From IT to ET: Cloud, consumerisation, and the next wave of IT transformation
IT as we know it is over.
IT as we know it is over.
A hot topic among my clients these days is defining a mobility business case. The rationale is simple: Mobility budgets have been rising more than 10% year over year for the past three years — even though IT budgets overall have been declining.
For a small but growing number of enterprise users, it's time to <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/news/2006/081006-no-analog-phone.html">cut the cord</a>.
In case you've missed it, someone recently dumped a large cache of e-mail files and documents from the University of East Anglia University's prestigious Climactic Research Unit onto the 'Net. The CRU is one of the leading climatology research institutions, and its data and models provide much of the infrastructure on which the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is based.
Last week, I wrote about the possible implications of the new lineup of FCC commissioners. They certainly haven't wasted any time: On Aug. 3, the FCC launched a full-scale investigation into the decision by Apple and AT&T to reject Google's voice application for the iPhone. As Sanford Bernstein telecom analyst Craig Moffatt notes, "The issue of application suppression affords the Administration a back door route to Wireless Net Neutrality, something that has been openly espoused by new FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski."
Unless you've been living in a cave all summer like one of my friends (it's in Finland, he's an artistic genius) you've probably heard the buzz about cloud computing.
Many folks are familiar with the modeling we've done over the past few years highlighting the fact that Internet demand is outstripping capacity, specifically access capacity. The findings were, to put it mildly, controversial: We've been called everything from carrier shills to nut-jobs. (No, the research wasn't sponsored. And we never claimed your fillings were receiving extraterrestrial radio signals).
Sounds like a crazy question, in this era of Facebook, Twitter and a "digital millennial" generation that's grown up never not knowing the Internet.
A little over a year ago, my colleagues and I modeled current and projected Internet capacity and anticipated demand to see if the curves ever crossed. The short answer: Yes, sometime before 2012, access (though not core) capacity would no longer be enough to serve demand.
As President-elect Barack Obama begins fleshing out his agenda, one promising sign is that he considers Internet infrastructure to be key, judging from both his stated goals and the caliber of people he's asking to advise him on policy.
One of the signs of getting older is the feeling that things were better "back in the day." I've been lucky enough to avoid it, most of the time. OK, I'd like to have tasted Coca-Cola back when it had the original ingredients. And I'll admit to being a bit nostalgic for the days when you didn't have to take your shoes off to get on a plane. But overall, it strikes me things are generally better today, from medical advances that didn't exist three years ago to being able to Google on your mobile phone.
It's gotten pretty hard to miss the financial news lately: September was the worst month for stocks in years, and October looks to surpass it. Despite the US government's massive US$800-billion bailout, the US economy is still roiling, and Europe's is doing even worse.
Not long ago, the powers-that-be detected an impending crisis. To resolve it, they rushed into action crafting a proposal that represented an unprecedented upheaval of existing infrastructure. On the grounds that "something needed to be done" to avert the crisis, they brushed aside objections that the upheaval was too convulsive and might nonetheless fail to address the underlying issues that had created the crisis in the first place.
You've got to hand it to the Canadians. Not only do they come up with great hockey, outstanding comedians and my friend Dave Keck (an up-and-coming science fiction writer) they've also generated one of the most innovative ideas ever for last-mile connectivity.
Many IT executives consider the WAN to be a monolithic entity: a giant network that connects all the organization's sites across a common infrastructure.