Tuesday, September 14, 2010, 2:00 - 3:00 PM EDT

The 2010 Nemertes PilotHouse Awards recognize enterprise-technology providers in 14 computing and communications categories: Carrier Ethernet Services, Cloud Computing, Data-Center Colocation, IP Contact Centers, IP Telephony, MPLS Services, Security as a Service, Servers for Virtualization, Sustainability, Unified Communications, Virtual Desktops, WAN Optimization, and Wireless LANs.

The annual PilotHouse Awards reflect how vendors and service providers perform in the eyes of their business buyers. What makes the PilotHouse award so unique? The results are based 100% on the views and experiences of actual technology buyers. Nemertes’ determines the methodology, conducts the research and analyzes the findings, however, Nemertes has no influence over vendor performance. The opinions rest with real buyers. In addition, no vendors sponsor this research.

During this Webinar, Nemertes will announce this year's winners and give details of the findings. We will discuss the methodology behind the selections, what stands out among winners, and how the results help IT technology buyers make well-informed purchasing decisions.

Presenter: Irwin Lazar, Vice President for Communications and Collaboration Research
Moderator: Johna Till Johnson, President and Senior Founding Partner

Tuesday, September 21, 2010, 2:00 - 3:00 PM EDT

What are the top three characteristics of highly successful IT organizations? Which technologies are emerging as must-haves for 2010, 2011, and beyond? Where are successful companies turning to managed, hosted, and cloud services—and why?

Nemertes Issue Paper

Overview: SIP, the Session Initiation Protocol, offers the potential to reduce telecom operational cost and complexity, take advantage of new hosted services, and integrate disparate applications via unified communications to improve collaboration. The introduction of SIP session management offers the potential to simplify communications system and policy management by fundamentally rethinking the way organizations deploy and integrate disparate communications applications.

But implementing SIP is not without challenges. IT architects must leverage solid ROI case studies to build tangible business cases to justify investment. They must also address training and interoperability concerns to ensure a successful deployment. Those organizations that meet these challenges stand to reap the benefits of SIP via delivery of new services and/or reduced operating costs.

Nemertes Issue Paper

Overview: The majority of companies are doing something—ranging from pilots to full deployments—with Voice Over IP. At the same time, nearly 80% of IT professionals say it’s vital to build a business case for any technology deployment, particularly given macro-economic problems, reduced IT budgets, and smaller IT staffs. It’s often difficult to build the business case, though, since it’s hard to judge how much implementation and ongoing operations will cost prior to actually deploying the technology. VOIP represents a new paradigm for real-time communications—it’s different from expanding TDM by adding a new PBX or a network with new routers. For six years, Nemertes has tracked how much companies spend on their IP telephony deployments within the LAN and VOIP across the WAN. This paper reviews the latest deployment trends and costs associated with VOIP for midsize and large rollouts.

Nemertes Issue Paper

Overview: New applications and an evolving organizational environment drive bandwidth growth and a need for predictable, stable, real-time performance. Voice Over IP (VoIP), voice and video conferencing, and collaboration tools are sweeping through organizations, while Software as a Service (SaaS) is shifting the place where optimization (and security) must happen. Desktop virtualization adds “desktop-like” to “LAN-like” as a user-performance expectation. As a result, network traffic must be conditioned to the new applications and controlled according to organizational policies and priorities. As IT shifts to charging business lines back for bandwidth, it will need the visibility and control to meet user expectations and business line SLAs. Now is the time for IT to re-evaluate its WAN optimization requirements and plans.

Nemertes Issue Paper

Overview: Technology is at a major transition point, similar to the shift from Management Information Systems (MIS) to Information Technology (IT) in the 1990s. In this case, the shift is from IT to Enterprise Technology (ET), driven by the confluence of new technologies and ongoing business imperatives. This transition point means that certain technology functions are commoditizing rapidly, while others are becoming more strategic. The fundamental challenge facing IT professionals is to determine quickly and accurately which functions are which, and react accordingly. This means IT leaders must embrace both strategic and utilitarian roles. Or, to put it another way, today’s IT professionals need a special version of the “serenity prayer”: “God grant me the ability to invest in enterprise technology, the courage to commoditize information technology, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Overview: New developments, such as Web 2.0, virtualization and Web services, are pushing data-center planners to make a complex and difficult decision: Outsource, build your own data center, or re-optimize the existing data center. Today, most organizations (53%) do some form of data-center outsourcing (either in addition to or instead of owning). A combination of factors drives the choice: location, financial, skill set, risk management, and power. Some see outsourcing options as a continuum from leasing through cloud services. Over the next three years, the differences between the services will blur. Two primary factors that ultimately influence the outsourcing choice are the economy and overcoming compliance and privacy concerns for cloud computing. IT organizations will resolve these issues, and we project significant movement to cloud services as alternatives to build-your-own, co-location, managed hosting and even disaster backup facilities. Most organizations should continue to architect a mixed environment. Success correlates most highly with mixed (owned plus co-location)

Nemertes Issue Paper

Overview:
Organizational convergence of the various operations teams in IT — network, applications, security, compliance — is logical, given converging infrastructures and similarity of staff tasks. Adopting technology-neutral, multipurpose tools to share across all silos is not enough to bring about convergence in itself, but it can speed and ease the process. IT needs to seek tools that support and enable the elimination of staff team silos and the creation of a converged operations team.

Overview:
Organizations are in both a reactive and proactive mode in response to the current economic challenges. Reactively, they trim budgets and staffs. Proactively, they re-evaluate what is and is not core, assess their teams, and move people to strategic areas to concentrate on more tactical, business-value services and projects. They also selectively outsource some of the day-to-day monitoring and management to third parties, taking advantage of the predictable monthly expense that managed services offer.

A big driver toward managed services is the increased adoption of complex unified communication and collaboration applications. The increasingly virtual workforce has led to growth in adoption of applications such as VOIP, unified messaging, video conferencing, Web conferencing, and document sharing. Unfortunately IT organizations struggle to support these collaboration applications. Many work with limited on-site resources and inadequate, centralized management tools. They also find a lack of internal, specialized expertise.

Nemertes Research predicts adoption of managed communications services will continue to increase across the board in 2010 and beyond. We expect the use of managed services for other UC applications to double or even triple by 2011, similar to what we saw with managed VOIP over the last couple years.

All IT functions are heading into the clouds: Cloud computing, cloud storage, cloud collaboration, cloud content management, cloud unified communications and even cloud security and compliance. Yet, security and compliance concerns are holding back adoption.

Nemertes’ PilotHouse Awards recognizes how vendors and service providers perform in the eyes of their business customers. What makes Nemertes’ PilotHouse award so unique?

The winners of the Nemertes PilotHouse Awards represent the “movers and shakers” among communications and computing vendors, and their customers, the IT practitioners deploying those technologies.

Vendors:

Tuesday, September 8, 2009 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM EDT

It’s highly likely that in a few years, we’ll be looking back at 2009 as the year when everything changed for IT. The recession literally decimated IT forces, or worse: Sixty-seven percent of organizations are decreasing their IT departments by an average of 17%.

Nemertes Issue Paper

Overview: Relevant to IT. Information technology’s role in businesses is changing dramatically. Today’s business issues open the door for the IT staff to play a major role in the transformation from a mildly effective, somewhat progressive organization to one that is truly innovative and industry-leading.

Nemertes Issue Paper

Overview: Whether an organization’s virtual workers are at a branch location, on the road, or working from home, they require IT support to stay connected to the rest of their team. The IT department’s challenge is to make sure these workers get predictable, high-performance access to applications and data no matter where they reside. The problem: Only 18% of branch locations (and virtually no telecommuter sites) house IT expertise.

Application performance is where the rubber hits the road in IT - it determines how IT's services are perceived by the rest of the business.

Tuesday, August 11, 2009 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM EDT

Nemertes Issue Paper

Overview:

Nemertes Issue Paper

Mobility represents one of the fastest-growing line items on most IT budgets today, as a rising number of employees request and receive an increasing range of mobile services. Nemertes strongly recommends companies consciously define a mobility strategy and policies to align deployment and procurement practices with business goals.

Nemertes Issue Paper

Nemertes Issue Paper

Overview:

Overview:

SOA creates unique challenges for architecture and governance. SOA is a global phenomenon with local significance. As discussed in Volume 1, "Organizational and Operational Trends," organizations are launching SOA initiatives with the goals of greater business agility and flexibility. SOA facilitates these business goals through increased interoperability, faster integration of applications and services reuse. If one distills down the SOA message to one word, it must be agility. Unfortunately, agility is not a term widely used to describe architecture and certainly not a terms used to describe governance. In fact, rigidity and static are far more common descriptors. After discussing these issued with participants, it had become clear that to us that the same driving goals of SOA-Flexibility and agility-must also drive architecture and governance. For organizations to be successful, they must implement an agile architecture with agile governance.

The Issue:

Unlike its TDM predecessor, IP telephony is not a closed-network, single-application environment using its own network resources. Rather, IP telephony is part of an overall unified-communications infrastructure, where multiple applications compete for finite network resources. As a result, IP telephony implementations require new monitoring and management tools and skills. But is the cost of these IP telephony management tools worth the benefit?

Nemertes Research has conducted an analysis evaluating the operational and capital costs of IP telephony, and has concluded that companies using IP telephony management tools demonstrate a compelling return on investment.

SLAs for hosted, managed and co-located data center services

New Data Center Strategies Newsletter, By Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Network World, 1/30/07

Almost 10% of participants in Nemertes’ data center research cited outsourcing data center facilities as one of their most important funded initiatives.

Over the last five years, the cost of building data centers has increased quite dramatically, mainly because of the increased power and cooling demands of dense platforms such as blade servers. So naturally, many businesses have decided that data centers are too complex and too costly to own, even if they are necessary to have.

Things to consider when leasing data center equipment

New Data Center Strategies Newsletter, By Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Network World, 1/23/07

Many of the IT executives I speak with lease their servers from one of the big server vendors. With a bit of careful planning they can use the lease to manage technology refreshes on a two-year basis, thereby always staying one step ahead of technology obsolescence.

The Issue:

A constant lament from IT executives these days is “We’re not getting more staff and we’re not getting more budget, but we always have more to manage!” Though they are not getting ongoing budget increases, however, they are still able to leverage extra money for specific projects if the case for doing so is strong enough.

The idea that IT departments need software to help them manage and support enterprise IT services is not controversial. The decision to spend a lot of money on a new tool for managing systems or problem tracking is, because it either requires displacing existing spending, or justifying spending above budget. But, since the alternatives are usually to add staff or to stretch existing staff ever more thinly, the case can be made for spending the money.

Overview

The enterprise is in a strange new position when it comes to providing its employees with the tools they need to perform their duties.

On the one hand, the tools continue to become, or come to rely on, information systems. Companies and industries convert processes that were paper-based (such as medical records management) to be all-digital. Physical tools (like packaging machines on a factory floor) continue not only to be driven by ever more sophisticated automation, but also are increasingly tied into the rest of the IT infrastructure by supply-chain management or other software.

The Issue:

The average consumer has become accustomed to the availability of a shopping site at 2 a.m., and sees that popular Internet search or portal sites are “never” down. These experiences now inform their expectations for computing in the workplace. Now, even in environments like higher education, where 24/7 availability would have been considered silly just a few years ago, each successive cohort of students arrives on campus with higher expectations. “We have to have all systems available all the time now. Our students have been spoiled by availability and we are struggling to keep up,” says the CIO of a university.