November 2010 Archives

During the last heady days of the economic boom, when a cloud was still a big grey thing that rained on you, many an IT expert was going about with the words 'green IT' on his or her lips.

But come the recession, concerns over carbon footprints and greenhouse gases for their own sake evaporated as everybody suddenly found they had far deeper problems to worry about.

Green IT became less a concept in its own right, and more 'a nice to have' feature.

But with the new CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme causing waves in the industry its now time to reconsider how a well-implemented network strategy can help your customers tick the right boxes.

Last week I spoke with Comtek CEO Askar Sheibani (pictured), who recently took the wraps off a new lab at his Deeside base.

In the past 12 months, Comtek has acquired 300 tonnes of Nortel equipment - including the entire contents of its training lab in Munich - which had been destined for scrap, and shipped eight forty-foot containers to north Wales where it is being used to help firms extend the life of their Nortel kit.

A survey by our sister ICT sector recruitment site CWjobs has revealed the true power of social networks, with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (pictured) topping a poll of IT personalities who have most inspired people to work in the industry.

Also figuring highly in the survey of 5,500 IT professionals were turtle-neck wearing Apple boss (and possible evil genius) Steve Jobs, and the ever-enthusiastic Steve Ballmer of Microsoft.

The growing role of networking and comms figured in the survey's other findings, too, as technological advances in the IT industry around mobile development platforms, social networks and cloud cited as inspiration for 58%, 47% and 34% of sector jobseekers respectively.

The five most 'inspirational' personalities in the IT community were, in order:

• Steve Jobs, Apple
• Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook
• Michael Dell, Dell (bit of a puzzler, this one)
• Steve Ballmer, Microsoft
• Larry Page, Google

Photo courtesy; SIPA Press/Rex Features

Those of us who were hoping that Apprentice star Stuart Baggs wouldn't find his way back into the technology industry may be wishing for his return after all, as fellow contestant Alex Epstein has now popped up at Masternaut, a Leeds-based satellite tracking firm.

Alex - billed on the show as an unemployed head of communications - has now returned to his former employer to take up the role of marketing consultant.

He counted among his successes the creation of the Boozy Banger and the Cuuli, a combination beach towel and beer cooler, which clearly impressed Masternaut MD Martin Port (pictured above with Alex) enough to rehire his former protege.

"Sugar was completely wrong in his evaluation of Alex and has missed out on the opportunity of hiring a highly talented, skilled marketer," said Port.

But I do worry that in the rush for column inches, Masternaut may have forgotten about some of Alex's less inspired moments...

When I first found out that the comms sector had a representative in this year's Apprentice, I couldn't help but smile.

It's nice to have someone to get behind, and I even suggested that Stuart Baggs might want to take a pass on working for Britain's most belligerent boss and concentrate on the communications market.

But after last night's display I'm starting to feel differently.

I thought Bagg's performance was a poor advert for our sector and a poor advert for the channel as a whole, and I hope customers do not judge their providers by his example.

BT is currently encouraging communities across the UK to vote for their exchanges to be upgraded to super-fast broadband capable of running its Infinity package.

BT claims over 200,000 votes have already been cast across the country, and yesterday revealed that Caxton in Cambridgeshire and Malvern in Worcestershire were the front-runners, having both registered over 1,000 votes apiece.

BT's East of England regional director, Peter McCarthy-Ward, put in his penny's worth.

"This is fantastic news for Caxton, and Cambridgeshire. Communities across the East of England have really been demonstrating demand for fibre broadband," he opined.

"I hope news that these communities have already registered 1,000 votes will spur people into action as [the] data will help BT determine where fibre broadband will be deployed in the coming years," he added.

As an exercise in determining where the demand for improvements to the UK's infrastructure really lies, I can sort of see the point in this exercise.

But part of me feels it's not being targeted very well.

As remote tribes yet to make contact with western society can hardly fail to be aware, next year will see the Royal Wedding of Prince William and long-term girlfriend Kate Middleton.

So let's get this out of the way now, shall we?

It's pretty much a given that the big news caused a spike in Internet traffic acoss the UK's national network that rivals, er, the last big spike in Internet traffic.

I should expect bandwidth requirements were only just up to the task, and IT managers across the country were feeling the strain as the workforce took to Facebook and Twitter to register their joy, disgust or heartbreak (delete as appropriate) with the world.

And business continuity experts are surely warning that this cannot happen again! Even though it will.

Probably it's a wake-up call to the channel to include WAN optimisation tools in their sale. Seems like a sensible idea.

Looking ahead, should the big day fail to be a public holiday, we can no doubt expect the Internet to creak under the pressure once again, particularly as millions rush to tune in via online video applications and news media players.

I expect businesses will be well advised to make sure their network infrastructure is in tip-top condition ahead of the day.

But thinking about it, the lost productivity will run into the billions, so why not just work remotely?

Things seemed so much simpler in 1981, don't you think?

Photo courtesy: Rex Features

In the latest of a series of industry guest blogs on Network Noise, Ian Kilpatrick, chairman of infrastructure security and convergence solutions VAD Wick Hill Group, responds to our recent blog on the problems surrounding the unified comms sale.   

In your blog, 'Cutting in on the UC conversation', you picked up on a major trend which presents very real opportunities for resellers. These UC (Unified Comms) opportunities are easier to pursue than they might seem. The learning curve is not very steep for IP literate resellers, especially if they can partner with a distributor who's willing to provide training, and support them through the first few sales.

You mentioned the difficulties in defining UC. You're not alone. Look on the web for UC definitions and you'll get over 450,000 results. We're not actually very keen on the phrase 'Unified Comms' and prefer to use the term 'convergence'.

You won't sell to most organisations by offering them an extensive, grand UC dream that claims to provide the universal business panacea. SMEs in particular want to buy a converged solution which meets their tactical needs today, at a very good price, and allows them to add further converged solutions that fit into their longer term strategy, as they grow, and as their expertise and sophistication increase.

Many resellers are already in the position of being 'trusted advisors' and they need to enlarge this role to incorporate advice on convergence, because, as you rightly point out, customers are already drifting into this area.

As a trusted advisor, customers will expect their reseller to be responsible for network performance, network security, and in many cases the network planning. So if something goes wrong, guess who they're going to blame!

One opportunity VARs can pursue is fixed and mobile phone convergence, a solution which offers reduced mobile costs, the ease of a "single" number  and true phone mobility in the office. This is a straightforward sale, offering cost-savings and improved productivity.

As the excitement of the quarterly results season dies away, one of the last big industry hitters, networking sector bellwether Cisco, will be unveiling its first quarter results later on this evening, and all eyes in the industry are turning to just what CEO John Chambers will say.

As regular readers of MicroScope will know, the outspoken Chambers was among the first to call the bottom of the recession and discuss the possibility of a tentative recovery, and his words carry considerable weight in our sector.

At the end of its fiscal 2010, Cisco attracted some negative attention after it came in slightly under expectations, meaning that it failed to make as much dosh per share as Wall Street analysts had hoped.

John Chambers also sounded a more conservative note that usual on the state of the global economy, although he flat out denied that there was a double-dip recession looming.

The demands of the financial markets mean that Cisco will be under pressure to show an improvement later on; at the time of writing, analysts were calling for earnings of 40 cents - approximately 24p - on total sales of $10.74bn.

Both these figures would be well up on the numbers this time last year.

Cisco has by all accounts had a decent quarter, with several headline announcements including the launch of its Umi home telepresence system, which will test once and for all whether or not it can truly play in the consumer space.

As always, I will be reporting for MicroScope in detail tomorrow morning.

As you will hopefully by now have read, M&A marvel Daisy Group has bought acquisitive Mitel partner SpiriTel for £27.3m.

I love a good M&A story as much as the next journalist; it's this sort of thing that keeps us in notepads, but in Daisy's case I have to say I wonder whether or not this can go on much longer?

In its last set of published results Daisy made a post-tax loss of £14m on sales of £134m.

I have also heard unsubstantiated whispers that some customers of the acquired businesses are not at all happy with the service they are receiving, and many are understood to be walking away.

Morale at Daisy has also taken a hit as the firm seeks to curb spiralling post-acquisition overheads, a source familiar with the firm has said.

If true, this points to only one conclusion that I can see; Daisy is struggling, both to integrate and make money from its acquisitions.

Today's SpiriTel buy, Daisy's largest since its inception last year, positions the business firmly as a mid-market comms provider. But its investors will surely now be putting it under pressure to turn a profit.

Nobody does cap-in-hand quite like Avaya...

A year on from its conference in Prague, the networking and convergence vendor that turned up for its 2010 Barcelona partner party is visibly more confident, and yet at the same time remains visibly apologetic.

It's a bit of a disconnect, really. Here, on the one hand, we have a firm that is happy to introduce itself to the bombastic strains of Also spracht Zarathustra, aka the theme to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, yet at the same time is still sitting naked in the snow, flogging itself with birch twigs.

Avaya's worldwide channel veep Jeremy Butt maintained the contrition today, hammering home the vendor's historical inadequacies, flip flopping between direct and indirect, its regrettable tendency to put in place far too many partner programmes for its own good, and so on.

And this is now starting to have an effect on the channel, as one partner told me today as we dissected the events of the afternoon.

"Things are much better, it's true, and it's time to stop being so contrite," he said.

"We have a long history with Avaya and it's great to see such openness, but everybody's ready to move on now, get into the new channel programme and build on the opportunities it brings."

Words I can certainly get behind. It's time for us to say, once and for all, yes, guys, you're sorry. We get it. Put the cap back on, and let's get on with it.

Will an audience with Pope Benedict XVI in Rome be on the cards for some key Cisco partners next week?

A well-placed mole tells us that alongside the delights of the Eternal City, a trip to the Vatican has been scheduled for attendees at the upcoming Cisco Partner Executive Exchange.

Maybe the partners will be shown how it is not, in fact, Opus Dei secretly controlling the world, but John Chambers.

After all, didn't another charismatic sort with the initials J.C. play a pretty instrumental role in ecclesiastical history?

Alongside representatives from BT and Eircom in Ireland, we hear Computacenter's Simon Walsh, Logicalis' Tom Kelly, Kelway's Phil Doye, 2e2's Terry Burt and Azlan's Simon England will be embarking on their own Roman Holiday.

The agenda at the Cisco Partner Executive Exchange will include strategic updates from Cisco, as well as feedback on "things that are working well and things that are not" said the mole.

Somewhat mystifyingly, our source tells us that the agenda also includes a morning run.

MicroScope would pay good money to see Mr Burt and Mr Kelly pounding the pavements with Edison Peres at 6:30 on a November morning, so photos to microscope@rbi.co.uk please.

There was a true moment of despair at the start of last night's Apprentice as comms entrepreneur and imminent Brand Stuart Baggs waxed lyrical on the fashion industry.

Apparently, the Brand doesn't understand the point of taking a £2 bit of cotton and selling it for £100.

Margins like that sound like a reseller's dream to us. I thought these people are meant to be bright business prospects?

Despite this early gaffe, Stuart emerged a bit from the shadows this week, and took one for Team Apollo, donning a hoodie made entirely of recycled pinstripe suits in order to hawk some truly bizarre fashions at Manchester's Trafford Centre.

Although Baggsy escaped being dragged into the boardroom in favour of the truly hapless Alex Epstein and the personality vacuum that is Sandeesh Samra, we're afraid to say we think it will only be a matter of time before Lord Sugar's flying fickle finger of fate fires our lad.

Stay tuned for more adventures in Baggs!

On 1 December, an online gold rush will take place as nearly 3,000 previously unavailable .uk Internet domains are released for sale by the UK Internet registry Nominet.

Up until now these domains, which include single and two character domains were never made available for technical and policy reasons.

Nominet is expecting high levels of demand, as domains such as ba.co.uk and aa.co.uk will obviously be snapped up immediately.

To cope with this, instead of its usual first come first serve policy, Nominet will release the short domains to trademark rights holders via a staged process.

Trademark rights holders will be allowed to apply for a one or two character domain that matches their trademark, and will have until 17 January 2011 to do so, with the burden of proof being on the rights holder to demonstrate they were using the trademark before 2008.

If there is more than one verified application, domains will be auctioned to the highest bidder, so there is a very real possibility that some big names could lose out, and a huge opportunity for savvy rights holders in the industry to get their hands on a valuable bit of Internet property.

"Having the .uk short domain URL can enhance brand value and increase customer access to businesses and individuals via search engines and beyond," said Nominet senior legal counsel Nick Wenban-Smith.

A full list of the domain names to be made available is located at www.nominet.org.uk/go/shortdomains.

Ofcom has rapped ISPs TalkTalk and Tiscali UK on the knuckles after they continued to bill end-users for cancelled services.

The pair were hit with a General Condition - a legally-binding notification - and must get their houses in order by 2 December or face the possibility of further action and financial penalty.

Under the terms of the notification the firms will have to refund money to customers who were billed for cancelled services since January, cease debt collection and withdraw from any in-process legal proceedings, and take steps to repair customer credit ratings.

But the industry needs to do more than just shuffle meekly into line, saying they "co-operated fully" with Ofcom, whenever they are caught being underhand. Deeper sanctions are needed, or this sort of thing will keep happening.

The Internet is fast becoming a vital service, and as providers of that service ISPs have a serious responsibility to the care of their customers.

I think that Ofcom, for its part, also has a responsibility to get serious about enforcing the rules.

I am equally perplexed as to why companies do not have adequate processes in place for ensuring that end-users are treated with honesty and fairness.

Maybe there's a disconnect between my expectations and accepted reality, but without being in charge of customer service at either TalkTalk or Tiscali, it seems that this is a case of one hand not talking to the other; someone had cancelled a service, but clearly nobody told the billing department.

Lack of communication within a communications firm? There's irony for you.

A few weeks ago, some of you may have noticed a bunch of faux-vintage print advertisements for modern-day social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Skype.

The posters were created by a Brazilian agency and hark back to 1950s-era America.

The 50s was a boom decade for the US, a time of relative peace and plenty, full of technological possibilities and beautifully designed products, complete with atomic age branding and adverts that were as camp as a drag show.

It was a true golden age of consumerism that of course is also recalled by AMC's Mad Men, and I think we could stand to learn a thing or two from this bygone time.

Flash forward to November 2010, when D-Link will be launching its latest consumer product in the UK, a home network centre and media streaming device called the Boxee Box.

Now, I'm sorry guys, but I just can't get behind that rather redundant name, and I doubt Don Draper would have stood for it either.

You just know that if D-Link had taken their account to Sterling Cooper the Boxee would have been called the 'Media-o-Rama' or the 'Vision-Eeze'.

I kind of wish for a return to those days; Apple would have to call the iPad the 'Slate-o-Matic', while Cisco would be marketing its new switch as the 'Connect-a-Tron 3000.'

Technology has come on so far and can do so much more than it could. Aside from the fact that we don't yet have flying cars, we are living in the future. Don't our gadgets deserve names to reflect that? 

Photo courtesy AMC/Everett/Rex Features