A new approach to cloud-based collaboration, with easy-to-understand plans, is making it easier for mid-sized and smaller businesses to enjoy the benefits of Sprint's Microsoft Office 365 solutions.

These new plans are not only designed to provide more choice and flexibility, but they are accompanied by 20 optional add-on or standalone products. These help a customer "co-create" the solution which best fits their needs, both current and evolving. Sprint has actually taken this co-creation theme further with our award-winning Carefree Cloud services for these add-on and standalone options. This gives the customer the needed deployment and in-life technical support for their ultimate Office 365 solutions. More...

Besides the dawn of tablets and other Internet-related sensations, what else is poised to grow exponentially in the short term? The answer, says Gartner, is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), expected to grow more than 40 percent in the next four years, reaching more than $72 billion in revenue (from less than $10 billion in 2012).

IaaS is one of three general pillars making up cloud computing services. The other two include Software-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service. Says Techtarget, IaaS is a “provision model in which an organization outsources the equipment used to support operations, including storage, hardware, servers and networking components. The service provider owns the equipment and is responsible for housing, running and maintaining it.”  More...

There was an interesting mini-debate in the March 25 Network World about whether the cloud is ready for mission-critical applications.

This side-by-side argumentation featured the "yes" position being argued by the CIO of IEEE, with the "no" position argued by the CTO of a financial trading company. You can take a look at the points each person made here.

After looking it over, we'd have to say that in many ways they are both right (do we have a future in politics, or what?). But we're not trying to just straddle the fence. For the vast majority of companies, with the right communications network in place, the answer is going to be yes. But specifically, for a financial trading company, we can understand why that type of organization would hold out for no at this time. More...

In case you missed them the first time around, a pair of Stratecast-Frost & Sullivan white papers focused on convergence are resurfacing for a second life.

The papers – Technology Convergence and Information Velocity: the Engines for Business Agility and Workforce Productivity and Simplification through Convergence: Reducing Cost and Complexities – were both sponsored by Sprint, which gave us the opportunity to highlight them before they were made available to the general public. More...

In case you missed them the first time around, a pair of Stratecast-Frost & Sullivan white papers focused on convergence are resurfacing for a second life.

The papers – Technology Convergence and Information Velocity: the Engines for Business Agility and Workforce Productivity and Simplification through Convergence: Reducing Cost and Complexities – were both sponsored by Sprint, which gave us the opportunity to highlight them before they were made available to the general public. More...

When it comes to picking a hotel for your business trip, if all your choices are similar in pricing and quality, but one has attentive concierge service, wouldn't it make sense to choose that one?

Maybe you'll need help picking the best nearby restaurant, or want to score tickets to a basketball game in town at the last minute. That's when you really appreciate the value of a concierge. More...

Call it the eight-step plan. Eight steps that move you from “that cloud sure sounds like a good idea” to true cloud readiness.

A new Stratecast/Frost & Sullivan paper available here (registration required) spells out the eight steps. The paper bills itself as a “practical guide” to a successful cloud strategy, and we have to say that the steps they describe definitely seem practical and sensible. More...

Well hey, it's 2013! The 20th anniversary year of Intel's Pentium chips and the first recorded incident of spamming. We've come a long way since then.

Now that everybody's all eager to get back to business after the holiday interlude, we want to take a second and anticipate what we'll be talking about this year in convergence, networking, and IT. More...

When your business depends on data and collaboration – and whose doesn't anymore? – it's understandable if you emphasize caution in how you change the way your people work with that data. That includes where it's kept, how you access it, and how you protect it.

So it's no surprise that a recent Forrester Wave white paper about cloud strategies found that even with online collaboration becoming much more appealing as business dynamics evolve, there is a certain amount of business customer uncertainty when it comes to committing to these collaboration solutions. More...

If there was ever a perfect example of why it's good to consult more than one news source to get the whole story, it's a little item about the cloud and people's perceptions of it.

Recently, an item in Fierce Enterprise Communications caught my eye. With the headline "Workplace of the Future Will Be in the Cloud," I plunged into the story, which concerns a Citrix-sponsored survey of just over 1,000 U.S. adults about the cloud. More...