ZEUS KERRAVALA
SVP Enterprise Research, The Yankee Group
Before joining Yankee Group, Kerravala was a senior engineer and technical project manager for Greenwich Technology Partners, a leading network infrastructure and engineering consulting firm. Prior to that, he was a vice president of IT for Ferris, Baker Watts, a mid-Atlantic based brokerage firm, acting as both a lead engineer and project manager deploying corporate-wide technical solutions to support the firm’s business units. Kerravala's first task at FBW was to roll out a new frame relay infrastructure with connections to branch offices, service providers, vendors and the stock exchange. Kerravala was also an engineer and technical project manager for Alex. Brown & Sons, responsible for the technology related to the equity trading desks. Zeus's Yankee Group blog can be found here.
Blog Entries by Zeus Kerravala
It's a (really) big router--not worth the enormous pre-announcement hype, but an important development in supporting the bandwidth that we'll all be consuming soon.
HP actually threw the first punch in this fight.
Despite the hype and announcements, I still think there are some significant barriers to video becoming a widespread corporate collaboration tool.
We need to see more in the way of best practices and practical deployments that lead to rapid ROI to drive this industry past experimental adoption.
Cloud computing announcements will be hot, deployments will be not. Social media will be hot with workers and not with IT departments. SIP Trunking is hot. No qualifier of "not" on this one.
The economy, Nortel, consolidation, SIP trunking, and what enterprise managers can learn from Tiger Woods.
DiVitas has identified FMC and dual-mode for what it is: a technology that has been eclipsed by the mobile Web and social media.
I actually like this move a lot and think 3Com fills more holes for HP than just providing a high end switch.
Five years ago the thought of Cisco in e-mail and Microsoft in voice was probably laughable, but here we are.
The ability to modify presence status from a mobile device, using a consumer tool would add a tremendous amount of value.
This may seem counter-intuitive, but in my opinion, it's actually a great time to be a Nortel customer.
There's great things coming for this industry down the road but it's a stronger market if all the participants are here in force.
It's a great move for Cisco in that it makes them more competitive with many of its foes and keeps another one at bay.
I've talked to handful of companies that are considering cutting the wired ports back by 25% or even more in some cases and using WLAN as the primary and wired as the augmentation.
Make no mistake, this is a very strategic and acquisition for Cisco but it will add fuel to the rapidly evolving competitive landscape.
We're continuing to see the transformation of Cisco right before our very eyes.
As consumers start to experience more of these applications in their personal lives, they'll start to expect it in the corporate world.
The biggest area of "low hanging fruit" for the SBC market is in helping enterprises connect to SIP trunking providers.
Cisco is going to find competition over the next ten years will be much stiffer than the past decade.
The combined organization will be the undisputed #1 voice vendor.
In my opinion, the two most likely candidates are Avaya and Siemens, with Avaya having the edge.
Many of Cisco's partners are convinced that Cisco's growth in services will be or even has been at the expense of Cisco's channel. The company needs to be careful, since perception can become reality.
I do believe that Cisco's best shot at being the de facto UC vendor is through transitioning the market to a cloud based delivery model.
It's got product, a great home market and the economy helps; and now it needs to execute.
Overall, my impression of the DiVitas Mobile UC solution was positive.
The 800 pound gorillas in communications & networking are looking to each other's markets for continued growth.
We're finally starting to see some early examples of applications that are communications enabled that can streamline or create new business process.
This tool is a great leap forward in recording capabilities.
This architecture scales much easier than the way traditional communications was deployed and frankly, I think it's long overdue from the vendor community.
After months of speculation, rumor and hype, Cisco finally announced its Unified Computing System (UCS) solution.
Think about all the things in a building that are currently networked but not networked together.
The majority of the telephony industry will continue to get smaller and eventually disappear.
Twas a week before Christmas and all through the industry, not an IT manager was buying, not even a mouse…
With the upcoming shift to UC being an application enabler instead of a standalone application, the way we secure and manage UC needs to be different.
In this year's Chambers keynote at C-Scape, the market transitions that Cisco is trying to catch were collaboration using Web 2.0 tools, visual networking and virtualization/cloud computing.
As 2008 draws to a close I thought it would be a good time for me to put on my prognosticator hat and take a few shots at what might occur in 2009.
NEC ran a series of demonstrations showing how, by using unified communications mixed with things like facial recognition systems, ID scanners and biometrics, the way users and systems work together can radically change many of the business processes we have.
Presence allows us to understand whether a contact is available, but does not provide information on the location of the contact (or device), the qualifications of the person or any other information. I think of this larger decision criteria as "context."
I made the decision to attend Voicecon Europe in Amsterdam a few months back and I really wasn’t sure what to expect. However, despite the dramatic downturn in the economy and the fact it was a first year show, I...
In Tuesday morning’s keynote to Wall Street at Cisco’s financial analyst conference, John Chambers participated in a Jim Grub-led demonstration where he played Tic-Tac-Toe over Cisco’s Telepresence system. My first thought was to write a very sarcastic blog pointing out...
Over the past couple of years we’ve seen a tremendous amount of companies merge, be acquired or turn private in our industry. Alcatel bought Lucent, Siemens went private and will be merged with Enterasys, NEC acquired Sphere, Mitel purchased Inter-Tel...
Earlier this week Alcatel-Lucent announced that CEO Pat Russo and chairman, Serge the Merge Tchuruk would be leaving the organization. The departures of these executives were no real surprise to people that have followed “Lucatel” since the two companies merged....
Last week Juniper announced that Microsoft executive Kevin Johnson has been named the new CEO of Juniper Networks, ending the 12 year Kriens era. Scott Kriens’ tenure saw Juniper’s meteoric rise, where it did the unthinkable and took router market...
Unified communications (UC) has been around as a market category now for a number of years. I wrote my first report on this topic in 2003 and I know I wasn’t the first author to do so. So, UC has...
Unified communications (UC) has been a hot topic in the vendor community for the past couple of years, particularly with the traditional communications vendors. The majority of positioning that I have seen around UC positions VoIP as the foundation and...
I think right now we’ve got two different definitions of unified communications. The vendor definition is unifying all the communications tools from one particular vendor. From the user perspective, it’s very important to unify the collaboration tools across multiple vendor...
Unified Communications was the main theme here at VoiceCon 2008 in Orlando, but there were a few underlying themes that were tightly related to UC, one of which was videoconferencing. Avaya, Microsoft and Cisco all made various forms of videoconferencing...
Over the past year or so the industry has started talking much more about the concept of “communications enabled applications”. This can mean many things, but to me it’s the concept of taking the communications tools we use today, things...
In this corner, weighing in at 800 pounds and sporting a brand new chassis and operating system, the champion of the networking industry, Cisco! In the other corner, the challenger, wearing a lean, mean operating system, a newcomer to the...
Over the years there have been many technologies come and go that promised to converge voice and data. Protocols such as ATM and ISDN would be the magical thing that would bring our voice and data networks together – and...
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