Month: August 2013

Forecast for Change: Making Sense of Nebulous Cloud Numbers

by Amy Larsen DeCarlo, posted in Cloud Enable
Amy Larsen DeCarlo
Amy Larsen DeCarlo

Summary Bullet:

  • IBM acknowledged that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is looking into the way the company accounts for cloud revenues, but the provider isn’t alone in reporting practices that can seem inscrutable.
  • Will the investigation prompt IBM and others to disclose more detail around their on-demand sales, or by their nature is it too difficult to break out revenue figures that are often bundled together with hardware, software, and other services?

When it comes to forecasting cloud computing revenues, ambitious projections are the rule as number crunchers envision expansive demand for economical on-demand IT services.  Yet calculating future cloud numbers is an especially speculative exercise in a market space where many of the top players don’t explicitly report their current cloud figures. The reason for this is fairly straightforward; as bullish as many enterprises – and IT analysts – are on the cloud, revenues from on-demand services still account for a relatively small portion of most publicly-traded companies’ overall sales and thus they are not specifically required by regulation or convention to report those numbers. Continue reading “Forecast for Change: Making Sense of Nebulous Cloud Numbers” →

M2M Managed Services May Represent Future Opportunity

by Kitty Weldon, posted in Mobilize
Kathryn Weldon
Kathryn Weldon

Summary Bullets:

  • Mobile operators are all going up the M2M value chain beyond connectivity services, adding end-to-end solution bundles for particular applications that may include connectivity, hardware, software and basic services such as provisioning, activation, SIM management, alerting, device management and troubleshooting, along with Tier 1 or Tier 2 customer support.
  • However, actual managed services, where the operator hosts and manages an application and runs a service on behalf of the customer (which provides value such as remote monitoring of assets that belong to the customer’s customer), are less common but seem a likely opportunity for the future, especially to cater to SMBs that have fewer resources.

A recent service launch by Vodafone, called Vodafone Remote Monitoring and Control Service (RMCS), is indicative of where Vodafone and many competitors are focused in adding value to their solutions.  RMCS provides a bundle including hardware, wireless network connectivity and application software that can help any company with remote assets to collect data and gain a real-time view of asset status and performance; this kind of capability is applicable to many different verticals and use cases.  When I first read the Vodafone press release, however, I saw the word ‘service’ and initially misconstrued this to mean that the operator would run this as a managed service for its customers.  It turns out that, at least for most large companies, not only are enterprises the expert on their equipment and how it is supposed to function, but they also want to remain the face to their customers and run these kinds of services themselves.  Some enterprises will offer this capability as a free service, as remote monitoring can save manufacturers on their own costs for onsite repairs; while others may turn it into a revenue-generating opportunity, charging the customer for the remote status monitoring and analysis.  In any of these models, the operator is still generating incremental recurring revenue, but this would not include a management fee for running the service itself. Continue reading “M2M Managed Services May Represent Future Opportunity” →

The Road to IPv6 Is Longer Than Expected

by , posted in Network
Mike Fratto
Mike Fratto

Summary Bullets:

  • IPv6 migration worldwide is dragging along at a glacial pace.  Yet, it is no wonder enterprises are not planning on migrations anytime soon.
  • Enterprises will be deploying IPv6 transition strategies long before they will be migrating their internal networks to IPv6.

Whither IPv6?  When the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) allocated the last IPv4 address block in January 2011, the prognosis did not look good for IPv4.  Shortly thereafter, some of the regional Internet authorities stopped allocating IPv4 blocks downstream, reserving a small portion for IPv4-to-IPv6 transition strategies.  Here in the U.S., Comcast and Time Warner started rolling out IPv6 to business and residential customers while Verizon Wireless began using IPv6 on its 3G/4G networks. Continue reading “The Road to IPv6 Is Longer Than Expected” →

Gambling with Customer Transaction Information Can Be Risky Business

by , posted in Communicate
Ken Landoline
Ken Landoline

Summary Bullets:

  • The use of credit cards to complete sales transactions in a contact center has become commonplace, but assuming all contact centers have taken appropriate actions to mitigate the risks associated with these transactions is a mistake.
  • Since standards are not yet fully developed, customer service managers should implement agent-assisted solutions that enable agents to obtain personally identifiable information, such as credit card numbers and codes, without ever actually seeing or hearing it themselves.

Contact center compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS), often referred to as PCI compliance, brings key security benefits to customer service operations and non-compliance can often have severe, long-lasting consequences.  PCI is the global data security standard that businesses and their customer interaction centers are required to follow in order to accept credit/debit card payments and to store and process related information at their site and/or transmit cardholder data between locations.  The obvious and immediate benefits of PCI compliance are likely to be increased customer security and trust, decreased customer churn and an improved status with credit card payment partners such as American Express, MasterCard and VISA, which will often require PCI compliance of their business partners.  Longer-term indirect benefits can include the fact that your center will likely be better prepared to include other security regulations as they are rolled out, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) and Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), if applicable to your business situation.  The bottom line is that if you operate a contact center that handles customer personal and financial information, PCI compliance is becoming more important, if not mandatory. Continue reading “Gambling with Customer Transaction Information Can Be Risky Business” →

BYOD and Regulatory Mandates: A Fine Waiting to Happen?

by , posted in Mobilize
Paula Musich
Paula Musich

Summary Bullets:

  • BYOD is bound to result in some big fines for organizations governed by regulatory privacy mandates.
  • Since it is only a matter of time before auditors catch up, IT should be proactive in putting effective policies, controls and end-user training in place.

As enterprise IT struggles to get its arms around BYOD policy creation and control over the growing number of employee-owned smartphones and tablets used to access critical applications and data, one of the big questions it has to address is how to ensure continued compliance with regulatory mandates such as PCI, HIPAA and state privacy regulations as well as Dodd-Frank and more.  A new survey of 3,500 IT leaders and tech professionals conducted in June found that half the respondents think at least 25% or more of sensitive data is made vulnerable because of employee access to it using those personal devices.  The TEKsystems study also found that 35% of the IT leaders it surveyed are not sure their BYOD policies are compliant with those data privacy mandates.   Continue reading “BYOD and Regulatory Mandates: A Fine Waiting to Happen?” →