| This week's sponsor is Kony. | 
| Webinar: Building great mobile apps for Marketing
Wednesday, December 4th, 2pm ET / 11am PT
Mobile applications are a great place to forge customer connections. That means IT, developers and marketers have to partner more effectively than ever to deliver the goods. Join FierceMobileIT and learn how to create fantastic mobile apps for customers and marketers alike. Register Today! |
Also Noted: AT&T
Spotlight On... Software-defined stuff is growing really fast
SAP's API management gateway; Salesforce hackathon ends badly; and much more...  Follow @fierceentcomm on Twitter
News From the Fierce Network:
1. Big data slowing holiday sales
2. Apple's fumble in enterprise opens the door for Microsoft score
3. Many organizations ill-prepared for today's top technologies
| This week's sponsor is Acronis and MobileIron. |  | Webinar: MobileIron and Acronis Deliver Secure File Access & Editing on Android
Thursday, December 12th, 11am ET /8am PT Join us on December 12th to learn how Acronis mobilEcho and MobileIron AppConnect together provide a complete solution for organizations supporting Android smart phones and tablets. Register Today! |
Today's Top News 1. Salesforce.com abandons 'social enterprise' push
Last week at its Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, Salesforce.com abandoned its push for the 'social enterprise', mentioning in its place a new catchphrase about the 'Internet of Customers'. Candor is refreshing; typically vendors simply move on without an admission of defeat. According to Benioff, Salesforce's sales force (that's not a typo) discovered that the social enterprise phrase didn't resonate with potential buyers. As Rachel King deduces on ZDNet, "even Salesforce.com didn't exactly understand what it meant." The Internet of Customers terminology conflate two hot trends--mobility and the Internet of Things. On GigaOm, Barb Darrow notes Salesforce's alliances with Dropbox and Evernote and the emphasis on its AppExchange platform. However, she also characterizes the mobility push as "a bit like putting lipstick on a chicken--an attempt to assume mobile cred long after it should have embraced mobile devices better than it has." The Fierce Take: The move away from the 'social enterprise' seems largely semantic. And if that term is too vague, it's hard to argue 'Internet of customers' is an upgrade.
Whatever catchphrase they're bandying about at the moment, at its core Salesforce looks to be a fast-growing, currently unprofitable platform for customer relationship management apps, now playing catchup on mobile platforms.
(The company anticipates a loss of about 42 cents per share for the current fiscal year, but revenues are expected to be up more than 30 percent from the previous year.) For more:
- read ZDNet's coverage of Benioff's pivot
- read Ron Miller's commentary on FierceContentManagement
- read Darrow's article on GigaOm
- and Alex Williams' September TechCrunch article about Salesforce as a platform company More on social enterprise tools:
Most organizations are kidding themselves on social collaboration technology
The quest for the enterprise communications hub
IBM, Salesforce acquisitions latest in series of high-profile cloud purchases
Read more about: saas
back to top |
2. It's all fun and games until somebody has to monitor the network
Gaming consoles on the corporate network? Sounds like a recipe for somebody getting fired. Then again, a researcher at the august institution Fermilab pointed out last week that GPUs--graphics processing units, the specialized chips built to accelerate game graphics, might be ideally suited for network monitoring purposes. Speaking at supercomputing conference SC13 last week, Wenji Wu said big, busy networks are difficult to monitor in real-time. General-purpose CPU chips simply lack the memory and power to keep up. Conversely, ASICs can handle the work but are expensive and difficult to program, and typically can't split processing jobs into parallel tasks. Wenji said GPUs don't suffer these limitations. They are built with multiple processor cores, perfect for parallel processing. IDG News Service's Joab Jackson reports that Wenji built a prototype system based on an Nvidia M2070 GPU and an off-the-shelf network interface card; the model outperformed a six-core CPU-based system by a factor of three. For more:
- read Jackson's account More on high-performance computing:
Memory limits hinder exascale computing
Spotlight: Evolution of the Top 500 Supercomputer list
What will the Open Compute Project mean for your data center?
On being dense: Network data centers struggle to pack more punch per rack
Read more about: Network Monitoring
back to top |
3. In SDNs, 'the edge' needs some love too
Most of the activity in software-defined networking (SDN) is taking place in the core, says Arthur Cole. Those developments are positive--but the network edge is going to need some attention as well. In fact, Cole goes so far as to say "The edge, in fact, is quickly turning into the brains of the enterprise network. It decides where and how data gets shuttled through internal infrastructure to both reduce the demand on network resources and improve response times." Edge improvements will become even more important as the amount of bandwidth-hogging rich media traffic increases, and as a wider variety of devices ("things") attach to the network. Cole rounds up some recent product developments, including Extreme Networks' Open Fabric Edge extension and edge routing hardware such as Juniper's MX2020. For more:
- read Cole's article More on network systems and architecture:
Cloud might be putting the U in Unified Communications
How to find fault with your Software-Defined Network
How complex is your network? Read more about: software-defined networking
back to top |
4. WebRTC just a different kettle of fish
The WebRTC technology for in-browser communications offers much promise in the enterprise space--for quick-and-easy videoconferencing, video customer service and other applications. But it's going to take some more work to put the 'easy' in quick-and-easy. On unified communications website No Jitter, Eric Krapf evaluates recent WebRTC discussion from Tsahi Levent-Levi of BlogGeek.me, particularly with an eye toward business applications. Key points: - Toll quality is no longer necessarily the expectation. This, in spite of the fact that, voice is the most critical element in video and other multi-media connections. (In videoconferencing, sometimes a dropped video feed wouldn't be a showstopper, whereas losing the voice channel would generally render the meeting pointless.) - Instead, it's about the user experience in any given application. App development culture needs to build in the habit of considering stream quality--for example, taking into consideration 'NAT transversal' (crossing Network Address Translation boundaries across a network connection), which can be tricky in real-time communications as compared to many other forms of Web app. - Interoperability is simplified. Instead of a dozen vendors pitching conflicting VoIP standards and proprietary technologies, now it all boils down to four browser vendors and their WebRTC implemenations. Or lack thereof--Krapf calls Microsoft and Apple 'no-shows' so far. "It's these issues--vendor cooperation; developer commitment; and a refocusing onto the user experience--that will have the most to do with how well WebRTC succeeds and how much change it really brings about," writes Krapf. For more:
- read the NoJitter column
- and Levent-Levi's ongoing WebRTC coverage More on WebRTC:
Will Amazon's Mayday button spark a video revival in customer service?
WebRTC steps outside the browser, shows up in Vonage mobile apps
Enterprises adopt WebRTC 'as fast as it comes out', says Thrupoint
Read more about: Unified Communications
back to top |
Also Noted | This week's sponsor is AT&T. |  | eBook | Making BYOD Work Chief information officers and enterprise IT departments face a myriad of challenges when allowing employees to bring their own mobile devices into the work environment. FierceMobileIT explores how BYOD can work best for your enterprise to solve these problems. Download for free today. |
SPOTLIGHT ON... Software-defined stuff is growing really fast Research and Markets, based in Dublin, says the Software-Defined Data Center market will grow by a 97 percent compound annual rate through 2018. That's a revised number, up from a 67 percent CAGR prediction issued by Research and Markets in August. SDCC is a big bucket that includes software-defined networks, storage and compute. Doubling every year is a big projection, but (speaking of big buckets) Network World's Jim Duffy tosses in other similarly bullish market estimates and research from IDC. The only sour notes are represented by research from management tool vendor Packet Design, concluding that SDN users will need new management tools. (Surprise!) > Building great mobile apps for Marketing - Wednesday, December 4th, 2pm ET / 11am PT Mobile applications are a great place to forge customer connections. That means IT, developers and marketers have to partner more effectively than ever to deliver the goods. Join FierceMobileIT and learn how to create fantastic mobile apps for customers and marketers alike. Register Today! > Building a Strategic Road Map for Enterprise Mobility - December 11, 2pm ET / 11am PT This FierceMobileIT webinar will explore how to use external subject matter experts to build a customized mobility strategy based on business priorities; simplify complexity and gain control through cross-platform solutions that align with existing information systems; develop standards-based mobile applications and processes that ensure seamless mobile transition and growth. Register Today! > MobileIron and Acronis Deliver Secure File Access & Editing on Android - Thursday, December 12th, 11am ET /8am PT Join us on December 12th to learn how Acronis mobilEcho and MobileIron AppConnect together provide a complete solution for organizations supporting Android smart phones and tablets. Register Today! > Moving Enterprise Apps to the Cloud – Fad or Necessity? - Wednesday, December 19th, 2pm ET / 11am PT If you're building mobile apps, this webinar is for you. Join us to learn how to utilize the cloud to optimize and improve your mobile application development strategy. Learn more about the advantages and challenges of cloud-based mobile development. Register Today! > Next Generation Data Center - Innovation, Transformation, and Management - Now Available On-Demand! Engage directly with Atos and Intel team members and see a live demonstration in unique approaches to innovation and transformation within the Data Center. Register to watch now!
| > Whitepaper: Enterprise Job Scheduling: 12 Things You Should Know > IT Made Easy with ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus is an ITIL-Ready Help Desk Software with integrated asset and project management. True to our tagline, "IT Made Easy", ServiceDesk Plus wins hands down when it comes to ease of use, out of the box settings and integration. Visit http://www.servicedeskplus.com/ to check out the list of features that come at just $995 and to download a 30-Day Free Trial! > Whitepaper: DIY SharePoint - 6 Reasons to Enable Self-Service SharePoint Customization More companies find that "citizen developers" – end users, not IT developers - are creating business applications. In this white paper, discover six ways to embrace citizen development in a way that minimizes risk and maximizes SharePoint. Learn More > Whitepaper: Avoiding the top three challenges of custom-coded SharePoint applications In this white paper, learn about the challenges of custom coded SharePoint applications. Then, see how you can overcome them to create the SharePoint sites you want. Download Today! > Whitepaper: Your Guide to iOS 7 he new version of iOS marks a notable improvement over the last in terms of aesthetics and features, and this guide should get you up to speed with the changes and additions to what Apple calls the world’s most powerful mobile OS. Download today! > Whitepaper: Know What Customers Want Before They Do Today's consumers only want interactions that are relevant, personalized, and based on a customer’s situation and preferences. Discover the framework for creating effective NBOs for B2C and B2B companies. Download today. > Whitepaper: The Future of Sales Performance Management Download this document to learn new technologies and tools that are improving sales managers' ability to measure and enhance the performance of their sales teams. Download today. > eBook: eBook | Making BYOD Work Chief information officers and enterprise IT departments face a myriad of challenges when allowing employees to bring their own mobile devices into the work environment. FierceMobileIT explores how BYOD can work best for your enterprise to solve these problems. Download for free today. > Whitepaper: Best Practices for Migrating to SharePoint 2013 SharePoint 2013 has the industry buzzing. It’s powerful and a vast improvement over previous versions. In this white paper, get best practice to ensure your migration to SharePoint 2013 is quick, easy and cost effective. Download Today! > eBook: eBook | Content for the Mobile and Social Workforce The smartphone and the cloud and the ability to share changed the whole notion of content management. In this eBook, FierceContentManagement looks at these shifts and make sense of them in the broader IT context as well as their influence on content management. Download for free today. > eBook: eBook | Convergence of Mobility and the Cloud As BYOD and cloud computing gain traction in the enterprise, CIOs need to understand how the two relate and how they can be leveraged to improve enterprise services while maintaining security. This eBook discusses the challenges CIOs and IT managers face in the application of cloud synchronization, and what to keep in mind while keeping up with the trend of applying cloud-based storage in companies' day-to-day work. Download it today. > Whitepaper: Encryption of Cloud Data Online data security is a complex, rapidly evolving landscape, requiring layered protections. Encryption is one tool in a comprehensive defense-in-depth strategy to mitigate the risk of accidental and intentional data breaches.
Download today to learn how to protect your data. > Whitepaper: Embracing Trends and Technologies: Change is in Your Hands In this whitepaper learn about these three key trends and technologies, how to be successful in the introduction of new IT services and how to embrace best practices for change adoption to facilitate simplified, reliable and cost-effective implementations. Learn More | |
Editor: 
No comments:
Post a Comment
Keep a civil tongue.