Moves, Adds, Changes--for the industry, not individual stations in your network--seem to be full blown for 2008. The tide may turn into a flood of paradigms for the industry that is indeed shaking up.
Moves, Adds, Changes--for the industry, not individual stations in your network--seem to be full blown for 2008. The tide may turn into a flood of paradigms for the industry that is indeed shaking up.Apple in less than one year, ranks among the worlds top ten mobile phone makers. Siemens is scrambling to sell off their assets and shed weight (job cuts) in an attempt to make the big sale of Siemens Enterprise Networks (SEN). Nortel is cutting 2,100 jobs as their sales slide. Maybe Nortel will join in on the selling action of some of their assets. Google isn't immune to down turns in the economy either and where's all the beef with those expensive click throughs? They are keeping pretty busy vesting themselves in "the cloud" and in alternative energy. It wouldn't be fair not to mention that Microsoft got another fine- another record fine.
So out of some of these MACs will come the dreaded deletions. Someone and some things must go. It's part of the evolving door. It's not all bad either.
There's still too much stuff, too many players, too many patch-worked solutions and not enough convergence. Software and services must converge. Multitudes of customer appliances must vanish- including those stand-alone fax machines and modems. VoIP didn't blossom quite like all the marketing gurus predicted but Cisco certainly did, and now lots of folks have impressive looking telephones. HYBRID is more of a solution that rose from the ranks expectedly and remains very viable economically speaking. As reluctant as people are to change- they will and they must change, only at an accelerated pace.
Paradigms have evolved and more will follow. Apple is in the phone business, Google will be in the power business to keep its cloud alive and to survive while tradition just won't work any more for traditional telecom players. Separate networks of voice, data, and mobile are already interdependent, just not intertwined with that magical communications glue that allows interoperability, standards and all that other stuff that is supposed to make what we want, where we want it and when we want it appear seamless or transparent to the user.
UC will thrive in the cloud and when it's leveraged this way with wholesale prices, the masses will justify the means. Home users, teleworkers and SMBs will eat up a tool that provides uniformity. The old magical telecom glue seems to have lost its magic and the bets are hinging on UC. So as loosely as UC is defined it's probably better that way. Perhaps PCs will give way to what- thin clients for home and SMB users connecting to the cloud? Keyboard, mouse and screen go a lot longer if connected to the cloud. As I've mentioned before, that's where most of the services are already. Goodbye Microsoft updates- wouldn't that be a shift in policy? Then, like Google- you too will get in the energy business, only you'll be using and selecting from a smorgasbord of services available not in your PBX or small office server, but in the cloud.
Maybe networks will become simpler and instead of intelligent networking we'll see intelligence in the cloud run by the network? Or is it the other way around? It won't really matter. I've also said it before- telecom for years has suffered the turmoil and turbulent hashing of jobs and burning of money along with trading off service for cost of market share.
IT's turn is coming. Services in the cloud will prevail. Flattening of wares along with organizations are always in motion- that's what's appearing in this wizard's cloudy crystal ball. But not to worry too much, it's all from the land of OZ and there's lots of work involving change to edge us closer to the clouds- so pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
