Enterprise Technology By Phil Edholm

I was in an office recently that had a 42" wall mounted plasma screen installed. I have always thought that this was an extravagance that more related to the occupant than business, however my recent experience has convinced me this is not the case.

Over the course of a couple of days, a number of meetings were held that I participated in. In almost every one the screen was used to present information used by the group. This included presentations as well as using the web browser to quickly find information needed during the discussion. The set-up included a dock station that could go to either the desktop monitor or this screen. Connected to the dock was ...

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I saw this article in eWeek about the most wanted IT skills and it got me to thinking about skills as a representation of either transformation or challenge. Of the 10 skills listed, Numbers 1,2, and 10 (1 - Security, firewalls, data Privacy, 2 - General Networking, Network Infrastructure, and 10 - RF Mobile-Wireless) are all areas where the networking world is limiting the movement to advanced Information and Interaction solutions due to the complexity of what we do. While the needs in this area can be related to growth, to a great extent it is a reflection of the complexity of the solutions and the inability of the technology and the products to come down the ...

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Doug Gourlay of Cisco recently responded to my post on "Merchant "silicon by putting a post on the Cisco site on his blog. Thanks to Brad Reese for pointing out the reply on his blog on the NetworkWorld site. While Brad felt Doug's response was a "stinging rebuke", I believe that most will agree with me that it was a lame and poorly thought through analogy. While I replied on Brad's site, I thought it would be appropriate to respond here as well........as Doug was really responding to my assertion that using proprietary silicon for packet processing is ...

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I started to reference the issue about the question whether the Internet bandwidth was going to become an issue in a post response last year. At the time I referenced a report issued by the Nemertes group that predicted that the capacity of the Internet would become an issue between 2010 and 2012. The post I did about Microhoo and Google competing to introduce new services and capabilities began to highlight this issue in my mind as well. Then last week I had a meeting with a key technology executive from a major North American service provider who indicated their bandwidth is growing 40% per year and they have begun the migration to 40 Gbps in their ...

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I was reading an article in Newsweek entitled "Not Made in Japan". The article detailed the challenges that the corporate, educational, and cultural structure(s) in Japan are facing when trying to compete in a world that is driven not by incremental improvement, but rather by innovative leaps. The article details the failure of DoCoMo to leverage it's leadership position in the Japanese market and in handset technology into the rest of the world and the loss of capitalization it has faced in this failure. It further discusses how Sony, originator of the Walkman, lost theMP3 market (even in Japan) to the Apple iPod through a lack of innovation in interfaces and design.

In reading the ...

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I was asked to post a bit about my impressions of Dubai...so here is a posting on my visit. I wrote this on my way home, but other topics that were more time relevant came up so it sat for a while before I was able to publish it.

I spent a few days this week in Dubai, and came away impressed both with the frenetic level of activity as well as the challenges that they are facing. Dubai is growing from 2 to 6 million inhabitants over the next 4 years and they are building to accommodate the growth. In the Marina area where I was staying, there were about 20 towers, virtually every one under ...

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I decided to wait a while before posting on this topic as there is so much noise on the topic. And I waited long enough that Yahoo turned down the first effort, but I thought a post was still appropriate as Microsoft seems to be undeterred in it's pursuit. Especially as this is the first in potentially multiple consolidations in the space.

I believe this is the logical transition of Microsoft from a "product" company into a services company. While Microsoft has continued to lead in the "product" space, it has not gained significant share in the "services" side of the business. As we all know, technologies and products tend to move down in value over ...

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I continue to be intrigued by the concept of virtual worlds and the ability of them to simulate/replace the physical environment. I find the concept of integrating virtual and real conference rooms (Sun has a demo of this) to be interesting. Much as a play is transformed when the actors "break" the 4th wall between them and the audience, this concept has the capability of radically changing both the virtual world (the play) and the real world (the audience). How could the unique relationship between the audience and Ferris Buehler have been achieved absent his initial dialog about; "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in awhile, you ...

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One of the techniques I use and suggest to customers is to ask the question "so what?" to get to the true value of a suggested benefit. The concept is that when a benefit is suggested, the question "so what?" is asked. If there is an answer to the question then the true benefit has not been reached.

For example; if somone says that you should buy their product for use in your IT shop because it is easy to use, ask the question; "so what?" the progression might go like this; users can support themselves..."so what?"....there are fewer support calls..."so what?"....it requires fewer support people..."so what?"....it SAVES MONEY...so it is a COST SAVINGS. If ...

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In a posting a few while back I commented on the potential of Audio IM replacing Text IM. As one of the comments, David brought up a great point I had not thoroughly considered; is text better than audio/speech because of the bandwidth savings? Is it worth the speech to text and text to speech for bandwidth for the savings in network load, especially if we have to add emotion cues and we would lose the senders actual voice.

While I responded in the comments on that posting, I thought some of you might miss the thought process this stimulated and some of the resulting analysis. I have long maintained that ...

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