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.

Let’s take SaaS in example. There are for sure some apps which should not move to public clouds, such as; heavy input/output apps, complex-sensitive mission critical data, an application workload that is flat and unchanging – then public cloud computing is hardly a best practice route towards maximised financial benefits and so on.

The cloud may be ‘up there’ and the new compute resources it offers may be strong, but we still need to have strong IT foundations on the ground if we are to look skywards. This means that it’s not a great idea to move to the cloud if your underlying network is a flaky archaic collection of resources built around legacy applications that are closely tied to obsolete equipment – disentangling them might be a tough ask.

The concept of cloud computing implies that the cloud computing platform is “mist” – ethereal and simple. In reality, it requires a complex infrastructure and sophisticated processes to make the illusion a reality. After all, do not just jump into the cloud. Make sure that you have a unique value proposition before you decide move an app, process or an infrastructure to the cloud.

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

This type of an approach might be a better and easy to track method for an instant-on enterprise. Talking a little bit about the virtualization, it definitely has great value proposition for enterprises. Such as, multiple virtual machines (VMs) per physical servers which provides better utilization of physical assests and reduce costs but do not forget that this might results in a virtual sprawl and greater management complexity. We can easily add or move applications, servers and storage which provides flexiblility and easier scalibality but might end up with complex, interrelated dependencies that often are impossible to track manually and are tricky to troubleshoot. Do not forget what happend to Amazon just couple of weeks ago. Outsourcing all your infrastructure and apps to a cloud service provider, does not solve your challenges. Do not forget that clouds are highly mission critical to both service provider and for consumers.

The report found a key driver behind SMB interest in purchasing IT products and services from telecoms is the rapid growth of mobile applications. “SMBs with multiple branches and greater smartphone penetration are more likely to expand their relationship with telecoms,” according to Yuki Uehara, AMI’s senior cloud analyst. “This growing interest suggests significant opportunities for communication service providers to be one-stop ICT partners, and to reshape the ecosystem of ICT products and services in the global SMB space.”

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.

Then there is a huge opportunity for Telecom operators to offer Ipad (or any other brand’s tablet PC) packages such as; “Buy Ipad from XX Telecom and you will get virtual desktop in it with a lot of applications/ app streaming, internet connection, VOIP telephony included, data storage capacity and a lot of stuff “. Telecom operators can be the real Cloud Computing provider for end users and SME market. Thinking about Cloud computing, Application Streaming and IP Centrex, all these new technology can make a huge difference for people and the way how we make business. To be able to have such stuff with high quality 4G is needed and this is the next big thing for Telecom operators. Well, although some says 4G concept is a media invention it still is the enabler for a lot of the Cloud story.

At the end of the day, we know for a fact that customers that purchase mobile broadband are not asking for 1G, 2G, 3G, or 4G, they are asking and paying for the possibility of getting online and using the available services. 4G brings a lot of new capabilities and Telcos will, soon, provide a lot of cool stuff with Cloud computing mentality. Clearly the future does indeed belong to technologies like Cloud Computing, predictive analytics, and the Internet of Things. Two other technologies will be IP Multimedia systems (IMS) which will enable better collaboration, and Internet TV for interactive TV content and expanding social networks to the living room.

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.

They have compared round trip times for a moderately-sized file between an optimized and an unoptimized connection.  The unoptimized connection completes in few minutes, while the optimized transfer completes in just in seconds. Quite a difference. I will look into this a bit more and lear more about other products in the market as well. Riverbad for example…

The most obvious point is to investigate how maintenance contracts/care packs are delivered when you are considering your product selection. It seems to be human nature to believe that the product will just work and so many people do not investigate maintenance, how the support is delivered and what are the response, repair times and the deliverables.

The second point is that you need to understand the difference between care pack (tech support, software upgrades, security patches) and basic warranty/lifetime warranty (software updates and parts exchange). Unfortunately the difference between a basic warranty and a support contract is not clear most of the time for customers.

All in all, support capabilities must also be involved in hardware selection criterias. It might cost you a fortune later on, if you have downtimes in your critical devices on your network. So, make sure that you have a support contract.

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.

For the first time midsized companies have deeper virtualization penetration than companies in the Global 1,000. That means a new market is opening up for extended cloud environments and managed cloud services. At this point HP Trilogy offers an interesting opprtunities for SMB market. As we said about a year ago, “private clouds” are all the buzz.

“Every major vendor on the planet who sells infrastructure stuff has a private cloud story today. In the last year, the marketing, product announcements and acquisitions have been mind-numbing. Some of this is clearly “old stuff, new name” but we’ve seen a number of smart start-ups captured by big vendors, and important product rollouts (notably VMware’s vCloud Director). Now the question is – what will the market buy?”

“IaaS (infrastructure as a service) providers have focused on open source and internal technologies to deliver solutions at the lowest possible cost. But that’s changing. In the past year, there’s been a rapidly growing trend for IaaS providers to add support for major commercial VM formats – especially VMware, but also Hyper-V and XenServer. The reason? To create an easy on-ramp for enterprises. As enteprises virtualize (and in many cases, build private clouds), the IaaS providers know that they need to make interoperability, hybrid, overdrafting, migration as easy as possible. The question is whether that will require commercial offerings (such as VMware’s vCloud Datacenter Services, or Microsoft Dynamic Datacenter Alliance), or if conversion tools will be good enough.

Last but not least, customers should not just focus on technical and virtualization side since points below are also equally critical for a breathtaking cloud experience.

1- Infrastructure and architecture
2- Service management framework
3- Governance , finance and security components
4- Company culture and staff
5- Operations
6- Services portfolio

• 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.
• Web-managed switches or Smart-managed switches enhance small-to-medium business networks by providing key features that are not available on unmanaged switches. Plus, they are easy to deploy and use, so customers need little experience in network technologies in order to install them. And finally, they are priced very similarly to unmanaged switches. These benefits make Web-managed switches a good place for growing businesses to start. provide basic capabilities and can be managed through a Web browser interface.
• The last family of switches, managed switches, provides more advanced features, ports, and remote management capabilities. Managed switches are designed for larger businesses that need to connect a greater number of elements on their networks. They can also be good solutions for customers that want more robust switching features and centralized management capabilities. Managed switches support Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and allow you to configure each port’s communication parameters and many other aspects of the switch through a command-line interface (CLI). They may also provide a graphical user interface, such as a Web browser interface.