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Mobile was a big hit in this week’s roundup. Major topics included enterprise mobile applications and Facebook Home’s effect on mobile security.

1. Forrester VP says enterprise mobile applications miss the mark – James Denman (SearchSoftwareQuality)

During his recent keynote address at EclipseCon, Forrester Vice President Jeffrey Hammond stated that building an enterprise mobile application shouldn’t be the focus of application development teams.

2. Facebook Home for Android heightens mobile data security concerns – James Furbush (SearchConsumerization)

With Facebook recently announcing the arrival of the ‘Facebook Home’, James Furbush discusses possible data security and private challenges that Home could bring to BYOD environments.

3. Social Media recruitment must be engaging, attractive to candidates – Aaron Lester (SearchFinancialApplications)

As social media recruitment grows rapidly, Aaron Lester says recruiters need to be social, engaging and attractive to in order to stay competitive.

4. Networking blogs: Tips for network strategies, handing tech support – Madelyn Stone (SearchNetworking)

Bloggers from across the network looked at several topics including why companies should ditch tech-specific plans for more general corporate strategies, and five trends that will dominate the networking industry in the near future.

5. Cloud telephony: A potential hit or miss for businesses? – Gina Narcisi (SearchUnifiedCommunications)

During Enterprise Connect, a panel of hosted and cloud telephony users spoke about their implantation process and why their processes make sense for their companies.

Despite grand ambitions at the start of the recession, Cisco’s been in a slump: Its stock price has struggled, its consumer ambitions have been shattered and a few rounds of layoffs have tried to focus the company on what matters to its core business, network dominance.

That focus will be put to the test soon as new competitors from above and below take aim at Cisco. The marquee name in this battle is none other than Google, which recently previewed its OpenFlow initiative to Wired.

Google’s Urs Hölzle wasted no time in outlining, peripherally, two of the existential threats facing Cisco, Cheaper hardware and smarter software:

“It’s not hard to build networking hardware,” says Hölzle, in an advance briefing provided exclusively to Wired. “What’s hard is to build the software itself as well.”

Commodification of hardware has been driving networking equipment prices down, and Cisco’s five priorities explicitly state it’s pushing towards a “smarter network” strategy. But Google has an almost unrivaled brain trust and while Hölzle explicitly stated his company isn’t interested in competing with Cisco and Juniper, he did state he wants them to fall in line with OpenFlow, further commodifying their offerings.

Which brings us to Nicira, also profiled in Wired this week, a feisty startup with ex-Cisco employees which explicitly does want to chip away at Cisco’s dominance. Nicira CTO and co-founder Martin Casado and vice president of marketing Alan S. Cohen did a lengthy interview with Shamus McGillicuddy this February, discussing their plans to virtualize the network, pushing more intelligence to the edge while working to make almost all network hardware interchangeable.

Nicira’s vision is a radical rethinking of what networking vendors will do, pushing traditional players farther away from the interesting, high-value work:

Do you need to build relationships with the network hardware vendors?

Casado: No, we don’t. These will become two different problem domains. Eventually Microsoft and VMware will also take similar approaches. [The network] hardware will essentially become a backplane. It will become a fabric. That fabric will still have to be competitive. It will have to be competitive on price, on the ability to do QoS, on the scale it can achieve [and] on the latency. That will be a separate entity in the market from the virtual network, which provides the provisioning, the security policies, the QoS policies, isolation and things like that.

There’s a lot of ambitious claims made in the networking space about reinventing the network (often made several times a year by all the incumbents as well as new whippersnappers), but now Cisco will feel pressure to make sure it can lead that revolution before someone else manages to redefine the hardware giant’s role for it.

SOPA, otherwise known as the Stop Online Piracy Act, has created headlines all across the United States. We have seen protests from New York City to Silicon Valley.  Even Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg weighed in with a status against SOPA.

“Sharing and talking about content and art are valuable to our everyday lives,” said Tiffiniy Cheng, co-founder of Fight for the Future.

Critics are comparing the bill to the Great Firewall of China, which controls and censors the Chinese Internet.

Jordan Hahn, CEO of IT firm Silent Movement Inc., told euronews that “Both bills contain broad language which could be used to censor web content and search engines in ways similar to China’s Great Firewall. The bills themselves are so far-reaching, it is impossible to predict their potential effects upon the internet as a whole. The question I have for the American government is simply this: Is it a good idea to put restrictions upon the last bastion of American innovation?”

What would happen to technology and the Internet if SOPA is passed by Congress? Thousands of Internet sites could be vulnerable to legal restrictions and possible shutdown.

Even though SOPA would target domain names outside the United States, many American companies have domain names registered abroad.  Businesses all across the U.S. would need to monitor Internet content and user access.

Network security personalities Dan Kaminsky and Paul Vixie sent a letter to Congress opposing SOPA stating the bill could ‘seriously harm the credibility of the United States in its role as a steward of key Internet infrastructure.’

The key fact to take away is SOPA will affect everyone, from major corporations to small start-up businesses.

Social media in particular could be potentially devastated by the passing of SOPA. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube would need to find a way to screen messages to filter links and pictures of pirated domains.

Technology and IT sites depend on social media to promote content and advertise online.  How would companies promote and engage their online community without it?

Social media has become the focal point for where businesses, groups, and people could interact with each other. If it’s taken away, technology and the American economy would take a significant hit.

Michael Tidmarsh is the assistant community editor at ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

A lot. The Marines, and in fact the entire Department of Defense, were mandated early adopters of IPv6, citing security and operational requirements. They had targeted FY 2008 as the final IPv6 transition date, with the transition plan going dated for 2004.

So I filed a Freedom of Information request for the full transition plan, and eight months later I got my response, embedded here:

The 38-page transition plan details, at a high level, all the steps the Marines took to ensure a smooth, cost effective switch to IPv6 while ensuring backwards compatibility, and there’s a lot of great case study material in there, especially if you’ve been pushing off your own switch.

• Start upgrading without disruption. One of the first steps the Marine Corps took was mandating that all equipment bought after October 1, 2003 be both IPv4 and IPv6 capable, ensuring that there wouldn’t be sudden end-of-lifing of relatively new equipment due to IPv6 incompatability.
• Plenty of lead time. In 2004, when the guide was drafted, IPv4 address exhaustion was a seemingly distant possibility. Now, it’s an impending reality. By planning far ahead, many changes could be incremental rather than wholesale.
• Trust but verify. Section 2-2 of the transition plan outlines various definitions. IPv6 capable devices, for example, means it is IPv6 ready today, as well as maintains IPv4 interopability. IPv6 enabled, however, means that the vendor states it is IPv6 ready today … but it hasn’t been tested internally yet. Internal testing of those claims is the key differentiator between capable and enabled, and often between a smooth transition and months of headaches and overruns.
• Failure IS an option. When it’s controlled, at least. The Marines created a “waiver” program that took into consideration edge cases. By adapting to situations where IPv6 targets couldn’t be met, it’s possible to keep track of what didn’t work out, why and plan for when it can be remedied.
• Forms makes process. The Marines also put together a number of forms for each department to follow, worksheets to help managers, for whom IPv6 probably isn’t a top priority, make sure they were aware of key considerations and could stay on target without major distraction.

The guy has a good personal story to tell: He was diagnosed with dyslexia as a kid, overcame it, excelled at Middle America universities – first at West Virginia and later at Indiana – and rose to head one of the world’s largest and most influential companies. He has an even better and more relevant business story to tell: He has pulled a company through a wrenching period – including big layoffs – helped reinvent its culture and operations and made money in the complex global marketplace.

He knows firsthand how government can both impede – and encourage – growth and deals daily with the competitive pressures of China and other emerging markets.

He could run as an authentic outsider, someone who hasn’t spent his life pursuing public office. A Washington-has-no-damn-clue message on navigating and dominating the world economy would resonate for many. His smooth speaking style and self-confidence would play well on the national stage.

More ingenious Cisco product placement? I hope not, but Chambers is one of the most non-conventional candidates on the list, now that Bloomberg’s established his political chops. Would he or could he make a presidential contender? I’m doubtful. Sure, he has the sales experience that comes with a large enterprise business, and that would surely help negotiate through the labyrinthine maze of Washington deal making.

He’s also got the technical chops: Cisco has had its down years, certainly, but he has plotted bold visions and painful pivots to keep the company strong, focused and ambitious. I simply don’t think the current leadership in Washington would know what to do with a Chambers presidency, stymieing any forward momentum from both sides, and I think his long-tenure as CEO and later Chairman at Cisco has ill-prepared him for the compromise, gridlock and frustration American politics hold.

But I could be wrong: His political aspiration led him to co-chair John McCain’s 2007 Presidential run, and Fast Company profiled him as a “hardcore Republican” experimenting with socialist corporate values.

Either way, I think Washington could definitely learn a lot from tech culture and Chambers in particular:

• It’s OK to admit your wrong: Chambers stepped away from Cisco’s 25 vaunted priorities, apologizing to the company’s stock holders, employees and customers just a few years after betting the farm on them. In politics, that’s called flip-flopping. In business, not doing that is called suicide.
• Directly connecting with people matters. TelePresence has been derided by some as a dressed up version of teleconferencing, but to Chambers, it’s an essential part of Cisco’s strategy. More closely connecting with others, whether in personal life, business life or political life, is important. That’s a lesson Washington seems to have forgotten on both sides.
• Building culture. A lot of politicians talk about the “culture” of Washington: Insider culture, partisan culture. But few seem to be able to actually do something about it. Chambers underscored the importance of building a quality corporate culture at Cisco, which was based on a non-partisan vision for a better future.

Reports of the sentencing of a Virginia woman, Chun-Yu Zhao, convicted of leading a counterfeiting group that specialized in Cisco equipment are circulating today. Add money laundering and fraudulent citizenship practices, and what kind of punishment can you expect? Sixty months in prison, $2.7M, a $17,500 fine, and three years of supervised release after her term.

But Zhao won’t be returning to her various homes, condos, Porsches, Mercedes, bank accounts, or even her U.S. citizenship after her sentence is up, the majority of which will be seized by the federal government.

Cisco and the federal government are no strangers to counterfeit IT products, which spurred the heightened effort to target companies peddling these knock-off goods, usually in the form of Cisco resellers. In 2005, the Department of Justice, FBI, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and U.S. Customers and Border Protection (CBP) reported over 700 separate instances of seizing counterfeit network equipment during Operation Network Raider. There have been over $143M in seizures, $3.6M in restitution ordered, five convictions, and over a decade in sentences being served for these crimes. As usual, what is actually lost — security where it’s needed most — can only be returned over time with continued efforts such as these.

Melanie Yarbrough is the assistant community editor at ITKnowledgeExchange.com. Follow her on Twitter or send her an email at Melanie@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

A new hope

As a little background, if you haven’t heard: Léo Apotheker, who was named HP’s president and CEO a little over a year ago, announced that the company’s PC division was going to be spun off, and its mobile hardware division wound (although the company claims WebOS will live on in licenses). At the same time, it was announced that HP was acquiring a U.K. company called Autonomy, which dubs itself the pioneer of “meaning-based computing.” The technology looks like a mix of e-discovery, enterprise search and fancy graphs, with a business very similar to Apotheker’s last company, SAP. In fact, the acquisitions $10 billion price tag and Apotheker’s statements have made clear that this company is critical to charting HP’s future strategy.

“Autonomy has an attractive business model, including a strong cloud based solution set, which is aligned with HP’s efforts to improve our portfolio mix,” he said in a press release. ”We believe this bold action will squarely position HP in software and information to create the next-generation Information Platform, and thereby, create significant value for our shareholders.”

And while the release goes on to talk vaguely about how this acquisition “aligns” with the rest of HP’s IT divisions, the fact is Autonomy is a largely cloud-driven company which seems like it would benefit very little from any enterprise synergies, except as far as HP could de-commoditize cheap hardware by putting expensive software on it.

Show me the money

The strange thing is, I could find almost nothing, even among my tech press peers, about what this means for HP. It’s like everyone forgot that the division even existed except for as a vague synergy. But deep down on HP’s summary of its Q3 earnings, some hopeful notes:

Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking (ESSN)revenue grew 7% year over year with a 13.0% operating margin. Networking was up 15%, Industry Standard Servers was up 9%, Business Critical Systems was down 9%, and HP Storage was up 8%. 3PAR revenue accelerated, with triple-digit year-over-year growth operationally.

That’s not the 20% growth the software side of HP saw, and they didn’t highlight margins or any actual numbers (Is it a tiny part of the overall business? Is it profitable yet?), but it’s a lot more enticing than the sales dud that was WebOS, particularly since the enterprise market is less fickle and easier to squeeze a long-term margin out of then consumers.

For some context, the company’s last quarterly statement included this breakdown (note that all numbers are in millions):

As you can see, while ESSN (HP’s catchall for their IT hardware) is profitable, but just chump change compared to the money they get from enterprise services and those higher-value options they can lay on top of their hardware. With that background, an SAP-ish future for HP makes a lot of sense. Particularly since, later on in the quarterly filing, HP acknowledges that it is fighting a way on many fronts, spreading itself too thin:

Unlike many of our competitors, we have a portfolio of businesses and must allocate resources across these businesses while competing with companies that specialize in one or more of these product lines. As a result, we may invest less in certain areas of our businesses than our competitors do, and these competitors may have greater financial, technical and marketing resources available to them than our businesses that compete against them. Industry consolidation also may affect competition by creating larger, more homogeneous and potentially stronger competitors in the markets in which we compete, and our competitors also may affect our business by entering into exclusive arrangements with existing or potential customers or suppliers.

I’ll take a look at the latest HP financial statements as they become available, and hopefully we can learn more about the fate of ProCurve and the rest of the HP enterprise hardware family.

Michael Morisy is the editorial director for ITKnowledgeExchange. He can be followed on Twitter or you can reach him at Michael@ITKnowledgeExchange.com. Image via Flickr user John McNab.

Cisco Live was quite the event (check out our full Cisco Live! guide for a quick look back), and with 15,000 attendees in person and 40,000 watching virtually, it certainly felt like everyone with any interest in the company or its technology was there. But if you weren’t able to make it out to Vegas (or attend every session you wanted), a lot of the material presented live is now available from Cisco Live Virtual, including a lot of video, briefing decks, tutorials and more. Cisco even included the keynotes, including the flashmob opening featuring dozens of Cisco employees (see after the jump for a preview).

Michael Morisy is the editorial director for ITKnowledgeExchange. He can be followed on Twitter or you can reach him at Michael@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

Cisco’s making it clear that the Cius “is not just a tablet” and “much more than a tablet” and “not a tablet.” Mention the word “tablet” around a Cisco executive and you can visibly see muscles tighten and for good reason: The Cius doesn’t stand up well as a standalone device against the iPad, or even the newer Android tablets, and Cisco’s recently-watched RIM’s PlayBook, marketed as the professional-grade tablet, flame out in spectacular fashion.

And Cisco has a leg to stand on when arguing it’s not a tablet. Tom Puorro, senior director of product management at Cisco, said the device was developed primarily by the company’s IP telephony group, which means much of its design and functionality DNA comes straight from Cisco’s high-end desk phones, and if you think of it in that vein – as a replacement for a desk phone that runs in the hundreds of dollars – then it begins to make some sense. Cisco is highly encouraging coupling the device with a purpose-built stand that includes a sturdy IP phone and even letting them plug in an external monitor that can be used to operate the Cius in a desktop-like fashion, complete with external mouse and keyboard.

Even by Cisco standards, however, it’s a pricey phone: The stand for the Cius runs $300 by itself, bringing the price for this package up to around what Cisco originally planned on.

When I asked Barry O’Sullivan, head of Cisco’s voice technology group, how they managed to chop off $250 from the original price, he said manufacturing volume and increased sales projections. How high were those projections?

“We sell 7 million IP phones a year, so somewhere in the order of that magnitude,” he said. “We don’t break out those numbers.” Puorro chimed in with more modest goals: “More than one.” For comparison, RIM’s PlayBook sold a million its first quarter and was reportedly on track for 800 thousand its second quarter.

Incapable by its own standards

Puorro was, of course, joking about Cisco’s aspirations: Cisco has quietly been selling the device to a few select customers before its more general release, through qualified partners, later this month. The publicly announced ones are generally cozy relationships: AT&T and Verizon, both of which hope to resell the devices for a hefty margin into the enterprise, and some educational customers which reported their students loved getting a first look at new hardware.

I found, however, that the Cius was a less-than-capable device at the points Cisco most eagerly promoted. For example, one of the verticals Cisco has been widely touting is healthcare, which has always been an early adopter of tablets. But one of the hypothetical situations the company references – using the back facing camera to send live video of a patient from a nurse to a doctor at home – simply does not work. You can record video with the back camera, but there is no option to switch to it or use it in a video call, meaning that the hypothetical stroke victim is now asked to hold onto the Cius, steady it, and follow the doctor’s instructions on helping him remotely inspect the potential trauma.

A Cisco engineer said that this feature would be addressed, and in fact it has been: By Apple, which implemented that exact feature about a year ago. No timeline for Cisco’s implementation was given.

Another widely touted feature was the remote desktop and desktop virtualization capabilities of the Cius, particularly when coupled with the above-mentioned stand.

“Cius represents a consolidation of the desktop,” Puorro said, stating that he no longer used a PC and instead did all his work right on a docked Cius.

With most monitors, however, the Cius offers a distorted view (the Cius 153.6:90.0 screen is stretched to fit, for example, a 16:9 monitor). A Cisco executive said that some higher-end monitors can correct for this. And while there are some clever new elements (right clicking brings up a clickable version of the Android menu bar, for example), some standard short cuts won’t work.

More importantly, the device is laggy as a desktop replacement: Like with most Android tablets, there’s a noticeable pause when doing a variety of tasks. The worst case might be typing: Typing a long URL into the web browser, for example, and the characters will start to trail your fingers. The problem is dramatically compounded by the virtual desktop tools, where network latency is added into the mix and further compounds the problem. It’s perfectly fine for typing in quick notes or even working in a pinch. Elsewhere on the tablet, apps would randomly crash, even though the demo devices had very few apps installed. These sorts of problems are what sparked the eternal wars between users and IT.

Coming soon

Just like the fully-functional back facing camera update, Cisco executives promised that a number of important features and fixes were “coming soon.” The operating system itself is still Android 2.x, built for smart phones. Cisco executives said that the company plans on updating the machines to the tablet-ready Ice Cream Sandwich at some point in the future, but there was no timetable. Meanwhile, one of the Cius’ key features, business-defined app stores-within-a-store, was just announced by Apple, even as vendors have worked quickly to fill other enterprise needs for control. Even Cisco has produced a great WebEx iPad app, yet again reducing the advantages the Cius can offer to the enterprise.

And on the low-end, I have to wonder if much of what the Cius is offering cannot be achieved not only more cheaply but more effectively with a smart phone device: For any employee who has to lug it around all day, the Cius is a relatively weighty piece of hardware. If you’re shooting and sending video, the latest generation of smartphones might work even better as far as being both intuitive and portable.

Missing the party … for now

During the keynote with CTO Padmasree Warrior and CIO Rebecca Jacoby, the executives made clear that the era of “just say no” to consumer devices was over. It really feels like, however, the Cius team didn’t get that memo. The stated feature list and problems the device addresses are very real – the importance of locking down data on mobile devices cannot be overstated – but vendor after vendor on the showroom floor was taking a more nuanced approach, offering web and native apps that balanced the business needs with the user demands by running securely on the device of choice.

The Cius approach is the opposite, offering a mashup of an older Android OS and custom Cisco software, freedom and control, all at a higher price point. It’s a strategy I’ve seen many vendors take with Android, and few if any offer an improved experience. I found myself wishing that the Cius had a little more Flip DNA in it and a little less of its IP phone heritage.

Internally, I spoke with a number of typically tight-lipped employees that felt the Cius was a product of the pre-lean Cisco, a product that was built and developed when Chambers thought Cisco could do it all. Having spent all that time and energy developing it, it would be a mistake not to release it and see what happens.

There is ample reason for hope long term for the Cius’ descendants, however. First of all, there will be a large segment of IT that will embrace the ideas and control the Cius promises, giving it at least some built in-usage early on. More importantly, however, I think that the Cius platform can potentially be a great teaching tool for Cisco and its partners in learning what works, and as long as something works, Cisco will come out ahead. They are, after all, providing the pipes over which video will be flowing no matter what software it uses.

Michael Morisy is the editorial director for ITKnowledgeExchange. He can be followed on Twitter or you can reach him at Michael@ITKnowledgeExchange.com. Check out our complete Cisco Live! Coverage guide for more breaking news.

Photo via

So the big news of Cisco’s upgraded Catalyst 6500 should not have been that big a surprise, but it sure felt like a letdown. Last year, we got Cisco announcing they were blazing tracks into a brand new area for them – the tablet! – and this year, all we get it a refresh to a 12-year-old product. So can the humble tech press, myself included, be forgiven for highlighting “new” features like “IPv4 and IPv6 support” support, even those Catalyst 6500 has supported that for years? I hope so, because it’s an important and impressive product with an interesting strategy (“most” of the new features and capabilities being offered do not even require a full upgrade). And more importantly, it highlights Cisco’s new-found strategy: Retreat to move forward.

Cisco’s realized that, as great as its Nexus line is, many of its core customers, the ones coming year in and year out to Cisco Live for example, still preferred the old, familiar, conservative way of doing things. Why throw out Cisco IOS for something new and different when you can have an upgraded version of the old?

Which is exactly what Cisco’s delivered, coupled with a promise of much more bang for your buck than HP (claims the latter disputes). Or, as my colleague Rivka Little so perfectly put it, “Cisco served up comfort food for the networking masses on the first day of Cisco Live 2011, sidestepping edgy cloud announcements and focusing instead on a major Catalyst 6500 upgrade.”

It should also be comfort food for Cisco’s shareholders. Has Jim Duffy notes, the leaner, meaner Nexus series has slashed profit margins for Cisco on a per-port basis, just as its starting to lose marketshare to budget competitors. Promising a more reliable, overall cheaper experience might be one way to staunch the bleeding even as it remains free to break new ground with Nexus.

Now that that’s out of the way, I highly recommend reading Rivka’s piece, which dives into the deep details of what makes the Catalyst 6500 tick, including the excellent service modules Cisco’s rolling out that will bake in firewall (yawn) and incredibly granular quality-of-service that segregates not just voice but also priority of voice calls, for example (now we’re talking.

Check back soon for the one glaring exception to Cisco’s new found conservatism, or chime in the comments on what you think it is or, more importantly, what you think of the Catalyst 6500 refresh.

Michael Morisy is the editorial director for ITKnowledgeExchange. He can be followed on Twitter or you can reach him at Michael@ITKnowledgeExchange.com. Check out our complete Cisco Live! Coverage guidefor more breaking news.