The Accidental Guru Rss

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Resistance is futile - Oracle to assimilate RIM? This is a great article sent to me by a colleague - Jonathan Fisher.  This sort of follow's up on my post on OpenOffice. Oracle has been quietly in the background building up a significant portfolio of enterprise plays. Considering all the posting I have been doing on RIM that is a accumulation of thoughts over quite some time, RIM could...

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Have Microsoft lost the plot? Before you put pen to paper on a topic like this you have to challenge yourself before you make such a bold statement - so note the question mark. Peter Drucker wisely noted, "Business has only two basic functions: marketing and innovation." High tech is uniquely a product of both. Inbound marketing leads to innovation, or at very least...

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#Cisco Cius video - this is one serious service for... httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEk2MI4ZGlQ&feature=related

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#Cisco enterprise desktop game changer - Cius tablet... This is a great move from one of the mega vendors. Recently Cisco unveiled its Cius tablet PC running the Android 2.0 OS aimed squarely at business users. This is a game changer. As you will see from one of my previous posts - back in Siemens over a decade ago, Cisco pulled the market as it changed the desktop paradigm for voice 10 years...

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#Hosting automation for Telco / Carriers - choice is... I was holding off on this post until a few things had passed but this is a really important one, its actually vital to how the hosting industry 'pans' out within the telco / carrier market - the hosting industry has quite literally gone 'pete tong' since the BPOS drive against partners. The market is full of technical 'diatribe' - everything...

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Jun

15

#How to bring all your social media channels together? check out RPX and GIGYA

Posted by It's me | Comments: (0)

Category : Cloud, Feature it, General, hosting, Social Media

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Social media tools are here to stay but the problem is this – the internet is personal, we are bombarded with choice as to the ‘channel’ we use to communicate whether in all aspects of our lives. The challenge is this – consistency, being proactive and response.

With the development of technologies such as OAUTH there is literally a plethora of social networking tools that build discrete communities typically built around personal choice and preference. For example – I use facebook personally but have it no where near business. I use linkedin to manage my personal profile but use wordpress to post out my news supplementing my reach with tools such as Digg, Delicious, Stumble …….
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Jun

14

#Carriers need to ‘sell with’ big software vendors ….

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Category : Cloud, Feature it, General, hosting, Mobile Operators

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,


Just a little picture of a great boat in San Fran – 09!

I feel traitorous in what I am about to say, I have been one of those ‘start up’ guys who injected time and passion into the carriers over many years – I passionately and genuinely believe that this is where the hosted applications market is now at. The Hosted Exchange market specifically has completely commoditised, gone are the days of strong margin, service led value sales – this is plain, simple economics.
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Jun

14

#Carriers and the developer community ….

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Category : Cloud, General, hosting, Mobile Operators

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Steve Balmer is famous for his energetic speech on developers, developers, developers.

Communities are as old as the hills being at the core foundation of societies very existence. More specifically in the IT services world communities have helped to drive, develop and create value on a truly wide scale due primarily to the gift we have been given – the internet.

Look at VMWare – they have quite literally given back the power to the communities of ‘experts’ . It used to be the Sys Admin guys – the NT or Unix crew but they have changed this with VMWare being the center of the universe, a trendy brand and something for everyone approach gaining support across the business – hence why all the sys admin guys are now in the VMWare camp.
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Jun

11

The end to unlimited bandwidth – AT&T – O2 set the trend

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Category : Cloud, Feature it, Mobile Operators

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Why would I ever want to change my contract? I won’t – at least they have given us the choice, that’s one thing.

Call 2 weeks ago from O2

“Mr Evans, as a valued customer you are entitled to an iPhone upgrade and a more competitive plan blah blah” – no thanks! Quick maths

1. iPhone is out of contract
2. I am on an old contract – ok minutes, unlimited data
3. iPhone is a little ‘battered’ but works

Why do I want to pay £180 to upgrade my iPhone and be charged more money each month on my contract for a package that doesn’t give me the same value?
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Jun

11

Watch out here comes Cisco, the power of the channel ….

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Category : Cloud, hosting

Tags: , , ,

Credit to me trying to type so much on an iPhone.

Anyway, Cisco. I said I would talk about this one in more detail.

My own experiences are pretty interesting as I have seen and witnessed their move as a data networking player to one who has successfully innovated and played to their strengths- the power of the network. Interestingly it’s the technical stuff and the whole way they get their services into the market, distribution and partnerships.

Be scared, be very scared anyone who plays in the Cisco game- look at the last post. It’s their game, their rules ……
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Jun

10

Hosting – the battle begins – Zimbra, VMWare and a bit of Cisco

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Category : Cloud

Tags: , , , , ,

You could see this coming. The market has been gearing up to take a ‘pop’ at Microsoft and there are some very clever people with the cash to go and pull something together.

I suppose it was inevitable that Zimbra was going to be acquired away from Yahoo, it was in the wrong place to go after the ‘business’ space. I actually really like Zimbra and when it comes down to it – its a viable alternative to exchange. Ok, so people may disagree but from my own experiences of selling plenty of hosted exchange no-one ever really said – “hey I would like to buy some exchange’. What they actually wanted was to get the system to drive the functionality in that desktop client we all know and ‘maybe’ love – Outlook. That’s what is great about Zimbra – Outlook works exactly the same so why do we care what sits behind it.

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Jun

03

The Smoking gun …. erm cloud

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Category : Cloud

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I am going to open up some of my lines of thinking which is all to do with regulatory compliance – specifically around the area of information technology – email archiving. I won’t even go into the “actually” we use many forms of electronic tools to communicate – email is just one of them.

Think about all the different ways you communicate across an increasingly connected world?
Back to my point- These statements astound me.

1. We delete all our emails after 30 days, period
2. We don’t really need to archive, that’s what Outlook is for? I store everything in my personal folder

I am going to respond to the second one first – you clearly have never lost your laptop, had a hard disk crash or had a server failure. It’s when this happens that you wish you had ‘backed it up’ or if you are the IT guy and it’s your bosses 5 years worth of email that is lost, it’s time to say get your resume up to scratch.
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Jan

20

The battle of the big guns ……

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Category : Apple, Cloud, Free Thinking, General, Google, HP, IBM, Industry voices, Microsoft

Working on this one!

In the past 15 years working in the land of information technology, you could see the patterns forming in front of the train. Who was going to take on who, the battle for supremacy in the world of IT services.

First a rant that came to mind – I really hate those adverts on TV that say ‘retrain and learn to use one of those computer things and you will make great money’ – they should be banned for misrepresentation by the advertising commission. All they are good at is marketing to those people who get suckered into the imagery of corporate life they throw in front of you. The facts about working in the IT industry – whether you are software, hardware, carrier, applications, services etc etc etc etc is that its a hard slog. A new level of competition, serious hours (working time directive my **** that’s cooked in 3 days) and you are dealing with some of the most intelligent people in the world. Seriously, some of the people I have worked with are super bright – they write software like the stuff that enables us to do this, write systems that can make millions and loose millions in a second (not so bright). Continue Reading

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