A year ago, the hottest topic amongst enterprise IT executives was their cloud strategy. There was the expected give and take about whether “The Cloud” was a flash in the pan or whether it was really the vein of gold that prospectors claimed. It is pretty clear that the cloud won, hands down. More...

Over the next decade, the focus of network evaluation will shift toward latency. In the client- server model, connectivity was in the background. In a cloud-based model, connectivity is front and center. This is because a cloud-based model relies on network connectivity as each letter is typed. 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...

OK, we’ve all had those dreams right? I still remember my nightmares as a six-year-old about getting on the school bus only to realize that I was still wearing my pajamas. This week, a host of companies in Silicon Valley hosted a series of events that I have dubbed “National Wear Your Pajamas to Work Week.”More...

It was a marketing piece, but the pitch for GigaOm’s upcoming “Net:Work” event was hard to dismiss: “Did you get the memo? Your workforce is implementing a multi-billion dollar infrastructure change — by themselves.” I couldn’t put it any more eloquently than that. More...

While the New York Times has a trademark on the term “All The News That’s Fit To Print,” getting a story printed will be less than half the battle going forward. In the future, getting a story read will be the focus of media outlets. The Washington Post recently released a Facebook application it calls a “social reader.” After using it for a while, it is pretty clear that social reading is the wave of the future. More...

For the past decade, enterprises have wanted to see more hybrid phones, those that do both cellular and WiFi. While we have been able to demonstrate this approach ad nauseam in the labs, the challenge has been in providing enterprise-class feature/functionality using the technology. My Sprint EVO does both 3G/4G cellular and WiFi, but while I have had Skype client on this phone for a while, I haven’t used it. Let me remedy that… 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...

Back in 2005, when I bought my house here in Peoria, I was sitting in a downtown law office when I suddenly realized that I had brought only my checkbook to the closing. Knowing that I needed a cashier’s check, I interrupted the attorneys and said, “I have a problem.” After calling my long-time bank in Minneapolis, I learned that the closest branch was 45 minutes away—so I hopped in my car and drove to get the check. Despite the “Check 21 Act” being enacted a year earlier, we were still a long way from the promises of paperless banking transactions. More...

When I first started working in technology, the world seemed to move more slowly. Before beepers and cell phones, few users expected network outages to be addressed instantaneously. Besides, I grew up in Minnesota, and when we were buried in four feet of snow, it was understood that we had to dig out before we could worry about things like phones or networks. (Unfortunately, with a per capita ratio of snowplows to people at 10:1, we rarely had “snow days” from school.) More...