In the beginning, there was MIS. It begat IT, which is now in the process of begatting ET.

No, this isn't a quotation from the tech bible. It is a shorthand description of the evolution that we have seen over the past half century in the way businesses handle technology. Those  early days of dumb terminals  and mainframes – the MIS era – gave way to individual computers that spawned what we now think of whenever we hear "IT." More...

The distinction between hosted and managed services is a persistent question, and one that the recent Sprint-Nemertes Research webinar, “The Bona Fide Value in Managed Services” answered quite well.

If you didn’t get a chance to attend the webinar, you can still catch the archived version here. This webinar offered insight from several different angles on the managed services question, with the objective, industry-wide viewpoint of Johna Johnson of Nemertes Research, the user viewpoint of Joseph Carpico of Energia Logistics, and the Sprint view from our own Mike Cole. More...

There are some interesting findings in a new “Benchmark Report” on Unified Communications from Nemertes Research, especially relative to return on investment and mobility. The report (registration required) is based on interviews with 240 IT leaders, so this is front-line intelligence. More...

I couldn't take notes fast enough to keep up with all the interesting information flowing out of the Sprint webinar on September 29, presented by Enterprise Connect. More...

It is almost October, when my beloved Minnesota Twins shall attempt again to do what they did in 1987 and 1991. This morning, my mother mentioned that a complete recording of a 1960's era World Series was found among the many video recordings in Bing Crosby's collection (I assumed it was on videotape, since his company, Bing Crosby Enterprises, was instrumental in the invention of videotape). So I pulled up Wikipedia, read about the history of videotape, recalled with fondness the Beta vs. VHS war of the 1980s, and then recalled a more recent "format war" from about 10 years ago. It was all about MPLS.More...

MPLS is a most interesting technology, and we’re going to be talking about it in depth in a couple of upcoming blog posts. But what matters most about any technology is what it can do for the enterprises and the people who use it. What does it enable that either wasn’t possible before, or wasn’t as easy before? More...

Maybe it’s not quite like winning the Super Bowl two years in a row, but it’s at least as good as winning your division two years running. We think so, anyway. More...

Trend stories are often pretty predictable, but we were impressed with a recent post on Unified Communications by Irwin Lazar of Nemertes Research over at No Jitter and FierceVoIP. More...

We’ve talked on this blog about the difficulty of quantifying the ROI for Unified Communications, since it’s tough to sell the concept of vastly improved productivity to those decision-makers who see the world in dollars and cents. There’s a new and interesting white paper on the topic by Irwin Lazar of Nemertes Research that offers advice on making a bottom-line business case for UC migration. More...

Some head-to-head contests are close matches, and some are blowouts. Sprint’s win in the MPLS services category of the Nemertes 2009 Pilothouse Awards was a blowout. And we haven’t stopped smiling since the results were announced. More...