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:

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%.

Executive Summary

In this research study, Nemertes performed an independent in-depth analysis of Internet and IP infrastructure (which we call capacity) and current and projected traffic (which we call demand) with the goal of understanding how each has changed over time, and determining if there will ever be a point at which demand exceeds capacity.

To assess infrastructure capacity, we reviewed details of carrier expenditures and vendor revenues, and compared these against market research studies. To compute demand, we took a unique approach: Instead of modeling user behavior based on measuring the application portfolios that users had currently deployed, and projecting deployment of those applications in future, we looked directly at how user consumption of available bandwidth has changed over time.

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

SIP trunking has emerged as an effective way to reduce telecom costs and take advantage of new call routing services. During this webinar we'll define SIP trunking, look at trends around adoption, explain the differences in service offerings, and discuss implementation issues around compatibility, security and management. Presented by Irwin Lazar, Vice President Communications Research

Nemertes Issue Paper

Overview:

Airtime: Tues. Apr. 28 2009 | :42:0 09 ET

There is so much streaming video and internet traffic out there that cyberspace is running out of capacity. Johna Till Johnson, president & senior founding partner at Nemertes Research tells CNBC's Martin Soong & Daryl Guppy, CEO of Guppytraders.com more.

Just when it looked like MPLS had simplified the WAN services landscape, Ethernet comes along to complicate things. Or perhaps simplify it further depending on your needs.

Nemertes Issue Paper

Overview:

Overview:

SMBs can compensate for expected Internet performance issues by designing their web presence to work well in low bandwidth environments.

The Issue:

Nemertes Unified Communications and Collaboration Market Analysis: Web
Conferencing

Nemertes PilotHouse Award program recognizes companies in a variety of technology markets for demonstrating outstanding achievement and superior performance in areas such as customer service, technological innovation, technical service, value and strategic product development.

Nemertes 2008 PilotHouse Awards - Top UC Providers

Nemertes PilotHouse Award program recognizes companies in a variety of technology markets for demonstrating outstanding achievement and superior performance in areas such as customer service, technological innovation, technical service, value and strategic product development.

Nemertes PilotHouse Awards 2008: Advanced Communications Services

Advanced Communications Services - 2008

Overview:

More companies are discovering the cost and productivity benefits of
using advanced communication services, such as MPLS, Ethernet and SIP
trunking, which let them combine voice, data, video, imaging and enterprise
applications on the same network. They also see the value in using hosted
services, including hosted audio, video and Web conferencing, as well as hosted
VOIP, contact centers and data centers.

By implementing these advanced services, IT teams not only enable their
business to communicate more effectively, they provide the means to better serve
customers, boost sales and improve employee productivity.

These capabilities are extending over wireless networks, making it easier
not only to serve the remote workers in fixed branch locations, but also those who
are truly mobile. As this unified-communications environment expands to
include other communications modalities, IT decision-makers must understand
the implications for IT planning and investment.

Often, organizations will restructure or consolidate their IT departments
to more effectively manage and monitor voice and data networks. A majority of
organizations have dedicated a “communications group” within IT focused on
providing these services.

Overview:

Advanced Communications Services have become increasingly relevant to
businesses in large part because of the proliferation of branch offices, remote
workers, and the need for access to centrally provided data and applications.
These services, including Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS), Ethernet,
Internet access, peering, hosted connectivity and mobile offerings, are becoming
even more critical because the way we work is changing dramatically.

The majority of companies now:

• Rely on MPLS VPN services for site-to-site connectivity.
• Are increasingly using Ethernet as part of their WAN strategies, eitherfor access to MPLS-VPNs,
  or to supplement (or even replace MPLSVPN services) with Layer-2 services.
• Are running multiple traffic types including voice, video, and/or data, across their WANs.
• Are increasing demands for bandwidth, both to the branch as well as to the Internet.
• Are deploying SIP trunking to reduce PSTN access costs while increasing call routing flexibility.

Consequently, understanding trends in service availability, features and
pricing around MPLS, Ethernet, Internet and SIP services is vital. IT have
aggressively leveraged these new service options to reduce operating costs, or
reduce per-bit cost of bandwidth enabling their organizations to meet everincreasing
demands for bandwidth with little or no increase in monthly operating
costs.

The limiting factor for many services continues to be availability as larger
providers are often slow to ramp up Ethernet or SIP-trunking service offerings, or
they must overcome challenges related to integrating past acquisitions. This has
led enterprise IT architects to leverage service offerings from emerging providers
as an alternative to their established service providers.

In the never-ending quest to stay ahead of industry trends, IT executives
are investigating hosted peering options to increase Internet resiliency. Finally, a
small number of organizations are investigating IPv6 to provide new
functionality or to meet growing governmental requirements.

Overview:

IT spending is generally up for 2008 and 2009 in terms of overall dollars
devoted to this area. But a growing number of organizations are decreasing their
IT spends or anticipating flat budgets moving into next year.

At the same time, communications budgets are not seeing hard times, with
many companies expecting increases in these budgets. This means that moving
into 2009, a greater percentage of IT spending will go toward communications
services costs.

This volume examines general trends in IT and communications spending.
Additionally, we review how different sizes of companies and different vertical
markets plan to spend their IT and communications dollars.

As the U.S. economy slows, it is key for companies to optimize every dollar
spent both in IT overall and within communications. Given the communications
budget is becoming a larger part of the overall IT budget, it’s imperative to stretch
a nickel into a dime. For example, managed services are one way companies can
leverage their communications spends because those services can help offload the
IT and network staffs.

In order to get the biggest bang for the buck, companies must devote time
and resources to effective carrier contract negotiations and procurement. In this
volume, we provide detailed recommendations on how to get the best deal from
the carriers. We also analyze what companies are doing today and where they fall
short.

Overview:

Advanced Communications Services have become increasingly relevant
to businesses in large part because of the proliferation of branch
offices, remote workers, and the need for access to centrally provided
data and applications. These services, including Multi-Protocol Label
Switching (MPLS), Ethernet, Internet access, peering, hosted
connectivity and mobile offerings, are becoming even more critical
because the way we work is changing dramatically.

The majority of companies now:

• Centralize their applications and data in primary and backup data centers;
• Open new branch locations, with an average growth rate of about 12% a year;
• Expand the percentage of employees who telecommute full- or part-time;
• Implement new collaborative applications to improve productivity, customer service, and remote management of staff.

Overview:

Wireless is emerging as one of the single most transformational technologies for business. Rather than being deployed in the context of enabling business communications, IT managers are deploying wireless to facilitate business computing. Wireless spending is now a key component of IT spending and is tied to revenue production, as well. Transformation is occurring both on the company campus and on the road, as mobile workers increasingly use wireless as their primary means of accessing company data.

Overview:

Overview:

This market analysis provides an overview of key trends in the MPLS services market,
including common service features, and a detailed feature matrix describing how
service providers differentiate their service offerings in the following areas:

Overview:

The Issue:

For some organizations, migration to unified messaging is a key
component of their voice over IP plans. Most VOIP vendors offer unified
messaging products as either an embedded capability within their VOIP
platforms, or as a stand-alone component of their product portfolios. But for an
increasing number of enterprises, voice messaging replacement has taken on a
new urgency, leading organizations to address voice messaging separately from
their VOIP plans.

A number of factors are converging to lead to a renewed interest in unified
messaging. These include obsolescence of many legacy voice mail systems, new
e-discovery and compliance rules requiring preservation and archiving of
voicemail messages, and the need for new features and capabilities to support the
virtual and distributed worker. Finally, enterprises are looking to reduce the cost
of managing complex disparate systems assembled by distributed purchasing or
acquisition of other businesses.

Read this issue paper: Next-Generation Unified Messaging