In November last year, I blogged about why ICT for women and girls in engineering matters. This year, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) Secretary-General is announcing the international “Girls in ICT Day.” He states:

“As the leading specialized agency of the United Nations for information and communication technologies (ICTs), ITU looks towards its Members to harness the catalytic role of ICTs in creating far-reaching opportunities for women and girls by eliminating gender disparities and empowering them to meet their goals and aspirations. I call upon all stakeholders (including policy makers, regulators, operators and industry) to adopt policies and strategies that will promote ICT opportunities for women and girls.

Women are the bedrock of our societies. Read More »

Tags: girls in ict day, ICT, international telecommunications union, ITU, Service Provider, women and girls in engineering

Before you take the leap into unified communications, make sure your top choice will meet business and users’ needs

Despite its inception as enterprise technology, unified communications (UC)—with its convergence of voice, video, and data communications on a single IP-based network—offers small businesses several benefits. Users can easily make a call, send an email or instant message, or launch a voice or video conference through a single interface on their computers. In addition, UC can help- keep mobile workers more closely connected to the rest of your employees and enable better collaboration among everyone in your company.

Companies are recognizing these benefits and turning to UC more and more. In fact, according to research firm AMI-Partners, small to medium-size businesses in the U.S. are expected to double their spending on UC solutions by 2015.

If you’re among the many small businesses planning to add UC to your network, you may be shopping around for a solution right now. Before you decide, you’ll want to take these five considerations into account:

Read More »

Tags: converged_networks, small_business, UC, unified_communications

If there was ever a doubt that our service provider customers did not see the market opportunity to leverage the cloud and deliver enterprise collaboration services to their business customers, that uncertainty continues to decline.

Today, AT&T announced the availability of its Unified Communications Service, a new way for its business subscribers to offer a complete collaboration suite of features to employees in a secure and cost effective way. At the heart of AT&T’s enterprise collaboration solution is Cisco’s own Hosted Collaboration Solution, the foundation that many other providers such as Verizon and Orange have turned to, in helping them offer the best customized collaboration solution to their enterprise customers. Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution gives partners, including service providers and integrators, the ability to deploy multiple collaboration applications on one server in a virtualized environment and then host those applications for multiple client organizations. The solution is designed to be run from partner data centers. Read More »

Tags: AT&T, Cisco, Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution, Cisco Systems, cloud, cloud collaboration, cloud_computing, collaboration, hosted collaboration, Hosted Collaboration Solution, Orange, Orange Business Services, unified communications, Verizon, Verizon Business

A while ago, Brock Palen tweeted me an MPI question: how does one send Standard Template Library (STL) C++ objects in MPI?

The problem that Brock is asking about is that STL objects tend to be variable size and type.  The whole point of the STL is to create flexible, easy-to-use “containers” of arbitrary types.  For example, STL lists allow you to create an arbitrary length list of a given type.

To cite a concrete example, let’s say that my application has an STL vector object named my_vector that contains a bunch of integers.  What parameters do I pass to MPI_SEND to send this beast?

Read More »

Tags: HPC, mpi

The Cisco 4Q11 Global Threat Report has been released. The report covers the period from 1 October 2011 through 31 December 2011 and features data from across Cisco Security Intelligence Operations. This quarter’s contributors were Cisco Intrusion Prevention System (IPS), Cisco IronPort, Cisco Security Research and Operations (SR&O), and Cisco ScanSafe.

Read More »

Tags: quarterly threat report, security