The Lippis Report

February 22nd, 2006

Nick Lippis has an industry discussion with Mark Straton, Senior Vice President Siemens Communications. Nick leads the talk by describing the third phase of IP telephony, the strategic phase, while Mark makes his points of why Siemens will lead this phase. Gone will be capital cost, siloed communications applications and in will be SOA based communications enabled applications and hosted IP tel solutions. There’s a good discussion about the industry structure and which vendors, Avaya, Cisco, Nortel, Mitel, Siemens, Alcatel will survive and thrive in the strategic phase.

February 21st, 2006

Nick Lippis interviews Kenny Frerichs, President & CEO, Scott Safe, VP of Marketing and Dwight Barker, VP Product Management and talks with them about their network application performance and optimization products. They discuss the NP-2000 NetSensory Professional appliance available for $9,995 with built-in best practices learned from their 200 customers and the NetSensory Solution Insights, and spend some time on channels as their new pricing model expands their addressable market to the mid-enterprise market. The NetSensory baseline, troubleshoot, secure and optimize graphical representations of network applications are some of the best Nick has seen in the industry. Enjoy.

February 18th, 2006

F5 Networks Jason Needham, Director of Product Management and Satya Vardharajan, Product Manager came to brief me on their new BIG-IP appliances, the Global Traffic Manager (GTM), the Link Controller and the 8400 Platform. We also discussed F5′s Traffic Management Operating System or TM/OS which is the firm’s product development platform for hardware and software development. I find two things different about F5. One is that their customers are both networking and datacenter executives which is unique to a company the size of F5. Second is their TM/OS architecture has allowed F5 to stack software features/services on top of their appliances pretty rapidly, i.e., adding DNS support, distributed application management, intelligent session persistence et al., on top of its industry hardened load balancing technology.

February 17th, 2006

Nick Lippis has a discussion with Lee Klarich, Director Product Management, at Juniper Networks. Lee provides an update to Juniper’s Integrated Security Gateways (ISG) with proof points from customers AvantGo, ADP and the University of Nevada Reno. They review the multi-processing, multi-tasking capabilities of the ISG and its competitive advantages. What Nick likes most about the ISG is its ability to virtualize firewall, VPN and IPS services and extend them to VLANs, ports, applications, etc., thus avoiding the cost of placing security appliances around your network. The integration of security features saves not only on capital cost, but on operations as well by having a single management interface for confirmation, control and monitoring and allowing the security services to collaborate in an effort to automate exploit mitigation at the application level. It’s a good deep dive into the network security market place and Juniper’s ISG. Enjoy.

February 11th, 2006

Nick Lippis interviews Brandon Hoff and Katie Dunn on the state of the network security market, data security and the launch of CipherOptics’ new 1Gb SG1002 IPSec encryption appliance. There´s a great discussion in this podcast, on scaling tactics for securing encrypted end-to-end networks versus tunnels. Also issues such as key and policy management and secure domains are explored.

February 8th, 2006

In this whitepaper, InfoTech provides an economic framework for the hosted IP telephony option. The paper identifies four key architectural alternatives to be considered when exploring a hosted IP telephony solution. Some time is spent on the hybrid model of hosted IP telephony in branch offices with private installations for larger facilities.

February 8th, 2006

Like the above whitepaper, InfoTech provides an economic framework for the hosted IP contact center option. They identify four primary financial impacts of a hosted contact center solution based upon the case study method. The paper is written for the business decision maker.