Jorge Blanco, Avaya'�s Vice President of Solutions & Software Portfolio Management joined me on the Lippis Report podcast to discuss Avaya's Unified Communications (UC) portfolio.  Many companies are using the term Unified Communication to describe different things.  Some companies use UC to describe the integration of a desktop launch point for communications.  Some use UC to describe communications enabled business process.  Some use UC to describe both.  In this podcast we talk to the man at Avaya in charge of it all and get the scoop on how Avaya defines the term and what's included in their Unified Communications offering.  This is one of our best podcast with a fresh off the cuff discussion on UC.  So listen up.

Where is networking heading over the next three to five years?  Zeus Kerravala, SVP Enterprise Research at the Yankee Group joins me for an industry roundtable discussion on the direction our industry is heading.  Is Moore’s Law about to collide with Metcalfe's Law bringing new combinations of companies and restructuring the industry?  Will the industry continue to be dominated by one company or will we see a major roll-up occur.  Will computing and networking firms combine to tightly link networks and application delivery?  We provide you a framework for how the industry may progress over the next three to five years.  Enjoy, Nick

Don Reece the Director of Information Technology at Pembina Trails, a Public School Division in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada joins the Lippis Report podcast to discuss his newly installed unified communications implementation.  Pembina Trails has an enrollment of approximately 14,000.  They have a network of dark fiber backbone between sites running at a gigabit, Microsoft Active Directory and Exchange, Dell Ethernet Switches and a very old voice system.  It was time to upgrade the voice system, so they did it with Objectworld’s Unified Communications Server and saved over $200K while offering a state-of-the-art IP telephony system.  Don goes into all the details.  It’s a great listen.  Enjoy Nick.

I was invited to deliver the keynote and moderate the Wall Street Technology Associations (WSTA) Hot Technologies conference in early October.  I spoke on network security, IP telephony and hosted IP services offerings and provided an assessment on what's hot and what's not.  You can download my presentation and listen to the keynote here.  Enjoy, Nick

Zeus Kerravala of the Yankee Group joins me to discuss Riverbed�s successful IPO, the rumors that Juniper is up for sale, the dismal performance of Interop in NY and the future of conferences in our industry.  Riverbed is valued at 3 to 4 times that of Packeteer, Force 10 and Mitel are scheduled to IP in early �07 is the IPO market back for networking companies?  You bet, listen in to find out which networking companies will have a successful IPO in �07, who may buy Juniper and how the IT competitive landscape is changing.

Brendan Hannigan, Chief Operating Officer of Q1 Labs joins the podcast to discuss the state of the network security industry.  Access control, compliance, internal data theft and integrating security data from point products are security projects being funded by most enterprises.  Brendan and I review these projects and put forward a network security strategy for rapidly containing security incidents thanks to analytics which can process tens of thousands of alarms per second while searching for anomalous behavior, delivering remediation options to security ops. If you�re looking to bring order and greater control to your security ops by integrating management and monitoring of multiple point security products, then listen in and learn. 

In this fourth and final special edition “Lessons Learned� podcast, Mr. John Poole, President and CEO, and Mr. Mike Taylor, CTO, both of Strategic Products and Services, discuss their experience, both pro and con, about deploying VoIP networks for 1000s of companies. As one of the largest system integrators in the VoIP space John and Mike have seen it all and they offer up a wealth of lessons learned for any company at any life cycle point of a Mike Taylorconverged network. Issues such as WAN provisioning, PoE budget planning, the top five issues that negatively impact voice service quality and more are discussed. The first three podcasts in this series are available in the Lippis Report Download Library. This is a must listen podcast for corporations serious about implementing VoIP. Special thanks to Viola Networks for sponsoring the “Lessons Learned� series. Enjoy, Nick

In this part three special edition �¢ï¿½ï¿½Lessons Learned�¢ï¿½ï¿½ podcast, Dr. Ron Marquardt, Director Broadband Access Technologies at Covad discusses their experience, both pros and cons, about deploying a nationwide VoIP network. As the largest VoIP service provider for business, Covad had many challenges to overcome which many of their competitors are now just starting to experience.  Dr. Marquardt discusses how Covad took a life cycle approach to their VoIP deployment and are now offer three distinct and unique VoIP services.  The first two podcast to this series are available in the Lippis Report Download Library. This is a must listen podcast for corporation series about implementing service provider  VoIP. Special thanks to Viola Networks for sponsoring the �¢ï¿½ï¿½Lessons Learned�¢ï¿½ï¿½ series. Enjoy, Nick

To deliver high performance applications and increase user productivity, IT and network management groups would like to identify the source of application performance problems in real time.  But to be truly effective, the identification of problems needs to be in terms all parties can understand and act upon.  A view of all major applications flowing across a network being discovered in real time which multiple groups can use to collaborate and troubleshoot performance degradation issues is discussed with Scott Safe and Dave Trowbridge both of Network Physics.  Network Physics� recently released NetSensory 6.0 and its Business Reporter delivers on the above.  Listen and learn how.

In this Part Two special edition “Lessons Learnedâ€? podcast, Peter Palmisano, CIO and Jerry Weiner, Manager of Systems and Networks both of Camp Dresser & McKee continue to discuss their experience, both pros and cons, about deploying a multi-national converged network.  This is, by far, one of the best podcasts we have recorded, and is full of useful advice and insights from two leading IT executives.  They will tell you what to look out for and what works.  The huge questions raised are:  Is the IP telephony industry ready to support connected remote offices, a fully converged network, disaster plans and more?  You will hear it from executives that are living with it right now.  The first part of this interview is available in the Lippis Report Download Library.  This is a must listen podcast.  Special thanks to Viola Networks for sponsoring the â€?Lessons Learnedâ€? series.  Enjoy, Nick

 

In this part one special edition Lessons Learned podcast, Peter Palmisano, CIO and Jerry Weiner, Manager of Systems and Networks both of Camp Dresser & McKee discuss their experience, both pros and cons about deploying a multi-national converged network.  This is by far, one of the best podcasts we have recorded and is full of useful advice and insights from two leading IT executives.  They will tell you what to look out for and what works.  The huge questions raised are:  Is the IP telephony industry ready to support connected remote offices, a fully converged network, disaster plans and more?  You will hear it from executives that are living with it right now.  The second part of this interview will be distributed September 12^th.  This is a must listen podcast.  Special thanks to Viola Networks for sponsoring the lessons learned series.  Enjoy, Nick

Changes in communications are accelerating at a rate no other industry has experienced.  The transition from circuits to packets is well underway while the transition from packets to applications is starting now.    The communications applications are being tightly linked into business process in an effort to automate workflow to deliver greater productivity and profitably to the global economy.  In this podcast, I interview Tim Kraskey of Spanlink, a leading communications application firm.  We explore how business processes is changing and how to utilize IP telephony for real competitive gain?  There is one slide to download for this podcast.  It is a great listen, enjoy.

There are three major industry initiatives in play today addressing network security; Cisco’s NAC, Microsoft’s NAP and the Trusted Computing Group’s TNC.   The problem with all three is that they are not ready, complex, non-standard and very costly.  However the market is demanding network access control without the above baggage.  So a few smart people started companies to address this window of opportunity; Tom Barsi being one of them with his company ConSentry joins me to discuss a better way to control network access.

As security features and functions become deeply embedded within network and IT infrastructure the need to centralize alarms, events and overall security monitoring is becoming increasing important.  The ability to analyze millions of events sourced from wide range of network and security equipment, correlate them, identify anomalistic behavioral threats and propose remediation promises to improve defenses while reducing operational complexity and cost.  This is a big promise.  I went to Q1 Lab�s Tom Turner, VP of Marketing to discuss this new category of security monitoring device as they build one, called QRadar.  You�ll be impressed at what you hear.  Enjoy Nick.

In this Lippis Report podcast, I interview Barry O'Sullivan on Cisco's IP Telephony strategy and tactics.  We discuss Cisco's SIP strategy within its Call Manager 5.0, its newly released Unified Communications and its approach to communications application development.  You'll learn that Cisco's Unified Communications is not the integration of e-mail, v-mail and fax but a larger approach to providing portals to multiple communications and back-end applications.  You may be surprised to hear Cisco's opinion on Web Services/SOA.  It's a great listen, enjoy.

Zeus Kerravala and I discuss two large industry announcements.  First, we dive into Microsoft's new Unified Communications announcement which we believe will start the communication application wars between Microsoft and the IP telephony vendors such as Cisco, Avaya, Siemens, Nortel, et al.  Then we weigh in on the pros and cons of the Nokia Siemens Networks joint venture and what will happen with their enterprise businesses.  We check the mood of the market by reporting on the Cisco and Nortel user group conferences.  We spend 25 minutes covering these important topics.  Enjoy.

I explore the third phase of IP telephony, the strategic value phase, which combines business process modeling tools with SOA and communications to deliver the new application creation model.  This new communications-enabled application creation model is being used by service providers and developed by all the major IT software and some IP telephony vendors.  Lawrence Catchpole Chief Strategy Officer and Co-founder of M1 Global joins the program to explain the benefits of communications-enabled business process.

Eric Bear, Vice President Product Management & Global Business Development for Viola Networks joins the Lippis Report podcast where we explore "Service Level Management" to solve scaling and converged network performance issues. This is a must listen podcast if you want to avoid the problems most find when they scale up their IP telephony pilots to full deployments.  Sale issues associated with equipment configuration and converged network design have a direct correlation on the stability of a converged network.  In this podcast we discuss best practices so you can avoid the crisis most organization experience.  Nick

CEO John Combs joins the Lippis Report podcast to discuss the IP telephony market and ShoreTel's chances of success.  The IP telephony market is growing rapidly.  It took 3 years for the industry to ship some 8 million IP phones; it ships that many plus in 3 months and the growth rate is increasing.  As the market starts to roar, private firms are taking the temperature of the IPO market.  John Combs comments on Mitel's IPO, ShoreTel's happy customers, innovation and the competitive IP telephony market.  There is a lot packed into this 20 minute podcast.  You'll want to make sure you listen to this episode.  Enjoy, Nick

I talk with Tony Barbagatto of GroundWork on the Open Source movement for network and system management.  The management software market as long been dominated by HP OpenView and IBM's Tivoli.  A new open source based model has emerged that promises to deliver a wider set of functions and features to IT management lowering operational cost.   The network management market is about to get interesting again.  Listen in, it is a great discussion of a new market disruption.

Zeus Kerravala, VP of Yankee Group's infrastructure research and consulting joins me as we discuss the hot new market of hosted IP services, Avaya On Demand, Cisco's Unified Communications, Mitel's IPO, the race for communication developers and more.  It is a fascinating discussion with insights into Cisco's IP communications management team and our take on its Unified Communications announcement.  Enjoy.

The Trusted Computing Group's Steve Hanna, of Juniper and Paul Sangster of Symantec provide us a progress update on the Trusted Network Connect (TNC) standards effort to deliver an open network admittance control approach.  Download this two page presentation to follow along with part of the discussion.  It's a great discussion on network admission control and which parts are and can be standardized avoiding vendor lock-in.  Enjoy, Nick

I interview Patrick Peterson, VP Technology of IronPort.  IronPort provides e-mail and web defense appliances blocking spyware and spam from desktops and exploits entering into an enterprise via port 80.   We discuss three general industry models available to defend e-mail and web traffic with associated pros and cons. These defenses are appliances, network or software based.  It's a great discussion if you need to know how to stop spam and spyware from steeling productivity and clogging your IT infrastructure.  Enjoy, Nick 

The anti-virus market distribution channel is changing for small to medium sized businesses.  Soon, gone will be the days when IT security personal managed AV client software.  AV is being increasingly bundled into communication services offered by ISPs and other service providers for both fixed and mobile end points.  In this podcast I discuss these trends with Curtis Cresta, VP & GM North America Ops of F-Secure, the leader is services based security.  If you thought your cell phone, smart phone or PDA were safe, think again.  Take notes on this one.

Scott Palmquist joins the program to discuss the network encryption market and CipherOptics' new Ethernet Security Gateway.  Protecting data in "motion" has become top of mind for most IT executives as they look to close network security vulnerabilities.  There's a great discussion on layer 2 versus layer 3 encryption, protecting data in motion versus at rest, where to apply encryption and the elimination of the encryption performance and latency penalty.  Enjoy, Nick

 

Nick Lippis interviews Al Baker of Siemens on how IT departments are looking to mold, shape and inject communications into business process.  IT departments are starting to view contact centers as the starting point to link communications directly into a wider set of business applications increasing productivity and creating competitive differentiation.  Al discusses these dynamics in the context of Siemens's new HiPath ProCenter Enterprise V7.0 contact center offering for the SME and mid-large enterprise markets.  It is a great listen and is studio quality too.

ProCurve Networking by HP Makes Its Most Significant Product Announcement To Date Nick Lippis interviews Andre Kindness, ProCurve Networking by HP on their largest product announcement to date. In this podcast I ask Andre to give us the bottom line on their new 5400, 3500, 6200 and 10 Gb modules for their 8100 core switch. One of the key points here is the integration of Power of Ethernet, network security and enhanced mobility features built into their 3rd generation of ProVision ASCI. As usual I give my take on the announcement at the end of the podcast. For a set of slides on the above go to www.lippis.com.

Zeus Kerravala, VP of Yankee Group's infrastructure research and consulting and Scott Bradner, University Technology Security Officer, Harvard University join me as we discuss the structural changes taking place which are shaping a new telecommunications industry.  Kicked off by a discussion on the pros and cons of the Alcatel and Lucent merger the talk then twist and turns into a discussion on Google, Microsoft, Vonage. legislative initiatives, mobile and wireline usage.  We end with a vision of the emerging telecommunications industry.  It is a fascinating talk.

Nick Lippis interviews Sid Nag, Founder, President and CEO of Prominence Networks www.prominencenet.com. We discuss the problem most IT organizations are having with quality of service (QoS) configuration, maintenance and troubleshooting over IPBPXs, routers, switches, WAN services etc. In short QoS is a tedious, time consuming and expensive process that eats up operational dollars. Prominence is offering its Clear Call Controller and Director which automates QoS configuration so that your users have an excellent voice and video experience over a converged network. It�s a great podcast for any organization serious about delivering high quality real time services over an IP network.

I interview Gopala Tumuluri of Foundry Networks on their ServerIron GT 10Gx2 and E 10Gx2P. These high performance switches are designed for IP data center applications in the enterprise and service provider markets. They sport Foundry's Traffic Works software which includes layer 2, 4, 7 plus SSL acceleration, load balancing, security features and more. I give my take on the announcement at the end of the podcast. Enjoy.

Nick Lippis interviews Bobby Johnson, President and CEO of Foundry Networks. In this podcast Bobby discusses the key areas where Foundry is investing to address the enterprise and service provider ethernet markets. There's a great discussion on industry structure and the new business cycle in which the network industry is entering that will be marked by innovation sparking a feature race and further consolation.

Nick Lippis interviews Naresh Kannan, Director Product Management and David Peikin, Director Marketing at Visual Networks now Fluke Networks. Visual Networks' flagship solution Visual UpTime Select is being upgraded to 2.0 with a focus on VoIP performance monitoring and troubleshooting. Select 2.0 will be released on Feb 24, 2006. I give my take on the announcement at the end of the podcast. If your interested in network performance monitoring you may want to check out the Network Physics podcast as well as these companies compete.

Scott Bradner, University Technology Security Officer, Harvard University and John Gallant, President and Editorial Director of Network World join me in our first industry roundtable. We discuss the reality of Web Services/SOA and how the IP Telephony vendors (Avaya, Cisco, Siemens, Nortel, Mitel) are using it. The discussion of VoiceCon drove us to E-911 open issues with Scott providing an IETF update on what the group is doing to help solve this important industry issue. VoiceCon also brought SIP to light as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, et al are embracing it and now pushing Cisco into SIP acceptance with Call Manager 5.0. ShoreTel made it to the discussion, thanks to its strong showing at VoiceCon. Juniper was next and we talked about its enterprise strategy and weighed in on its pros and cons. This led to a general discussion on Xorp or eXtensible Open Router Platform, Vyatta and its potential impact on Cisco and Juniper. John gives a sneak preview on next week�s Network World where they�ll cover the hot topic of IT pandemic planning, thanks to concerns over the avian flue, and the planned acquisition of BellSouth by at&t.

I interview John McHugh, GM and Vice President, ProCurve networking by HP. The ProCurve Group is the 2nd largest network switch concern, bigger then Extreme and Foundry combined and perhaps bigger then 3Com and closing in on Nortel in terms of the overall enterprise network infrastructure market. John talks about ProCurve's successes, challenges and where he is leading this group. It's about 25 minutes. Enjoy.

F5 Networks Jason Needham, Director of Product Management and Satya Vardharajan, product Manager came to brief me on their new BIG-IP appliances, the Global Traffic Manager (GTM), the Link Controller and the 8400 Platform. We also discussed F5's Traffic Management Operating System or TM/OS which is the firm's product development platform for hardware and software development. I find two things different about F5. One is that their customers are both networking and datacenter executives which is unique to a company the size of F5. Second is their TM/OS architecture has allowed F5 to stack software features/services on top of their appliances pretty rapidly such as adding DNS support, distributed application management, intelligent session persistence et al on top of its industry hardened load balancing technology.

Nick Lippis has a discussion with Lee Klarich, Director Product Management, at Juniper Networks. Lee provides an update to Juniper's Integrated Security Gateways (ISG) with proof points from customers AvantGo, ADP and the University of Nevada Reno. We review the multi-processing, multi-tasking capabilities of the ISG and its competitive advantages. What I like most about the ISG is its ability to virtualized firewall, VPN and IPS services and extend them to VLANs, ports, applications, etc, thus avoiding the cost of placing security appliances around your network. The integration of security features not only save on capital cost, but operations too by having a single management interface for confirmation, control and monitoring and allowing the security services to collaborate in an effort to automate exploit mitigation at the application level. It's a good deep dive in the network security market place and Juniper's ISG. Enjoy.

I interview Kenny Frerichs, President & CEO, Scott Safe, VP of Marketing and Dwight Barker, VP Product Management and talk with them about their network application performance and optimization products. We discuss the NP-2000 NetSensory Professional appliance available for $9,995 with built in best practices learned from their 200 customers and the NetSensory Solution Insights. We spend some time on channels as their new pricing model expands their addressable market to the mid-enterprise market. The NetSensory baseline, troubleshoot, secure and optimize graphical representations of network applications are some for the best I have seen in the industry. Enjoy.

Nick Lippis interviews Brandon Hoff and Katie Dunn on the state of the network security market, data security and the launch of CipherOptics' new 1Gb SG1002 IPSec encryption appliance. There’s a great discussion in this podcast, on scaling tactics for securing encrypted end-to-end networks versus tunnels. Also issues such as key and policy management and secure domains are explored.

Nick Lippis has an industry discussion with Mark Straton, Senior Vice President Siemens Communications. Nick leads the talk by describing the third phase of IP telephony, the strategic phase, while Mark makes his points of why Siemens will lead this phase. Gone will be capital cost, siloed communications applications and in will be SOA based communications enabled applications and hosted IP tel solutions. There's a good discussion about the industry structure and which vendors, Avaya, Cisco, Nortel, Mitel, Siemens, Alcatel will survive and thrive in the strategic phase.