With the unified communications market already hard at work digesting the significance of Microsoft’s recently announced strategic pact with Polycom, rumours are emerging that Cisco is preparing to spring a surprise bid for Internet phone operator Skype.

According to TechCrunch, Cisco made a formal offer to acquire Skype just before the company’s recent SEC filing of its intent to make an initial public offering (IPO). Continue Reading

Gartner, the IT industry analyst, has pared back its earlier growth estimates for enterprise IT spending 2010, and warned IT strategists that whilst they still expect spending to grow in 2010, there is still a chance that 2011 may see a return to zero growth. Continue Reading

Dell’s ongoing game of catch-up with IBM and HP in the race to be the enterprise infrastructure provider of choice gained vital momentum this week with the company’s $1.15 billion acquisition of virtualised storage vendor, 3PAR. The deal, which has been widely applauded by analysts is also expected to give Dell a little more leverage in its relationship with EMC.

However, the most immediate impact of 3PAR’s acquisition Continue Reading

As the UK’s premier IT infrastructure technology conference and exhibition IP EXPO has always been the ‘go to’ event for state-of-the-art virtualization technology. This year’s show will be no exception, not least because IP EXPO 2010 is set to be the first UK event to showcase VMware’s latest infrastructure technology – a network hypervisor. Continue Reading

The passing of the Digital Economy Act in April has thrown up a whole host of issues for those of us in the digital entertainment industry. No longer a niche industry, but resolutely mainstream, how many businesses are able to get to grips with the lightning speed at which the world of digital entertainment and consumer behaviour is changing?

As a new report suggests consumer behaviour and attitudes are shifting almost as quickly as new technology itself is emerging, how can organisations large and small, new and established, keep up to speed with key commercial issues affecting them and shaping the industry at large? Continue Reading

The IP Expo ‘09 keynotes and sessions offered insights not only to the current state of the industry, but also the drivers and challenges in the years to come, as Lord Carter’s opening address illustrated.

The “bedrock” of a series of lectures on trends in the IT industry is surely the future of infrastructure – whatever that happens to mean in the context – followed by a sufficiently robust service architecture and delivery mechanisms. Continue Reading

In a time of economic restraint, IT organisations are under pressure to do more, with less. Budgets are flat – or falling – and companies are forced to look carefully at their network infrastructure and ask if it provides too much at too greater cost?

Budget pressure, the need to cut expenditure and be more efficient has resulted in many organisations reassessing traditional approaches to networking. That reassessment invariably results in the recognition that wireless networks – particularly 802.11n wireless – offer far better value than existing wired networks. Continue Reading

The IEEE has, since September 2005, been crafting a standard commonly known as PoE (Power over Ethernet) but in today’s power hungry multi device world this was clearly never going to be enough. Enter the latest incarnation imaginatively called PoEplus or to give it its official name 802.3at.

What is exciting if power delivered over a LAN cable can be associated with excitement is the ability to now provide power for pan-tilt-zoom video surveillance cameras, videophones and thin clients. The significance of a workable marriage of PoE and wireless applications is understandably causing a further ripple of excitement.

Continue Reading

If you and your company are involved in Voice over IP and Unified Communications then there’s no doubt you’ll have heard about SIP (the Session Initiation Protocol). You may be (even a little bit) excited about all the things it promises to achieve by enabling multivendor products and services to work together. However, sometimes it’s good and even necessary to just stop and look closely at what’s actually happening with SIP, who’s using it and what lies ahead for this most disruptive of protocols!

So let’s start by asking,

What is SIP? Continue Reading

Founded in 1994, Opera Software can justifiably argue that it is the oldest browser company in the world. Its vision is to provide a Web experience on any device. Why should we care? According to Jon S von Tetzchner, Opera’s co-founder and CEO (and contributor to IP Leaders), only 12% of phones are Apple iPhones, leaving a huge market for open source operating system Android to reach high- and low-end phones: “There will be around two billion desktop PC users in 2011, but the majority of the population doesn’t have one, so a viable alternative platform that can deliver the Web is mobile.”

Continue Reading