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: Thanks to the rapid growth of Web sites such as Facebook and Twitter, social computing has entered the enterprise lexicon quickly as business and IT managers seek to leverage the power of social applications to improve communications and collaboration both internally and externally. Though social computing can complement unified communications, it also can create potential challenges with respect to compliance and security. As social-computing adoption grows, IT and line-of-business managers must leverage "the wisdom of the crowds" to improve collaboration, while also meeting compliance and e-discovery requirements.

Nemertes Issue Paper

Overview: Numerous organizations are evaluating their use of softphones, mobile devices, and desktop phones. They are trying to discern how to integrate the three, in terms of usability, voicemail, and single number service. They are evaluating whether softphones can replace desktop phones, or whether mobile devices can replace both. This issue paper provides guidance on how companies can efficiently use communications devices to support a mobile workforce.

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.”

Who should attend: Business and IT managers seeking to leverage use of social computing to improve internal and external collaboration; those seeking to understand how to leverage social computing in a manner consistent with compliance requirements.

Thanks to the rapid growth of public Websites such as Facebook and Twitter, social computing has quickly entered the enterprise lexicon as business and IT managers seek to leverage the power of social applications to improve communications and collaboration; both internally and externally. While social computing can complement unified communications, it also creates potential challenges with respect to compliance and governance. During Nemertes’ complimentary Webinar, Vice President of Communications & Collaboration Research, Irwin Lazar and Senior Research Analyst Ted Ritter, will show the growth of enterprise social networking, explore opportunities for IT and company managers to leverage "the wisdom of the crowds" to improve collaboration, and discuss best practices for incorporating social applications into your compliance and e-discovery strategy.

Nemertes Issue Paper

Overview:
Thanks to the promise of open interconnectivity optimized for IP networks, SIP, the Session Initiation Protocol, has emerged as the de facto signaling standard for unified communications, including Voice Over IP (VOIP). Now, the rise of unified communications is pushing SIP into the world of videoconferencing, offering the potential for easier integration among disparate applications and interconnectivity across corporate boundaries.

Enterprise IT architects should demand SIP support from their vendors and they should look to solutions that let them easily integrate existing H.323 solutions with emerging architectures based on SIP.

Nemertes Issue Paper

Overview:
The modern healthcare organization operates in an ever-challenging environment. It must fulfill its primary mission of providing high-quality patient care, while also addressing economic realities that require maximum operating efficiency and minimal costs. What is more, healthcare is highly regulated; data and information resources must meet strict requirements for privacy and protection. These requirements often extend beyond the traditional enterprise boundaries, thanks to programs such as telemedicine, and the need to support contract-based workers.

Unified communications can help meet all these requirements by reducing communication complexity, integrating disparate applications, and tying communications services directly to specific business process to reduce human latency.

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.

Overview:
Since the introduction of the AT&T Picturephone at the 1964 World’s Fair, proponents of videoconferencing have argued that widespread adoption is just around the corner. However, while room-based videoconferencing is widely deployed, usage has suffered due to the high costs of bandwidth and systems, complexity of use, and poor picture and audio quality. Now, after decades of promise, a number of key trends have converged to create a “perfect storm” driving increased videoconferencing deployment and use. These include:

* The growing distribution of the workforce across geographic boundaries,
* The coupling of increasingly high-quality systems with falling prices,
* Economic concerns forcing travel expense reductions.

Growth of videoconferencing adoption has led to a new set of challenges, including how to integrate video plans with unified communications architectures, how to extend videoconferencing to mobile and remote users, how to enable videoconferencing across company boundaries, and finally, how to effectively manage video delivery and quality.

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:

After decades of promise, a number of key trends have converged to create a “perfect storm” to drive increased video conferencing adoption. These include the rapid distribution of the workforce, the coupling of increasingly high-quality systems with falling prices, and economic concerns forcing organizations to reduce travel expenses.

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.

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

This week I’m switching gears and writing about unified messaging (UM); another agility enabler. Specifically, how UM raises significant e-discovery challenges.

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 Research has tracked growing enterprise demand for video conferencing solutions, especially as organizations look to video to reduce travel costs and improve collaboration among distributed workers. But a number of concerns are clear:

• How to build a solid business case and measure return on investment?
  
• What technology makes sense and where?
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Nemertes Issue Paper

The Issue:

Overview:

By leveraging a hosted VOIP service, an organization does not need to make a large investment in equipment, nor manage an in-house IP-telephony infrastructure. Rather, organizations can purchase hosted VOIP services much in the same way they buy any other hosted application or software-as-a-service (SaaS).

Overview:

Overview:

PRESSRELEASE

November 11, 2008
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

For more information, contact:
Nemertes Research
Phone: 888-241-2685
research@nemertes.com