Voice is changing within the Enterprise

I’ve been working recently on several voice projects for large corporates. For many years I have not been overly impressed with the business justification for the move from TDM to VoiP. The issues of reliability, cost and reduced VoiP functionality made me fell uneasy, even though I come from a data - as opposed to voice - background.

Now I finally think VoiP is a dead duck. My definition of VoiP being the replacement of TDM fixed phone technology with IP based fixed phone technology. Product developments by Cisco, Microsoft and even Google over the past twelve months are starting to render VoiP obsolete.

Finally Unified Communications is coming to the fore. I’ll define UC in a later post but for now here is a quick presentation on where I think fixed voice is going over the next 4 - 5 years.

More to come on this subject.

EA Sports business challenge

EA Sports have a well established and mature catalogue of computer sport franchises.  Madden and FIFA are the big sellers, with NBA Live, NCAA Football, NHL and Tiger Woods all contributors to annual sales.  The problem EA have is that the annual release cycle for each franchise is seemingly creating a jaded feel to the games, even though many of the games contain a large number of improvements. Madden last year was good example. A new art direction gave it a great new look but many people questioned was there enough of a change to justify a new purchase. 

The incremental nature of improvement within a game seem at odds with an annual purchase. To help combat this dislocation Peter Moores has created a new approach where the development studios communicate early and often with the community.

To this end EA Sports are utilising a large number of social media tools:

• Peter Moores, head of EA Sports has a regular blog that contains full and frank discussion about the EA Sports business
• Over the past couple of months developers of the 2010 games have started to blog early about their games
• EA Sports have a presence on Playstation Home
• They stream interactive content such as news within their games
• Developers are encouraged to particiapte within the community forums
• Gamers can upload their favourite plays within the game to show off on youtube
• EA Sports have invested heavily to provide the most comprehensive online play for gamers
• Within the 2009 series FIFA and NBA included a constantly updated player form and play feature

While these are welcome additions I suspect social media alone is not enough, the annual release cycle may be flawed, they may have to find a subscription payment similar to a MMORPG and investigate further in game sponsorships and advertising.

Such a change will not occur overnight, many people still want to buy the annual release from a retail outlet, however a growing number of gamers no longer see the value of the annual release. The social media tools the EA team are currently deploying could be the start of a strategy that could change their entire business model.

btw I’m a sport nut so I love Madden, NCAA Football (only available in the UK via PS3 import), Fifa (much improved but still does not feel dynamic enough), NHL (be a pro mode), EA Cricket and Rugby when available.

Creating a twitter stream with Wordpress

In the space of a few hours with a combination of Wordpress, RSS and a couple of Wordpress plugins any business can create a twitter stream that collects information from several different RSS feeds and provides an automatic twitter update. The functionality is similar to Yahoo pipes or twitterfeed but crucially for the Enterprise this functionality can be provided behind the firewall rather than rely on third party services.

This solution could be used to aggregate multiple content stream generated within the Enterprise and streamed to twitter. PR releases, news items, product updates, service updates.
What I haven’t looked at yet is streaming content to an internal twitter service. If achievable this solution moves from a simple automatic twitter tool to a company wide Enterprise work flow system.

To prove the concept I have taken three NFL streams (NFL Network, National Football Post and ESPN NFL) and aggregated them into a single twitter stream at nflfreeagency. The Wordpress output can be found here.

Here’s a quick overview of how the solution works:

Stage One: the basics

• download and install wordpress 2.7 onto your web server

Stage Two: managing the multiple RSS streams

• three plugins are required that will allow you to manage RSS feeds and display on your Wordpress blog: SimplePie Core, SimplePie for WP and WP-o-Matic
• when the three plugins are installed browse to WP-o-Matic in settings and enter the feeds you wish to manage
• once entered WP-o-Matic will create a new blog post for every new RSS entry

Stage Three: getting your blog posts from Wordpress into twitter

• download Alex King’s TwitterTools plugin and install within Wordpress, make sure you check the options to create a new tweet for every new blog entry

Wordpress in the enterprise

Wordpress is a great platform. Considering all the money and time spent on enterprise software it is amazing to think that Wordpress can provide many of the same features and functionality and yet is rarely spoken as a serious option.

Below is by no means an exhaustive list of how Wordpress can be applied within the business environment. I will attempt to keep adding to this list as I go along.

General business functionality

1 - General blog platform (well kind of obvious I know)

2 - Take the wind out of Yammer’s sails and create an internal twitter clone

3 - Nice and easy ecommerce website

4 - General team/news site

5 - Video web site (e-learning etc) - Video in the enterprise is going to be a big growth area over the next couple of years and IT teams could do a great deal worse than establishing their early thoughts on a Wordpress platform.

6 - Idea site (digg functionality)

Vertical specific

1 - local news
2 - sport webpage
3 - local sports club
4 - real estate

Mind the IT Gap: Introduction

I’ve witnessed a new growing anxiety within IT departments over the last few years. Apart from worrying about the usual stuff: costs, viruses, delayed projects, handling faults etc etc there is a new challenge - the power home user. The power home user challenges the IT department to provide an IT capability similar to what a user can have at home. At home they typically have a broadband connection, a wireless network, applications in the cloud that can be accessed from anywhere with a mobile device, choice in the browser they use and google provides access to information. All for what they consider a relatively cheap price: £30 a month broadband, £35 a month on a mobile device, the largest expense being the hardware device, £700 - £1000 for a laptop or £300 - £400 for a desktop which they refresh every 2 - 3 years.  They don’t care too much about the operating system but are probably on windows XP or Vista which they only upgrade if and when they upgrade their hardware.

This type of user isn’t the geeky type of person who are likely only to reside in the IT department, they are a typical office worker in a standard environment and when they get to work they feel frustrated with the technology they have at their disposal.  This type of feeling was experienced by the Obama team when they moved into the White House, where an Obama aide was quoted as saying the gap in technology was comparable to Xbox and Atari.

The type of frustrations power home users experience at work:

They require multiple sign offs or certain managerial ‘privileges’ to receive mobile email access.  iphone support is ‘on the IT roadmap’ (translation - will be supported when it is too late)
They are often constricted to a single browser
Company applications are often bespoke and do not support good usability
They try and search their intranet and hardly ever seem to find what they are looking for
The network their office sits on is slow and prone to failure
It takes several minutes to log onto the corporate network

Even greater challenges for the IT department:

The power home user doesn’t even include the cohort of users that are just hitting the workforce, sometime referred to as Generation Y or Millennials, those that have grown up exclusively with the internet, who are likely to find corporate IT provision even more alien to their standard computing consumption.

The question is will business simply shrug it’s shoulders and tell such workers to suck it up or will IT departments adjust their habits and provision to adapt to their growing base of users that demand more?

Opportunity Database

Intel WAN traffic 2004 - 2008

Intel publish their IT performance each year. I’ve extrapolated the Wide Area Network figures and I am not surprised to find the explosive growth in demand that the Intel IT team have had to meet in WAN traffic. I do hope they negotiate a good deal with their WAN provider that at least includes year on year reductions in price per terabyte.

Thanks to Intel for the openness in providing the data, the report is valuable for the whole IT industry.

Recession IT

The bad news for IT workers is that the recession will cost hundreds of thousands of IT jobs across many different industry sectors.  The good news is that the recession will create many opportunities for IT to fill gaps in other parts of organisations that also face budget and head count reduction.  Those opportunities could be especially felt within the cloud based systems and open source.  Cloud and open source combine lower cost barriers to entry and can be deployed in much shorter time periods.

Every CIO/CTO and small business owner should be asking how their business can exploit the technology to gain competitive advantage in such tough economic times.

Every IT professional should also be asking a similar question; how can I help a business take advantage of the technologies? 

Spend Less on Networks: part 1

2009/10 wont be the year to go ask your CIO or CFO for millions of dollars on new IT equipment

In the network space that shouldn’t be too much of a problem

In fact you’ll be able to go to your boss and tell them two things:

1 - I will sign a deal this year that will reduce our spend on networks (relative and finitie)

2 - At the same time I will transform the network estate into a single global unified service with the latest collaboration technology without investing any precious capital

Enterprise spend millions of dollars a year on the run costs of their underlying infrastructure:

LAN, WAN, Voice, Mobile

Many companies spend millions of dollars a year investing in new equipment

There is wide variance in the way that enterprise procure and manage their networks

Improving on key areas of network provision will save millions of dollars