Acquiring C&W Worldwide Would Give Vodafone Many Advantages and a Few Big Risks

G. Barton

Summary Bullets:

• C&W Worldwide fits with Vodafone’s UC ambitions and would significantly boost Vodafone’s UK global capabilities.
• On the downside, C&W Worldwide is a challenging organisation for Vodafone to integrate.

The news that Vodafone has become the first of Cable&Wireless Worldwide’s (CWW) alleged suitors to formally announce that it is considering making a bid for the carrier has been greeted with surprise in certain quarters, but it shouldn’t really be seen as unexpected. Vodafone frequently been cited as a likely candidate to acquire CWW and this speculation increased in late 2011 when former Vodafone exec Gavin Darby became CWW’s CEO. It certainly shouldn’t be a surprise when you consider that for the full year 2010/11 the two companies would have had combined worldwide revenues of GBP 48.14 billion and combined UK revenues of GBP 6.97 billion.

Try-Before-You-Buy Options for Microsoft Lync

B. Riggs

Summary Bullets:
• Microsoft Lync is starting to be offered on a hosted basis
• Trial software and services are readily available and a good way to determine if Lync is right for you

When I first saw the press release for BT’s Hosted Microsoft Lync pilot service, , I thought it was the first stage of a pilot for a new hosted Lync service that BT is planning to rollout. Upon closer reading, and after a conversation with Stephen Bruce, Portfolio Partner, Unified Communications and Mobility at BT Global Services, I found it is rather a pilot program where enterprises – large, multinational ones – can pay $15,000 to kick Lync’s tires for 90 days.  Lync, for those not following the communications space closely, is the latest and greatest version of Microsoft’s unified communications software. It not only provides instant messaging and presence, but also can augment or completely replace a traditional PBX. Microsoft has a huge marketing campaign behind Lync and a growing number of highly capable channel partners very actively selling it. But Lync has only been out for about a year and for this and other reasons businesses have been hesitant to use it to replace tried-and-true PBX systems. Hence, BT’s kick-the-tires pilot program. Two things strike me when thinking of the BT pilot from the perspective of IT buyers: the state of hosted Lync services and for-pay Lync trials.

‘Hacktivism’ Changes the Threat Landscape, Again

A. DeCarlo

Summary Bullets:

• Recent research finds that ideology and politics – not money – were the top drivers of DDoS attacks in late 2011.
• High profile scores like hacktivist group Anonymous’ breach of Strategic Forecasting’s site are inspiring dogmatically-minded attackers to strike more often and hit new targets.

From Tahrir Square to Ducati Park, 2011 was the year protestors took to the streets to overthrow the establishment.  In parallel, hacktivists went viral with more cyber attacks launched for the purpose of humiliating their enemies and calling attention to their causes.  The trend is continuing into 2012, when the hacktivist group Anonymous launched a DDoS attack against the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI in retaliation for the shuttering of file sharing site Megaupload.

Preparing for Dual Use (Corporate and Personal) Mobile Devices

A. Braunberg

Summary Bullets:

• No silver bullets for mobile application controls
• No single metric for success

Galen Gruman had an interesting article in InfoWorld last week, “Virtualization No Silver Bullet for Macs or Mobile” that got me thinking. While the article is actually chiefly about virtualization on non-Windows PCs/laptops it does make some important points about what is needed (and not needed) on mobile devices. To cut to the chase, what is needed is data/application partitioning. That is not news, of course, but the more interesting question that Gruman tackled is whether virtualization is the way to achieve partitioning of personal and corporate data and applications on mobile devices. He sees partitioning as one of the more compelling use cases for virtualization on mobile devices and I agree with that. But it is important to keep in mind that virtualization is just one of numerous techniques that are currently being developed to handle privacy, compliance and security concerns associated with dual-use devices.

Immersive Video Considers Steps Beyond Inter-Carrier Bilateral Deals

B. Washburn

SummaryBullets:        

• Cisco rallied big global service providers to marry platform, service wrap, network, and business processes for immersive video.
• If it succeeds, Polycom-founded OVCC could let providers connect once to work with many partnersRoom-based, immersive video conferencing has come a long way to mainstream enterprise use in just a few short years. There are several large vendors that put their muscle behind immersive video adoption. However, Cisco deserves credit as the juggernaut pushing this part of the industry forward. Cisco TelePresence System (CTS) endpoints and the Cisco TelePresence Multipoint Switch (CTMS) bridging platform are strong products, but the real revolution was Cisco’s ability to get carriers on board with the idea of marrying the platform, service wrap and network with providers’ business processes.

Socializing Data, Not Just People

B. Shimmin

Summary Bullets:

• Collaboration players accustomed to putting people above data can learn a thing or two from infrastructure vendors steeped in the rigors of data integration, event processing, and systems automation.
• TIBCO’s new geolocation service, tibbr GEO, successfully turns a physical location into a contextual data hub where information is socialized alongside people.

I spent most of my early years skiing in the Rocky Mountains, a fact which has apparently skewed the way I perceive the world.  This worldview, as my wife has pointed out many times, makes me drive too fast and complain about a distinct shortage of mountains in the Northeast.  It is the same for technology companies.  Early experiences inform future actions.  A vendor steeped in messaging, for example, views the collaboration business as a people-driven equation.  So, what happens when a vendor accustomed to viewing all business problems as being data-driven approaches collaboration?

Endpoint Security in 2012

A. Braunberg

Summary Bullets:

• Post-PC era is not PC-less
• Where policy for mobile devices is managed is a critical question.

To say we are moving into a post-PC era does not imply that the PC is going away, only that much of the energy in the computing markets is moving to newer, more nimble devices. PC shipments in 2011 were down about 4% year over year. This is attributed mostly to the rise of interest in tablets and smartphones, which can both assume some of the tasks traditionally performed by PCs. This is an important point to emphasize when thinking about the endpoint security markets. Firstly, there will be a strong market for PC client security products for years to come. And because of this, traditional endpoint security vendors believe they have potent leverage when moving into the markets for securing tablets and smartphones: namely, that enterprise customers want to consolidate and integrate endpoint security policy across all end user devices. (Everybody better start thinking more holistically about identity management by the way. But that is a discussion for another post).

Mobile Apps Rule in 2012 as Service Providers Enhance Offerings

K. Weldon

Summary Bullets:

• Recent announcements confirm our predictions that mobile apps for the enterprise will continue as a big theme this year.
• New offerings from IBM and AT&T focus on mobile application development and application delivery through enterprise app stores.

We predicted in our January 5^th blog entry (“Enterprise Mobility 2012: What Can Businesses Expect in the New Year?”) that the heated debates in 2011 about the best way to develop and manage applications and the rise of the enterprise app store would continue in earnest in 2012.  In early February, we are already seeing new products and services available from some of the leaders in the enterprise mobility ecosystem.

Cloud Computing Fabric Capacity May Be Here (Debatable), But Is It Manageable?

M. Spanbauer

Summary Bullets:

• While software-defined networking (SDN) offers a means to normalize and simplify/automate a portion of the switch infrastructure configuration, work remains on policy deployment and security.
• The deployment and integration of management software has been a severe pain point for enterprise infrastructure, with cloud services only compounding the issue.

Historically, enterprises either “built their own” management tools for script control and device configuration, used vendor-specific element managers and resigned themselves to running many different platforms (usually one per vendor), or attempted to integrate some of each of these into a framework from one of the major management platform vendors (HP OpenView, Computer Associates, BMC, IBM Tivoli, etc.).  This issue has only been compounded with the needs driven by cloud applications and associated experience management (centrally managed QoS, security policies, and of course, bandwidth assurance) across a virtual infrastructure which has its own challenges.  Part of the answer lies with SDN, particularly the OpenFlow initiative, which will provide a common management framework across a multi-vendor infrastructure, enabling consistent policy deployment (QoS, security, etc.) and configurations.  However, the vendor-agnostic orchestration and automated deployment of an end-to-end cloud experience, whether application-driven or organization-dictated, is still in the process of jelling and remains the purview of startup vendors.  There has been a significant amount of venture interest in this space in the last few years (VMTurbo, Puppet Labs, and Joyent, to name just a few of the many).  These start-ups will also be competing to some degree with the larger framework players mentioned before, as they, too, seek to address this growing need.