MCPc Blog

I Went to a Street Fight and a Sales Summit Broke Out

 

This past week, MCPc hosted its annual Sales Summit in Independence, Ohio, a sleepy suburb of Cleveland. This afforded our sales leadership the opportunity to come together with other MCPc arenas like human resources and marketing. Shortly after the glad tidings and smiling was handled, blows were thrown, land mines stepped on and full scale guerrilla warfare was the state of reality in an Embassy Suites conference room.

But I should back up. These sales warriors weren’t fighting one another -- they were trying to understand one another. If I had one major take-away after meeting with our lieutenants of commerce, it is that they are so invested, so personally fused to our company and its success, they will stop at nothing to ensure that they vet every issue and analyze every risk within an inch of its life. There was the occasional awkward silence between leaders, the regular gnashing of teeth. Partners were brought in to give presentations, we heard from Dell and VMware, CommVault and financial providers. My oh my, the discussion surrounding sales figures, product offerings, and consulting practices swirled.

We discussed things like injecting savings and discipline into product offerings to our customers. Our Director of Engineering, Dominic DelBalso, was relating how our new products were up-and-running in our offices, saying, “It’s easier for the sales team to talk about now that we’re using it.” The sentiment was echoed by many. Doug Jones, our Director of Public Sector echoed “there is no better substitute for individual experience.” The sales team clamored for more -- how can MCPc do more assessments, provide more solutions to customers. More speed. More savings...Just…more.

While it was all good talk, this is what you might expect from a sales summit. No, that talking wasn’t what I was impressed by –- I was impressed by the candor. Andy Shannon is a Regional VP of Sales up in Grand Rapids, known throughout the company as a guy who will tell it like it is. In his words, “I said I wasn’t going to say this. But I’m going to say this…” led into a discussion about the sales team’s training platform. That conversation led to a plan, and that plan will lead to positive change. Leaving the smoke behind and cutting to what is really on people’s minds –- that’s what we need more of, and that’s what we are aiming for.

We realize that articles like these can be seen as for our benefit, that while they add a voice to our corporate philosophy, they are taken with a grain of salt. Some might say that they are nothing but fluff, and inaccurately represent our motivations. Ultimately though, regardless of the lens through which statements like these are read, the soul of our corporate ethos is one of candor and honesty - evidenced by the scrappy, dogged commitment at this Sales Summit. These men and women spoke up for what was right – for our customers, for our partners, and for our employees, regardless of incongruity with policy or challenge to an outranking leader. I even overheard the phrase “Fairness is at stake here…” during an afternoon lunch session. The heart of this particular street-fighting sales summit was a one of candor and honesty; so, if people want to call that “fluff,” fine by me.

 

Andy Jones is Senior Vice President of Sales. He has more than 15 years of IT industry experience, and is an expert on cloud, virtualization and managed services solutions. Connect with Andy on LinkedIn.

 

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Get the Most Out of Windows 8 Devices with a Holistic Approach to Your Hardware and Software

 

As a consultant on end point client computing and mobility, I’m having a lot of conversations lately with organizations that are eager to adopt Windows 8 devices -- tablets, smartphones, Ultrabooks and tablet-notebook hybrids -- into their IT environments. We saw this same rush to adoption in the first mobile device wave a few years back -- enterprises looked to standardize on mobile devices and tablets before first defining use cases, governance or security policies. Often these policies eliminate certain devices from consideration or have policy requirements that only specific devices support.

Today, a compelling hardware solution is impossible to achieve without software to leverage touch or integration to take advantage of Windows 8 live tiles and, in some cases, numerous other Windows 8 features for business. So, when considering new hardware, now more than ever, software and software compatibility must be center stage.

If you’re considering a Windows 8 or mobile device initiative, there are a few basic steps you can take to gain an understanding of your hardware and software environments and how they can be better aligned. This will help you establish a broader end point strategy that looks at hardware and software holistically – a critical component to maximize productivity gains from these new devices.

Step 1: Perform a User Segmentation Assessment

This exercise should be conducted with an eye towards building a deep understanding of how each application is used and by which user segment. Work with your user groups to capture needs and define workflows. That information, coupled with a solid understanding of critical business processes and initiatives, desired service levels and integration into other business systems, will lay the groundwork for making meaningful use of these devices.

Step 2: Build a Hardware and Software Roadmap

With usage and workflows defined, begin researching hardware and software roadmaps. Are your software publishers building mobile apps? Are they HTML5 and device independent? Do they only function on iOS? Consider peripherals too. All of these questions will likely impact your approach.

Step 3: Explore Custom and Specialty App Possibilities

The app age has ushered in a trend toward deconstruction -- unbundling monolithic applications into applets designed with a single purpose in mind. Oracle, SAP and Salesorce.com have all moved or have started to move in this direction. Many organizations have taken advantage of robust APIs or web services from core applications to build custom applications internally, accelerating the transition and not waiting for the software publisher.

You should also consider leveraging the versatile tools from smaller specialty app developers, such as Roambi for visual business analytics, FileMaker for automating workflows or packaged software providers like Verifone's GlobalBay for payment and retail solutions. You no longer have to limit your applications to mainstream publishers. The switching costs have been lowered to a point where experimentation is an expectation and not a luxury to be performed only if time permits.

Do you have a clear picture of all your end point hardware and software needs? Are your hardware and software groups talking? What is your approach to building use cases and defining success criteria before buying and testing a new device?

 

Ira Grossman, CTO, End User and Mobile Computing, has more than 15 years of technology project management experience and is an expert in lifecycle management and mobile device management for the enterprise. Connect with Ira on LinkedIn.

 

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image credit: Microsoft Sweden

Telecommuting Policies: Trying to Find A Balance

People have been talking about Marissa Mayer and the Yahoo! and Best Buy decisions to call their employees back to the brick-and-mortar office. As it happens, I agree with the move by Yahoo!, and further, I applaud the conversation it has started. The more things change, the more they stay the same. At MCPc, we are the architects of the anyplace workspace, and as such, our corporation enables and espouses the notion that people are generally capable of working outside of the office. Does that mean that remote working is automatically right for everyone? Does that entitle everyone to business casual from the waist-up, and sweatpants from the waist-down while on telepresence? Our employees work well together in a shared, physical space because that’s what we’ve seen work; but our culture is such that we also want to enable people to live robust, full lives with their families. Balance -- that is the real story here. Creating a culture of thoughtful balance. 

 

Once Bloomberg published its initial summary of Marissa Mayer’s internal memo conscripting employees back to their office chairs, I cut the article out of an actual, physical newspaper and pinned it to a cork board in a highly trafficked hallway of the MCPc headquarters. This nostalgic act seemed to resonate amongst our employees  -- both in terms of the article’s substance, and the gesture of the article’s physical presence. I happen to agree with the sentiment that people work well together in offices (our offices especially), and we feel that we provide a great environment to do some really amazing things. This discussion is about reflecting on what kind of company we want to be, what kind of culture we want to embrace.

I, for one, lean towards a culture that champions that pivotal family-work balance.
After the news got ahold of the internal Yahoo! memo, discussion swirled. The Wall Street Journal boiled down the 67% of men vs. 59% of women who brought home work with them. Forbes columnists said that hiring standards and accountability were the only safeguards against opportunistic telecommuters, then dismissed Yahoo!’s follow-up “morale-boost” press tactic as pure spin. A dollar-by-dollar analysis of the average Yahoo! employee’s gas, work clothing, and child care costs were injected into the argument. NBC News put together a “how-to” plan for convincing your boss to support telecommuting.

The discussion is about balance, not policies. At MCPc, we make doing business easier by providing options to find that balance -- and have been pleasantly surprised at the discourse that has been sparked. Remote working increased 41.9% between 2000 and 2010 (subscription required), when 13.4 million U.S. workers telecommuted. It has enabled companies to still function in the face of weather disasters, closed freeways, and cancelled flights. And that is what we are after, that kind of character, that kind of balance, and we empower our employees to achieve it. We want to get the most out of our workforce while they are in our offices, and enable them (and all of our partners who work within our architecture) to strike a great balance when they are outside of our buildings. That way, when our employees have a sick child at home, or need to step in to care for an ailing parent, they can stay connected and keep the ball rolling. At its core, the telecommuting discussion has emphasized exactly what we stand for: an honest, caring, and thoughtful balance.

 

Mike Trebilcock, MCPc Chairman and CEO, and leader in the IT industry, has more than 25 years of sales and management experience in many entrepreneurial roles. MCPc is driven by Trebilcock's values, vision and leadership in setting the standard of excellence for our customers.

 

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Mobility is Transformational: Mobile World Congress Wrap-Up

 

MCPc CTO Darin Haines and I were fortunate enough last month to attend Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona. It’s probably the biggest show you’ve never heard of -- 72,000 attendees from 200 countries plus 3,500 members of the media. Don’t confuse this event with the Consumer Electronics Show. This event is all business, focusing exclusively on all aspects of enterprise mobility.

A broad spectrum of IT and mobility professionals attend, and there were more than 1,500 exhibitors at the show, including industry leaders HP, Cisco, Citrix, AirWatch, Qualcomm, Intel, IBM, Oracle and Samsung. There were also a number of organizations that we’ve never encountered -- those selling hardware and software solutions to carriers and those in the cellular industry, including a company that helps to disguise cell towers. Many industry leaders reserve key product announcements for Mobile World Congress. HP announced a 7” Android tablet and Samsung made a major BYOD announcement introducing a dual persona solution called KNOX, as they continue to make strong inroads into the enterprise.

But equally important to another BYOD solution or another tablet is that it’s more clear than ever that mobility has become pervasive in everything we do (whether we realize it or not) and will grow more persistent in the future. Would you have expected Ford Motor Company to have one of the largest exhibit spaces at Mobile World Congress? They announced an agreement with Spotify for streaming audio to your vehicle along with a developer program for apps.

We attended to meet with key mobility partners and leaders in the industry, to listen to Gartner and IDC on mobility trends and see first-hand where the industry is heading. The answer? Mobility is everywhere and will, over time, impact our work and family lives in a dramatic way. It will be transformational.

Putting NFC to Use

Near Field Communication (NFC) was everywhere -- on our badges, on the walls and at every exhibit space to collect and validate attendee information and to request collateral from partners. Near Field Communication is a contactless radio technology that can transmit data between two devices within a few centimeters of each other. Mobile phones are increasingly being equipped with NFC capabilities, enabling an array of compelling new digital services. Combining NFC with mobile connectivity offers many benefits in retail, transportation, payments, access and other industries. For example, consumers could use a mobile connection to buy a train ticket and then use NFC to validate the ticket when they reach the station. Or a retailer could use the mobile network to send a customer a coupon, which could then be redeemed using NFC at checkout.

Conspicuously Absent: Apple, Microsoft and BlackBerry

Notably absent were a few players you would have expected to attend. Apple did not have a presence. Blackberry (Research In Motion) was not on the show floor but did have an off-sight location for executive meetings. And Microsoft, a company that’s been trying to crack the code on tablet computing, was also absent, although organizations like Nokia did display Windows 8 phones and HP did have the Elitepad 900 on display.

Darin and I had a philosophical discussion regarding Apple’s absence. We saw a number of highly creative solutions that leveraged Android’s open source concept. Imagine a solution that allows you to transform your personal tablet and productivity tool to a device used to control key functions within your car or your home -- not airbags and braking, but HVAC, entertainment, communication and navigation. That exists today because third-party developers leverage Android’s open source. Apple’s very narrow APIs and app model limit this adoption with iOS devices. Conversely, Apple’s fairly closed ecosystem ensures interoperability, backward and forward compatibility and an elegant solution that is likely to transform yet another industry, albeit alone.

Let me explain. We spent time in what MWC called the Connected City, a showcase of some current and future technology that will impact how cities manage traffic to circumvent an accident or congestion and how restaurants are building self-service ordering and payment solutions. If you haven’t spent time reading about The Internet of Things or machine-to-machine technology to determine how sensors can transform your organization, you’re likely falling behind your competition. According to a recent A.T. Kearney study, mobile traffic grew 66% in 2012 to 0.9 exabytes per month and is predicted to hit 11.2 exabytes per month by 2017. The concept of The Internet of Things is the fastest growing segment, and it has the ability to revolutionize how business is conducted and how data is used in real time like never before.

Samsung Making a Play for the Enterprise

Samsung was very prominent at MWC, and their complex resembled a large Apple store. However a significant portion of Samsung’s exhibit space was devoted to business partnerships and applications. Dropbox, Cisco, Citrix, and healthcare/life science and education solutions were all on display within the Samsung complex. Samsung launched KNOX, a solution to manage work and personal environments on Android. Samsung also demonstrated an integrated audio conferencing and collaboration tool.

According to Gartner, while 40% of the Android tablet market is driven by Amazon Kindle tablets, Samsung is clearly in a battle for the enterprise. Can Apple continue to win the market share battle and still remain relevant for years to come in the fast-changing tablet space? They have certainly raised the switching costs, but time will tell. The Gartner analyst even suggested that a properly secured and managed Android is more secure that an iOS device. That is difficult to comprehend, and I’m not sure how useful a properly secured and managed Android tablet could be given the controls you have to invoke just to address the non-curated Google Play store.

What's Your Mobility Strategy in 2013?

Enterprise mobility isn’t just about handing out tablets. It’s a comprehensive strategy. And it goes beyond mobile device management and desktop virtualization, as well. The diverse ecosystem of suppliers at Mobile World Congress illustrated how mobility touches every aspect of organizations large and small.

How does your organization define enterprise mobility? Have you satisfied your strategy once you’ve implemented mobile device management and served up application virtualization? Or are you planning something more transformational?

 

Ira Grossman, CTO, End User and Mobile Computing, has more than 15 years of technology project management experience and is an expert in lifecycle management and mobile device management for the enterprise. Connect with Ira on LinkedIn.

 

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image credit: Augmented Event

Recapturing the Value of PowerPoint

We’ve all experienced it. The presenter with 67 text-packed slides who proceeds to read them word by word. And I’m betting we’ve all shared the same thought: Just give me five minutes alone with the guy who created this product and I’ll make the world a better place. But is PowerPoint the archenemy of creativity or just an innocent tool misused by many, many practitioners? The answer isn’t as simple as you might think.

"PowerPoint makes us stupid," Gen. James Mattis of the Marine Corps and Commander of the United States Central Command, said at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H.R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.

"It's dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control," General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. "Some problems in the world are not bulletizable."

Their point is that some information is too complex to fit the PowerPoint format. Here’s an illustration of what General McMaster was talking about. Below is an actual slide used in a military presentation on the factors in the Afghan political process. It purports to be comprehensive but it ends up looking like a bowl of spaghetti.

 

 

Some topics require an in-depth explanation. Imagine, if you will, a lawyer presenting his case to the Supreme Court through a PowerPoint presentation. Doesn’t work. These cases are too complex and layered to be reduced to bullet points.

PowerPoint is a tool. It’s terrific at presenting bullet points but crummy at complex information. In preparing a PowerPoint it is wise to strictly adhere to the 10/20/30 rule:

• Keep your presentation to 10 slides.
• Keep your presentation to 20 minutes. 
• Don't use anything smaller than a 30 point font.

What to do in those twenty minutes? I’d suggest an outline that would look like this:

1. Summary (tell them what you’re going to tell them)
2. Team members (who’s working with you)
3. The problem
4. Your solution
5. The technology you’re proposing
6. How you will approach the problem
7. Who are the competitors and why are you better
8. The results

Slides should be visual, not crammed with words. Additional information you want to provide should go into the notes section and conveyed orally. And remember, even the most powerful presentation will fall flat unless it’s presented with enthusiasm and energy. Rehearse your presentation several times. Get your timing down. And, most importantly, be brief, be targeted and be direct. Watch your audience, not the screen. Know when you are holding their interest and when you’re losing it. And finally, remember that while you want to deliver the most engaging possible presentation, nothing beats a hands-on experience with the product you’re promoting.

PowerPoint isn’t evil. It’s a tool. But as a tool it’s more of a hammer than a delicate woodcarving knife. If what you want to convey can be reduced to bullet points, PowerPoint will do the job. If it’s complex concepts you want to get across, then think about alternative formats.

 

Bill Cannon is a long-time member of the Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and a sponsoring member of the 802.11 Standards Committee. He participated in IEEE’s deliberations of the formal definition of both cloud computing and its studies on the relationships between cloud computing and virtualization. He currently serves as a Partner Manager for Cisco and Dell. Connect with Bill on LinkedIn.

 

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Is 2013 the Year of Storage?

Time… it seems with every passing year that time is accelerating. That the available time to accomplish a task or start an adventure are growing shorter day by day. The only thing that seems to be outpacing this undeniable march is the rate at which we are inundating ourselves and our networks with data. Data has become the proverbial rabbits of information technology -- one minute you have a few, but turn your head for a split second and there are dozens. That is the place we find ourselves in today. To compound the issue, data is immortal. Unlike the inevitable end to natural life-forms, our data is in it for the LONG haul.

We have reached a tipping point due in part to the near ubiquity of computing resources in every employee’s workspace and the overwhelming flood of mobile computing platforms. We may have crossed that tipping point in perhaps due to a larger part by the move to more interactive media… from email to video, from texting to photos. Hardly a day goes by where we are Skyping, Facetiming or posting photos to FaceBook. We as a society have crossed the point from data-starved to data-saturated. We are experiencing a data flood. Google’s Eric Schmidt recently stated that mankind now creates data at an unprecedented rate -- we now create more data in TWO days than was created in the period between the dawn of our species and the year 2003! That is nearly FIVE exabytes of data being created every TWO days! Too big to wrap your head around? That is nearly 11 MILLION Blu-ray dual layer discs full of data EVERY SINGLE DAY! Still a bit hard to fathom? Another staggering estimate of data size puts every sound, word, grunt and sigh that humans have ever uttered to be in the neighborhood of FIVE exabytes… again, in TWO Days. The most recent estimates put the amount of data stored digitally around the world today at 2.7 zettabytes (approximately 550 times what is created every two days) Remember… like rabbits! And this flood is only accelerating! Despite IT’s every effort to delete, purge, merge and otherwise eliminate waste, a typical business DOUBLES its data every 1.2 years!

So is 2013 the Year of Storage? I think 2013 will be the year that many organization’s IT leaders wake up in a cold sweat with nightmares of petabytes haunting their dreams. 2013 is the year that unstructured data gets a long hard look from corporate IT. Our efforts will fall into a few buckets:

1. Data Deduplication
2. Tiering/Archiving, Cold Data and Retention Policies
3. Advanced Searching Techniques

Data Deduplication
Probably the single biggest dent we can make is to eliminate duplicated data. Data deduplication (or single instance storage) is a technique where file systems and storage devices can look for duplicate data (say a 5MB attachment to an email that was sent to 100 folks) and eliminate all but one copy. The savings both immediately and long term can be profound! Upgrading your operating systems, files systems and data storage devices to include data deduplication will pay for itself in typically short order. Many have likened the profound savings to that of some green initiatives where replacing your light bulbs with 'green bulbs' may cost a little more today, but over their lifespan will save you significant costs in both replacement bulbs and electric consumption.

Tiering/Archiving, Cold Data and Retention Policies
Storage tiering, archiving and cold data aren't new concepts. Many IT organizations have some sort of tiering or cold data strategy today. I would submit that we by and large aren't doing enough. Our tiering strategies, automated or not, will demand much more data discipline in the coming years if we are to wrap our arms around the explosion we are experiencing. I suspect that much more stringent tiering strategies will need to be implemented, and far more aggressive data retention policies will become de rigueur. We have become a society of data pack rats. If our sinful ways persist, I foresee a future that is indeed bleak… American Pickers: 2040 Edition -- "In tonight’s episode we rummage through the storage devices and lockers of Big Box Co. looking for some gems! With over 800 exabytes at hand, surely we will strike gold!"

Sadly, I may yet be way off base on this prediction on data retention policies. Concerns around increasing legal requirements for data retention may only aggravate our already sore wallets with more storage needs? Perhaps more cloud archiving will help alleviate some of this need… but I digress.

Advanced Search Techniques
The next big hurdle we are going to face in 2013 and beyond is a better way to mine and interoperate the data we have. I began this article stating that we are no longer data-starved but data-saturated. Data analytics will emerge as a brave new discipline that IT organizations embrace to help drive business value from the mountains of data we have and will continue to generate. Many colleges and universities are getting ahead of the game by offering degrees specific to carving up data into usable and manageable chucks. The world may indeed be social and mobile, but when it comes to Big Data we humans are absolutely contextual. Harken back again to earlier in this post when I talked of exabytes and zettabytes -- without context or a point of reference comprehension eludes us. 2013 will be a year of bold data analytics initiatives that bring the 2.7 zettabytes of information into context and a relational state so that we can make more informed decisions and experience more 'ah-ha' moments. Imagine the amazing things we might find just in the data we already have as we improve the processes, procedures and practices with which we distill it. Peanut butter and chocolate alone are magical, but put them together and you have something truly amazing!

How will you prepare for the Big Data flood of 2013? Contact us today to connect with an MCPc storage architect to continue this conversation. They have donned their hip waders and are MORE than prepared for the Big Data flood of 2013!

 

Andy Jones is Senior Vice President of Sales. He has more than 15 years of IT industry experience, and is an expert on cloud, virtualization and managed services solutions. Connect with Andy on LinkedIn.

 

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image credit: Dusty J

Cisco's Meraki Acquisition and the Future of Wireless Access

 

Last week in a transaction that received little notice Cisco Systems bought Meraki Inc., a six-year-old wireless company, for $1.2 billion. This for a company that had less than $100 million in annual sales. Did Cisco overpay? No, they made a critical acquisition that is going to have a major impact on how we work and live.

To understand the deal’s impact you have to know a little history of the wireless industry. For more than one hundred years the federal government has been selling off chunks of the radio frequency spectrum. The first customers were, of course, radio stations. But, eventually, pieces of the spectrum were sold to television stations, cell phone companies, satellite providers and more. But there was an exception. It was determined, years ago, that the frequencies at 2.4GHz and 5GHz were useless, having no commercial application. So the government left them unlicensed. Anyone could broadcast at these frequencies, and the thought was that they would be used exclusively by amateur radio enthusiasts. But a funny thing happened. Bright people started thinking up commercial applications. One company, Telesystems SLW Inc., rapidly became the industry leader. This Canadian developer and supplier of wireless data communications products and local access networks (LANs) was the first company in the industry to receive the approval of both the U. S. Federal Communications Commission and Canada's Department of Communication for its spread spectrum radios. Telesystems was acquired in 1992 by Telxon, an Akron based supplier of hand-held barcode readers. Telxon renamed the company Aeronet and, in 1999, spun it off as a public company. Six weeks later, Cisco, wanting to make a move into the wireless industry, bought Aeronet. The age of broad acceptance for wireless networks had begun.

The products Aeronet brought to market were autonomous access points. Each AP was controlled individually. If you wanted to change channels or power settings, you consoled into the AP to do it. And in the early days that worked fine. But by 2005, autonomous wireless networks were becoming a victim of their own success. There were so many APs out there that management was becoming a nightmare. Enterprise organizations, such as hospitals, couldn’t keep up with maintaining the WLAN, and a new breed of wireless companies sprang up. These companies pulled the intelligence from the APs and centralized it back on a controller. Now WLAN administrators could manage an entire network from a centralized point. Cisco responded to the changing market by acquiring Airespace, a leader in controller-based wireless networks. To this architecture Cisco has added many innovations. ClientLink, Clean Air, Unified Access and ISE are just a few of the enhancements coming out of their labs.

But, in the background, change was coming again to wireless. While controller-based architecture allowed centralization, it also added complexity. Now, besides understanding RF you also had to be a networking expert to maintain your systems. Organizations found themselves dedicating more and more resources to an ever-expanding WLAN. In many ways we have returned to our old problems. Innovation in wireless has brought increased proliferation, and expanding wireless networks have brought complexity. In 2006, three doctoral candidates from MIT had a different idea. What if complexity could be removed from the wireless network? Thus, before anyone was saying cloud they created a cloud solution for wireless. The idea was simple. Their company, Meraki, would do all of the management. There’d be no need for controllers. Customers could just install thin APs -- access points with no built-in intelligence -- and Meraki would take it from there. The idea resonated with customers and Meraki became an overnight success. Now they’re part of Cisco, a company with the ability to scale the Meraki approach out over hundreds of thousands of APs. This is not to say that controller-based WLANs are going away anytime soon. They will be part of our infrastructure for the next several years. But soon, I think, you will see an increasing proliferation of cloud-based WLANs, and by 2015 they will become the norm.

What does it all mean to you? I can tell you what it means to me. I’m a traveler. I’ve been fortunate enough to have had experiences like spending days in the Amazon rainforest, spotting condors in the Andes, visiting a Berber camp in the lost city of Petra, hunting tigers from the back of an elephant in the jungles of Nepal and exploring tombs in the Valley of the Kings. But a few years ago I achieved a life goal of reaching the Base Camp of Mt. Everest. It was an arduous trip. Beijing to Xian to Chengdu to Lhasa and then two days in the back of a Land Cruiser getting to the base camp. It was worth it. Waking up in the morning to a cloud free view of the most magnificent mountain in the world is an experience I’ll never forget. The downside was that I wasn’t able to share it with my family. We were off the grid. In fact I was out of touch with them for a week.

The year after I made it to the base camp, Cisco installed a wireless network there. If I went back now, I’d be able to Facetime with my family on an iPad. They could see what I was seeing. But I still couldn’t share the journey with them. I couldn’t show them the ancient Buddhist monastery at Shigatse or the Potala Palace in Lhasa. I couldn’t share adventures like being detained by Chinese authorities on suspicion of something or other or almost sliding off a 3000 foot cliff in the Himalayas because our driver wanted to save gas by not using 4-wheel drive. OK, maybe some things are best left unshared but you get the point.

Over the next couple of years that’s going to change. You are accustomed to having a wireless client device in your laptop, tablet and phone. Now you’re going to start seeing these devices and many others, including cars, becoming access points that can connect, via satellite, from anywhere in the world. There will be no more remote places. From the jungles of Borneo to the Arctic Sea the Internet will always be on.

About a year ago, MCPc introduced a concept called the anyplace workspace®. It isn’t about a device or protocol –- it’s about how we live and work. We saw then the rise of cloud architectures for both wired and wireless networks. There are many more changes coming that we can’t foresee, but the anyplace workspace will be ready for them because it focuses on the end result of a simplified, connected, freer work life rather than specific solutions. Your anyplace workspace may be a ski mountain in Colorado or a beach in Mexico. As for me, I’ve got my eye on a trip to Patagonia next year. Maybe we can Facetime while I’m there.

 

Bill Cannon is a long-time member of the Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and a sponsoring member of the 802.11 Standards Committee. He participated in IEEE’s deliberations of the formal definition of both cloud computing and its studies on the relationships between cloud computing and virtualization. He currently serves as a Partner Manager for Cisco and Dell. Connect with Bill on LinkedIn.

 

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image credit: Sistak

anyplace workspace--Shaping Business in a Time of Chaos

 

 

As I write this I am 35,000 feet in the air and, if my calculations are correct, flying over Denver, which means I just crossed the 75,000 mile mark for the year. That is a lot of flying. A lot of time for reflection, thinking, catching-up on email, drafting presentations and listening to music—specifically the group Fun (lead singer Nate Ruess pictured above) at the moment, who I love! Thanks to my partner in crime, our SVP of Sales Andy Jones, for turning me onto an outstanding group! 

So, what is on my mind on this flight? In a simple one-word answer, Chaos.

Chaos is everywhere in our world. Economic, political, religious, technological, you name it. Chaos is lurking behind every door that we encounter in our lives. The elections are a week behind us, and I venture to say that more chaos is about to ensue as a result. Businesses will be trying to wrangle every cent out of every dollar in an effort to be profitable and grow while looking for new ways to unleash innovation. But how will they do that? One way will be to find new ways to lead during this new normal of chaos. The dizzying velocity of change has made chaos the defining feature of modern business. Those who adapt will thrive (Amazon, Apple, Google); those who don't (Research In Motion, Blockbuster) will fail and disappear.

What will help separate those who succeed from those who fail? Simply put, it will be the ability to adapt to chaos and change. In my mind, it is becoming less about generational differences (Baby Boomers, Gen X, Gen Y, etc.) and more about supporting a new group of leaders (generations aside) that are about getting things done. I see Baby Boomers, Gen X, Gen Y and Millennials all coming together to forge a new world order based on embracing chaos and change. I fall into that category. What makes this group different? A few common characteristics:

• Natural curiosity, or the desire to ask why and seek answers to some of our world's toughest questions.
• A belief in an FIO (Figure It Out) culture. Every job in my career was a newly created position where I had no choice but to figure it out. That has shaped my view and leadership style more than any formal lesson learned in college, grad school or seminars.
• And an insatiable appetite for technology that thrives in the new consumerization paradigm. In other words, someone who proactively seeks new tools to help them do their jobs better.

That last point—an insatiable appetite for technology—is driving our anyplace workspace. As I get to consult and meet with some of our most innovative and successful clients, that insatiable appetite is evident, and seems to get hungrier every day. These businesses are trying to find new ways to use mobility, the cloud, video, virtualization, storage, the network and management tools in one cohesive solution, unleashing innovation and profitability in their workplaces. Those are the tenets and the beauty behind anyplace workspace, as it brings all of these disciplines together in an orchestrated, validated architecture to drive productivity and innovation gains.

For organizations to thrive in our chaotic world, they need to be able to support the traditional hierarchy of business while cultivating an empowered workforce and fostering that FIO mentality. Does your technology architecture support this type of model? Does it support the ambiguity of leadership today? Both top-down and bottom-up leadership styles? If not, maybe now is the time to engage MCPc Consulting Services to help align your technology with your business objectives and learn how anyplace workspace can be the catalyst to unleash innovation in your company and the foundation to help you embrace and adapt to chaos.

 

Darin Haines, Chief Technology Officer, leads MCPc's technology consulting practice and spends much of his time speaking to business and IT leaders about effectively using collaboration and other advanced technologies. Connect with Darin on LinkedIn.

 

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New 802.11ac Wireless Standard FAQs

 

In talking to some of our customers about their wireless infrastructure, it’s been no surprise that one of the issues top of mind for them is the new 802.11ac standard. 802.11ac is an evolution from the current 802.11n standard that boasts improved performance on the same 5GHz frequency bands. A first wave of 802.11ac routers have already shipped, and they’re expected to be the dominant option by early 2013. I will try to address in this post some of the most frequent questions I am hearing in the field about this evolutionary step in wireless technology:

Since there are so many 2.4ghz clients out there now, does this mean we will need to manage two separate infrastructures, .11n and .11ac?

No, 11ac devices are 100% backwards compatible with 11n devices at 5 GHz. 11ac enterprise-class APs will typically be dual band concurrent, containing 11ac(+11n+11a) at 5 GHz and 11n(+11g+11b) at 2.4 GHz. Parallel infrastructures won’t be necessary.

We are trying to plan for our wireless 2 to 4 years out. How many data drops and what speed should we be putting in our specs? Cat6A for 10 gig or 1 gig speeds?

Run at least 1 CAT6A (it wouldn’t hurt to run two of them) for a new install you can always use the extra for console should it not be required.

What options are there for 2.4GHZ users on wireless guest access networks?

2.4 GHz (802.11n) is still supported on the AP - just AC rates won't be on 2.4 GHz. So to be clear, an 802.11ac AP can also have 802.11n on the 2.4 side. Also, since these clients will run on 2.4GHz, 802.11ac will elevate the congestion on the 2.4GHz band by utilizing the 5GHz band.

I understand 802.11ac will support backward compatibility to .11a/n, but is it also still supporting .11/b/g/n?

The 802.11ac standard is backwards compatible with 11a and 11n devices at 5 GHz. 11ac enterprise class APs will typically be dual band concurrent, containing an 11ac(+11n+11a) radio at 5 GHz and an 11n(+11g+11b) radio at 2.4 GHz. So products are backwards compatible.

Will the wider bandwidth and higher frequency provide better live medical HDTV images?

Yes, the purpose of .11AC is to obtain faster throughput for video, CAD, MRI files and other uses where more data throughput is required.

Will 802.11n drag down the whole 802.11ac AP throughput?

The legacy standard will not drive down performance on ac. 11n and 11ac have the same preambles so they don't need long inefficient RTS/CTS or CTS2 self-protection that we see at 2.4 GHz to help out 11b devices.

Are 802.11ac AP's half duplex?

Yes.

Faster is great, but what will be the typical range limitations... similar to 802.11a now?

It is an overlay of 802.11n designed to allow you to maintain similar cell sizes but add the faster throughput when the user is within the typical range of the AP.

Has the bandwidth been approved by the FCC?

802.11ac will utilize the unlicensed bandwidth that has already been designated for use by the FCC.

Will .11ac performance depend on T1 connections?

Your connection to the Internet (or destination) could be the performance bottleneck. However, within your intranet you should see the performance gains of 802.11ac.

How many spatial streams will the 802.11ac module for the AP-3600i support?

3.

What is the recommended number of devices to connect to the network per access points?

An AP supports 254 or so clients per radio. However it’s not about how many can connect but how many can be used with a good experience, and that all depends on the data flow of those clients (for example - much more if you’re talking about a bar code application, less if it’s video)

How many non-overlapping channels are available with 802.11ac?

That depends on what channel size you designate. With 160MHz, you will have 3 non-overlapping channels available.

Hopefully this helps some of you make sense of the new 802.11ac wireless standard. The bottom line: this is one more step in the evolution towards a wireless that truly supports HD video and other high-bandwidth data. And, as Network World recently reported, the next step beyond 802.11ac is expected to be even more of a leap forward.

 

Kevin Cannon is an MCPc Solution Architect with a focus on Cisco advanced technologies, and has over 8 years of experience in developing and deploying WiFi, VoIP, video and RTLS solutions for mid-sized and enterprise-level organizations. Connect with Kevin on LinkedIn.

 

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The Year of the Virtual Desktop - Really!

Since 2010, IT industry analysts have predicted the “Year of the Virtual Desktop” which has subsequently been met with limited fanfare or increase in market penetration. Why has this been the case? The benefits that desktop virtualization brings are strong and well known- increased end user productivity by enabling remote and BYOD capabilities, freeing up IT resources by streamlining management, and strengthened security of vital data. However, barriers such as perceived cost and complexity around desktop virtualization deployments- especially for small and mid-sized organizations-have prevented the mass adoption predicted.

At Dell, we’re embracing 2012 as the “Year of the Virtual Desktop” and supporting the influx of BYOD initiatives through our focus on Dell Cloud Client Computing. These end-to-end desktop virtualization solutions help break down the perceived barriers and allow organizations to provide any app to any user on any device--securely and easy to manage. 

One of the most popular cloud client computing solutions that we’ve launched this year to our customers and partners is the Dell Desktop Virtualization Solutions (DVS) Simplified Appliance. The appliance is a simple, practical VDI appliance that integrates pre-configured 12^th generation Dell PowerEdge servers with factory-installed Citrix VDI-in-a-box software, world-class Dell ProSupport™ for both hardware and software, and optional Dell Wyse thin or zero clients like the new Wyse Xenith 2.

 

 

The DVS Simplified Appliance has made VDI simple to implement and extremely cost-effective for customers, and today we’re announcing the addition of a new PowerEdge T620 tower version to the appliance lineup for installations where rack mounting is not needed or desired--and it delivers the same performance and scalability for demanding VDI workloads as the R720 rack model. We’re also announcing even more flexibility with the DVS Simplified Appliance--now you can chose from Microsoft Hyper-V or Citrix XenServer as the integrated hypervisor.

Finally, for organizations requiring small deployments without need to scale in the future, Dell is now offering an entry-level 50 user appliance configuration to allow organizations with the greatest budget constraints to enjoy all of the benefits that a VDI solution brings.

 

This is a guest post from Eric Selken, Marketing Manager for Dell's desktop virtualization solution set. Connect with Eric on LinkedIn.

 

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