What’s in a (Cloud, Hosted) Name?

January 22, 2013 by Leave a comment

Cindy Whelan

Cindy Whelan

Summary Bullets

  • The last couple of years have brought increased visibility to “the cloud,” driven in part by the economic environment.
  • Cloud and hosted models have some similar elements; some marketers use the terms interchangeably, adding confusion to the market.

Over the last several years, the communications marketplace has been inundated with news of “cloud” services, offering businesses the promise of cost savings in a challenging economic environment.  It has been difficult to find a news article or press release from a service provider touting its latest unified communications offer without the word “cloud” in the headline, or at least in the body of the release.  Some services previously referred to as hosted are being rebranded as cloud-based; marketing collateral sometimes uses the terms interchangeably, further muddying the waters. Read more of this post

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Brokering a Better Cloud Position for the Enterprise

December 5, 2012 by 1 Comment

Amy Larsen DeCarlo

Amy Larsen DeCarlo

Summary Bullets:

  • With the emphasis on cost competitiveness and transparency, distinguishing features can quickly fall away in the cloud.
  • Some providers respond by stepping up to strategic roles as chief advocates for their clients, aggregating services and supplying mechanisms to streamline provisioning and management.

In an environment where providers trumpet similar pricing models and comparable feature sets based on technology from common vendors, it can be hard to distinguish one cloud service from another. Enterprise IT decision-makers tend to select providers that have earned their trust through work in other projects. However, there is still room for rival providers to compete for new accounts by offering a compelling solution. The most savvy of these service providers recognize that a change as inherently complex a change as the move to the cloud presents opportunities for them to position themselves as  strategic partners in guiding clients through this transition. Read more of this post

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Vodafone Accelerates Cable&Wireless Worldwide Integration

December 5, 2012 by Leave a comment

Gary Barton

Gary Barton

Summary Bullets:

  • Faster integration will deliver quicker synergies for Vodafone and allow it to develop converged fixed and mobile services faster.
  • This is a sudden change in strategy from Vodafone’s initial slow integration approach and the MNO’s plans are ambitious.

Vodafone has set out a strategy for its enterprise facing divisions that will take it through until 2015. Effective January 1st, 2013, will launch a new ‘Group Enterprise’ umbrella (GEU) consisting of four units: Vodafone Global Enterprise (VGE); Vodafone Carrier Services, Machine-to-Machine (M2M); and Hosting and Cloud Services. Vodafone’s new strategy also involves an accelerated integration schedule for Cable&Wireless Worldwide (CWW). From the start of 2013, Vodafone will begin to integrate CWW’s UK operations with Vodafone UK – including customer service; CWW’s international business, carrier services, hosting and cloud business with the new GEU; CWW’s HR, finance and legal services will be merged with Vodafone UK and CWW’s technology division will be merged with Vodafone’s Group Technology. Read more of this post

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Balancing the Need for Access and Security in the Age of IT Consumerization

November 21, 2012 by Leave a comment

Amy Larsen DeCarlo

Amy Larsen DeCarlo

Summary Bullets:

  • Trends such as the ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD) movement put more IT power into the hands of end users.  However, making IT resources more accessible can significantly increase the risk of breaches.
  • Having a handle on data security in what today are extremely porous environments requires more than sophisticated technology; enterprises also need to have the right policies and practices in place to avoid the most prevalent cause of incidents: human error.

Access is everything in IT today, with organizations placing a premium on the ability to tap into enterprise resources from virtually any location and a multitude of different device types.  This extensible approach to enterprise IT is meant to support more productive and agile operating models.  However, for all the potential value technologies such as mobility can bring to an organization, there is also risk associated with allowing end users and their often unmanaged devices rights to direct entry to critical resources. Read more of this post

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Networks Do Matter – Really!

November 12, 2012 by Leave a comment

Jerry Caron

Jerry Caron

Summary Bullets:              

  • Networks and networking suffer from a lack of respect that defies logic.
  • Innovation continues apace, however, the industry often fails to give these advances the attention they deserve.

Networks and the stuff that make them work are suffering from a dearth of respect to which even Rodney Dangerfield would have to defer. Sure, we all know that it is lunacy to dismiss the value of both private and public networks because the quality of experience is utterly dependent on the quality of the network connections. This is a stone-cold fact, whether we are talking about a teenager looking at YouTube videos on a smartphone, or a business running mission-critical applications.

Yet while networks and networking have never been truly glamorous, there is a perceptible downward trend in love for the stuff of connectivity. It has long been the case, for example, that the hottest, most admired Internet businesses take public and private networks for granted and ride roughshod over them with something approaching complete disdain. If Facebook is sluggish, you don’t blame Facebook, do you?. Read more of this post

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Out of the Shadows: Making a Decentralized Approach to IT for Business

November 12, 2012 by Leave a comment

Amy Larsen DeCarlo

Amy Larsen DeCarlo

Summary Bullets:

  • Flexibility is one of the prime benefits of a cloud-based IT consumption model, giving IT and non-technical employees capacity when they need it.  This access to resources enables organizations to execute new projects quickly and respond to fast-changing market dynamics.
  • This appealing model has risks for the IT organization – issues around manageability and control are a natural byproduct of shadow IT.

While cost reductions are often the main driver for cloud adoption today, elasticity and accessibility distinguishes cloud from traditional methods. Organizations of many sizes gravitate toward the cloud to make it easier for individual business units and employees to tap IT resources to support organizational goals. Cloud can facilitate a more improvisational approach to technology and project management, allowing even non-technical users to dial up and down server and storage capacity for short term or cyclical projects. Read more of this post

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Small Business IT Turning to Social for Renovation over Innovation

October 23, 2012 by Leave a comment

Brad Shimmin

Brad Shimmin

Summary Bullets:
• Like their big business brethren, small businesses are flocking to enterprise social networking solutions as a means of cutting travel costs and improving productivity.
• As our research has revealed, when the rubber hits the road, however, IT buyers prioritize the improvement of existing collaboration tools such as e-mail over pie-in-the-sky ideals such as business transformation.
As an industry analyst, I find it very tempting to look for that next big thing, the innovation just over the horizon, which promises to sweep away our obviously outmoded notions of what it means to build a productive, innovative business. We analysts are not mistaken in looking to the future and imagining “what if.” But as our recent survey of 600 SMB IT buyers has revealed, the future can actually improve the past. What if ideas like social analytics, event streams and rich profiles had been around when e-mail first found its footing in the mid-1980s? What if early messaging products like cc:Mail had the ability to recommend people and documents contextually, based upon the message being viewed?
Read more of this post

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‘Live’ from CTIA: Day One at MobileCon

October 11, 2012 by Leave a comment

Kathryn Weldon

Kathryn Weldon

Summary Bullets:

  • MobileCon (née CTIA Wireless) 2012 is nearly half over, and while it is by far the smallest Fall CTIA show yet, the major vendors in the enterprise mobility ecosystem showed up to demo their wares, hold informational sessions, and talk to the analyst community.  There has even been a sprinkling of announcements.
  • While the fate of the show itself may be in doubt, the growth of both the overall enterprise mobility market and the M2M segment in particular is apparent.  The usual suspects (operators, mobile device management/mobile application management vendors, smartphone manufacturers, m-health providers, UC enablers, mobile application ISVs, systems integrators, and M2M aggregators and technology suppliers) are all here.  So, what were some of the major announcement from Day One?

Sierra Wireless announced a major new partner, Amazon Web Services, which will be providing Sierra customers with its cloud-based infrastructure on which to run their M2M applications.  The Sierra AirVantage cloud (which provides asset, data, and device management) has been integrated with Amazon’s service to provide a joint offer for building and deploying M2M applications with no IT infrastructure costs. Read more of this post

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Interop New York: Successful Cloud Transformations Start with Well-Defined Migration Paths

October 8, 2012 by Leave a comment

Amy Larsen DeCarlo

Amy Larsen DeCarlo

Summary Bullets:

  • Organizations emerging from experimental to broader cloud deployments are running into hurdles in full-scale on-demand implementations
  • Acute challenges relate to enterprises’ lack of internal cloud expertise

For all of its many potential benefits, the cloud also comes with a myriad obstacles and challenges attached that are daunting enough to keep enterprises relegating on-demand services to support only the most basic tactical use cases. Yet, however complex or difficult cloud computing may seem to be, the advantages are so compelling that even the most risk-averse have to at least consider whether there might be an enterprise-wide fit for the model in their organizations. Read more of this post

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Beware the Cloud Service Provider Shell Game

October 1, 2012 by Leave a comment

Jerry Caron

Jerry Caron

Summary Bullets:

  • Cloud services imply a new type of sales and support ecosystem that is still very complex and relatively unstable at the moment
  • This should not put buyers off, and should be welcomed—but all customary, cautionary warnings apply

The dynamics of cloud services have caused a fair bit of healthy upheaval in the way technology and software suppliers deliver and support their goods. In fact, that would be an understatement. Beyond the obvious difference between a network-based infrastructure or a software service versus goods sold or licensed for installation on-premise, there is a fundamental shift in the go-to-market plan for suppliers that takes the notion of so-called co-opetition to an entirely different level. Read more of this post

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