You may have heard the term cloud computing before and wondered “what in the world have they thought of now” or “this can’t possibly be useful to me”.  If that was your initial response, you’re probably not in the minority. However, cloud computing is everywhere and you could be using it every day without ever knowing. 

No, cloud computing is not the act of using your laptop computer during a commercial flight, nor is it a top secret government project to harness the sky for IT applications.  Cloud computing is an information systems and business concept used to deliver data to a user wherever he or she might be.  Sounds complex, right?  In reality, it’s pretty simple to understand, and in practice, it’s very useful for many businesses.

Wikipedia defines cloud computing as “internet- ("cloud-") based development and use of computer technology ("computing")… Typical cloud computing providers deliver common business applications online which are accessed from a web browser, while the software and data are stored on the servers”.  In its simplest form, cloud computing allows a user to access information via the Internet through a web browser instead of a dedicated program running on the PC’s desktop.  So what does this mean for business?  If I’m connected to the Internet, I have access to my data.  It’s that simple.

The flexibility and scalability of cloud computing is what attracts many businesses, especially when it comes to Software as a Service (SaaS).  SaaS is a type of cloud computing that delivers actual business applications through a web browser (think Google Docs or Salesforce.com).  In the example of Google Docs, a user can create and edit documents as if he or she was using Microsoft Word or any other word processing application.  Those created documents can be saved to “the cloud” or the user’s PC; Word- created documents can even be uploaded to “the cloud” and edited via Google Docs.

The possibilities of cloud computing don’t just end at the desktop, in fact the promise extends far beyond.  Because your data is in “the cloud”, it can be accessed through any web connected device that has a browser.  This includes laptops, tablets, and smart phones, with no data synchronization of any type required.  Enabling collaboration is a key element of cloud computing as well.  Now, your documents stored in the cloud can be shared with others and true real-time collaboration can take place at the click of a button.  Imagine a platform where your data is stored in one place but accessible and sharable from anywhere - that’s flexibility.

As knowledge workers are asked to be more productive and businesses are looking for ways to innovate, providing the flexibility of “the cloud” can be crucial to staying competitive for any business.  The fast paced world of today requires information be readily accessible and easily customized to fit any need.  Providing users with the power of cloud computing may just give your business a competitive advantage and have your customers sitting on cloud nine.    

Credit: InternetNews.com

January 26, 2009
By Sean Michael Kerner: 

The thin line between networking hardware and application servers is getting even more blurry, thanks to HP's latest move.

 

HP's (NYSE: HPQ) network equipment division is launching a new initiative called the HP ProCurve Open Network Ecosystem (HP ProCurve ONE), which enables applications to run inside of a network blade.

 

HP ProCurve has signed up Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), Avaya, McAfee, F5 and Riverbed as partners for the program, which could help HP to compete more effectively against networking giant Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO).

 

"HP is the largest IT provider on the planet," Marius Haas, senior vice president and general manager of HP ProCurve, said during a Webcast press conference today.

 

"So the kind of depth and breadth of coverage that we have at HP is something that outweighs anything that has presented itself in the networking space as a true alternative to what Cisco provides."

 

Cisco has its own application server on a network blade effort called the AXP, which was announced in April of 2008. Cisco is also reportedly expanding its application delivery capabilities with a new server lineup.

 

Like Cisco's AXP, HP will use Linux as the core underlying operating system on which application vendors will deliver their solutions. A Linux 2.6 kernel will sit on top of HP's new ProCurve ONE Services zl Module, which is a blade that plugs into the ProCurve Switch 5400zl and 8200zl series switches.

An HP spokesperson explained to InternetNews.com that the Linux OS is being used as a service OSto provide application installations, diagnostics and the checking of application licensing credentials. The applications themselves bring their own OS, just as if they were an appliance.

Article continues here....

Credit NetworkWorld.com:

In today's just-concluded press briefing, the White House has confirmed that President Barack Obama will have the use of a security-enhanced BlackBerry, to correspond with a small group of personal friends and senior staff.

Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said the wireless e-mail communications will be secure, and that hackers will not be able to access GPS coordinates on the device to pinpoint its location

When asked if other friends and members of Congress would be able to e-mail the president, Gibbs declined to answer on security grounds. Gibbs confirmed that all wireless e-mails will be covered by the Presidential Records Act, and made public in due course under the Act's provisions.

We reported last night that political blogger Marc Ambinder asserted yesterday, without attribution, that Obama would receive a standard BlackBerry device outfitted with a government-supplied "super encryption" package, presumably from the National Security Agency, to protect e-mails. Bloggers today have speculated that Obama would be using the high-security Sectera Edge smartphone, a Windows Mobile device built by General Dynamics.

Article continues here.....

You can see the whole article at the NetworkWorld link above.  It is an interesting fact that neither George W. Bush nor Bill Clinton even had an e-mail address.

 

 

New ShoreGear Family of V Switches helps ensure access to business-critical voicemail applications in the event of WAN failure

SUNNYVALE, CA, January 22, 2009 - ShoreTel, Inc., (NASDAQ: SHOR), a leading provider of Pure IP Unified Communications (UC) solutions, has unveiled a new family of ShoreGear® Voice Switches that extends the company's unique single-image distributed architecture to voicemail and auto-attendant applications. By integrating support for these capabilities into its switches, ShoreTel expands its leadership in the UC industry by reducing the cost and complexity of deploying a highly reliable and robust voicemail and auto-attendant system across multiple locations. With the ShoreGear 50V, ShoreGear 90V and ShoreGear 90BRIV switches, organizations can ensure local access to voicemail even in the event of WAN downtime.

NEWS HIGHLIGHTS

• ShoreTel continues to extend the capabilities of its distributed and robust communications platform, making UC easier, more reliable, and more cost-effective to deploy.
• More Flexibility: The ShoreGear family of V switches gives our companies greater flexibility to deploy reliable voicemail services at their branch offices by simply equipping the office with the new switch.
• Improved Reliability: The ShoreGear family of V switches stores voicemail messages on highly reliable Compact Flash Card technology, offering superior reliability over traditional disk drives.
• Small Footprint: To conserve space in the data center, the ShoreGear V switches are packaged in 1U half-width chassis and occupy no more rack space than the ShoreGear 50, 90 and 90BRI models.

FEATURES

For a detailed description and list of features for all ShoreGear switches click here.

• The ShoreGear 50V switch supports up to 50 IP telephones, two analog extensions and four loop-start trunks. It also supports 50 voicemail boxes with 22 hours of voicemail storage.
• The ShoreGear 90V switch supports up to 90 IP telephones, four analog extensions and eight loop-start trunks. It also supports 90 voicemail boxes with 56 hours of voicemail storage.
• The ShoreGear 90BRIV switch supports up to 90 IP phones, four analog extensions, and four BRI ports (eight channels). It also supports 90 voicemail boxes with 56 hours of voicemail storage.

QUOTES

"Voicemail is an essential component of business-critical communications and, as such, it is one of the key pillars of a unified communications platform. For today's workers, voicemail is a crucial business tool that must be accessible anytime, and from anywhere. By integrating voicemail into a distributed architecture through the new ShoreGear V switches, ShoreTel has made it possible for companies to cost-effectively increase the reliability and accessibility of their voicemail, leading to greater productivity and improved customer service."

- Kevin Gavin, vice president of marketing, ShoreTel

For detailed information on ShoreTel products and features, click here.

Credit: Marketwire.com

ORLANDO, FL--(Marketwire - January 19, 2009) - LOTUSPHERE -- ShoreTel® (NASDAQ: SHOR), a leading
provider of Pure IP Unified Communications (UC) solutions, today announced
that it has begun field trials of the ShoreTel plug-in for IBM Lotus
Sametime.

ShoreTel announced in March 2008 it was working with IBM to integrate
technologies that allow customers to access ShoreTel's powerful IP
telephony features from within their Lotus Sametime application. Customers
interested in leveraging this integration can now apply to participate in
the field trial by sending an email to fieldtrials@shoretel.com.

The ShoreTel plug-in includes call control and management features of
ShoreTel's award-winning ShoreWare Call Manager end-user application suite.
With the plug-in for Lotus Sametime, companies can integrate voice
capabilities throughout their IBM Lotus collaboration applications,
providing new ways to increase productivity and collaboration without
requiring users to learn a new program or change their habits. The combined
solution is easy to deploy, easy to manage and easy to use, and offers
unmatched reliability. ShoreTel will preview the capabilities of the
plug-in at this year's Lotusphere 2009 conference, January 18-22 at Walt
Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort, Orlando, Fla. in the Foundation lab
and on the exhibit floor in booth #622.

"The ShoreTel plug-in for Lotus Sametime provides customers with more
options for integrating our wide range of unified communications
capabilities with their core business processes to increase employee
productivity and collaboration throughout the enterprise," said Mark Arman,
vice president of business development at ShoreTel. "Our ongoing work with
IBM reflects our deep commitment to delivering the communications
solutions enterprises need to remain competitive, while ensuring an optimal
customer experience."

The ShoreTel plug-in adds the following key capabilities for Lotus Sametime
users:

-- Telephony presence - System users can see when another person on the system is on a call.

-- Click to dial, call by name - Users can easily place a call by selecting a name in the Lotus Sametime or IBM Lotus Notes and Domino directories.

-- Telephony control at a click - Telephony features, such as hold, transfer and conference, become intuitively easy.

-- Integrated call stack - Users can manage multiple calls from within the Lotus Sametime user interface.

You can see the whole press release here. 

 

 

Credit: Silicon Alley Insider, Jan. 14, 2009:

"Telecom gear maker Nortel's (NT) downward spiral continues: The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in Delaware today. Nortel owes companies more than $3.8 billion, according to court filings, the WSJ notes.

What happened to Nortel? The company hired former Motorola exec Mike Zafirovski more than three years ago to turn things around after a huge accounting and management mess.

But since then, Nortel has fumbled, focusing at different times on wireless equipment, large-scale ethernet buildouts, office phones -- including a high profile partnership with Microsoft (MSFT) that seems to have led nowhere, etc.

More recently, Nortel's telecom carrier customers have cut spending as the economy has soured. And asset sales haven't worked out as planned."

Check out the whole article from Yahoo Finance here.

 

Chris' take:

We all saw this coming, Nortel's stock price has been plummeting over the last 2 years and they are a dinosaur in the telecom world that has failed to innovate and provide 21st century products.  We even commented on Nortel's problems and their shaky alliance with Microsoft back in March on this posting.

Unfortunately, this is a trend for many of the telecom giants from the 80's and 90's.  The current economic conditions may hasten this process for many companies already walking the financial tightrope. 

Accent has recently added Samsung as a vendor partner to provide enhanced communication solutions to our customers!

The relationship is brand new and still being developed, but from what I have personally seen from the Samsung solution it will help fill a product void that has existed for a while now.  Accent will mainly use the Samsung product to provide wide area VoIP networking to customers looking to use traditional (TDM) switching locally.

More on this exciting development to come!     

Flying Lizard Ends Fifth Season with GT2 Drivers' Championship for No. 45, 3rd in GT2 for No. 46, and Team Championship

October 18, 2008 -- Monterey, Calif. -- Today's Monterey Sports Car Championships at Laguna Seca proved to be a four-hour race of frustration for the field, with most of the race run under caution (of which there were twelve!) The Flying Lizard No. 46 finished 5th in class, the No. 44 was 6th and the No. 45 finished 10th, because of a lengthy repair in the pits after the car was hit on course early in the race.

Although it was a disappointing race for the team, who had hoped for their eleventh consecutive podium of the season, they end their fifth season with the GT2 drivers' championship for Joerg Bergmeister and Wolf Henzler, the GT2 team championship, and a third-place in the GT2 drivers' championship for teammates Johannes van Overbeek and Patrick Pilet in the No. 46 Porsche. In the No. 44 Porsche, Seth Neiman finished sixth in the drivers' championship and Darren Law was seventh.

The Lizards were also proud to help Porsche clinch the manufacturers' GT2 championship this year.

Team principal Seth Neiman reflected on the season, "It's days like today that make me so happy we secured the championships at Petit Le Mans. Hats off to all three cars, drivers and crews for continuing the fight and completing the rest of our objectives, including the Porsche manufacturers' championship. The team can take great satisfaction in this result in what has been as competitive season as one can imagine. Of course, now we have to start focusing soon on next year, which promises to be even tougher. But not until a well-deserved celebration tonight."

A full race report will be available on Sunday, October 19th. In North America, the race is broadcast on NBC Sports, tape delayed, starting on Sunday, Oct. 19 at 11:00 am PT / 2:00 pm ET. In Europe, the race is broadcast on MotorsTV, tape delayed, on Mon., Oct. 20 starting at 10:30 pm (UK) or 11:30 pm CET.

About Flying Lizard Motorsports
2008 is the fifth consecutive ALMS season for the Sonoma, California-based GT2 team. Since its first year of competition in 2004, the team has finished in the top three in the ALMS GT2 team and drivers' championships. In 2007, the team was second in the ALMS GT2 team championship and drivers Johannes van Overbeek and Joerg Bergmeister finished second in the ALMS GT2 drivers' championship.

Flying Lizard is sponsored by ShoreTel, a leading provider of enterprise IP telephony solutions, and eSilicon, a semiconductor company, both based in Sunnyvale, California. Team partners include Porsche and Michelin.

The converged network—running both voice and data over IP networks—offers cost savings, increased flexibility and new capabilities. Savvy solution providers start thinking about VoIP security from the get-go, not after the fact.

Traditional telecom networks used to be considered fairly secure because you generally needed to be physically there to access the system. With IP networks, voice is much more vulnerable because of all the security weaknesses associated with IP—including sniffing, spoofing, denial of service and integrity attacks. The phone environment is exposed to the same worms and viruses that steal information and slow down the network on the data side, except these threats also affect call quality. An unprotected voice network is also a potential entry point into the data network. Voice networks need the same careful attention to security as data networks do, if not more, since there are more endpoints to protect.

The Test Center deployed a full system from ShoreTel Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif., to evaluate the ways the VoIP vendor incorporated security features into its latest offering. The system, ShoreGear-90 and four IP phones, were configured using ShoreTel 8.0. For the most part, all the security features were either built-in out of the box or could be enabled with a checkbox in ShoreWare Director, the management interface.

ShoreTel allows the network to be logically segregated by supporting VLANs and tagging straight out of the box. Customers can use existing switching infrastructure to create VLANs separating data and voice traffic. As long as the ShoreGear switch and phones are plugged into the ports designated for the voice VLAN, the system will obtain the correct configuration and route the calls along the proper network. Voice packets can also be prioritized to optimize performance and guarantee bandwidth.

Check out the entire review here.

Unified Communications (UC) is getting a lot of publicity in the tech media these days. But the big push by manufacturers to integrate chat and presence with existing communication systems may not drive sales as much as initially expected.

A recent Forrester survey of 2,187 North American and European companies stated there is "confusion about the value" of unified communications for their company. It seems that UC is regarded as a "nice, but not critical" application for communication systems. In fact, UC is not even the number 1 priority for corporations, mobility is. 64% of the respondents in the Forrester survey indicate that "providing more mobility support to employees is a priority", with 23% citing it as a critical priority.

Unfortunately, mobility is a trickier topic than UC for many communication systems due to the complexities of multiple cellular carriers, mobile devices, and operating systems. Getting all 3 pieces of that puzzle to work together is a daunting task. However it does generate a call to action for future investment and upgrading of communication technology. Extending the desktop to the mobile space adds many levels of value and an enhanced ROI to a communication system.

Unified Communication could find a niche spot in the marketplace riding the coat tails of mobility. As UC becomes more common, many manufacturers will begin to offer it as a standard feature and not an enhanced (think more money) add-on with true enterprise mobility becoming the featured enhancement. UC can provide a nice complement to mobility extending enterprise chat, presence, and even GPS personnel location to a mobile device.

Soon, users will have access to UC apps as easily as traditional e-mail and unified messaging (voice mail merged with e-mail). Remember, these features were once heralded as high-end cutting edge applications as well.

Somebody let me know when they merge mobility with video conferencing, that will be interesting.