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Hill
Associates Telecom Newsletter
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HAPPY NEW YEAR and welcome to 2008!
We hope that everyone had a safe and wonderful Holiday Season and New Year! Now it’s time to look toward 2008.
This year, telecom carriers will continue to attempt to remain relevant in an IP-enabled world. For a while now, we have been helping many of you figure out how to be perceived as more than “the phone company.” Now that services such as basic bandwidth and connectivity are commodities, providers must offer value over and above mere dial tone.
Pundits are also predicting an eventful 2008 for information security, so now is the time to gain a competitive advantage in this area. Over the past year, we have rolled out several new programs focused on how to create both business value for end-users and linkages to newer services around mobility, security, business continuity, multimedia, and VoIP.
We look forward to helping your business stay competitive this year. Let us know how we can help.
Paul
President & CEO
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| In
the News
See what growing old looks like
A video from artist Jonathan Keller provides a fascinating look at eight years of aging in about one minute. Very cool!
YouTube storage videos making the rounds
We’ve been talking about the death of tape and its replacement for almost two years now. Now, virtual tape storage provider Sepaton has created two new humorous videos about tape. The first is about the death of tape; the second shows an ejected tape killing the IT guy. For more on our view of storage, check out our podcast series and ExperTechs on Storage Fundamentals and Security.
Will ’08 be a v6 year?
IPv6 has been around for many years, but there has been no real sense of urgency around transitioning to it. This is about to change. Geoff Houston has been tracking Internet address utilization, and IPv4 addresses will likely run out in 2009/10. Ars Technica reports that ICANN/IANA has announced that IPv6 AAAA records (pronounced quad-A) are being implemented in several root DNS servers in February. It also has tight requirements for IPv4 allocations. All federal government agencies’ backbone networks must be able to transport both IPv4 and IPv6 protocols by June 30, 2008. Microsoft and Apple operating systems fully support IPv6 as do the major routing and switch vendors.
There is no cut-off date since address exhaustion does not mean the Internet stops, but now is the time to start working on those plans. Early preparation will help avoid the Chicken Little Y2K syndrome. |
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Industry
Analysis
Storage a hot topic in 2008
Storage will remain a big draw for 2008. But it will be software that will grow almost twice as fast as hardware. With storage set to go from being a critical business function to enabling competitive advantage, there are now new disruptive technologies that promise to turn the data storage market on its head.
The 2008 forecast for GPS and location-based services
Will 2008 also be the year that location-based services (LBS) using GPS capability take off? According to Sal Dhanani of TeleNav, the answer is yes. Nick Lippis and Zeus Kerravala also review the mobile application trends for the year and look towards 2012.
Every CIO’s New Year’s resolution
All you CIOs out there must resolve to be nimble and be quick! Andrew Bartels, a research analyst at Forrester Research Inc., notes that CIOs realize that the key lies with IT. Read more here.
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| Tech
Talk
The honeybee waggle dance helps Web surfers
Yes, you read the headline right. Scientists at Georgia Tech and the University of Oxford actually used the honeybee waggle dance to help Web surfers get to popular websites faster. Read more here.
Google and the wisdom of clouds
The amount of business and scientific data continues to rise, almost exponentially. What if companies could hand off some of their computing requirements to a global network of servers known as “clouds”? What if a company like Google could enable that? Such is the concept presented in a recent BusinessWeek article.
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Hill Associates News
Hill Associates launching video podcasts
Hill Associates is adding to our repertoire of information to keep you up to date on the latest technology topics. We will soon begin launching a series of video podcasts, which will complement our existing PodSnacks and Wiki articles. Look for links through YouTube in the January/February timeframe.
What is your ETQ (ExperTech Quotient)?
We know it can be a challenge to participate in a long technical program. For those of you that can’t get away, you can participate in a Hill Associates program without leaving your computer. Check out the ExperTech titles available at our online store presented by some of your favorite facilitators. We have customized these topics for several of our partners, and we can do so for you as well.
Are you getting your daily PodSnack?
Subscribe to our RSS feed to receive a daily PodSnack. Let us know if there is a term or concept you want more information about. And continue to spread the word about our weekly podcast series called the Hill Associates Week in Telecom (tHAWT).
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