Archive for the ‘Executive’ Category
Thursday, October 28th, 2010
Karen Ambrose Hickey, Editor
Barbara Nelson
Barbara Nelson, our iPass CTO and one of the top women in wireless, will be speaking at a few upcoming events.
LTE North America 2010
November 10-11, 2010, in Dallas, TX
At this show, Barbara has a presentation called:
Is WiFi Offload a Long Term Solution? Can LTE and WiFi Co-Exist?
- Examining mobile offload strategies – should WiFi offloading continue with the introduction of LTE?
- Comparing Wi-Fi offload as an alternative solution to LTE Femtocells
- Deploying WiFi hotspots in areas where data usage is more intensive
- Is WiFi just an interim solution to managing capacity?
All About Mobile, by SIIA
November 16-17, 2010, San Jose, CA
Barbara is on a panel, led by Maribel Lopez, Founder & Principal Analyst, Lopez Research, which also includes Adam Blum, CEO, Rhomobile, John Carini , CEO and Chief Software Architect , iEnterprises and Chris Clark, COO, Fiberlink Communications.
Building & Delivering Your Mobile Solution
The mobile space has a plethora of options, and making sense of them can be challenging. How do you know which platforms to support? Can you deliver through a browser with HTML5? Do you need carrier support to sell? These issues can all have profound impacts on your mobile development strategy.
Along with a noted career in voice and data communications and having several patents, Barbara chaired the X.400 Special Interest Group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
If you are going to these shows, hopefully you will listen in!
Barbara Nelson, iPass CTO, in upcoming speaking events >>
Monday, October 25th, 2010
René Hendrikse, Vice President, Northern Europe
At a time when you would think Governments would be looking to stimulate business travel after the recent economic downturn, it seems ridiculous to hear of the situation facing Dutch hotels, specifically relating to their provision of Wi-Fi. As this article says, Dutch hotels may be forced to register as ISPs if they offer internet access to the public.
Much the same thing has been discussed before, particularly in the UK, and I think the reaction of this from the vast majority of people is that it seems an incredibly heavy-handed and short-sighted way of cracking down on copyright infringement. Let’s be honest – given the choice between becoming an ISP and monitoring all the usage on their connection, or simply turning off the Wi-Fi, what are Dutch hotels going to do?
I fear what this approach may mean for Dutch hotels, and business travel in the country generally, if the legislation is adopted. The Netherlands is a major international transport hub, as well as an important business venue in itself. Connectivity has become critical to modern business; the moment we start to let clumsy or unnecessary legislation get in the way of creating an environment conducive to business and economic recovery then something is clearly wrong.
I completely understand the end towards which these changes are aiming – clearly, copyright infringement is a crime– but the means are all wrong. There must be better ways of detecting and punishing copyright infringement without punishing honest business travellers, surely?
Welcome to the Hotel ISP. Please Enjoy Your Stay. >>
Monday, October 25th, 2010
Kevin Murray, VP, Product Marketing
On a recent visit to Europe, I had the pleasure of talking directly to iPass customers on a Customer Advisory tour. I visited customers in London, Frankfurt and Paris – all-in-all chatting with about 10 different large enterprise customers.
There were some consistent themes:
- Free Wi-Fi is not as big in Europe as it is in North America (and Asia, they reported)
- Windows 7 is taking awhile to get out, with most organizations using 2011 to evaluate; as a result, XP SP3 is still the OS of choice in these organizations
- Macs are not penetrating the large enterprise as quickly as we might think
- Smartphones are interesting, and most are supporting iPhones and kicking the tires on Android
Free Wi-Fi
Free Wi-Fi is increasing in the US as quickly as you can say “Starbucks” but it simply is not moving as fast in Europe. Customers attribute this to fragmented provider strategies and many looking to cling to these day-pass dollars. Although slow to adopt, most agreed that it would happen eventually, just not fast enough.
Windows 7
It doesn’t matter how hard Microsoft tries, customers are going to move to a new operating system when they darn well please. One customer is moving to Windows 7 soon, though mostly because they reported Microsoft was making it difficult to renew licenses on Windows XP, providing that added push over the cliff for them. (Ouch!)
Others merely stated they just were not convinced they could do it without significant pain. So, to minimize that pain, they want to test as much as possible, determine their standard image and then roll out. I’m sure this is not what they want to hear in Redmond, but this sentiment was fairly consistent throughout. XP SP3 remains the top dog, and Microsoft has made it clear that they won’t be adding any enhancements to XP, which had ruffled some feathers with one customer in a big way.
Macs – Where Are They?
With the meteoric rise of Apple’s “i-devices,” the Mac has benefited greatly, drafting off the big rig as effectively as a road bike. But we asked our Council customers and they reported very small pockets – not enough to outright manage them, so they just “tolerate” them. So where are they all going?
I would love to hear your thoughts on this.
Smartphones – Are iPhone and Android Taking Over Yet?
The short answer is “no” — at least, not in the enterprise yet. While corporate policy varied on whether they support these devices, or even pay for them, it is clear that only the minority had committed to managing them.
There was still a high incidence of Blackberry as the standard, and the sense was that it would be awhile before iPhone or Android displaced the Blackberry as the standard. Why? Well, because the BES Server (“Blackberry Enterprise Server”) is considered more secure since it is a relatively isolated/protected environment.
It was understood, however, that Android has an advantage (in the enterprise) for a couple of reasons: 1) It has true multi-tasking and can run apps in the background, making it easier for Android devices to be managed like other enterprise devices, and 2) Google seems more willing to build features specifically to meet the needs of the enterprise, unlike Apple. Tough news for Apple – but the way they’re going, they may not need the enterprise.
So that was the tour – we learned a lot, and are planning a round with North America in the coming months. Stay tuned for updates, and please feel free to comment on this post.
Enterprise Mobility in my European Customer Tour >>
Friday, October 22nd, 2010
Karen Ambrose Hickey, Editor
Yes, that’s right. During GigaOM Mobilize, Evan Kaplan, CEO of iPass, presented on what we call, the Mobile Employee Bill of Rights, for enterprise mobility.
Do you know this person? They are not a “millennial.”
- A master of digital technology
- A relentless seeker of productivity – in personal and work life
- Always connected; in fact, wireless is a way of life
- A big consumer of mobile technology; carries multiple devices
- Works across space and time (anytime, anywhere)
- At the same time, the boundary between work and life is permeable
This is the “millennial workforce” and it spans generations. Hear Evan talk about this workforce, our survey results on what these workers demand and our subsequent Bill of Rights.
Podcast/Download MP3: Evan Kaplan, CEO, at Mobilize presenting on the Mobile Worker Bill of Rights
Go to our Enterprise Mobility Bill of Rights page, giving you the listing and a view of the video.
Mobile Employee Bill of Rights >>
Sunday, October 17th, 2010
Karen Ambrose Hickey, Editor
At this week’s VMworld Europe, desktop virtualization was a key theme. That may not be big news, given that it is a show organised by virtualization giants VMware, but nonetheless the amount of vendors talking up their offerings in this relatively immature market was significant.
VMware CEO Paul Maritz suggested in his keynote that legacy desktops would make way for a new generation of virtualized desktops delivered via hybrid clouds (which are effectively the combination of internal datacenter resources and external cloud services). Aside from the usual suspects, a number of smaller, highly innovative companies with interesting new approaches to desktop virtualization were also conspicuous at the show.
Server virtualization has been one of the most important technologies in Enterprise IT of the last decade. It has become synonymous with several of the major datacentre trends: cloud computing, Green IT; utility computing. In a matter of years, what was a relatively unknown technology, confined to the darkest depths of test & development environments, has made the leap to become a truly mainstream part of IT infrastructure and a technology that is shaping the future direction of computing in general.
If desktop virtualization had only half the transformational potential of server virtualization, we would be talking about it as the next big thing. In my opinion however, its effect on how IT is delivered and consumed could ultimately be more significant and wider-reaching than its older sibling.
To try and define desktop virtualization in all its flavours and guises within this blog would be pointless (if you don’t know what it is, then Wikipedia is as good a place to start as any). Suffice to say, it’s about abstracting the desktop environment from the underlying hardware, so that applications are available for a range of different devices.
This could be seen as a technological movement running in parallel towards roughly the same ends as cloud computing and SaaS – making applications easier to deploy and access. However, the impact of virtualizing clients has potentially huge repercussions for IT departments, end-users and device manufacturers.
Centralized delivery of data and applications, if done properly, should mean simplified security, application provisioning and management. It also moves us even further away from a device-centric view of IT consumption and closer to a more user-centric model. Information should ultimately be linked to a user identity, not unnecessarily tethered to a device.
If we take desktop virtualization to its ultimate end-game scenario, then we could find ourselves in a situation where devices become completely commoditized and are simply a way of connecting to centrally provisioned applications. Data could simply be streamed (fully encrypted) from the datacentre to the device which would receive data in much the same way as a walkie-talkie receives a radio signal.
All this is some way off and of course dependent on many technologies and trends converging further down the line. Standardisation – that ever-elusive IT utopia – will be as important as improvements in the underlying virtualization technology. Connectivity will also be a vital part of the equation, both in terms of pervasiveness and speed; virtualization vendors are already delivering technologies where users can ‘check out’ virtual desktops for offline use, but this would appear to simply be a stop-gap measure. Ultimately you would want a pretty-much permanent connection to make a virtualized model work.
The desktop virtualization landscape is much more complicated than I’ve made it sound, but if it ever truly reaches maturity, watch out! Along with cloud-computing, it has the potential to completely shake-up the way the relationship between users, data and devices is defined.
Get Ready for the Virtual Desktop Revolution >>
