Return on investment and budget constraints are the biggest roadblocks to convergence projects.
Or so said large corporate customers attending a recent VoiceCon conference, where discussions focused on the business of planning, securing and cost-justifying IP telephony.
Internet traffic might be growing at an explosive pace, but the same cannot be said for IP-related spending.
This dichotomy can be seen not only on the furrowed brows of service provider executives, but also in the hedge-your-bets approach to IP services that corporate network professionals have adopted.
Reduced telecom costs, easier network administration and the promise of less expensive, more responsive disaster-recovery operations convinced Fidelity Investments Inc. it could wean itself from traditional Centrex services and move to IP PBXs.
The financial services giant is one of the larger Centrex users in the country, with more than 11,000 phone lines, but it has begun a large-scale voice-over-IP (VoIP) implementation and now uses approximately 600 Cisco Systems Inc. IP phones. This year Fidelity expects to add 700 more IP phones and 3,500 softphones, which were built in-house.
This is the year that enterprise IP telephony hits full stride with advanced product features and more large-scale user deployments, experts predict.
Remote-office resiliency, wireless voice over IP, and expanded server platforms and protocol support are some of the items IP PBX users want - and VoIP vendors say customers can expect - in 2003.
A report released this week by the Information Technology Association of America shows that US businesses using application service providers are reaping real benefits and plan to continue using ASPs going forward.
Nemertes Research LLC worked with 45 companies to benchmark how they're deploying Web services, what benefit they're achieving, and how they're measuring and monitoring the performance of these services.
It's getting hot in data centers around the world, but Hewlett-Packard has come up with a "smart" cooling analysis service that places cooling resources where they are needed the most, the company said Tuesday.
This year's CeBIT is going to be filled with huge, high-resolution, color screens and packed with wireless LAN base stations -- and that's before the exhibitors even get there.
Royalty-free industry specifications are needed to enable Web services to fulfill its potential as a mechanism for business process integration on a massive scale, Sun Microsystems officials stressed during a Sun "Chalk Talk" session in San Francisco on Thursday.
CIOs are becoming increasingly involved in business performance intelligence (BPI), a rapidly growing subset of the business intelligence market. BPI involves planning and budgeting, Balanced Scorecard performance management, and activity based costing. And to be effective, CIOs must understand three things:
1. how BPI apps are changing;
As e-learning platforms and content evolve toward open standards, the capability to surface learning seamlessly within the context of enterprise applications and business processes is almost within reach.
Enterprise portals are becoming ubiquitous, according to a new study by Jupiter Research: More than 80 percent of polled companies said they now have or will deploy within a year a portal site for their employees.
As IT managers consider which technologies to invest in this year, they should exercise caution with supply chain and customer relationship management (CRM) projects but expect high yields from business intelligence (BI) efforts.
The widespread use of Linux on the desktop hasn't caught on so far. But don't count it out quite yet: A new group, the Linux Desktop Consortium, is being formed by a growing number of Linux and application vendors to promote the use of the open-source operating system on corporate and home desktops.
Can't miss money makers. Improved masculine stamina. Fun with farm animals. Sexy schoolgirls. It's all there waiting for us in our e-mail every morning. Beyond being time-consuming to sort through and delete, those unwanted messages can also be downright offensive, creating an HR nightmare that has many IT departments looking for some relief.
One of the newest players in the antispam field is San Mateo, Calif.-based startup Deersoft Inc. The company's products are based on an open-source antispam software project called SpamAssassin (www.spamassassin.org), which was started in 2001 by Irish programmer Justin Mason. Not long after, Craig Hughes, CTO and cofounder of Deersoft, began working with Mason to enhance the software. That initial work led to a round of funding from venture capitalist Gordon Kruberg, and Deersoft was born.
On Sept. 11, 2001, the phone company's central switching station serving the headquarters of New York City's Department of Sanitation (DSNY) was crushed by the collapse of the Towers. The very agency with line responsibility for the Herculean cleanup effort that would soon be required suddenly found itself unable to communicate with its offices and personnel. Even worse, DSNY headquarters soon learned it was on its own so far as restoring service was concerned; its telecom provider-- Verizon Communications Inc. --had its own wounds to look after. But the Sanitation Department's commissioner made his needs clear to MIS Director Steven Stam: He wanted his telephones back immediately, whether it was possible or not.
Fortunately Stam had a few functional assets, including a reasonably robust LAN and the knowledge that there was a fiber data line running through the building that did not terminate at the destroyed Verizon facility. Strictly speaking, the fiber didn't belong to his department (it was leased by the Department of Health), but these were unusual times ("I begged, I borrowed, I was accused of stealing," Stam remembers), and by Monday, Sept. 24, he had started to lash those together to support a voice-over-IP (VoIP) network--using the LAN to carry phone calls and support a gateway into the public switched telephone network (PSTN). By the following Monday he received the go-ahead for the rollout, and the new phones began to ring one week later. With technical help from Dimension Data Holdings PLC (a networking infrastructure services company in Reston, Va.), Stam had 285 VoIP phones running throughout the department's headquarters. Today, with 600 phones in three buildings on the new system, Stam is beginning to refocus on more traditional IS issues, such as tracking the reduction in costs. "Fifty percent of our phone calls are internal," he says. "The savings we get from putting those calls on the network are already substantial."
Imagine a storage device that uses its own horsepower to manage data, requires no manual settings for security and doesn't care if the client server speaks in blocks or files. That's the promise of object-based storage. Object-based storage technologies shield the application or operating system from the low-level details of managing file storage. In one method, intelligence is added to the storage device in order to offload low-level storage management tasks traditionally handled by the operating system, such as mapping files to actual storage blocks on the disk drive and managing file attributes and other associated metadata.
Outsourcing for the mid-sized market and cost of ownership will be two key areas of focus for this year's Oracle AppsWorld conference in the US, according to company officials.
Like a 1960s hippie who now wears a conservative business suit and works for a big investment firm, Linux has matured from a cult-embraced operating system to a real-world, cost-saving option for business.
While WI-FI is a branded certification for wireless LANs and wireless LAN products, it's also a catchy shorthand that's become synonymous with the products it certifies. And it's a lot easier than saying IEEE 802.11b, the technical term for conventional wireless LANs. But no matter what you call it, everything is coming up roses for Wi-Fi.
