Network and Telecom Strategies Blog

Closing in on Catalyst

Posted by: Michael Disabato

The preparation for Catalyst includes reviewing all the presentations that will be given. While this is a lot of work (NTS reviews 18 presentations in our track and about 20 more in other tracks), We get an excellent sense of where the conference will be headed. We have consistently improved Catalyst through one simple tactic: We listen to our attendees. We hear you when you talk about the things that keep you up at night. We look through the corridor of time to the future and see what will be exciting to you when it's ready for prime time. We present that in a forum where you can meet and greet your peers and the presenters.

If you have not made plans to attend Catalyst 2009, head over to the Burton Group web site, take a look at the agenda, and make your reservations today. We are indeed covering the right issues with the right speakers, and this is the right time to hear what they have to say.

Michael

I hate when I'm right. Sometimes.

Posted by: Michael Disabato

As I blogged before, the Sprint/Pre combination is not the iPhone killer that was predicted:

 June 17 (Bloomberg) -- Sprint Nextel Corp. and Palm Inc. shares fell after an analyst at Wachovia Securities Inc. signaled the new Pre touch-screen phone may not be luring customers away from rival carriers. A survey of retail sites showed that most buyers of the Pre are already Sprint subscribers, helping the carrier retain customers.


What does this mean? Little or no growth for Sprint. Faint hope of recovery for Palm. Their CEO departed on June 11 after "sixteen years of leadership". Some leadership. The cadre of developers has dispersed to more profitable platforms. Their mindshare has all but evaporated. Their last offering (Windows Mobile) was so stunning (not), no mobile operator would subsidize it.

Had the Pre been on a GSM network (T-Mobile?) it might have had a chance. Instead, it's on a CDMA network on frequencies used in the United States. And that network is the smallest of the "Big Four." Palm lacks a compelling story. Sprint has made some dubious technology choices. The result is evident.

What where they thinking indeed.

Michael

Tax Relief - Maybe

Posted by: Michael Disabato

A few days ago I posted about an effort by the IRS to revive and revise a lay that is basically ignored by employees and employers alike that would have taxed personal use of business cell phones. Now, the Wall Street Journal, among others, have reported that the IRS is backing off.

"IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman on Tuesday asked Congress to repeal the 20-year-old law to ensure that neither companies nor workers will be subject to taxes for employees' personal use of work cellphones. The request is a turnabout from last week, when the IRS proposed measures to improve enforcement of the law, which is now widely ignored by employers and employees."

Evidently, more rational thought is prevailing. Either that, or someone is reading the blogs and tweets about this that universally said the IRS is out of touch (no surprise there).

Keep at it, folks. Mail bomb your congress critters and tell them what a stupid idea this is given the current technical and economic environment of the mobile industry. Then go ask them to work on handset exclusivity and subsidies. ;)

Michael

ITIL Version 3 Overview

Poste by: Michael Disabato

Last week I spoke at a BrightTalk summit on ITIL and gave an overview of Version 3. If you are interested, the talk is repeated here.

Enjoy!

Michael

Taxing Mobile Phones

Posted by: Michael Disabato

The IRS is at it again. According to the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, the IRS is working on "simplifying" a 20-year old rule that requires the value of employer-issued cellphones to be included in workers' gross income, unless an employee kept detailed records showing the phone was used only for work. The law was passed in the late 80's (last century) when mobiles were a comparative rarity. Since more business calls are now made on mobiles than landlines, and there are more mobiles than wired phone accounts in the U.S. (something that has existed in Europe for a long time), the law would seem to be antiquated.

According to the Journal:

"The Internal Revenue Service proposed employers assign 25% of an employee's annual phone expenses as a taxable benefit. Under that scenario, a worker in the 28% tax bracket, whose wireless device costs the company $1,500 a year, could see $105 in additional federal income tax."

This is going to cause a real mess for employers and employees alike. I strongly urge you to contact your Congress-critter, vent your displeasure, start blogging and tweeting about it, and generally raise a royal stink.

Michael

Evaluating Change Management

Posted by: Michael Disabato

The Change Management process is one of the most important processes that will be developed. Change Management ensures the stability and security of the infrastructure. Unauthorized or rushed changes account for a significant source of service interruptions and can open a company to potential security breaches.

The best way to determine the quality of the Change Management process is to examine five indicators:

• The number of unauthorized changes
• The number of unplanned outages
• The change success rate
• The number of emergency changes
• The number of delayed project implementations

Any number of unauthorized changes above zero indicates your process has failed. Find out who is bypassing the process and discipline them.

If the unplanned outages can be traced back to the changes being made (and some, if not most of them will), the process needs rework in the risk management and QA phases.

A high change success rate means you can cautiously celebrate. A low change success rate means you need to post-mortem each change and see where they went awry.

Emergency changes generally are caused by incorrectly applied changes. This indicates the testing process is flawed and needs to be reexamined.

Delaying projects is never a good thing. If delays can be tracked back to the change process, find out what the cause is and fix it.

Change management is not hard, but it is critical to the success of the IT department.

Michael

The Future of UC and the Cloud: Google Wave?

posted by: Mark Cortner

The future of real-time communications and the cloud took an interesting twist recently when Google showcased a new communication and collaboration tool: Google Wave.  Google Wave is a browser-based application that creates a shared online desktop where multiple users can interact and collaborate. As described by its inventors, Google Wave is what email would look like if it were invented today.

The base applications embedded within Wave include email and instant messaging; though essentially these applications are now unified together and become a conversation in the cloud as opposed to messages sent from one place to another.  The conversation or “wave” becomes a shared communication space with email, instant messaging, and social networking elements.  Furthermore, a wave may consist of a full, integrated collaborative experience that includes rich document editing and sharing and the ability to save and store any “Wave” resulting from their interaction to the Web.

Interestingly, the questions that the inventors of Google Wave started with are very similar to those connected with the topic of unified communications (UC):

• “Why do we have to live with divides between different types of communication –  email versus chat, or conversations versus documents?”
• “Could a single communications model span all or most of the systems in use on the web today in one single continuum?”
• “What if we tried designed a communications system that took advantage of computers current abilities, rather than imitating non-electronic forms?”

The parallels to UC are very close; the concepts of breaking down silos of communication to an integrated or unified experience, transitioning from single-purpose infrastructure to multi-application infrastructure, and adapting user experience to advanced in computing and networking technologies. Google Wave diminishes the role of the computer desktop in the future of computing … and could impact the future role of unified desktop clients and cloud-based services for UC!  

iPhone 3Gs and Release 3.0 - my thoughts

posted by: Paul DeBeasi

Apple announced the iPhone 3Gs and release 3.0 today. The iPhone 3Gs will be available in about a week.The 16 GB version is $199, the 32 GB version is $299. The older iPhone 3G price drops to $99. (Note the pricing caveat at the bottom!)Release 3.0 is a free upgrade. Here is my take:

What I like :-)

Hardware encryption – Finally! An enterprise can perform iPhone encryption. Expect to see 3^rd party security applications take advantage of this capability in the near future.

Instantaneous remote-wipe – An essential capability for any enterprise. Expect to see 3^rd party management applications like Trust Digital and Credant to support this capability in the near future.

Supports HSPA+ (7.2Mpbs download) – Nice, but the REAL question is WHEN will AT&T improve overall wireless performance (Radio Access Network AND backhaul network) so that the end user experiences a significant performance boost?

iPhone tethering – This allows a laptop or PC to use the 3G network for communication. Unfortunately, AT&T is not supporting this feature!

Apps load/run 2- 3 times faster – Who doesn’t love this?

Improved battery life – WiFi-9 hrs, audio-30 hrs, video-10hrs – This is good, but 3G talk time did not improve (still 5 hours) and 2G talk time improved a little (5 to 7 hours).

Voice activated commands (includes voice activated dialing) – This is a “me too” feature that Apple has integrated into other apps (not just voice dialing).

Video camera and embedded compass – These are nice, but not really necessary for the enterprise.

Remote control of 3^rd party hardware – Release 3.0 now allows software developers to create wireless protocols that operate between the iPhone and 3rd party hardware.  At the WWDC today, Apple showed an iPhone communicating with Johnson and Johnson a heart monitor.  This capability allows enterprises to develop custom applications that integrate the iPhone with their products.

Cut and paste – Finally!

MMS – Finally! (But, AT&T will not have this capability until Fall 2009). 

What I don’t like :-(

Poor iPhone provisioning – The iPhone does not yet support real “over the air” provisioning.  If an IT department wants to provision an iPhone (3G or 3Gs), they need to email the configuration profile to the user and then the user installs the profile. Alternatively, an IT department can email /text a URL to each user and then the user needs to click on the URL to initiate profile installation.  This is kind of kludgy because it requires end user intervention. I prefer this capability to be under IT control.

No SDRAM slot – Can’t add more memory ingdings

No user-facing video camera – No video conferencing yet!

Expensive upgrade– For existing AT&T customers who want to replace an iPhone 3G, the price with a new two-year agreement is $599 (16GB), or $699 (32GB)!

All in all, this is a good step forward and will put further pressure on IT departments to support the iPhone.

Big Deal

Posted by: Michael Disabato

Next week is the Apple World Wide Developer's Conference (WWDC). Historically, Apple releases something new and shiny for us to play with at this time, and we all dutifully wander off to get it, thereby keeping the stock analysts happy. What can we expect this time around? Another iPhone (yawn) and a new release of the iPhone/iPod Touch operating system.

The iPhone is incremental improvements, best of which will be more memory and a faster CPU. But there is still no SDRAM slot, so whoopee. Rumors also have a better camera and one that faces the owner for streaming video. Given that AT&T is sobbing about already overloaded 3G network, I doubt it.

As for the operating system, another whoopee. It has copy/paste. Should have been there in release 1. You can send MMS. Should have been there in release 1. What it doesn't have is native encryption of the on-board data to protect it if the device is lost or stolen. Should have been there in release 1.

All in all, lots of stuff, but nothing that's going to make me run out and buy one.

Except...

My trusty 30GB iPod of 5 years has died. And the new memory on the phone is 32 GB. Hmmm.... I'll see what really happens next week. Meanwhile, I'll be watching with interest, but not rabid fascination.

Michael