Recently, Sprint asked an outside research and consulting firm to take a close look at Compass, Sprint's online portal for IP/MPLS VPN service. The idea was to get a "second opinion," and we now have it.

The outside firm happens to be named Compass Intelligence (no relation to Compass the Portal), and the paper they generated after looking at the portal can be found here. It's worth taking a close look at, but we'll hit a few highlights for you.

First, if you're not familiar with Sprint Compass, it lets you view, understand, and manage your network configuration and performance. We enhanced it in mid-2012 (see the summary we wrote at the time) with a number of self-service features that support both Sprint Managed Solutions customers and network-only customers.More...

While many swoon over the latest consumer technology, it is interesting to assess and consider how technology affects the customer or user experience, especially relating to the intersection of technology and privacy.

Many of today’s advancements include location-based technology, and data mining and analysis of personal and public information. Here is a look at some industries that use technology for good, and at the same time prompt the question of whether society’s acceptance of new technology is changing the notion of privacy. More...

What do the Truman Show, Face Off, and The Terminator have in common? Besides being hit movies, these films portrayed a fantasy for their time that in many ways is now becoming reality. In a recent Wall Street Journal interview between a father and son, two technologists separated by a generation, these men discussed the future of technology and how the wonders of sci-fi may not be far off.

Their comments leave you feeling that the human race is on a precipice of enormous change. They call it the “Law of Accelerating Returns,” in which technology advances exponentially. Think about that. Because of technology, more digital content is being created, consumed, shared, and stored in a single day around the world, than in all of an entire year just several years ago. That may make some of us uncomfortable,  but like so many new advancements, the initial resistance wears down to acceptance, and then finally wide-scale adoption. More...

If you're among the thousands heading to Enterprise Connect in Orlando next week, there will be lots of opportunities to hear Sprint people offer their perspective, on everything from SIP Trunking to mobile Unified Communications.

During the course of the annual conference, five panels – four of them on Monday the 18th – will include Sprint representatives. As you're putting together your must-see Enterprise Connect schedule, here are the sessions that we recommend:

SIP Trunking: Who's Offering What? This 9 a.m. Monday roundtable discussion has a stageful of panelists, including Sprint's own Dimitrios Kioukis, Manager of Converged Solutions Engineering. The focus of this session is how an enterprise can procure the right SIP Trunking services and equipment to make a SIP technology initiative a success.More...

If you’re going to “do” Unified Communications at all, you want it to succeed, and to succeed across the entire enterprise – at least eventually. We’ve talked one time or another about some of the challenges, and just ran across a white paper that nicely summarizes them and makes suggestions about how to overcome them.

The white paper (registration required), titled “Driving UC Adoption in Your Business,” is from the good people at Ziff-Davis. A lot of what they say in this paper comes down to common sense, but their approach is a helpful one. More...

Recently the President issued an Executive Order on cybersecurity, and it’s drawing a lot of attention. This order presents a framework for reducing cyber risks to critical infrastructure in the United States and encourages collaboration between the public and private sector. Some believe the order overreaches; others think it is not enough. Regardless of where one stands on the issue, at least it is getting people and organizations talking and problem-solving.More...

We were taken by surprise by the news that Yahoo is apparently turning thumbs down on telecommuting and remote work, and will begin to require everyone to come to the office. If this turns out to be true, there are a lot of Yahoo people who are going to have to make some adjustments.

You can read this Fierce article about the move, along with some read-between-the-lines interpretation about the possible motivations behind it. But even taken at face value – that the reasons for this change in approach is to foster more face-to-face collaboration and creativity – it all seems so retro. More...

Every so often it's useful to take a pulse on privacy – what that means in our personal lives and among businesses today. It’s not just technology that is changing at a rapid pace, but data availability and information sharing as well. This brand new world, the new normal, is blurring the lines of what, if anything, is considered private. More...

Yes, BYOD is the universally recognized acronym among techies, for Bring Your Own Device to work. But what does that mean? We can all agree that at its simplest, BYOD is the employee initiative of leveraging their own personal devices, such as smartphones, tablets, and laptops, for work. After that, it gets fuzzy. More...

How many times have we made the point that Unified Communications has to be mobile in order to be truly unified? That's a rhetorical question – we don't expect you to know the answer – but let's just say that we've said it a lot.

So you can imagine how heartened we were by a recent survey, reported in a Network World article, that shows a distinct increase in demand by users for mobile UC. This survey of businesspeople in the U.S. and two other countries showed that workers are often frustrated when it comes to their existing communications options. More...