Carriers are struggling to realize new technologies' promise
Business Communications Review, April 2007

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

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If Ethernet Is The Answer, What Is The Question?

  By Sandra Gittlen, Newsfactor.com, 04/11/07

Many companies' data center responsibilities are broken out piecemeal, but experts say that companies embracing New Data Center technologies, such as blade servers, grid computing and virtualization, will succeed by consolidating the management of all critical functions into a single role. Using these advanced technologies begs for someone capable of bringing an integrated, holistic approach to data center architecture and design, says Johna Till Johnson, Network World columnist and co-founder of Nemertes Research.

The Importance of Logs

New Data Center Strategies Newsletter  By John Burke, Network World, 02/20/07

There’s good news and bad news about data center security, according to Nemertes’ just-published “New Data Center” benchmark.

First, the good news. Almost 80% of enterprises (both large and small) have a data center-specific security policy defined, and of those with policies, more than 80% regularly test compliance with them.

Network World Editorials  By John Dix, Network World, 03/22/07

In a recent study about spyware by Nemertes Research, Senior Vice President Andreas Antonopoulos was surprised to find that 16% of the companies examined were not concerned about the threat.

Suspecting that was because they were small companies, he dug deeper, but found they were some of the largest companies analyzed. He also discovered why they weren't concerned: they spent 6% to 8% of their IT budgets on security, twice what the average company spends.

Collaboration Loop, September 06, 2006

By Irwin Lazar, Principal Analyst & Program Director, Collaboration & Convergence, Nemertes Research, Inc.

ImageIt’s football season here in the United States (for those of you reading this from outside the U.S., I’m talking about the kind played with the oblong ball and guys wearing lots of pads). That means one thing: fantasy football leagues are forming at a record rate. According to a recent Business Week article, over 15 million people now participate in fantasy sports leagues, and 90% of those play fantasy football. The article also notes that web sites supporting fantasy football leagues have grown 20-25% a year for the last five years -- an astounding rate. Fantasy sports are big business, estimated at generating between $1 and $2 billion in revenues annually.

So why bring up fantasy sports in the context of collaboration? Simple, much in the way the adult film industry drove growth of technologies such as video tapes and the Internet, I’m convinced that fantasy sports will drive the growth of online collaboration.

By Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Network World, 06/27/06

When companies budget for new applications, do they have a line item for “cooling the servers”? Not often, to say the least.

Even in the recent past, we could live with a clear separation between facilities management and IT. If IT had a requirement, facilities could most often deliver. That is no longer the case, necessarily.

Today’s IT growth places extreme demands on the physical infrastructure - the data center facilities. A simple capacity projection based on floor space is no longer enough, or even possible: facilities managers must take into consideration power density, circuit availability, cooling requirements, and yes, floor space (and what about availability?). When computing reaches extreme densities we find companies applying computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations to model the airflow and temperature gradients in the data center.

In our recent research benchmark on data centers, Nemertes Research discovered many different approaches to server virtualization. Some companies are combining virtualization with blade servers in a double-barreled approach to modernizing the data center. Others are aiming to bring a halt to the rampant growth of servers by moving many barely utilized services to virtual machines.

One thing was clearly obvious from our research: The best starting point for server virtualization is the consolidation of “low-hanging fruit.”

Four major themes emerged in Nemertes’ latest data center research, drawn from interviews with 82 data center managers, CIOs, IT directors and other IT executives from 65 companies. Regardless of size or industry, companies were dealing with major changes centered on issues of consolidation, growth, availability and operational efficiency. This week, we examine how companies are trying to cut operational costs while dealing with extreme growth and demands for high availability.

Four major themes emerged in Nemertes’ latest data center research, drawn from interviews with 82 data-center managers, CIOs, IT directors and other IT executives from 65 companies. Regardless of size or industry, companies were dealing with major changes centered on issues of consolidation, growth, availability and operational efficiency. This week we examine how availability expectations have changed over time, leading to “extreme availability: 100%,” as one IT executive put it.

Four major themes emerged in Nemertes’ latest data center research, drawn from interviews with 82 data-center managers, CIOs, IT directors and other IT executives from 65 companies across a range of industries and company sizes. Regardless of size or industry, companies were dealing with major changes centered on issues of consolidation, growth, availability and operational efficiency. We will be discussing each in turn, starting this week with consolidation.

May 17, 2006
Written by Melanie Turek

Nemertes’ research shows that close to 95% of organizations are deploying, or have plans to deploy, voice over IP (VoIP) in the next two years. Doing so will certainly help those organizations lower their voice costs overall, as well as take advantage of IP capabilities to add new applications—and treat voice itself as an application going forward. However, among those companies, only around 23% are in the midst of a full VoIP adoption; among the rest, close to 30% are in the middle of a growing rollout, around 20% report a limited deployment, and just over 6% are still in the pilot phase. Furthermore, just over 50% of companies are or plan to extend VoIP to telecommuters. That means that today, the vast majority of organizations aren’t yet realizing the cost and productivity benefits of VoIP across the enterprise, or their entire employee base.

As a result, many employees are using consumer-oriented peer-to-peer voice services, such as those offered by Skype and Vonage, on the job, usually in an effort to save their employers a few bucks on interstate and international calls. But by their very design, these services pose significant security threats to any business IT infrastructure. As a result, IT executives are faced with a problem: Allowing their end users to act on their desire to save the company money, while not opening up their entire business to hackers and malware.

Nemertes' latest data center research involved interviews with 82 IT executives - CIOs, IT directors, data center managers, and other professionals from a range of industries and company sizes - between January and March 2006. Each company may have different challenges in the data center, but overall we discovered four main themes.

Comparison by Nemertes rates Avaya, Nortel, ShoreTel.

By Robin Gareiss, Network World, 05/15/06

In the Nemertes study, Avaya, Cisco, Nortel and ShoreTel garnered enough statistical responses to be counted individually.

When we asked respondents how much time they spent on operational start-up, measured in minutes per user, Cisco came out on top at 250 minutes per user, followed by Nortel at 186 minutes, Avaya at 77 minutes and ShoreTel at 69 minutes.

Nemertes study shows that as companies broaden their VoIP rollouts, setup costs increase - but so do savings.

By Robin Gareiss, Network World, 05/15/06

When IT executives make the strategic decision to implement VoIP and other converged applications, cost savings is one of the key drivers.

But is VoIP really a money saver? Based on a Nemertes Research survey of 90 IT executives, the answer is yes - over time. In other words, steep start-up costs will be offset in the long run by significant savings.

Consolidation, standardization, virtualization and utility are the four stages of development data centers pass through as IT organizations move towards a truly services-based model. Virtualization is the first step in the process that goes beyond straightforward optimizations and requires a small leap of faith.

Paradigm shifts almost always result in people and process shifts. As new technologies get rolled out, they require new approaches to architecting, designing and managing them - and that's in addition to the entirely new technical skill-sets they require.

Companies that take data-quality management seriously should evaluate the key technologies that can help automate processes and eliminate human error.

Companies that take data-quality management seriously should evaluate the key technologies that can help automate processes and eliminate human error.

How should a company begin to put in place a data quality management strategy? First, as with all disciplines, IT executives must assess the current state of data in the enterprise.

A key element of information stewardship is data-quality management - that is, ensuring that the mission-critical data within an enterprise is reliable, accurate and complete. DQM is increasingly important as data is used by more people to make more decisions within the enterprise, and as compliance requires that certain types of data be kept accurate during the entire course of their lives.

A key element of information stewardship is data-quality management - that is, ensuring that the mission-critical data within an enterprise is reliable, accurate and complete. DQM is increasingly important as data is used by more people to make more decisions within the enterprise, and as compliance requires that certain types of data be kept accurate during the entire course of their lives.

Our vision of the next-generation data center may be that of a highly integrated and automated environment, but Nemertes’ research shows that most companies are not even close to that vision. One way to improve things is to introduce collaborative tools, copying some of the more successful aspects of “Web 2.0” such as wikis, RSS feeds and collaborative communities of experts.

Moore’s Law has been the driving force behind computing for decades. Every time pundits heralded the end to Moore’s Law, scientists have crested each performance “hill” to find more performance capacity just beyond. This has brought us today to extreme computing density and heat output.

One surprising finding from Nemertes’ recent security research is that, the more critical a server, the longer it takes to get patched. Not only are most critical servers patched manually (slower but safer) but patches also need to be subjected to rigorous testing so as not to cause disruption. As a result, security professionals are faced with an uncomfortable dilemma: leave the server exposed to hackers or expose it to potentially damaging patches.

By Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Network World, 03/07/06

IT operations are increasingly “blessed” with a wealth of metrics concerning the supply of IT services. Dashboards and key performance indicators offer many IT shops a unique view into the cost of operations, the “hot” areas of growth and potential areas for savings and efficiency improvements.

Data centers are the biggest consumers of utility power in most large companies. Power needs range from 1 kilowatt per rack to more than 25 kilowatts per rack for dense blade servers. With rising prices in the energy markets, the electricity bill for your data centers could take a big bite out of your budgets. Increasing energy efficiency in the data center is not only an environmentally friendly strategy, but also a smart way to cut costs.

By Andreas Antonopoulos, Nemertes Principal Research Analyst

Executive Summary

Security professionals often argue about whether they should apply security in the network layer or at the application layer. But for an enterprise’s security architect or chief security officer, the answer is “apply security where the risk justifies the cost.” In most cases, that means applying security controls in the network layer, at the application layer and pervasively throughout the organization. The disappearing security perimeter only heightens the need for a holistic approach to security.

By Melanie Turek

Principal Research Analyst, Nemertes Research LLC

Executive Summary

Chances are, if you work for a company with more than a few dozen employees, you work for a company that has remote workers, whether they’re in a satellite office, a home office or spend almost all their time on the road.

But the virtual workplace is about more than having a distributed workforce. It’s about having employees regularly work in a location that’s separate from that of their managers, direct reports and/or immediate co-workers. In other words, it’s about having employees who regularly work with people without actually seeing them live. And often, it’s about having employees who interact across regions, countries, and time zones.

Major carriers score high on network performance, but billing woes and installation delays open the door for second-tier providers.

By Robin Gareiss, Principal Research Officer, Nemertes Research
Network World, 07/19/04

Customers think highly of the reliability and performance of carrier networks, but aren't so thrilled with the level of customer service, especially when it comes to billing and management tools. That leaves the door open for second-tier service providers such as Broadwing, Masergy Communications, Savvis Communications and XO Communications, according to a Nemertes Research survey of about 100 major U.S. and global companies.

By Melanie Turek, Nemertes Principal Analyst
April 2004, WSTA Ticker

Instant Messaging, or IM, is a rogue technology that's here to stay. It gained traction among consumers (specifically, young consumers, and later, their parents) before making its way into the corporate world. But a recent benchmark research series from Nemertes Research LLC, "Getting a Grip on Collaboration," shows that today, fully 90% of companies are running IM on their networks.

Instant messaging lets users send pop-up messages to other people using the same IM software whenever they're online at the same time. Its real-time nature makes it a very useful tool for back-channeling during meetings, as well as for getting simple answers quickly. But its history as a consumer application means that the free IM services in use in most organizations today lack enterprise-class security, reporting and management capabilities. So although IM is fast becoming a must-have business tool, it can also be a headache for unprepared IT managers who don't take steps to control the instant messaging running over their networks.