We have a new ‘Spotlight on Unified Communications Management’ available now and it may really help many of you get your head wrapped around the value of buying and using this kind of software. We tackle four typical headaches around:
Remote Site Rollouts
Moves, Adds and Changes
Monitoring and
Problem Resolution
We showcase the incredible new look and feel that PRIME brings to the UC Management Suite as our favorite tools have gotten a lot more integrated and easier to work with.
UCMS will help you automate the minutiae, delegate the redundant, all the while giving you a rich tool set to be in control when times are smooth and quick to react when things go awry.
Cloud Expo was indeed a very interesting juxtaposition of people espousing the value of cloud and how their stuff is really cloudy. You have a group of presenters and expo floor booths talking about their open API and how that is the future of cloud. Then you have the other camp that tells us how their special mix of functions is so much better than that. All of this is a very interesting dialog. APIs are indeed very important. If your technology is indeed a cloud operating model then you must have an API. Solutions like Cisco’s Intelligent Automation for Cloud rely on those APIs to orchestrate cloud services. But APIs are not the end all. The reality is that while the cloud discussions tend to center on the API and the model behind that API, the real change enabling the move towards cloud is the operating model of the users who are leveraging the cloud for a completely fresh game plan for their businesses.
James Urquhart’s recent blog: http://gigaom.com/cloud/what-cloud-boils-down-to-for-the-enterprise-2/ highlights that the real change for users of the cloud is modifying how they do development, test, capacity management, production operations and disaster recovery. My last blog talked about the world before cloud management and automation and the move from the old world model to the new models of dev/test or dev/ops that force the application architects, developers, and QA folks to radically alter their model. Those that adopt the cloud without changing their “software factory” model from one that Henry Ford would recognize to the new models may not get the value they are looking for out of the cloud.
At Cloud Expo I saw a lot of very interesting software packages. Some of them went really deep into a specific use case area, while others accomplished a lot of functional use cases that were only about a inch deep. As product teams build out software packages for commercial use, they have a very interesting and critical decision point that will drive the value proposition of the software product. It seems to me that within 2 years, just about all entrants in the cloud management and automation marathon will begin to converge on a simple focused yet broad set of use cases. Each competitor will be either directly driving their product to that point, or they will be forced to that spot by the practical aspects of customers voting with the wallets. Interestingly enough, this whole process it drives competition and will yield great value for the VP of Operations and VP of Applications of companies moving their applications to the cloud.
In Part 1 of this post, I described how Cisco IT addresses the first key question—about reporting on voice service availability. In this Part 2, we’ll cover the second question: How does the call sound to all of the connected parties?
Cisco IT Metrics for Measuring Call Quality
Although it seems counter-intuitive, the best source of information about voice quality may not be the people who were on the call. Of course, user trouble tickets about problems such as static and echo can be important indicators of bigger issues in a voice system. But we often find that users don’t report voice quality issues, so additional tools are needed.
Is the cloud the cure for what ails you? It could be, if service providers and telehealth device manufacturers have anything to say about it.
Home healthcare monitoring technologies have become big news in the last few years, and are poised to become even bigger. According to a recent Berg Insight report, remote health monitoring of chronic diseases generated €7.6 billion ($10.01 billion USD) globally in 2010, and is growing at 9 percent each year. MarketResearch.com projects the market for telehealth monitoring equipment alone to reach $3.1 billion by 2017.
By Jason Kohn, Contributing Columnist