Since I’m a technology guy I thought I would bring these terms to your attention.  I really liked this picture as it represents one of our Native American friends, but of course my post is not about his culture but rather about your digital type.

I recently was introduced to these terms by Tiffani Bova, VP of Research for Gartner Inc.  My children are “digital natives” – from day one, they have had electronics in their hands;  Everything from BlackBerry (founded by RIM in 1999), iPhones, iPods (first came out in 2001), Laptops, Wii, Guitar Hero (introduced in 2005) and Playstation.  If you were born before 2000, you are probably more of a “digital immigrant”.  We came into the world playing with blocks, not Webkinz and Club Penguin.

If you don’t have young children you have missed many of the sites that have been established over the last 5 years.  Everything is set up like a child’s version of Second Life.  Second Life was established in 2003 as an alternative world where adults can create avatars and live out an alternate (online) existence.  Many of the children sites created today are designed around the same principal – create your online character (a penguin, or a stuffed animal) and cruise around the online world – make sure you feed the Puffles, and feed your avatar friends, or they will die.  My daughter uses this as an excuse to justify why she needs to get on my laptop every other day.

I love technology and consider myself somewhat of an early adopter for many of the new concepts entering our lives - I’ll reserve my opinion for a few years to see if it was a good direction to take our digital natives.

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As we enter 2011 it is clear that more and more of our customers and peers will be discussing Cloud computing.

As business people we once used to interact with the web to find services and general information, but clearly this relationship continues to evolve.  Many of those services that we seek online have become applications themselves and now exhibit a certain level of complexity along with their own functionality.  Many have confusion when asked to define Cloud computing – check out Webopedia to see how they define it. 

What applications are you now managing internally that you would consider non-critical?  What apps do you want to continue managing in house, and which are you willing to put into the cloud?  These are the many questions that many of our customers are asking today.  After reading the white paper titled ”Cloud Buyers’ Decision Tree” at the Open Group site I had a better idea of how to determine which apps would be best for the cloud.  This site seems to be a valuable resource for all things from our industry.  They are a technology neutral consortium that provides some great resources.

Cloud computing offers massive scalability, in virtual computing power, storage and application resources – all at almost immediate availability and low cost, and CEO/CIOs are demanding that their IT operations determine what the benefits of this will represent in the way of reduced cost and improved efficiencies for their organizations. 

Are you looking at implementing a public or private cloud in 2011?

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Happy New Year from Cottonwood Communications!

We hope that you and your family enjoyed the holidays and have set some new goals for 2011.  We believe, along with many of our peers and business partners that 2011 will be a strong recovery year for the United States.  Attitudes are changing, and many seem to be going into the year with chins held high, ready for new challenges and desires to improve ourselves and our businesses.

One thing that should be at the top of your “to-do” list this year should be evaluating your overall IT and Telecom strategy.  Here are 6 ideas to consider as a start to determine what areas of your business you should work on first:

1.)   Your Wide Area Network or WAN.  Are you currently using the right technology for this?  Is your bandwidth to each end point large enough?  Do you need Quality of Service or QoS to make sure that voice is prioritized over your network?  In evaluating your WAN, make sure you are working with a partner that can support you with multiple carrier offerings, and assist you in evaluating the different technologies available.

2.)   Is your Internet connection large enough to handle and support the applications your leadership team is encouraging throughout your organization?  Our team constantly runs across business customers that are using connections that are 1/2 or in some cases 1/4 of what they should be based upon the daily applications and business tools that customers are accessing.  If your employees are waiting around for things to load, it makes sense that this is causing reduced efficiencies and loss of productivity in your workforce.  Instead of bonding T’s, take a look at Ethernet – if it’s not available on fiber, many of the carriers can offer 10 or 20 Mb over a copper connection.

3.)   Is your phone system giving you all of the functionality that your organization needs?  Have you evaluated how Unified Communications or UC would impact your employee’s ability to communicate both internally and with your customer/constituent base?  Is an IP system necessary?  Should you consider a hosted solution, or do you want to manage and touch your own gear in your own data center?  With 100+ stores nationwide what advantages are there in having a VoIP capable system?

4.)   Do you have a “cloud” strategy for the future?  Are there applications now managed by your team that could be dished off to a third party to manage that would allow you to focus on your core offerings and save you money?  More and more of our customers are implementing cloud solutions (SaaS or IaaS) to assist in minimizing future IT costs.  There is still much confusion around cloud computing, but much of the discombobulating is beginning to go away and the message seems to be getting more and more clear. 

5.)   Are you still paying retail for your POTS (analog phone lines) service?  If you have 15 or more of these you should be pushing your carrier for a discount plan.  Qwest (soon to be CenturyLink) offers their QLVP plan which offers discounts up to 30% off the standard tariff rate (10  line minimum).  If you’re not asking your carrier about this, you’re leaving money on the table.  If your carrier won’t offer this, there are usually many alternatives to using analog lines.  Have you considered an Integrated T-1 as an alternative for your offices that have POTs and DSL/Cable Internet connections?

6.)   If you’re paying more than 6 cents per minute for your toll free or outbound long distance service you’re getting robbed.  My partners and I constantly run into clients who are paying upwards of $0.15 to $0.50 per minute for their 1+ and toll free (800 number) calls.  STOP and  look at your most recent invoice so that you know what you’re paying for each call. 

If you need help with any of these items above, get with a carrier agnostic consultant or agency for help in evaluating your options.  Many of these individuals will charge you nothing for their expertise – they are compensated directly by the carriers that they have relationships with once they place you into a new service.  If you’re working with one carrier you are most likley not getting the most complete picture.

We wish you and your families the best in 2011! 

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10 years ago most businesses could get away with having just 1.5 Mb of bandwidth to the Internet.  Today that doesn’t touch the surface on what is needed, particularly if you’re utilizing your connection to access many of the applications now available.  As SaaS (Software as a Service) models continue to grow and more and more businesses reach outside of their LANS for dial tone, CRM, ERP, PLM, SCM, SRM type applications, the need for bigger and better bandwidth will always be needed.  I stuck dial tone in the list above because now more than ever more and more businesses are looking to get a hosted PBX – Telesphere is a company that seems to have a grasp on this technology.

With cloud computing software designers can design, build, and deliver services that allow clients to easily access their applications from virtually any location.  IBM seems to be positioned extremely well to assist many of the large software providers with implementing a SaaS strategy.  Today, increased demand for Internet access is directly driven by the need for business applications.

Most of the carriers will bond T-1′s to provide their customers 3.0 – 9.0 Mb of access, but most have realized that to be positioned for the future they have to provide ethernet grade Internet access.  Qwest has led the way in their 14 states providing ELA (Ethernet LAN Access) to the Internet over their QMOE (Qwest Metro Optical Ethernet) backbone.  TW Telecom, Integra, and XO offer great pricing on their EoC (Ethernet over Copper) offerings.  Be patient when you’re working to check availability and get quotes for this service as it can sometimes be a lengthy process.  As always, make sure that you’re working with a carrier agnostic agency so that you can get multiple pricing from one source.

Happy Surfing!