As I drove back to the office with a clean bill of health, I thought about how a holistic approach could also solve some of the aches and pains felt by enterprise businesses today. One of these pain-points lies inside the data center where infrastructure, network, and applications all meet. System health monitoring is typically divided between these three groups.  But problems arise because each group has its own tools to monitor performance and none of these groups has final responsibility over end-user performance. The lack of accountability results in a loss of productivity for the enterprise business when systems are down or not functioning optimally.

I spoke to Joe McKinney from ADCom Solutions who has been working with IT professionals for over three decades.  He explained that many companies struggle with aligning resources to manage and troubleshoot across multiple IT silos.  When a problem occurs, a “pizza party” with the various teams is needed to solve it. While the meal is delicious, it pulls IT staff away from strategic CIO technology initiatives that are needed to keep the business competitive and relevant. McKinney’s firm suggests that clients should take a more holistic approach. Managed Application Performance (MAP) is a new way to quickly isolate and mitigate the problems in the data center and vastly abbreviate the time it takes to fix them.

Here are three ways this approach could benefit your business:

1. Isolating the fault domain more quickly

By closely monitoring the entire system, small problems in any part of the IT stack are given proper attention.  A minor error in the network may not be reason for alarm, but when it is in conjunction with another alarm in the application, it poses a major impact to users. Holistic monitoring will quickly identify and fix the problem by alerting the right team. Before a bad IP routing address or line of code can cause a huge headache, Managed Application Performance brings the problem to its rightful owner to fix it in an orderly fashion By taking a holistic approach, Managed Application Performance allows companies to get the most out of the tools they have invested in even in this day and age of constrained resources.

2. More meaningful reporting

Most tool sets have vast reporting capabilities. But lack of resources and trained expertise prevents the data from making it to the executive’s desks.  The problem is further complicated by the fact that no one tool set exists to show the overall health readings. There have been ‘manager of manager’ systems on the market for years such as HP OpenView and IBM Tivoli, but they do not poll the user experience in an end-to-end manner and require trained staff to implement and operate. A managed holistic approach to monitoring does two things. It provides a regular and meaningful dashboard of the end-user experience and it provides correlative information to predict and proactively fix impending performance problems.  Legacy reporting metrics include system availability and uptime.  While these are intrinsically significant, an available system isn’t always usable by the end-user or customer.  Managed Application Performance creates of more meaningful metrics around whether an internal user can do their work or whether customers can purchase products on the ebusiness site.

3. Transforming the business

Kesha McDade, technical service director for AT&T in Richardson, Texas told me that she has seen a lot of interest in Managed Application Performance, especially from customers who are deploying transformational technologies such as new ERP, UC or VoIP systems. This is because customers lack a single point of contact that manages and troubleshoots across all the different silos.  Consider the following: when moving from a TDM to a VoIP platform the voice will now ride on the data backbone and call patterns will change from distributed PBX model to a much more centralized call-controller environment.  These two variables can be tricky, and there is only one shot to make a conversion like this work. Having end-to-end monitoring tools and reports is in high-demand when a business is transforming these mission critical applications.

Lack of resources and fragmented monitoring tool sets are common problems today for over-stretched IT departments. How is your company coping in this environment? Have you considered or implemented a holistic Managed Application Performance service to get the most from your investment in performance tools?

Technology-powered improvisation

It was just another not-so-typical Tuesday. A business partner and I were reviewing a presentation we were about to give on a new idea. When our executive sponsor arrived in the meeting room, he decided to add two new attendees to the meeting by teleconference.  And then the meeting took a sudden turn when our sponsor announced we had discussed the idea long enough, and we needed to get started on implementation. He wanted it operational in just a couple of months, including marketing and legal review, build-out, testing, and launch. Everyone was given action items, and keyboards whizzed to keep up with it all. We were all trying to alert the necessary teams about the new push.

Just then, someone burst into the room carrying a cake. The conference room was double-booked and we offered to find a smaller room. No worries. We were up and running within minutes on Wi-Fi and cellular signals in a space just down the hall. The very life of this project now owed its existence to the myriad of real-time technologies being used.

Real-time resource sharing

As this story illustrates, the network provides a form of ever-present and life-giving oxygen to the innovative worker.  But that vitality can breed new challenges and create social and personal burdens that need to be addressed. In order to address these challenges, here are few ways for workers to be more productive by leveraging real-time platforms that help keep everything organized.

1. When we have the whole Internet in our hands, how can we find the latest version of that presentation?

Just because I can access anything, anywhere and anytime, doesn’t mean I can easily find it. In my meeting, we faced some confusion over who had seen the latest version of the slides and who hadn’t. But enterprise social media software, like Chatter from Salesforce.com, can help eliminate this kind of confusion by creating mini-communities focused around a project. These private communities are like a shared website.  They are easy to set up and can even be securely extended to a vendor outside the company firewall. Inside the shared site is a single repository for all the files, plans, statistics, and dialog about the project. Team members look there to find information.  New team members get up to speed on the project by reading through the daily communication feed.  The feed shows all the interaction to date and even includes project milestones. Finally, platforms like Chatter are geared to the mobile user and allow mobile devices to be used to display activity real-time and preview large files quickly.

2. Realize the benefits of making analytics real-time.

Waiting for updated analytics from a program that updates only once or twice a day is one way to frustrate an employee working in real-time. If they can access the network, they expect the network to be up to date and have the numbers already crunched without enduring a long wait. This means analytics around web-site traffic for a Cyber-Monday retailer or getting circuit-breaker status for Superbowl electricians must be current. Cloud services can play an important role in enabling a real-time experience.

In the case of the retailer, large numbers are distilled to an easy-to-read dashboard, thanks to a powerful network connected to a service providers as-a-service (Xaas) server farm. In the case of the electricians, Machine to Machine (M2M) status is constantly monitored by cloud-enabled software.  The cloud makes sure things are running correctly. If there are problems, it alerts other machines or a human helper to correct the problem in real-time. No more blinking red lights!

3. Responsibly communicating with each other is an important advantage of real-time network access.

Finding ways to best communicate with people in any given situation is critical in a real-time world. For example, it might be best to open a chat conversation with an engineer because she is sitting in the public area of an airport and cannot talk.  But later that day, the same engineer is best reached in a private office by video. Or maybe it is not a convenient time to talk or chat, but finding a colleague with similar expertise who could answer the question would suffice. Communicating and dictating the best means by which it is done are functions of Unified Communications (UC) platforms.  UC organizes the omnipresent network to the desires and circumstances of each participant.

Additionally, it is important to remember that sometimes people cannot be safely reached. Sometimes colleagues are actually busy concentrating on a work project that requires focus or they are keeping lives safe by being an attentive driver. Knowing our limits both as a caller and receiver in a real-time world is everyone’s responsibility.

No doubt real-time collaboration will continue to be refined. Getting network access everywhere was an important first step, but only one step in many. As devices and access evolve using collaboration platforms, we will see smarter and safer real-time work foster greater productivity.

Have you used social media, cloud-enabled software or UC platforms to help make real time collaboration more efficient? What other tools have worked for you?

In his blog recently posted on Forbes, he deftly reasons that Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) is an obvious outcropping of the “bring your own device” (BYOD) trend.

Here is why: BYOD devices need to keep corporate data safe despite the fact that the devices belong to the employee. The best way to do that is to store the sensitive corporate data in the cloud and only allow access on a user-by-user and session-by-session basis.

It is important to realize that this vision hinges on a fast and reliable mobile network. Without that, MCC would not be possible, and therefore BYOD would suffer.  After all, speed and reliability were two important drivers for fixed-line cloud service adoption. It is no accident that interest in MCC follows on the heels of 4G and LTE deployments that have improved data speeds and building penetration.  Mobile LTE speeds are starting to approach LAN speeds at 50Mbps to 100Mbps.

I wanted to add to a few additional ways that MCC will drive productivity and security for the mobile worker connected with his personal BYOD device to the corporate infrastructure:

1. Users misplace things.

Thankfully, my corporate mobile device is locked down today and, if necessary, can be remotely erased. But what happens when I start to bring my own BYOD device to the office? It is one thing for my personal information to be in the clear, but quite another for my corporate information. Cloud services will ensure that mobile devices only carry the password-protected user rights to access data and not the actual data itself.

In addition to being security enhanced, the cloud helps ensure that the most recent data is always available to the user and facilitates searching for files. With so much data being created on tablets, it is a natural fit to find a common, safe place to store and organize all that data.

2. Users rely on more than one mobile device.

With data stored in the cloud and not on the device, it is easier for a user to move from one device to another and have the data move along too. The user is no longer tied to a single device to access secure work files.  Hopping back and forth between a smartphone and tablet based on the work being done is much easier to control and manage when the data source is in the cloud and any authorized device can call up that data.  Also, if a device breaks, another can quickly take on the job, even at the last minute.

3. Don’t forget about the machines.

Machine to Machine (M2M) apps also benefit from a cloud environment. Storing sensitive data such as health metrics and business analytics in the cloud as opposed to a device is far more desirable. M2M devices can be hacked, destroyed, or require frequent hardware or firmware updates to remain current and secure. Having data and analytics reside in the cloud where it can be more securely stored and processed makes good business sense.

What other roles do you see mobile cloud computing taking on? Will this sub-trend change our thinking on BYOD? Why or why not?

Everyone from Lenovo to Dell is trying to find the ‘Goldilocks zone’ of just the right size, functionality, and battery life in mobile devices for the professional who now alternates between in-the-office and on-the-go.

But besides our need for mobility, why this sudden move away from laptops and PC’s?

Here are a few of my thoughts:

1. Waning corporate reliance on Microsoft Office software.  Many new corporate apps are being sized for and work optimally on devices other than a laptop screen. In short, we are going to the tablet because we can.

2. I spend more time booting up my laptop each day than I do brushing my teeth. High speed Internet everywhere leaves no reason to ever turn off the smaller tablet devices.

3. Touch screen capabilities are commonplace. Please don’t say ‘click’ anymore.  It is so 2008.

With all this advancing technology, I decided the time is right to accelerate this trend and cut the laptop out of my life!  What efficiencies am I going to discover that can convert to new levels of productivity for my enterprise?

Click below to get the details and follow my progress on Twitter: @sanderbiehn #tabletchallenge:

Do you think a tablet could ever replace your laptop? What are your main concerns and how can they be overcome?

I believe productivity is very hard to measure at the individual level, but one common thread lies at the core of both sides of the Yahoo debate. Everyone is hankering for more human interaction. By interacting with each other, we solve problems we could not solve by ourselves. Being able to find the right people to work with — at the right time, quickly and securely, and with resources that are available– is an indicator of efficiency that no one will argue with.

So while the banter flies back and forth on whether VPN usage is a leading indicator of productivity, here is a checklist of rock-solid indicators of how efficient your VPN is making your business right now.

Is your VPN…

1. The web of interconnection for your enterprise?

Can your VPN support data, voice and video services that allow each employee to log their presence and the best way to reach them during the day? Unified Communications software simplifies staying in touch whether you are at home, in the office, at a meeting or out-of-town. The VPN is the backbone and hub, not the public telephone exchange or any single piece of communications software that may run over the VPN.

2. Helping keep your company information secure from prying eyes?

We are all sick of hearing about security, but judging by the lack of investment in this area, the message is not fully sinking in. Consider this: More and more, the advantage one enterprise holds over its competitors is found in its internal process, innovation, and speed. If sensitive market-timed information leaks, that could be the end of an entire campaign’s effectiveness. Organizations that hack for a living and then try to sell intelligence were unthinkable only a decade ago. Today they are at every corner of the “interwebs.” Your VPN can help keep data secure for home workers on laptops, office workers on tablets, and traveling employees on their mobile devices if deployed properly.

3. Taking you to the clouds?

Cloud computing has the promise of lowering the enterprise need for computer resources, bandwidth, and increasing availability.  However, these goals can only be met if the VPN is properly positioned in the mix. Using a VPN provider that has the needed cloud infrastructure — redundantly and organically attached the cloud — can be a huge advantage. Complexity greatly increases if the VPN needs to be built-out to intersect with a private or public cloud that resides elsewhere.

I hope you could answer some of the above checklist questions in the affirmative. What else do you keep on your checklist when considering a VPN supplier? What future tricks are you hoping your VPN will learn to perform for your business?

FierceWireless correctly identified this trend almost a year ago, and it has never been more complicated for businesses to make sure customers and employees are able to securely access the right apps at the right time without delays.

I caught up with Scott Poretsky, Director of Solutions Architecture for the Americas at Allot Communications, who specializes in solving these problems for enterprises and mobile operators. I asked him about what is trending around the causes of the mobile bandwidth crunch and solutions to cure the problem.

Increased demand is an issue. And there are many developments driving this increase:

1. The rise of 4G LTE

Believe it or not, better networks are heavily driving demand. LTE speeds can now overwhelm corporate and even cloud networks. Yet, even faster mobile networks are on the way demanding still larger back-end connectivity at the carrier and corporate Wi-Fi level to handle the crush.

2. Video

It has been widely reported that video now constitutes over 50% of internet traffic. When an investor or customer announcement video is first posted, a bottleneck can occur at the source server as everyone tries to access the clip at the same time.

3. Bring your own device (BYOD)

The BYOD phenomenon can cause erratic spikes in usage. One minute a user is in the corporate CRM system and the next he is streaming a home video off of Facebook. Building for scale in Wi-Fi networks to accommodate this phenomenon is not easy.

4. The cloud

Many cloud applications, especially mobile ones, depend on Internet connectivity. Additionally, the need for encryption and the nature of these applications means that they devour bandwidth. More cloud equals more demand for mobile bandwidth.

Scott and I also discussed some ideas to meet the challenge:

1. Security

BYOD is great for corporate productivity. The usual response from IT Managers, however, is, “You want to put THAT device on my network? I don’t know where it has been and what it has been doing.”  Freedom of mobility begets security risk. A corporate network must permit BYOD while also providing security protection for devices and servers on the network.

2. Usage policy

When BYOD users are on the corporate Wi-Fi, enterprises can now identify them by device and IP address. This allows control over what services users access. For example, a warehouse worker may access corporate SCM and personal email but is blocked from entertainment videos. Meanwhile, a senior executive walking through the same warehouse can access his corporate dashboard and public video of analyst reports.

3. Fair access to business resources

Enterprise IT departments and global carriers alike want a way to set performance expectations with their users. Mobile access has increased demand on resources by increasing the number of users demanding those resources at all times. It is critical that employees are able to reach business applications. Bandwidth control on a per-application basis ensures fair usage for all employees so that heavy users do not block other employees from access to resources.

4. Meeting SLAs in the cloud

As employees are increasingly mobile on smartphones and tablets, enterprises are offering them cloud-based services. Cloud service providers now offer tiered services based upon the corporate SLA to make sure that their applications, especially their mobile ones, work as designed for the individual employee.

5. Video caching

Content distribution networks are becoming more prevalent. They move content away from corporate servers with limited CPU and bandwidth, and cache files in various strategic places on the edge of the Internet. The result is that more instances of the same video content can be downloaded simultaneously without congestion.

Are you seeing fairness inserted into this thirsty world? Have you tried any of these strategies to reduce impact at your business? How does this video trend impact your BYOD strategy?

Check out my ideas on why BYOD will ultimately be a de facto standard and how both employers and employees are going to need to adapt to the inevitability of this key “Consumerization of IT” trend in this new video.

What has your firm decided about BYOD? What, if anything, is preventing your enterprise or others you have observed from jumping on board with this trend? Some are calling 2013 the year of the tablet. Will this year also be the tipping point for BYOD?

The modern ISIS mobile wallet payment system has similar goals for anyone calling upon ISIS at the point of sale. ISIS is joint venture of AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile, hopes to eliminate the need for a wallet by converting your smartphone into a mobile payment device.

Here is how it works: An ISIS user loads their cards onto their smartphone. When they reach a merchant who has a Near Field Communication (NFC) payments reader, the cardholder unlocks the ISIS app with a pin code, selects the card they wish to use, and taps the device against the reader.  The reader translates the card information and makes the payment authorization just like any other credit card payment method. It is noteworthy that participating banks have partnered with ISIS to develop an algorithm of changing codes that is hashed between the ISIS smartphone and the bank acceptance systems to protect the card from fraud.

This is a great new way to bring NFC to the masses because:

• There’s no intermediary. Bank funds are not funneled through a middleman, eliminating ambiguity and opportunity for fraud.
• The card transaction is indistinguishable from any other credit card purchase on a merchant card terminal. The only thing a merchant needs is an NFC reader compatible with the smartphone running ISIS. It can work anywhere in the world.

The cult of Isis spread like wildfire around the ancient world. According to legend, her success was due to her promise to help not only wealthy merchants and the noble elite, but also common people, sinners, and (gasp!) artisans. The modern ISIS and the ancient goddess face similar challenges in their goal to help their patrons everywhere:

1. Spreading the word across the stormy Mediterranean

Using your smartphone to buy donuts is pretty cool, but it will take practice to form the ‘NFC tap’ habit. ISIS has super saturated a couple of markets with advertising and merchant NFC readers to promote that habit.  Leaving your wallet behind and solely using ISIS is a little ways off, but we have taken the first steps.

2. Stiff competition to differentiate from what other gods may be offering

Other mobile wallets exist in the market already, and merchant groups are also proposing their own mobile wallet to keep control of bank fees.  One key aspect of any mobile wallet will be marketing opportunities through loyalty cards. Getting loyalty cards to work optimally on any mobile wallet is a must.

3. Conversion of the faithful over to ISIS

Because ISIS requires close integration with banking systems, banks need to be on-boarded with ISIS one at a time. Each bank has different back-end systems. Those systems need to be certified to work on ISIS and this takes time. Today, there are a handful of banks on the network. According to ISIS officials, aa few more are in the wings.

What would stop you from being a convert to ISIS?  Will her cult grow in our modern world? How might your business prosper by having loyalty cards loaded onto customer’s mobile wallet?

I wonder how many good ideas flounder, not by lack of technology to create them, but by lack of technical expertise and know-how to test them out and see how they might work? By getting a group of programmers in a room for 24 hours, nothing is outside the realm of possibility in our platform-driven world. With more standards-based software platforms than ever, we stand on the shoulders of giants. Much of the basic work we need to innovate and create already exists in the form of modules that can make almost any idea come to life–especially in the world of mobile communications and applications.

Enter the Hackathon

Discreet events developed to bring big ideas to life, known as hackathons, are nothing new in the tech world. High-tech companies have been putting them on since the beginning of the new millennium, but because of the increase in standards and the subsequent rate of innovation, these events are now finally reaching Main Street offering a huge opportunity for businesses of all sizes to take advantage of them.

Here’s how:

1. Leverage the creativeness in each of us

Your business has a lot of smart people at work. Use what they know and their creativity to innovate. Canon cameras is in the second year of a project using the creative photographic skills of their consumers, big name celebrities, and a well-known Hollywood director’s talents. With this sort of crowd-source at work, the results promise to be tantalizing. New ideas for any industry can be game-changing in the market. In fact, did you know the ‘Like’ button on Facebook was the result of a hackathon focused on improving the overall Facebook product?

2. Leverage diverse points of view

Consider bringing strategic vendors and key business or consumer customers into the hackathon with your team to help grease innovative thinking. The more angles on current challenges or the more needs that can be expressed, the better the chance for true innovation.

3. Keep it fun

Hackathons, like a lot of crowd-sourcing activities, are light-hearted affairs featuring lack of sleep and Doritos coupled with very serious intentions such as transforming a business process or our world itself.  My colleague Dan Schmidt Director of Strategy for AT&T, suggested assembling hackathons with customers in their own territory to address big innovation inside of a vertical market. For our airline customers, he and others have proposed doing a hackathon in the sky. Perhaps an around-the-world venue taking advantage of in-flight WiFi will draw interest from the transportation vertical to create some innovative new apps?

Have you ever thought of using a hackathon to tackle nasty problems that require out-of-the-box thinking to solve? What kind of success has your group or company seen using this approach? Do you think it would work to bring customers and vendors in to these events?

The below two videos highlight the Internet of Things and explain the relevance to our society and the IT community.

The first video features yours truly, and is a layman’s approach to making sense of the Internet of Things, its genesis, phases, and its possibilities.

The second video from 2010 is a more sophisticated production that explores the evolution of the Internet of Things and its meaning in our world.

How is your business planning to participate in and leverage the Internet of Things?  What effect will an Internet-enabled world have on you and your business? Please post your comments on Networking Exchange and not YouTube so we can hear what you think.