Newswatch
Why spend precious IT resources on personal devices when your employees already carry and use cutting edge smartphones and tablets? Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) work cultures are a growing trend, and made quite a bit of news last month. A trio of research released by Cisco, BT, and Heavy Reading revealed that an increasing number of IT departments are moving to a BYOD culture and the vast majority of IT managers feel BYOD lends enterprises a competitive edge. Capitalizing on the news trend, Amdocs made the case for converging BSS and OSS, a necessity for an evolved BYOD culture, claimed the 'Docs.
With the opportunities afforded by BYOD come risks, however, as Neil Sutton, Vice President, Global Portfolio at BT Global Services, explained in an announcement. “There is no denying it. The BYOD genie is out of the bottle bringing with it unprecedented opportunities for enterprises but also new threats. The new perimeter is everywhere, defined by employee-owned devices, clouds, and extranets. The risk of abuse and attack has multiplied along with this massive expansion.”
Cloud News
Dial-up is dead, but EarthLink sure isn't. The company that made its bucks in the baud business is back in the news with a virtualized cloud workspace for business customers. And they aren't the only company with big cloud news this month. Citrix and Zuroa joined forces to capitalize on the new subscription economy. "There’s an intense battle among service providers to deliver differentiated, value-added app and desktop services from the cloud – services that businesses depend on," said Shawn Price, President at Zuora. "Together, Citrix’s comprehensive cloud platform and Zuora’s subscription billing platform combine the power of two industry leaders to empower and accelerate the growth of service providers.”
BT and Equinix also partnered in the cloud, this time for a high-performance cloud services offering (Radianz Venue) for the financial services industry that require minimal latency, proximity hosting, and robust interconnectivity. John Knuff, General Manager, Global Financial Services at Equinix, explained the advantages of partnering with a distributed data center partner for advanced cloud offerings: “These dense interconnection points are critical to the global trading community, providing an environment where shared infrastructure, super-fast connections, reduced total cost of ownership, connectivity costs and a wide range of choices form a new industry backbone for service delivery, prospecting and innovation.”
Taking the cloud in another direction, NTT DOCOMO launched a new cloud brand, a SIRI-like assistant, and a real-time language translation engine that utilizes their innovative “network cloud,” a combination of both network and cloud assets.
