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

Processes vs. Tools

Posted by: Michael Disabato

I had a dialogue the other day concerning ITIL adoption. The client wanted to upgrade their Service Desk tool and implement Service Catalog. In the process, they wanted to integrate identity management, no mean feat.

But as the discussion revolved around processes, it became clear to me they were focused on the tools. This is a strategic mistake.

When doing any kind of business process automation, make sure you have the process right BEFORE picking the tool. The tool needs to adapt to the business; the business should not adapt to the tool.

Michael

What's this button do?

Posted by: Michael Disabato

I am constantly amazed at the range of interface designs on web pages and smartphones. One would think greater care would be taken with the face of a product that stares back at a customer on a regular basis and either facilitates, inhibits, or, as is often the case, frustrates the person a company is trying to reach. 

My insights into interface design come from my son, Nick. He has written a pamphlet called, "Functional Interface Concepts" (www.nickd.org) that will provoke some interesting thinking about web sites and smartphones. The most interesting part of this was the section on "vanishing cognitive cost" where he states, "An interface should be understood at a minimal cognitive cost, which vanishes after enough practice." I have had devices that I could not seem to learn no matter how much time I spent with them. Others just seemed to become an extension of my brain and disappeared from conscious thought after a short time.

The next handset war will not be fought over content, applications, or which network a device connects to. It will be over ease of use. The late Mark Wieser once said, "The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the  fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it." That is precisely where we are headed with our mobile devices. Those of you who have seen Star Trek: The Next Generation, may have noticed the effortless way the characters use their universal data pads. (Yeah, yeah, it's a tv show, bear with me.) The point here, is the pads are well integrated into their lives. The point is our smartphones are becoming integrated into our lives.

The key to acceptance is simple. Devices and the content on them must evolve to become seamless parts of the casual things we do every day. Enjoy the ride and the experiments to follow.

Michael

The Blivet and IPv6

Posted by Michael Disabato

When I was in engineering school and working as an intern, I was introduced to the term "blivet." According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blivit), "In traditional U.S. Army slang dating back to the Second World War, a blivet was defined as "ten pounds of manure in a five pound bag" (a proverbial description of anything egregiously ugly or unmanageable); it was applied to an unmanageable situation, a crucial but substandard or damaged tool, or a self-important person." What does this have to do with networking and IPv6? Everything.

I have recently held discussions with several governmental organizations, retail, medical, and financial firms about IPv6 and whether or not they should proceed with it. In every case there has been interest, but no movement, mostly citing lack of business case. Well, I have one for you.

Several of these firms are exhausting the private IP space they are using. One of them had this happen overnight as they absorbed one of their former competitors, which had a network almost as big as theirs. One firm is close to hitting limits because they are virtualizing their desktops, and I don't mean thin clients accessing instances of Windows on a central machine. I mean multiple instances of multiple operating systems on their workstations. Each of these requires an IP address, so you can see where this is going. We may be looking at public IPv4 address exhaustion in one or two years, but some firms see it now. They have a 5 pound network with 10 pounds of addresses. Blivet.

One practice to alleviate this problem is using "dark" IP addresses. Basically you take a range of addresses assigned to another registry and treat them as unroutable, hiding them behind your firewall. This is all well and good until you either acquire the company that really owns the addresses and have to deal with overlapping address space or Something Goes Wrong with your firewall and this hidden address space becomes visible (oops). The latter can bring all sorts of collateral damage when news of this hits the press.

Another practice is to segment the network and create NAT areas. However, this can impact legacy applications, real-time applications (voice and video), and peer-to-peer applications. 

What's the solution to this? Get a bigger bag. There is no longer time to wait on investigating and certifying IPv6 for use in the enterprise. Either a merger, acquisition, or virtualization of your infrastructure will force you to this before we run out of IPv4 addresses. The recommendations from Burton Group are:

• Set up a lab and begin testing and learning immediately 
• Enable your edge connection to the Internet to handle IPv4 and IPv6 
• Identify applications and infrastructure components that cannot be upgraded to hand IPv6 and make plans to isolate them in IPv4 islands with appropriate gateways.
• Set up dual stacks (IPv4 and IPv6) into your data center for you internal network
• Inventory your IP address space and keep a close watch on consumption rates
• Make sure all new applications can handle IPv4 and IPv6 and retrofit existing applications during maintenance cycles 

Burton Group has documents that cover this in detail, and our consulting group can help you plan for the migration and adoption of IPv6. Tempus fugit, folks. 

Michael 

The Femtocell "Scam"

Posted by: Michael Disabato

Dave Passmore is finishing up a paper on femtocells. These are tiny cellular base stations that live in your home or office and use your broadband to connect to the mobile operator's network. They serve to improve cellular reception in areas of weak coverage. They also serve to offload traffic from the operator's network. And that's where the fun comes in.

Now I can see the benefit of these things, but I'm curious as to why the mobile operators feel they can charge you for one when it fixes a customer service problem, offloads traffic from their network, and consumes your bandwidth, which may cause you problems with bandwidth caps as we move forward. (Yes, Dave, I'm one of those.) At the minimum, they should match or improve your account and allow you the same features you have from their normal network.

The other issue will be one of network neutrality. Femtocells rely on your broadband, and if Verizon or AT&T or Comcast or whomever have caps that your cellular traffic goes against, you could find yourself blocked before the month is over.

There is a lot more detail in Dave's report, but these are things to think about.

Let's get the debate going and tell the operators what we think.

Michael