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Market Roundup HP and Cisco Join Together for Pervasive WLAN |
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HP and Cisco Join Together for Pervasive WLAN
This week HP and Cisco announced a joint effort to bring applications and services based on Cisco’s Pervasive Indoor Wireless technology to enterprise customers. Cisco announced many of the core services in its Unified Wireless Network Solution family in June, and the new applications and services include security, guest access, voice-over WiFi, and location-based services. HP and Cisco envision customers using these capabilities for applications such as IT asset tracking, presence-based applications, dual-mode voice, and integrated intrusion detection and prevention. The companies expect enterprise customers to find improved operation efficiencies and reduced costs for wireless network services. Cisco will address WLAN security, deployment, management, and control issues. HP Services will build upon the Cisco platform and provide design, systems integration, and management services as well as support for the new solutions. Cisco believes that a significant step in this solution was the introduction of products that work with its Light Weight Access Point Protocol (LWAPP), a management protocol that allows intelligence for a wireless network to be located centrally. Cisco believes that by moving the intelligence to a centralized controller, configuration time for an access point can be significantly reduced. HP Services will be able to take advantage of LWAPP to provide faster deployment and expansion, as well as simplified management.
The evolution of wireless networks has resembled the earlier evolution of LANs in the enterprise. At first they were either designed for small groups and then later expanded to include everyone, or they were designed for specific applications, such as shared printers or files. This soon expanded as the technology became pervasive until today when it is hard to find an enterprise without a network. Wireless networking is not yet pervasive, but the range of capabilities and applications possible with wireless networks is growing as the underlying components are maturing and hardening around security and standards. HP is one of the first major integrators to develop a practice around pervasive WLAN and Cisco is a natural choice as it is owns the lion’s share of corporate networking revenue and is heavily investing in its WLAN capabilities. Although HP owns ProCurve, who also provides network equipment, like most professional services businesses HP tries to provide multiple vendors’ products in order to remain neutral for its customers.
Cisco meanwhile is facing some of the same issues in networking that its partners are facing with systems and storage. As many components become commoditized, there is less and less value in providing hardware, and leading-edge design provides a shorter and shorter first-mover market advantage. Instead, software, services, and solutions are the three magic words. Making routers is not the important bit, but providing the solutions comprised of the applications and services that make next generation networks valuable to enterprise customers is what it takes to be the strategic partner to enterprises. Additionally, both HP and Cisco have managed to credibly introduce management into the discussion. Many of the issues facing network managers—again like those facing systems managers—revolve around managing the various entities on the network. HP’s OpenView is another product the two companies are hoping to bring into the solution to help make managing simpler, and to provide HP another leg up in the management battle. HP and Cisco customers who want to investigate pervasive wireless networking in their environment have an opportunity to be one of the pioneers of next-generation projects. Finally, HP can regain some exposure in this space and build its professional services in a sensible direction at the same time. We look forward to hearing about projects in this space.
This week
Job scheduling is one
of those areas of IT that is almost invisible to the enterprise as a whole but
which has always been incredibly important. Its importance will only increase
as organizations seek to utilize their IT systems in the most effective and
business-efficient means possible. The fact that
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has released the draft of its five-year strategic plan designed to foster American innovation and competitiveness at home and around the globe. The draft is soliciting public comment—including suggestions, questions, and other input—regarding optimizing the quality and timeliness of the patent and trademark review process that will guide the agency from 2007-2012. The Office indicated that it would be publishing the final plan in early 2007. Included in the proposed plan is a peer review mechanism that would encourage outside participants to provide feedback on patent applications, in part to help lessen the burden on the Office staff. Separately, a patent attorney and accountant announced the launch of wikipatents.com, a patent-rating site with more than 3 million patent listings that in part seeks to help patent examiners, attorneys, litigants, inventors, and other interested third parties decide whether existing patents deserve patent protection. In addition, the site plans to garner feedback on pending patent applications in the future. Current features of the site include searching by patent number, reading/writing a patent's description in laypersons' terms, rating a patent’s technical accuracy, voting on a reasonable royalty value, and providing licensing information and/or availability. In addition, site users can list prior pieces of art, i.e., previously available public information related to a present invention, such as academic literature and other published patents, which they feel are relevant to assessing the patent in question.
Last January we
discussed the Open Source Software as Prior Art project that OSDL,
Wikipatents.com looks to offer contributors a star-based rating scheme, a la restaurant or hotel reviews, as part of their commentary. While such a visual representation can be helpful in quickly gleaning relevant information, it does not in and of itself come near the depth of technical review warranted in the patent-granting process. When recognized as prior art, patents descendent from innovation developed on top of existing patents can be clearly delineated from the works that have already been created. To us, the more eyes there are out there viewing patents the better, as this could aid in the patent examination process, with substantial amounts of information aggregated and roughly reviewed prior to the patent examiner’s initial investigation into a proposed patent. Just as with the open source or other similar communities of interest, encouraging the broader community to comment on the patent process could assist examiners when it comes to deeply technical or mind-numbing abstractions, and thus help move the process along.
While we not sure how wikipatents.com commentaries might mesh with the results of The Patent Quality Index for example, or at what point information gathering initiatives would become duplicative, or worse, competitive, right now we believe raising the awareness of patent quality issues is paramount. To our way of thinking, the higher the awareness, the higher the participation by the community at large, the higher the likelihood of patent process reform, and thus the higher overall value of the patents themselves. We are quite pleased to see continued interest in improving the patent process and the process being championed by new communities. we shall keep a keen eye on this exciting, and very important space.
Amazon Joins the Server Network
Amazon recently
announced its intention to offer computing power on demand over the Internet.
This service is now in beta testing and is targeted at software developers
writing Web applications. It is called Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and
is being offered at $0.10 (yes, one thin dime) per instance hour consumed. Each
instance hour provides the equivalent processing power of a 1.7 GHz Xeon-based
server with 1.75GB
Essentially, with this
announcement Amazon has decided to become a provider of computing services on
demand for software developers. This means that software developers do not need
to purchase their own servers and thus purchase the attendant support issues.
Purchasing only what is needed from Amazon could allow developers to worry
about their real business: writing cool software. However, Amazon, like any
retail business, suffers from seasonal highs and lows. Would its extra server
capacity that is available in, say, April also be available in the middle of
the December Christmas rush? We don’t believe that this is going to turn into
an entirely new business model for Amazon, replacing its über-successful online
marketplace. Rather, this seems to us a way for savvy businesspeople to make
the most of their assets. Have extra server capacity? Sell it, cover some sunk
cost, and maybe generate some profit. If this new venture does become a
significant business for Amazon, would it think about changing its business
model? Perhaps it would make sense for Amazon to charge different rates at
different times of the year, or even different times of the day. On the
speculative side, if this idea catches on, maybe eBay will start auctioning off
its extra server time. If the two Internet retail giants start muscling in on
the server-for-hire business, what might this mean for other service providers
as well as the system vendors Sun, HP,
One thing that may give Amazon an edge over other companies, besides its low price point, is its better-than-average customer service. Part of Amazon’s success story lies in the realization that customers are in charge of its revenue, so Amazon generally treats its customers very well. With most other companies, the customer service can be a spotty, binary experience: it is either on or off, and with some, it is mostly off. Better customer service, in addition to lower price points, may just put Amazon on the map of the software designer’s possible options for extra computing power, despite the fact that Amazon isn’t generally what one thinks of first. But, diversification is healthy, or so they say in Business 101. And we have to admit, Amazon has definitely mastered the basics of running a successful business.