What do gas prices and SaaS have in common?

09/04/08

It's hard to turn on the TV, read the newspaper or talk to your neighbor without hearing about the impact of high gasoline prices. However, I believe that much of the attention paid to skyrocketing prices for gasoline has more to do with a lack of information historical context that skews our perceptions. For example, the most recent issue of Fast Company magazine calculated that the 1908 price of gasoline at 18 cents per gallon is equivalent to $3.90 per gallon today in the United States, adjusted for inflation. That means that gasoline is not overpriced today, but instead has simply caught up with the price that Americans paid 100 years ago.

PostPath acquisition is a smart move for Cisco

09/02/08

Cisco last week announced that it had purchased PostPath for $215 million. This follows the acquisition of IronPort for $830 million and WebEx for $3.2 billion, among other Cisco acquisitions, including Linksys, Pure Networks, Five Across and many others - a total of 56 since 2001.

DLP's impact on archiving

08/28/08

One of our clients, a leading provider of hosted messaging archiving services, raised an interesting point in the context of helping us to frame issues for an upcoming white paper we will be publishing shortly on DLP issues (data loss prevention or data leak protection, whichever you prefer). That issue focuses on the impact of DLP systems' modification of e-mails and other messaging content in the context of how that content is archived.

Which do you adjust: The culture or the technology?

08/26/08

A reader of a recent newsletter article disagreed with my comment about unified communications that read "perhaps the first step should be to adjust the culture to fit the technology - you're likely to be less successful if you try to use technology to change your corporate culture." His contention was that technology should not be used to try and change people or the way they work.

A sweet tool for mobility and data access

08/21/08

The Dieringer Research Group of WorldatWork estimated that in 2006 28.7 million American workers telecommuted at least one day per month, and that up to 100 million people may be doing so by 2010. The advantages of telecommuting are obvious: less employee time spent in traffic, lower gasoline consumption, fewer expenditures on office space, and the like.

Why organizations don't implement enterprise instant messaging

08/19/08

We have just wrapped up a major study of the instant messaging, real-time communications and presence market. The goal of this study is to understand how real-time communications technologies, such as instant messaging and Web conferencing, are used by midsized and North American organizations.

Unified communications and corporate culture

08/14/08

Last week, I discussed one reader's opposition to the growing use of presence and my assertion that unified communications in the future will look more like today's social networking sites. A reader of that newsletter had this to say...

How frequently do you check mobile e-mail?

08/12/08

We have just completed two surveys on mobile messaging - one with IT decision makers and the other with end users. For the North American portion of the end user survey, we asked a number of questions about how, where and when mobile e-mail is used.

Gaining insight and control in your messaging infrastructure

08/07/08

E-mail is an extraordinarily useful tool, as virtually all of us recognize. However, it can create enormous liabilities for an organization and it can cost an organization more than it should.

Resisting the move to unified communications

08/05/08

A reader offers some insightful thought on the future of unified communications, "It is cool to find out that you are at some Expo and find out that there is a new gadget from Twitter. The fact that you are now going to the restroom is more than I need to know. Yes, unified communications may become like Facebook or MySpace, but I hope not."

What will truly unified communication be like?

07/31/08

There's a lot of talk about unified communications - the integration of e-mail, voice, fax, video, presence-enabled applications like instant messaging, collaboration tools and other capabilities into a unified system that can be accessed through a single interface. But what if we look 10 years down the road and examine the characteristics of a truly unified communications system? Here are my thoughts on what that might look like.

Making a federal case out of records preservation

07/29/08

On April 15, three U.S. representatives introduced H.R. 5811, The Electronic Message Preservation Act. This Act, if passed into law, would bring up to date the parameters of the Federal Records Act and the Presidential Records Act, effectively requiring the preservation of government records in a way that current practice does not dictate. The impetus for the submission of the bill was the loss of thousands or millions of e-mails by the White House over the past several years.

How adequately are you protected against information leaks?

07/24/08

We recently conducted a survey for FaceTime Communications to determine how well organizations are protected against information leaks. Here's some of what we found:

Hosted messaging market trends

07/22/08

We have just published a new report on the hosted, software-as-a-service and managed services market for messaging services in North America. Here's some of what we found:

The need to archive e-mail is a growing concern

07/17/08

We conducted a study recently and asked decision-makers in midsized and large organizations in North America about how concerned they are on a variety of issues. We asked them whether they are more, less or equally concerned about each issue now compared to 12 months earlier.

Standardizing instant messaging protocols

07/15/08

Industries thrive when there is just one standard to adopt. E-mail has become much more pervasive because of the SMTP protocol; the video industry grew quickly because VHS won out over beta; IBM dominated the PC industry in the 1980s because only 20% or so of its architecture was proprietary; Warner's and Wal-Mart's decision to go exclusively with Blu-Ray effectively killed HD DVD, paving the way for more rapid growth of the high-def video format.

Migrating data from one system to another is not for the faint of heart

07/10/08

Migrating from one messaging server platform to another is not for the faint of heart, particularly for large organizations that store tens or hundreds of terabytes of messaging data on their servers and support thousands of users. The process is difficult, time-consuming and often results in data loss, conversion problems, lots of weekends spent by IT personnel on problem resolution and the like.

The MacBook Air and the security of your data

07/08/08

Much has been made of the Apple MacBook Air's smallish hard disk (and even smaller flash memory drive). I use one regularly and haven't found the 80-gigabyte drive to be an impediment, but I'm using it primarily for e-mail, Web surfing and writing - nothing that requires really heavy lifting on the part of the CPU or for storage. However, I think that the MacBook Air and computers like it may represent the future of computing for international travelers.

The long road for unified communications

07/03/08

Gnostic Concepts, one of the leading market research and consulting firms of its time, merged its communications and computer practices in 1984 in advance of what it perceived to be the joining of both fields into a unified communications/messaging paradigm. While that was a wise move in many ways, the only problem is that they were about 20 years too early.

You can, but should you purge everything?

07/01/08

Some still believe that deleting all e-mail and other messaging content is the least risky strategy for their organization, that it reduces risk by eliminating e-mails that might contain damaging content from senior executives, etc. The number of those who believe in a "purge everything" strategy is diminishing rapidly compared to even just a couple of years ago.

Unified communications and security

06/26/08

Unified communications and unified messaging provide a number of advantages for organizations of all sizes: users will be more productive through the consolidation of various communication types; IT departments will become more efficient by integrating management of e-mail, voice, instant messaging and fax into a single system; decision-making will be faster; and companies will save money.

Does an employer have the right to view employee text messages?

06/24/08

Last week, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that an employer does not have the right to view employees' text messages without a warrant. The ruling is based primarily on who pays for the storage of the content. For e-mail stored on company's servers, U.S. law is quite clear that employers own the content because they pay for the storage. The Court, however, does not view text messaging in the same way: because employers do not pay for the storage, but instead pay only for the service itself, employers do not have the same legal access to this content.

E-discovery is becoming much more important

06/19/08

E-discovery is simply the extension of the discovery process to information that is stored electronically and includes e-mail, instant messages, word processing files, spreadsheets and other electronic content that may be stored on desktops, laptops, file servers, mainframes, smartphones, employees' home computers or on a variety of other platforms. Unified communications and unified messaging systems that store a variety of different data types, including voicemails and instant messages, further complicate the entire process.

Should you consider tomatoes in your messaging infrastructure decisions?

06/17/08

Let's say you were the final decision maker at McDonald's who decided to stop using tomatoes at the company's roughly 12,800 restaurants in the United States. Your decision would certainly make sense given the fact that (a) you wouldn't want people to be harmed by your food and (b) you don't want to be sued for serving food that makes people sick. Now, how would you get the word out to all of these restaurants' managers and staff in a timely way and ensure that they had received the order to stop serving tomatoes immediately?

The impact of attachments on e-mail systems

06/12/08

Most of us have experienced the problem of trying to receive an e-mail with an attachment that was too large for our mail system to accept, or trying to deliver a large attachment to someone with the same limitations. We recently conducted a survey of corporate e-mail users in order to determine the impact of attachments on e-mail systems.

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Michael Osterman is principal analyst of Osterman Research.