CCTV: a nice little earner for the IT crowd

Friday, September 10th, 2010

If you take look at the product portfolio of a networking company such as Cisco, there are some things that you would never have imagined seeing a decade ago. The diversity is pretty immense and includes storage, applications servers, teleconferencing services such as WebEx, and even home wireless audio gizmos from its Linksys brand.  Yet one of the most interesting is video – and specifically, CCTV.

The UK has between two and four million CCTV cameras in operation. It’s hard to pin the exact number down as there is no requirement to register them, so figures are based on somewhat flaky sales data. What is certain is that the bulk of these cameras use analogue technology which causes a lot of problems in terms of quality, accessibility and reliability.

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What next for HP?

Wednesday, August 11th, 2010

The IT industry and Wall Street were both rocked this week by the resignation of HP CEO Mark Hurd after he was caught fiddling his expenses and concealing a relationship with a female contractor.

The criticisms levelled at Hurd over his tenure as CEO include that of stifling innovation in favour of making money. However, since he took the reins in 2005, HP’s market value has more than doubled to roughly $100bn, so those are some big shoes to fill. To quote Motley Fool analyst Rick Munarriz: “Outside of Steve Jobs at Apple, it’s hard to imagine a CEO that is more important to his company than Mark Hurd to Hewlett Packard. He did a massive turnaround job.”

Like me, you’ve probably read the coverage with interest. However, the real talking point now is where does HP go from here?

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How will IT departments cope with virtualisation fever?

Thursday, July 22nd, 2010

This week, the Channel Pro team has been chatting about different industry trends, and in particular, the virtualisation ‘love-in’ that we’ve seen happening for a while now. Better utilisation of resources, lower power consumption, ease of management – the list of things virtualisation can do seems endless. Too good to be true? Well maybe it is, a little.

Those who remember back to the switch from mainframe to client server will recognise another paradigm shift, but there are some drawbacks. Much more technically adept colleagues tell me virtual machines are easy to set up and deploy but gauging performance is much trickier. And even though assets are now sweated harder, performance is degraded as resources are no longer dedicated.

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Cisco and Compellent in bullish mood… so is the downturn over?

Friday, May 14th, 2010

I’ve just returned from a trip to the US to find a coalition Government in power for the first time in my lifetime, with Nick Clegg and David Cameron exchanging jokes, patting one another on the back and generally expressing bullish optimism for the future.

There must be something in the air, because there was much the same feeling of bullish optimism in two of the conferences I attended stateside, both of which were organised by US vendors for their international partners.

And in both, the vendors were attempting to convey an upbeat, “go-get-‘em” approach to their respective sales channels.

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Top 10 business technologies of 2010 – really?

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

Analysts at Gartner yesterday attempted to look into the future to guess what would be making the biggest impacts on businesses in 2010, as it revealed the top 10 strategic technologies for 2010.

Technologies to make the top ten include Client Computing (think virtualisation, again), Social Computing (personal and work time will mix, darn it) and, rather less exotically, Flash Memory.

Meanwhile, Gartner also points to the rise in mobile apps, stating that despite the plethora of applications for platforms such as the iPhone, it predicts a newer version with identical operating system interface and processor architecture.

But can we trust Gartner to predict the future? (more…)

Stephen Gately, tube workers and the power of Twitter

Monday, October 19th, 2009

This weekend saw a fascinating display of the influence of social networking, and how it harnessed its power to unify – and arguably lead – people to rally together against wrongdoing.

Events kicked off on Friday morning when the Daily Mail published an article by one of its columnists, Jan Moir, on the death of Boyzone’s Stephen Gately last weekend, in which she claims there was “nothing natural”  about the circumstances of the gay singer’s demise, and that Gately’s death struck a blow to the “happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships.”

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Should you be sacked for sending SHOUTY email?

Friday, September 4th, 2009

This week it was reported that a New Zealand woman was sacked from her job as an accountant at a healthcare company after colleagues complained that her emails were too “shouty”.  This was because of her tendency to write her emails in CAPITAL LETTERS.

Perhaps understandably, she thought that by using capital letters, her fellow employees would PAY MORE ATTENTION to her missives than if she used regular, lower case.

An employment tribunal also heard that Vicki Walker behaved “provocatively” by highlighting the REALLY IMPORTANT phrases in bold or red.  In one office-wide email presented as evidence she had typed in bold blue letters: “TO ENSURE YOUR STAFF CLAIM IS PROCESSED AND PAID, PLEASE DO FOLLOW THE BELOW CHECK LIST.”

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