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Hill Associates instructors
have an extensive background in all aspects of the telecommunications
industry, and are the authors of all of our courseware.
Many of our instructors are also published.
We present for you here our white paper series.
All papers are in PDF format and require Adobe Acrobat 4.0 or later.
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Connect the Dots: Health Care
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This white paper speaks to the challenges health care organizations face today and how to best address them. These challenges extend beyond HIPAA or security around electronic health records (EHR). How can the health care industry achieve new levels of efficiency and effective patient care? By leveraging telecommunications and a modernized IT infrastructure. However, most health care organizations are probably not entirely comfortable dealing with these new pressures.
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Connect the Dots: Telcos
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To be competitive today, telecommunications companies must become true solutions providers that create value for their customers. Such providers understand all of the following: their products, the technology behind their products, and how their products are positioned in the marketplace. This white paper discusses these concepts in detail.
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Enterprise
Applications A Conceptual Look at ERP, CRM, and
SCM
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The telecommunications industry, like many
others, is experiencing a watershed. No
longer can customers pursue technological
advances just for technology's sake. Technology
must support real, measurable, and innovative
goals of the enterprise. The technologies
and terms in every major provider's portfolio
are starting to look and sound alike. New
product offerings appear almost identical
to existing products in the same market.
The terms VPN, MPLS, convergence, the ubiquitous
"IP," service level agreements
(SLA), single points of contact, managed
network services, and global footprints
are important in the telecommunications
market, but we have heard them all before.
The competitive
differentiation that service providers desperately
seek will not occur on this homogenous slate
of technology and service offerings. Only
when service providers truly understand
what is happening from the customer's perspective
will real competitive differentiation take
place. Providers must realize that they
do not drive the networking and telecom
environment; the customers' strategic and
tactical objectives drive it. If service
providers wish to position at higher levels
in the corporation, they must change the
way they communicate. Such communication
should not only show an understanding of
the enterprise applications themselves but
also an understanding of how the applications
relate to the service providers' product
set.
This paper
will outline three (of the many) enterprise
applications and business drivers service
providers can use to differentiate themselves.
We will examine the concepts of data warehousing
and data mining for the purpose of effective
enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer
relationship management (CRM), and supply
chain management (SCM). We will define the
major aspects of each, examine the drivers
and impacts of each, and consider how each
relates to the service providers' product
sets.
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Mobility Is a Hot Topic
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Does mobility imply wireless? Does wireless ensure mobility? Is there a difference between portability and mobility? Should an organization have a mobility policy before it crafts a mobile solution? This white paper answers these questions and more.
The paper examines wireless from the PAN, LAN, MAN, and WAN perspective. For each coverage area, we look at the relevant technology and decide if it provides portability, mobility, or both. With this question resolved, we turn our attention to the issues related to introducing mobility into the enterprise. We address issues surrounding access, transport, security, devices, and applications. Finally, we introduce the components of the mobility policy.
The paper also discusses the technologies used in contemporary mobile telephone systems, which we discuss in two podcasts. The first podcast explores UMTS and cdma2000, paying particular attention to base technology and the implementation differences. The second podcast discusses issues related to mobile computing.
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Security Compliance Best Practices
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There are numerous new laws related to corporate governance, financial reporting practices, protecting personal information, counter-terrorism, and the potential for litigation. These laws impact an organization's data backup and storage requirements, electronic documentation, and overall security strategy. Plain and simple, many organizations are not prepared to comply with these laws. This white paper discusses what organizations must do to get prepared.
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Signaling
Processes in Third Generation Wireless Systems
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The laws of Nyquist and Shannon govern the
world of data communications-the information
carrying capacity of a channel is a function
of the channel's bandwidth and noise. In
wired networks, we have developed ways to
reduce noise and increase the channel's
bandwidth. In many respects, the bounded
media of the wired world has almost boundless
channel capacity. However, in wireless communications
the properties of the channel are not as
easily manipulated. Ironically, this seemingly
unbounded medium of the airwaves has some
severe limitations. As we move toward the
information capacity required for 3G wireless
communications, we need to develop signaling
processes that allow high data rates in
relatively small channels. Some people call
these procedures post-Shannon architectures.
This paper examines such architectures.
We first examine
the techniques known as signal hardening,
signal shaping, and signal reconstruction
or recovery. Then we look at processes that
deliberately spread the signal, for example,
direct sequence spread spectrum (used in
the CDMA systems) and orthogonal frequency
division multiplexing. All of these procedures
take a different view of the laws of Nyquist
and Shannon. Post-Shannon architectures
are being deployed today, as are other potential
signaling solutions, for third generation
(3G) wireless systems.
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Storage
Networking: An Essential Guide to Storage
as a Component of Business Continuation
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According to the 2006 Global State of Information Security report, published by CIO Magazine in conjunction with PricewaterhouseCoopers in September of 2006, business continuity is the number four "to do" item for this year, down from number one last year. Data backup rose from number three in 2006 to number one in 2007. Why are these two important goals for 2007?
Information is a business's primary asset. Historically, data storage was a local issue, either on floppy discs or hard drives. In a data center, storage went to tape and was stored in libraries. Things are more complicated today, especially after September 11th, the natural disasters of 2005 (the Indonesian tsunami and Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma), or even severe storms such as those that hit Greensburg, Kansas in 2007, as well as the constant threat of data loss due to security breaches. Companies are more concerned than ever about storage and business continuation in the event of catastrophes-large or small, natural or man-made. This article provides a high-level overview of the concepts of storage networking and business continuity, including the often-confusing terms associated with the industry. It concludes with a concise look at the storage marketplace and a plan for survival.
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VoIP
and IP Telephony
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Today, corporations and service providers
are creating single networks that serve
multiple purposes and save critical dollars.
Currently there are two views of a converged
network. The first is the creation of ISDN
and Switched 56. This view is one of "Build
a voice network and data will ride for free."
"Legacy" data rarely required
transmission rates greater than 56 Kbps,
it was easy to consider transporting it
along with the already establish voice network.
The other was created when IP traffic accounted
for a greater volume than voice on carrier
networks. This view was, and still is, "Build
a data network, and the voice will ride
for free." This is the view of convergence
that is the basis of voice over IP (VoIP).
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