There may be more in common than one thinks between enterprise IT and Facebook. And it has everything and nothing to do with social media. To start, consumers upload 300 million pictures each day to Facebook, and this number is only growing. In addition, this rate is seasonal says Facebook as the company anticipates up to 2 billion photos on Halloween alone.  

Enterprise organizations, like Facebook, understand the demand for network and storage requirements. Traffic spikes, usage of network collaboration tools, and availability of critical data on the spot – all increase the need for more bandwidth and network intelligence. There may be a lesson in the way the company addresses these challenges:More...

How will Unified Communications evolve? Now that we're at a point where more and more organizations are embracing UC, it's worth looking at its future. What will UC look like next year? In five years? Will we even recognize it in 10 years?

Michael Finneran, writing at Webtorials, offers an interesting point of view on the future of UC. In his view, basically it gets absorbed into the social media vortex and disappears. Its functionalities and purpose will remain, but UC won't be recognizable as a technological or operational entity. We're not fully convinced, although there's no doubt the advancements in social media will have a tremendous effect on UC.More...

One of the biggest drivers of bandwidth on the network today is multimedia. While the consumer market often moves first to take advantage of new technologies in this space, there are key learnings that we can take away as we think about enterprise strategy. Web media guru Liz Shannon Miller recently asked her GigaOm audience “Is Facebook the way to go for new web originals?” My vote is yes, as the Facebook API allows content creators to know more about who their audience is than they have ever been able to before. In fact, the power of video entertainment will help those who never understood “this Facebook thing” to have their “eureka” moment. More...

I spend a lot of time thinking about the growing set of threads that will tie together social media and convergence. As a result of my obsession with this emerging technology, I am starting to conclude that social media is the killer app for enterprise convergence, and corporations will have no choice but to warmly embrace it or get left behind. More...

Five years ago, Time Magazine named “You” as its Person of the Year. Shortly thereafter, I started writing an internal blog at Sprint called “CG’s Soapbox.” The blog’s title paid homage to the days when a person would literally grab a wooden box, plop it down on a local street corner and start speaking freely.More...

Folks in the financial industry often talk about a “perfect market.”  What they are referring to is a hypothetical, idealistic state in which both buyers and sellers know all of the information there is to be known about a product and service. In a perfect market, all financial transactions would take place at the true value of the product, service, or commodity.More...

Too Much Information (TMI). We are inundated. How do companies and their employees make sense of this infinite information? Here is a look at the challenges and how businesses can respond:

Accuracy – How do we know what we are reading is the truth? Wikipedia, for example, is edited by the population at-large. (Who are these authors?) Amazon.com and Yelp.com aggregate comments about user experiences. (Are the posted comments unbiased or written by the author’s brother, a disgruntled employee, or a representative from a company’s PR department?) In the business world, employees are challenged to find the most accurate and relevant information too. (Is this the most recent inventory report? Who is the source of this customer research – a social network chat room or an analyst firm?) More...

Salesforce.com is one of the leaders in cloud computing.  At the recent “DreamForce” users annual conference, CEO Marc Benioff was quoted by the San Francisco Chronicle as saying “Companies need to build social networks into their businesses or risk falling by the wayside.” His main point was that monitoring social media is the best way to hear your customers. I agree, but would take it a step further and say that social media is the best way to hear and be heard. Period. More...

As I turned on the light this morning in my downtown Peoria office, I was reminded of one reason I originally opted for an office --to have more social interaction and routine in my day. Previously, I had been a Sprint telecommuter, using the latest in Unified Communications technology to telecommute from my home. I spent my days interacting with my boss in London and with other colleagues, and have written before about how productive that kind of work arrangement can be, This Isn’t Your Father’s Telecommuting, UC, Web 2.0 and the Future of Collaboration, and Social Media Goes to Work. More...

The enterprise embrace of social media has been well documented. Organizations are creating corporate Facebook pages, showcasing product demos on YouTube, and acquiring Twitter fans by the minute.  Many corporations are wisely leveraging social media beyond a branding tool, and finding success using it as a major communication and marketing channel. More...