Johann's Unified Communications : analyst

RTM’d today: Programming for Unified Communications

jkruse — Fri, 01 May 2009 02:41:00 GMT

Unified Communications is about much more than what you get out-of-the-box – it is a platform that you can use to build, extend and enhance your own applications & business processes. Looking at UC as a platform is about more than cost-savings, it's about competitive advantage.

As a software & platform company this is one Microsoft’s key strengths versus our UC competitors who still think very much inside-the-box – in fact this is why Gartner has had Microsoft as the leader in its UC Magic Quadrant for the last few years.

Microsoft Press have just RTMed a new book titled Programming for Unified Communications that explains how to use OCS R2 as a development platform, and to fully realise the benefits of UC.

More details at http://blogs.msdn.com/microsoft_press/archive/2009/04/30/rtm-d-today-programming-for-unified-communications.aspx

Do You Really Need A SAN Anymore?

jkruse — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 12:46:00 GMT

I have had many interesting conversations about my post on Advantages of DAS over SAN storage in Exchange 2007 and the related session I delivered at Tech.Ed 2008… many sceptics have seen the light, although some remain sceptical.

It’s interesting to see that Forrester have published a paper titled “Do You Really Need A SAN Anymore?”.

An excerpt from the paper…

It's been the conventional wisdom of the past 10 years that to provide the best performance, protection, and capacity utilization for applications and databases, you need a robust storage array in a storage area network (SAN). But with low capacity utilization, the inability to prioritize application performance, long provisioning times, and soaring costs, SANs haven't lived up to their promise. SANs also leave application, database, and system administrators at the mercy of storage administrators for all their storage-related needs, such as capacity, data copies, and backups. To regain control and get better results, application vendors are starting to subsume more storage functionality into the application itself, giving IT buyers the option to spend less on commodity storage and get their high-value features from the application. The time has come for buyers to question the value of their SAN and consider simpler options that fit better with the applications they truly care about.

A very interesting read on allowing advanced applications (e.g. Exchange) look after storage. Unfortunately it’s not free, but you can purchase and read the paper at http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,47089,00.html

Gartner's top 10 Strategic technologies for 2008

jkruse — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 09:08:00 GMT

1. Green IT
2. Unified Communications
3. Business Process Management
4. Metadata management
5. Virtualization
6. Mashups
7. The Web Platform
8. Computing fabric
9. Real World Web
10. Social Software

Read the full article here

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