One of the biggest trends on the minds of enterprise IT executives is “Big Data,” a term coined a couple of years ago by Gartner. One of the first things to come to mind when some hear that term is “Hadoop.” Unfortunately, it is becoming increasingly apparent that many folks are still not up to speed on Hadoop. In a nutshell, Hadoop is a Linux technology that supports the trend toward virtualization, allowing data and applications to span multiple virtual servers.  More...

It’s easy for tech people to lapse into a false assumption, and that is that people we talk to have a similar understanding of the technologies we’re talking about at any given time.

When you work around other IT and/or communications technology people all the time, it becomes natural to think that “everybody” knows the acronyms, the underlying technology, and essentially how all this stuff works. More...

The need for small cells – those miniature cellular access points traditionally known as femtocells – typically arises because of coverage or capacity issues within a building. Small cells are a relatively new concept that works on an operator’s licensed frequency to extend the wireless network inside a building. These cells can be installed in a number of ways to accommodate different needs. More...

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...

Convergence is ultimately about connecting – more, faster, easier. We live in a world where billions of people are connected through the Internet. More content is created in a single minute online than in a single year back in the 1990s. According to IDC, the "digital universe" – the amount of information and content created and stored digitally - will skyrocket from 1.8 ZB (zettabytes) in 2011 to more than 7 ZB by 2015 with 90 percent of that coming from digital content in the form of graphics and video. 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...

Already 2012 technology predictions are being revealed. Gartner recently released its top 10 strategic technology trends for the coming year. Here’s a look. More...

If you had any doubts about whether interest in the cloud is real, a fresh survey of IT professionals should dispel them.

Detailed in a new Webtorials paper (registration required, but it’s free), the survey asked 164 IT pros how likely it was that their companies would leverage the cloud for a variety of uses within the next year. The numbers are surprisingly promising for cloud adoption. More...

If SIP Trunking looks so good on paper – and it does – as you run the numbers on it for cost savings and productivity gains, why do many enterprises seem so half-hearted about it?

Sorell Slaymaker, writing at NoJitter, has some thoughts on that, with some interesting insight into why it is that, as he says, some 70 percent of organizations have SIP trunks in their network environment, but only five percent have fully migrated. More...