connect to the speedy connection, it renders the whole exercise a bit pointless.

We're seeing a lot of research popping up at the minute into the problem of legacy networks and how failure to adapt to changing infrastructure needs is damaging innovation and investment in other parts of the IT sale.

Last week we wrote about research carried out by networking integrator Kcom, which highlighted concerns around ignorance of network management tools among CIOs.

But Brocade has put a more positive slant on this picture, suggesting that in fact, CIOs and IT buyers are ready and waiting to invest.

The network infrastructure and storage vendor released the results of a poll of 600 EMEA CIOs today.

According to Brocade well over three quarters of enterprises are looking to consolidate their existing IT infrastructure in the next 12 months.

As London Underground staff embark on a planned 24 hour walk out, the channel has been reminded of the cost to the economy of a stranded workforce, and urged to be more proactive in talking up installations of remote working and unified comms technology...

No. Wait. Just ... no .... 

I can't bear to transcribe any more of these press releases. We all know that remote working is a time-saver in a crisis, and I like to think that channel sales teams are intelligent enough to be able to identify a sales lead when it's dancing the macarena in front of them wearing a sandwich board with 'SALES LEAD' written on it.

Instead of boring you rigid, I decided to take a peek at the future of remote working, so I nicked a crystal ball off the newsdesk at Fortune Telling Week (one of RBI's lesser known titles) and looked up some future editions of MicroScope.

We turned to the Hovertube strike of 2025 and asked what technological innovation awaits us in the next 15 years?

"For one brought up in a pub in Suffolk, Mitel CEO Don Smith has come a long way. While he describes himself as a 'reformed engineer' he is also something of an industry veteran," wrote MicroScope in 2008.

Don Smith today announced his intention to step down from his position and retire, having overseen the firm's transition from a legacy digital PBX vendor to a bright prospect in the world of UC, mobility and networking software.

Don started his career with BT Labs back in the 1970s before moving to Canada towards the end of the decade.

There he joined Mitel for the first of two stints with the company, and ended up as executive veep of worldwide sales and marketing.

In 1986, he moved to AIT Corporation, where he steered the company to gain a 90% share of the worldwide automated border control market before taking the firm public in 1993.

Internet services outfit Griffin Internet is gearing up for its annual channel partner day and poker tournament, which this year will be held at Sandown Park in Surrey in early October.

Attending partners will get a sneak peek at the firm's product strategy and channel roadmap for 2011, and this year the agenda is firmly up in the clouds, with Griffin rolling out new virtualisation products and enhancing its MPLS networking line-up.

Griffin's top-performing partners will get a seat at at the poker table, where they will be playing for prizes donated by BT Wholesale, Ericsson, Softcat and Virgin Media.

"It's a good opportunity to give partners a preview of our plans for 2011 and to have a bit of fun," said Griffin MD Andrew Dickinson (not pictured above)... just so long as he's kept well away from the blackjack table, that is.

Internet provider Virgin Media has thrown its weight behind growing public demand for truthfulness in the claims ISPs are allowed to make.

Releasing ICM-conducted research that said 90% of people found broadband advertising misleading, Virgin has pledged to publish the typical speeds its customers receive each month across its 10Mb, 20Mb and 50Mb services.

The information will be made available at www.virginmedia.com/speedhonesty.

The research comes on the heels of July's Ofcom report that highlighted a growing gap between advertised broadband speeds and what was in fact attainable.

As our readers will remember, out of all the ISPs tested, only Virgin came close to delivering what it promised, and even it fell short.

But the funniest part of all this has been BT's reaction. According to this morning's Guardian, the telco has already complained that listing 'average' speeds is, and I quote "disadvantageous to larger networks operating in rural areas that require longer copper lines".

Maybe so. But the thing is listing average speeds is closer to the truth than any claims BT has made over broadband speeds.