Eye on the Carriers By Johna Till Johnson, Network World, 10/20/06

In case you missed the memo, MPLS now is the technology of choice for WAN underpinnings. More than half of the companies I work with on a regular basis say they're using MPLS or planning to in the near future - and that number increases dramatically among companies that are large (with more than $1 billion in annual revenue) and/or have global operations. That's why I've been spending the last few columns detailing best practices for migrating to an MPLS-based WAN, for those who are still in transition.

Branch Office Best Practices Newsletter, By Robin Gareiss, Network World, 10/10/06

In recent discussions with IT executives and investors about branch office products, one major vendor continues to surface with intrigue - and for good reason. It’s not a “traditional” optimization vendor, such as Packeteer or Blue Coat, nor is it a traditional networking vendor with integrated optimization capabilities, such as Cisco or Juniper.

By Irwin Lazar, Principal Research Analyst and Program Director, Collaboration and Convergence

This week Cisco(NASDQ: CSCO) announced its intent to acquire Orative Corporation, a privately held developer of applications that integrate enterprise telephony systems with mobile devices. Nemertes believes that this acquisition underscores the importance of delivering features to the mobile device as a growing competitive differentiator among those vendors and service providers offering unified communications products and services.

Branch Office Best Practices Newsletter, By Robin Gareiss, Network World, 10/03/06

Most small businesses and home-office workers rely on an external hard drive, tape drive, or even just a CD/DVD, to back up their critical data and files.

But is that the best approach? Well, it’s better than no approach. (Let’s face it. How many of us has gotten the blue screen of death only to realize that last backup was a week or a month or… ahem…a year ago?)

Branch Office Best Practices Newsletter, By Robin Gareiss, Network World, 09/26/06

Network optimization is becoming increasingly multifaceted and granular. Not only has the market activity heated up - with numerous acquisitions and undoubtedly more to come - the technology is becoming more and more innovative.

As an IT or network manager, you know the drill. It’s up to you to understand how it all works, who offers what, and how to craft a business case for the products.

Eye on the Carriers By Johna Till Johnson, Network World, 10/16/06

Last week, we discussed some of the "lessons learned" from early adopters who are moving toward MPLS. This week, we're covering some of the specifics for migrating to MPLS from legacy services, particularly frame relay.

First and foremost, make sure you plan to invest the necessary time upfront. One of the most common questions I get is "how long will my migration process take?" There's no easy answer - it depends on the number of sites, the number of geographies and your starting state. But here are rough guidelines:

Branch Office Best Practices Newsletter, By Robin Gareiss, Network World, 09/19/06

Numerous vendors are addressing branch-office needs but affordable, yet functional, products for small branch sites still are in short supply.

Packeteer this week is introducing new PacketShapers, the 1400 Lite and 1400, that are designed for small branches, or those that don't have a large number of applications to manage and optimize.

By Robin Gareiss, Executive Vice President and Senior Founding Partner

When the time rolls around to go out for a wide-area-network bid, most IT executives cringe at the time, complex pricing tables, and 3-inch-thick binders of information from five or 10 carriers. Virtual network operator Vanco (LSE: VAN.L) is trying to make that process easier with a new portal that lets organizations receive online pricing for global MPLS networks.

Will this type of portal replace the RFP process? No, but it will make it easier for companies to get a budget price and to do quick comparisons of different MPLS options. It may make it easier to eliminate some carriers right up front—or add some new carriers that were otherwise unnoticed but still solid options.

Branch Office Best Practices Newsletter, By Robin Gareiss, Network World, 09/12/06

I’m starting a series of columns this week that highlight some of the more interesting, useful products available for branch offices.

Cisco’s branch office strategy has been a mixed bag. Its innovation often has lagged behind more nimble start-ups. But the most recent product launch caught my eye as one that addresses some growing needs in the branch office.

Eye on the Carriers By Johna Till Johnson, Network World, 10/09/06

Last week, we discussed some of the "lessons learned" from early adopters who are moving toward MPLS. This week, we're covering some of the specifics for migrating to MPLS from legacy services, particularly frame relay.

First and foremost, make sure you plan to invest the necessary time upfront. One of the most common questions I get is "how long will my migration process take?" There's no easy answer - it depends on the number of sites, the number of geographies and your starting state. But here are rough guidelines:

Collaboration Loop, By Irwin Lazar, October 10, 2006

Standards such as SIP/SIMPLE and XMPP are often touted as providing significant benefits to enterprises. But the reality is that many real-time collaboration applications still rely on proprietary protocols, or extensions to existing standards. Should enterprises demand open standards support from their vendors?

In a Nemertes benchmark released in February of this year, we asked enterprises about their views toward SIP. The results were startling: 54% of participants said SIP is important, but 29% say it’s not important at all. Another 18% say it’s either somewhat important or will be in the future, but that it isn’t today. Yet for at least the last two years SIP and SIMPLE (SIP extensions for presence and instant messaging) have received considerable media attention as the basis for next-generation open communications and collaboration applications. But our research showed that for enterprises, the bottom line is functionality. People don’t buy open standards for open standards' sake; rather, purchasing decisions are made based on the ability of a product or service to meet current and anticipated future requirements.

Factors driving increased interest in the branch office

Branch Office Best Practices Newsletter, By Robin Gareiss, Network World, 09/05/06

The number of calls, e-mails, and general inquiries I’ve been receiving about the branch office has done the hockey-stick incline in the past few months. At the same time, you’ve probably noticed a lot of vendors discussing their products, services, and plans for the branch office.

Branch Office Best Practices Newsletter, By Robin Gareiss, Network World, 08/22/06

As I’ve followed the progress of VoIP for the past 12 years (yeah, it’s been that long now), one of the most compelling types of investments in the technology comes from organizations that leverage VoIP to extend their contact centers.

By making the location of contact-center agents irrelevant, numerous companies have been able to reduce employee turnover, avoid closing and opening contact centers to follow the talent pool to different geographies, and better serve their customers.

Eye on the Carriers By Johna Till Johnson, Network World, 09/29/06

Most of my clients are making the move to MPLS. They're either actively considering MPLS-based services, testing them or embarking on a migration. I've learned quite a few lessons:

• Expect to save 25% to 40% compared with your existing voice, data and video services - but with some caveats. First, the greatest savings accrue to folks who combine all three (thereby eliminating such things as redundant ISDN networks for video). Second, the greatest savings apply to highly distributed, relatively low-bandwidth networks (that is, dozens or hundreds of T-1 sites). A network with relatively few high-speed sites (a dozen OC-3s, for instance) may not see the same savings. Finally, your mileage may vary: The savings aren't guaranteed. Some companies have found that because of previous competitive negotiations or unusual network configurations, MPLS doesn't provide any savings.
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By Christopher J. Kardish, Principal Research Analyst

For years, Motorola [NYSE:MOT] has been working with Symbol Technologies [NYSE:SBL] So it comes as no surprise that Motorola is buying Symbol – in fact, it brings our attention to the reality of the virtual workplace, and how technologies are beginning to merge to make this happen. The key to the virtual workplace is to ensure that remote workers can connect to corporate application resources, regardless of device and/or location.

Branch Office Best Practices Newsletter, By Robin Gareiss, Network World, 08/15/06

I’ve discussed the growth rates we’re seeing in branch offices at length. For those who haven’t read it yet, we’re seeing an 8.9% annual growth rate in the number of branch offices organizations are adding to their roster of locations.

The IT/network/telecom staffs are managing seven networking devices at each location, and potentially dozens of servers and up to hundreds of desktops/laptops.

New Data Center Strategies Newsletter, Network World, By Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Network World, 09/26/06

Many organizations still approach IP address management as a somewhat secondary consideration. Since the basic tools are available for free on any platform, many companies will deploy DNS and DHCP servers on an ad-hoc basis with little or no central management, often without an organization-wide naming and addressing schema.

Eye on the Carriers By Johna Till Johnson, Network World, 09/25/06

Remember Vonage? Back in May, the Internet VoIP company held its much-anticipated IPO, which investors and various pundits were predicting would showcase the triumph of "next-generation" VoIP services over the old, tired offerings of the Bells.

What happened instead was that Vonage's shares, which were initially offered at $17, promptly tanked (Vonage is trading at about $8 per share now). That's not all - Vonage is now apparently suing its own customers for failure to purchase roughly 1 million shares of its stock. The company recently sent "pay up or face the consequences" letters to roughly 9,000 of its customers who had promised to invest but backed out in the face of the disappointing IPO.

By Robin Gareiss, Nemertes executive vice president & sr. founding partner

A growing number of IT staffs are assessing Skype, underscoring the trend toward grassroots adoption of Internet-based phone services—integrated with contact lists—that make it easy to reach customers and colleagues worldwide. Skype last week said it’s (finally) planning on addressing some key enterprise requirements.

Skype, owned by Ebay (NASDAQ: EBAY), has seen its successful consumer model infiltrate the business market: 30% of its customer say they use the service for work. For the past year, several enterprise IT executives have discussed with Nemertes whether they should be more formally considering Skype (or other free services from vendors such as PhoneGaim and Gizmo) for their mobile workers.

Eye on the Carriers By Johna Till Johnson, Network World, 09/18/06

I'll admit it: I'm a data junkie.

That's not just because I'm in the research business - though admittedly, it's the perfect gig for someone with an obsessive desire to measure, record and track the effectiveness of everything.

No, my fascination with data isn't just a consequence of my day job. It comes from both temperament and training. When I was 9, I measured the relative effectiveness of two processes for shelling peas. (No, I'm not kidding, and yes, I was a really weird kid.)

In my years as an engineer and physicist, I maintained a focus on measurement - one of my earliest research designs in high energy physics was a liquid-argon calorimeter, which measures the energy created by a particle physics experiment.

By Christopher J. Kardish, Principal Research Analyst, Nemertes Research

Sept. 15, 2006

Three deals by mobile infrastructure vendors this week demonstrate the growing acceptance of IMS by the industry as a whole:

*Lucent's [NYSE:LU, http://www.lucent.com/] agreement to resell Westell's [NASDAQ:WSTL, http://www.westell.com] TriLink IMS gateway.

*Lucent's acquisition of privately held Mobilitec, provider of content-management software for wireless service providers.

*Sybase's [NYSE:SY, http://www.sybase.com/] acquisition of privately held Mobile 365, a mobile enterprise software and services provider.

What is IMS? IMS stands for IP Multimedia Subsystem. It is a standardized architecture for providing any services across IP networks, mobile or fixed. Why do we care? First, IMS is an industry-driven standard, based on the market accepted Internet Protocol (IP). Cellular companies plan to use IMS to provide VOIP over their data service, permitting concurrent access to the Internet, effectively making cell carriers ISPs.

If you would like to receive our full Impact Analysis, sign up for our weekly newsletters.

Branch Office Best Practices

Table of Contents

1 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 6
2 BRANCH-OFFICE STRATEGIES 7
2.1 WHAT MAKES A ‘BRANCH OFFICE?’ 7
2.2 BRANCH-OFFICE DECISION MAKERS 8
2.3 INVENTORY ANALYSIS 9
2.3.1 Tier One 10
2.3.2 Tier Two 11
2.3.3 Tier Three 11
2.3.4 Tier Four 12
2.3.5 Tier Five 13
2.3.6 Inventory Recommendations 13
2.4 BRANCH OFFICE MANTRA: ‘BETTER, FASTER!’ 14
2.5 GROWTH IN BRANCH OFFICES 17
2.6 BRANCH-OFFICE MANAGEMENT 18
2.6.1 Centralized 20
2.6.2 Distributed 22
2.6.3 Combination 22
2.6.4 Service Provider 23
2.6.5 Time Spent on Managing Branch 23

Eye on the Carriers By Johna Till Johnson, Network World, 09/11/06

The great thing about tracking the telcos is that if you wait long enough, they're guaranteed to pull some really dumb stunts. This week's cases in point: Verizon and BellSouth.

Consumer customers of both companies recently noticed the fine print on their telecom bills that basically said: "We are no longer charging you the Universal Services Fund tax. However, we're replacing it with our own mysterious surcharge, so you won't be seeing any savings."

Talk about a tactic that ticks off customers! This move generated some major responses, including the creation of a Web site named (appropriately enough) Stop the DSL Rip-off. It also merited a mention in The Onion, a satirical online magazine.

By Johna Till Johnson, President, Nemertes Research

The Issue

Companies are increasingly migrating towards WAN services based on multi-protocol label switching (MPLS). MPLS affords the ability to integrate voice, video and data across a common platform that delivers quality of service (QoS), improves performance and availability, and provides a variety of VPN and LAN-interconnect services. Enterprises should seriously consider MPLS-based services—and service providers need to continue stepping up to provide the features, functionality, services and support that enterprises increasingly require.

The complete issue paper is available to Nemertes clients. Non-clients, please contact research@nemertes.com

Advice for running IT at branch offices

Branch Office Best Practices Newsletter By Robin Gareiss, Network World, 06/27/06

If you’re responsible in any way for a new IT initiative in the branch office, one of your biggest concerns is likely to be how to monitor and manage the products and services involved with the initiative.

After all, without insight into the performance, you won't be able to document success (or failure) - and you'll be hearing from the end users in those branch offices when they can't access an application, complete a call, or are experiencing long delays.

I’ve talked to many IT executives about this challenge. If they had no budget constraints whatsoever, the ideal scenario is a combination of sophisticated management tools and a dedicated IT person at every location.

By Johna Till Johnson, Network World, 02/27/06

Last week we brought up some of the most critical telecom policy issues for 2006. Top of the list is net neutrality. Congress started hearings on the topic a few weeks back, and both telcos and content providers are lobbying hard.

By Johna Till Johnson, Network World, 02/20/06

Last week, we examined the bio of the newest FCC commissioner, Robert McDowell. He's a more important guy than it might first appear, because he'll serve as the swing vote on a number of critical regulatory and policy issues the FCC plans on addressing in upcoming months.

By Johna Till Johnson, Network World, 02/13/06

If President Bush has his way, the FCC will soon be dealing off a full deck. Bush recently nominated telecom lobbyist Robert McDowell as the fifth member of the FCC, which has had an opening for most of 2005.

Benefits of consolidated networking gear for branch offices

By Robin Gareiss, Network World, 02/07/06

Nearly two years ago, my house caught on fire and everything but the outside walls had to be gutted and rebuilt. But from every disaster emerges silver linings - and indeed, we discovered many.

OrbitalEdge delivers WAN optimization through a software client

By Robin Gareiss, Network World, 01/31/06

The benefits of WAN optimization products are clear. Using compression and latency-reduction algorithms, they essentially increase the amount of traffic that can travel across a WAN link.