Capitalising on the market for Tablets

Since Apple launched the iPad in April 2010, tablets have emerged as the latest “must-have” device for the early adopters, like my self. I have recently read an article which says that Apple had sold a cumulative total of nearly 40 million tablets worldwide and continue to dominate the tablet market. Figure below shows the iPad sales, source Analysis Mason 2011.

I am a teblet believer and very positive to use tablets for business purposes. Businesses thinking in the same way as I do will have a broad range of choice. The launch of Amazon’s Kindle Fire and others represent the first major threat to Apple but a lot of alternatives for consumers and businesses.

By providing businesses and consumers with access to a range of content and apps on tablets, operators can create a new market opportunity and differentiate themselves. In some cases, notably in emerging markets, operators could even provide with own-branded tablets manufactured by white-label vendors as a value-for-money alternative to premium-branded tablets. I believe in order to position themselves as a preferred distribution channel for tablets among consumers, operators should consider: a business model for connectivity bundles with tablets, fully integrate tablets within their existing ecosystem of device and services, push tablets for businesses not only for the consumers. On top of that, I also belive operators should provide shared data allowances between devices and multi-SIM propositions for the end users.

All in all, I am a tablet believer, even for business usage. I have an iPad II 3G + Wifi and I use it for my personal as well as business duties. Once operators find better and flexible business models and bundling strategies, I am sure we will see more and more tablets consumed by businesses.

Cloud Needs Careful Planning

It is obvious that the cloud is the next big thing on IT and Telecom world. A lot has ideas, expectations and dreams. Some vendors out there are preaching to move everything to public clouds. I personally do not agree with it. Cloud, first of all, is an umbrealla term. Under that umbrella there are lots of sub branches such as IaaS, SaaS and XaaS. All need careful planning and realistic expectations.

Funny Cloud Consultant

I have presented cloud computing several times for some customers, colleagues or partners. Most of the presentations ended up with a lot of interesting discussions and questions. But I think, the cartoon below is a very funny summary of my cloud presentations.

Step-by-step Approach to a Fully Automated Cloud

I was reading an article about cloud this morning and I realized that they try to push for rip-and-replace type of an approach to the cloud. I think it is totally wrong. What I believe enterprises should do is a more step-by-step approach. In example;

1- Standardize, consolidate and virtualize infrastructure

2- Standardize management tools and processes

3- Automate, standardize services

4- Aggregate services from many sources

5- Become a service broker

Key SMB Cloud Players will be Telecom Service Providers

As many traditional small and medium business (SMB) channel partners make the transition to the Cloud services model, telecommunication service providers (telecoms) are making a strong bid for the SMB Cloud share, beyond their traditional voice and data service offerings. Facing the continuing prospect of declining average revenue per seat (ARPU) and increasing churn, telecoms see the SMB Cloud as an opportunity for sustained revenue growth and customer loyalty. At the same time, many SMBs are open to expanding their relationships with telecoms beyond traditional voice and data services. According to an upcoming study by AMI-Partners, 38% of U.S. SMBs say they are willing to purchase IT products & services (including hardware and software) from telecommunications service providers.

How can Telecom Operators Can Sell More with 4G

“The weakness of the telecom industry is that when it’s time to harvest the success of its investments, it rushes into new technology,” says Bengt Nordström, CEO and founder of Swedish firm Northstream. That is a reality and it is time for the next big thing in technology; Cloud Computing. Cloud, starting by virtualization and continues with a lot of innovation and user centric mobility is a fact but how Telecom operators then can make profit from Cloud Computing?

More and more people are using a Smartphone. As a result, increase sales steadily. Thus, in the last quarter of 2010 for the first time, more than 100 million Smartphone sold. In the same period, however, were only about 92 million computers sold. For the first time the Smartphone sales so get the computer sales. This gives us an interesting tips about the future of computing.  A possible reason for this is, however, the tablets, whose sales during the same period was dazzling.

F5 and HP Networking

Yesterday we had a meeting with f5 guys at HP’s office at Stockholm. HP is now investing a lot on Networking and trying to dominate the enterprise networking market. While at the same time F5 helps organizations create an agile IT infrastructure that aligns with their business demands.

They demonstrated what f5 WAN Optimization might be able to do for international companies.  Just like most IT organizations with multiple locations connected by WANs, networks are stretched beyond where they should be, and they  suffer from latency issues.  The result is poor user performance for the kind of applications (Exchange, SharePoint, SAP etc.) that run in nearly every enterprise.

What to think about when buying a support contract?

You, for sure, bought maintenance contracts for your network products. But, have you ever tempted to change your product choice once you discovered that the support and maintenance (hardware support/tech support I mean) are not up to your requirements? What you should think about buying a support contract is all about knowing how fast and good can your vendor provide your support and what will be the response, repair times and the deliverables. Otherwise it is so easy to “trick” the customers by vendors.

From Virtualization to Cloud Computing

It has been almost a year since we had an internal meeting at HP Stockholm to discuss virtualization and cloud computing. Nowadays we see some analyst firms, IT experts talking about the similar stuff and delivering the same message as we did in the past; Virtualization is an overall catalyst to IT modernization and change and should be taken seriously. In addition to this, virtualization is one of the main roads heading into the Cloud Computing via Private Clouds.

Virtual machine penetration has increased 50% in the last year. Gartner believes that nearly 30% of all workloads running on x86 architecture servers are now running on virtual machines.

HP Networking Switch Manageability

HP Networking switches fall into three different families: Unmanaged switches, Web-managed switches, and fully managed switches, better known as managed switches.

• Unmanaged switches offer the most basic functionality and are designed for small networks. They are plug and play: that is, the customer simply connects the switch into the network, and the switch begins to function without any setup or management required. Unmanaged switches provide basic Layer 2 switching and are not configurable.