Microsoft Build: Xamarin’s Cross-Platform Importance Highlighted

C. Dunlap

Summary Bullets:

• Xamarin was highlighted at Microsoft Build for its cross-platform capabilities for .NET developers.
• Xamarin provides additional value-add through testing, monitoring, and managing of mobile apps.

Despite all the hullabaloo around HoloLens and other sexy topics such as Xbox developer kits, Microsoft managed to spotlight its recently acquired Xamarin, a development tools leader which makes it easier for Microsoft developers to leverage a single code base across mobile platforms, supporting native experiences for each. During the keynote at the Microsoft Build developer conference, officials demonstrated how developers can create apps using Xamarin tools which use shared code that runs on Windows, iOS, and Android platforms.

Fortinet Loses Another Marketing VP, and Loses Another Chance to Cure Its Ills

E. Parizo

Summary Bullets:

• CMO Holly Rollo has resigned from Fortinet after just six months at the company.

• Fortinet, which has struggled with marketing, must make changes to stop driving away talented executives.

Count this analyst among those who were surprised and disappointed when news broke this week that Fortinet CMO Holly Rollo had resigned. Rollo, hired away from FireEye in September, had been handpicked by Oracle CMO and Fortinet Director Judith Sim to lead a marketing overhaul for the billion-dollar network security vendor.

Tele2 Hopes to Awe Customers with Virtual Magic, but This Might Not Be Enough

I. Grant

Summary Bullets:

• Customers should insist operators explain new technology in terms of what they care about.
• Virtualizing network infrastructure makes it harder to charge extra for mobility support.

Arthur C. Clarke once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. When it comes to telecommunications, most end users like to keep it that way. Rightly, they care most about what it can do for them, not how it works.

2016 Collaboration and Communications Forecast: Cloudy with Outbreaks of Hybrid?

T. Banting

Summary Bullets:

• Many enterprises are so hampered by traditional, inflexible IT models that they’re eager to jump into the cloud and start reaping the benefits.
• Some customers still have security and privacy concerns, and will continue to err on the side of caution by favoring private cloud or on-premises deployments.

Having attended two large industry events this month, it is clear that public cloud services are top of mind for many customers and a trending topic for 2016. Indeed, both Enterprise Connect and Jive World abounded with customers adopting public cloud collaboration and communication services. Cloud adoption in 2016 seems more tangible compared to the hype of last year and the momentum is staggering. While customers believe the cloud offers lower total cost of ownership, productivity improvements and increased flexibility, I also discovered two other themes worth mentioning.

IT Service Provider Mobility Update: How Are Providers Enhancing Portfolios to Better Serve the Enterprise?

K. Weldon

Summary Bullets:

• IoT is a strong focus for all ITSPs, but there are multiple organizational strategies used to accommodate the growth opportunity without diluting the ‘cash cow’ of traditional enterprise mobility.
• Mobile app development is evolving to better meet the needs of customers with faster development tools, use of open source resources, and new development and delivery options.

Current Analysis provides biannual update reports on the mobility services of key IT service providers such as Accenture, IBM, T-Systems, BT Global Services, HPE and CSC. Our most recent updates show some key trends.

As IoT grows in importance (but remains significantly lower in revenue than traditional enterprise mobility services), IT service providers are utilizing different strategies to balance the growth opportunity in IoT while maintaining the focus on the currently larger market of developing apps, providing advisory services, and offering EMM and security solutions. Some examples follow:

2017: When Kitchen Appliance Manufacturers Start Competing with Amazon and Microsoft

• The German appliance manufacturer Bosch has announced it is building its own cloud to serve customers that connect their Bosch devices to its own-brand Internet of Things. Once it’s up and running, Bosch will look to sell cloud services to other businesses—presumably adjacent manufacturers and service providers (but not direct competitors), e.g., suppliers of consumables such as soap or spare parts, and non-competing consumer product makers.

• It is not the first time a company operating in a sector other than ICT has planned to turn its ICT investment into a profit centre. Could this be one of the few successful examples?

Bosch announced at the Bosch ConnectedWorld event in Berlin last week the launch of its own cloud for web-based services. The Bosch IoT Cloud includes technical infrastructure owned by the company as well as platform and software offerings for the Internet of things (IoT), enabling solutions for smart cities and the connected home. To begin with, Bosch will use it for in-house solutions. From 2017, the Bosch IoT Cloud will be made available as a service to other companies, putting it in direct competition with IT and cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

Enterprise Connect 2016: It’s All About the PaaS, Stupid

B. Shimmin

Summary Bullets:

• At Enterprise Connect, the unified communications (UC) market’s slow and painful transition from hardware to software and services took an interesting and sudden toward platform-as-a-service offerings.

• It’s unclear if this “platformification” of communications heralds a new wave of investment and innovation, or is it yet another attempt to sell collaboration-enabled business processes (CEBP).

Toss a pebble into a still, small pond, and the ripples left behind will spread outward, eventually touching upon each and every inch of the shore. An idea is the same – and sometimes, when there’s more than one idea or pebble, they interact and interfere with one another, creating beautifully complex patterns of interference.

MWC16: IoT Battle Takes Shape as Middleware Vendors Prepare to Take on Telcos, SIs

Charlotte Dunlap – Senior Analyst, Application Platforms

Summary Bullets:

• Application platform vendors are working to build IoT initiatives based on integration infrastructure, app development tools, and business intelligence.

• UX has become mobile app development’s critical component for ensuring success around B2E and B2C apps.

Keenly aware that Mobile World Congress (MWC) is heavy with telco vendors, application platforms providers at last week’s event aggressively marketed their IoT and mobile initiatives to try to convince customers that their core integration technology provides the best foundational platform for expanding app development to connect to IoT devices. They are pressed to provide clarity around their IoT strategy, however, as the industry struggles to differentiate between various solution provider and service provider platforms.

The Carrier Consortium, Reloaded

B. Washburn

Summary Bullets:

• The ngena alliance promises to unite 20-30 network providers worldwide, to begin offering a single source for global/local services empowered with SDN, virtualization and orchestration in 2017.
• Just like Airbnb isn’t Marriott and Uber isn’t a taxi fleet, enterprises using ngena may see a tradeoff between local variety vs. global operators’ unified customer experience.

One of the big news items to hit from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last week didn’t have anything to do with mobility. U.S.-based service provider CenturyLink, Europe-based Deutsche Telekom, Korea’s SK Telecom and India-based Reliance Jio have teamed to become wholesale suppliers to a startup company called ‘ngena,’ short for ‘Next Generation Enterprise Network Alliance.’ The startup is based in Germany and intends to sign 20-30 providers to the alliance. Presumably, the members will be companies with a strong national or regional presence, but which lack the reach and clout to match the largest global network operators.

The Case for SD-WAN

M. Fratto

• Your organization may be in the minority that won’t benefit from SD-WAN products replacing your existing WAN infrastructure, but for everyone else, there’s significant upside to moving to SD-WAN sooner rather than later.

• Algorithms in SD-WAN products rationalize competing demands such as current conditions and your pre-defined requirements to optimize application performance. Let go and get on with your day.

There are too many times when I see a technology and think, “Yeah, I want to buy that.” I’m talking technology, not products, in this note. SD-WAN is one of those technologies that I think has so much upside that no matter what product you pick the result will be far and away better than what you have, in particular for interconnecting remote sites. I’m not entirely convinced of the efficacy of SD-WAN for inter-data center connectivity. The key feature is operational simplicity when compared to how inter-office connectivity is achieved today.