If you're not too proud to admit that there's still a lot you could learn about SIP trunking and SIP session management, we've got a suggestion for your reading list.

It's a new pair of those "... for Dummies" books that are designed to provide the basics of a complex topic. These books were all the rage a few years back, but then we hadn't heard too much about them lately. However, when we heard that SIP Trunking for Dummies and Session Management for Dummies had been published – a joint effort between the publisher and a maker of session border controllers – we figured it would be worth mentioning. More...

Over the past several decades of working with IT departments, there has always been a percentage that insist, “we don’t do managed services.” I never quite understood what exactly customers meant by that, because I can’t think of a single company that runs its own coal generators for electricity, builds a new building without hiring an architect, takes their company public without hiring an underwriter, or builds their own 10,000-plus nationwide tower network rather than use a wireless carrier. All companies use managed services of some form; it’s only a question of when and where. More...

You should have been there. Or maybe you were one of the 1,200-plus attendees who were there, in which case you know that the just-concluded 2012 annual Sprint Open Solutions conference was a big success. It was all that we told you it would be in some of our pre-conference posts.

We talked M2M, for example, whether it was in transportation, insurance, retail, or in the environmental "greening" of various aspects of business. For instance: in one session we focused on connected transportation solutions from Sprint, combining the latest in wireless telematics and location technology to enable valuable real-time vehicle status and driver performance information.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...

Business professionals and IT see things differently. Some say they each speak their own language. Priorities are often different. 

Here’s an example. In Gartner’s CIO Survey 2012, the technology priorities of CIOs were revealed. In order, they are:
1. Analytics and Business Intelligence
2. Mobile Technologies
3. Cloud Computing
4. Collaboration
5. Virtualization More...

Anant Jhingran of Apigee recently opined on GigaOm that our Big Data future will require data marketplaces and data syndication models that few enterprises are currently prepared to support. If one follows the trend toward singularity, it should be clear that an enterprise’s ability to quickly acquire new data sources will require a marketplace that is somewhat akin to the NASDAQ. In other words, it would allow data set contracts to be opened or closed in a matter of minutes or seconds. More...

It’s impossible not to notice the changing role of enterprise IT. While there continues to be a need for network management and expertise, IT is being called both to do more and to do things differently. How we live and work has fundamentally changed; for IT, these changes amount to a 180-degree turn in how they support and lead their organizations.

First, there is no perimeter to protect anymore. It wasn’t long ago that security was all about protecting the perimeter, limiting Internet access, and restricting mobile devices to an exclusive few. The thinking was that if IT could just guard the network perimeter and limit access, the company and its intellectual assets would be safe. More...

As the “cloud” concept arose, there was a lot of debate about whether cloud computing would really replace the client-server architectures of today’s enterprises. Now it’s clear that the answer is both “yes” and “no.”

Cloud computing isn’t an “either/or” proposition. What will happen at first is that CD and DVD-ROM drives on computers will start to disappear. “App stores” and the like are nothing more than cloud-based software management systems -- but they work really, really well. Few of the “apps” one downloads to a device or PC are actually cloud-based apps -- but as more and more applications are developed for cloud-based distribution, more and more cloud-based functionality is being written into these apps. More...

There is interest across most industries in hosted Unified Communications, but it is interesting that we at Cisco, as we work with Sprint in implementing these solutions, are seeing spikes of interest in certain vertical markets and sectors.

There is a high degree of interest in financial services and insurance, all professional services, manufacturing and packaged goods, and in every area of the public sector. Why these markets more than others? We think the answer is in a few key business and competitive pressures that seem to be more intense in these areas. Interest and activity will remain high here, while other verticals are quickly following this market transition. More...

Looking at the as-a-service smorgasbord, can you guess which one tops the list in terms of growth? Number one is Business Intelligence (and Analytics) as-a-Service (BIaaS).

BIaaS can trace its roots to "Big Data." Companies are striving to make sense of the ever-growing amounts of data – be it from sources such as company databases, CRM tools, and social media. Already a $12 billion market, says Gartner, business intelligence (BI) and analytics is big business – whether premises-based or in the cloud. More...