Mark Steinberg

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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.

Mark Steinberg

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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.

Mark Steinberg

Click here to download the entire white paper (PDF, 119 KB).

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.

Paul Whalen

Click here to download the entire white paper (PDF, 97 KB).

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.

Mark Steinberg

Click here to download the entire white paper (PDF, 107 KB).

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.

Paul Whalen

Click here to download the entire white paper (PDF, 232 KB).

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.

Mark Steinberg

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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.

Mark Steinberg
Peter Southwick

Click here to download the entire white paper (PDF, 146 KB).

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).