Ray Hood, CEO Qumu

Ran across a great interview with Ray Hood, CEO of Qumu from the good folks at FierceOnlineVideo. They caught up Hood to discuss the company's progress so far this year, its plans for the future, and what trends and highlights he sees in the online video industry.

Below are two excerpts from the conversation that particularly relates to our work with Enterprise. We welcome you to visit the entire article here.

FierceOV: Are there specific verticals where you are seeing greater uptake of enterprise video?

Hood: No specific vertical comes to mind as adopting much more quickly than others, but the size of the company is a factor. The larger enterprises are leading the way on adoption of streaming video, and we'll see that continue as we roll out products that allow for scheduling streaming video direct from calendars. The companies we've seen with the clearest benefits from our products have more than 5,000 employees and are geo-distributed.

FierceOV: What do you think the next "big thing" in enterprise video might be?

Hood: I think the convergence of technologies and ease of use with video will continue. For instance, an executive wants to have an event, he has three technologies at his disposal, what is the best choice: Qumu, Polycom or LiveMeeting? I think we need a clear and smooth transition to automatic selection of the best choice, given the present circumstances and what the exec wants to achieve with the meeting.

On the streaming side, I think the acceptance and adoption of H.264 as the standard will reduce latency in streaming events, and eventually, you'll be able to call on someone at a remote location to address a group in a multi-cast.

Microsoft, HP Tie the Knot on Unified Comm

Sean Michael Kerner of InternetNews.com reports that Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard have officially joined forces for UC communicationons. "The move aims to better capitalize on burgeoning demand for UC solutions. Forrester Research has said the market for enterprise unified communications could grow as high as $14.5 billion by 2015, and that businesses will give about 60 percent of their workforce access to UC functions to improve their productivity." Kerner also reports that, "of course, interest in linking applications, devices and employees together through unified communications has also encouraged new efforts from other major industry luminaries, ranging from Cisco to Oracle."

Will the "marriage" work and offer more functionality to each companies software and development issues?

Microsoft, HP Tie the Knot on Unified Comm

Motorola brings new network options to enterprises

According to eWeek, Motorola has developed a new LAN solution which will offer more to enterprises looking to enhance their networks. Its advantages are cost, power, and performance.

Kevin Keefe, vice president of marketing for Motorola's Access Network Solutions recently stated:
"Enterprise users require a different level of network sophistication today than they did even a few years ago. Not only do they expect secure and reliable IP voice and data, but they demand improved network economics and greatly simplified solutions."

Read the full article here.

Enterprise 2.0 Maturity and Adoption: It's About Work

According to Gil Yehuda of Social Computing Journal, Enterprise 2.0 is at a very challenging stage of development. It's no longer a fad. It's not going away. But it's not a fundamental part of mainstream businesses, yet.


Do you think it will be a part of mainstream business within the year, within two years?



Yehuda goes into detail what can and should be done to enable enterprise 2.0 to head more into the natural order of business computing, we encourage you to read the article in its entirety here.



What are your thoughts on Yehuda's findings and predictions?

Wolfram Alpha gets supercomputer boost

According to CNet.com, concerns with the public launch of Wolfram Alpha later this month is withstanding the crushing load the Internet can impose. But Wolfram Research revealed Tuesday it's building the service on the world's 66th-fastest supercomputer. The machine, built out of Dell hardware by a company called R Systems, can sustain performance of 39.6 trillion mathematical operations per second, according to the November 2008 list of the top 500 supercomputers. That muscle will come in handy for Alpha, which I think of as a combination of a graphing calculator, search engine, and reference library that not only supplies some answers to factual, data-intensive questions but also does math in the process.

What will this mean for public performance issues? Will it make a change in your work?

Leading BOLDLY Through Change

The IIR Executive Education series is designed to provide senior executives with practical, yet aggressive strategies for surviving the economic downturn and leading through change. Blending business topics with corporate experiences, this series is tailored to helping you be an integral part of jumpstarting your company’s future. Think differently about your organizations efficiency model, ensure employees maintain an entrepreneurial spirit, build a team of leaders that help manage change, and plan for short term adjustments and longer term innovations beyond the immediate crisis.

Develop the insights, tools, instincts, and confidence you need to lead BODLY through change and capture success through corporate stability. Consider this your blueprint for becoming a high-performance leader and profiting from uncertainty.

Find out more here:
http://www.iirusa.com/leadchange/home-page.xml

Oracle Takes on SharePoint With Beehive Upgrade

Alex Goldman of Internetnews.com writes that, Oracle is adding several new features to its Beehive enterprise collaboration software, including unified communications and Web-based collaboration...Add unified communications (UC), and faxes and voicemails come directly into e-mail. The UC function also stores voice and Web communications for compliance purposes...With other Oracle software products, Beehive can do more. It can connect to any custom application that an enterprise has built to run on Fusion middleware, for example, using open platforms such as Sun's Java Management Extensions (JMX).

Will Orcale's introduction of Beehive cause you to think twice about your current collaborative software?

Oracle Takes on SharePoint With Beehive Upgrade

Vine - Microsoft's New Social Web Application

According to this article in eWeek Microsoft will launch a new Facebook/Twitter like application that is expected to blow them out of the water. Brier Dudley of the Seattle Times describes the app as,

"...a hyperlocal, personalized message and alert system. It's intended to be a dashboard that people can use to keep tabs of their family, friends, activities and major events in their community."

The app Vine is expected to be used first to alert people of schedules and changes. The idea for this came out of Microsoft's response to Hurricane Katrina, so Microsoft will be initially targeting first aid responders and local emergency officials. It shouldn't be too long though before we see this app being used in the enterprise.

Enterprise 2.0 - Efficient Collaboration and Knowledge Exchange

Oscar Berg from The Content Economy recently put up his slides from their seminar, Enterprise 2.0 - Efficient Collaboration and Knowledge Exchange. Take a couple of minutes to view them below.

Enterprise 2.0 - Efficient Collaboration and Knowledge Exchange

View more presentations from Acando Consulting.

Managing passwords is still a challenge for the enterprise

According to GCN.com, managing passwords is still a challenge for the enterprise. William Jackson writes,

the overhead required to manage passwords for a large population of users can overwhelm a help desk, and managing large numbers of passwords can be complex for end users. The problems are magnified by requirements for complex passwords that must be regularly changed. Still, passwords are not disappearing despite the proliferation of certificates, tokens and other schemes for access management, and tools for managing them are still in evidence at this week’s RSA Security Conference.

Jackson intereviews Phil Lieberman president of Lieberman Software Corp. and Bill Carey, vice president of business development for Siber Systems Inc. of Fairfax, Va. for this article. Both Lieberman and Carey offer their own take on how difficult it is to manage passwords.

Visit the original article here.

Cloud e-mail service available

According to eWeek, Iron Mountain has begun offering a total email management service. All of the data is store don Iron Mountain's servers in their secure data centers. There is no software needed for this email service, just a monthly payment for the service. Read the full article here.

Sharing Information Throughout the Enterprise

The main theme of Oscar Berg's latest post in the Content Economy is that businesses must support sharing and use of knowledge. Seems straightforward right? Well this is a concept which was thought up ages ago, and was followed by many including Andrew Carnegie.

Although this practice of sharing knowledge has tested well throughout the century, still many companies don't get it. The use of social technology platforms is crucial to a company's survival. After all knowledge is key. Share it...

StumbleUpon back to origional owners

According to the Bits Blog at the New York Times, StumbleUpon was purchased from eBay by its original owners. New plans for the site include features such as URL shorteners so that StumbleUpon users can share the links in places such as Facebook. The websie currently has 7.5 million users.

Twitter's wide web

Are you still looking for those companies on Twitter who tweet about your industry? Are you looking for your competitors? ReadWriteWeb recently did a great wrap-up of what they consider the top 7 Twitter search engines. Check them out:

monitter
Twitterfall
twistori
Tweet Scan
TweetChannel
Twitscoop
Tweetizen

Skype coming to a Blackberry near you

eWeek is reporting that Skype will be available for free on Blackberry Curve and Bold phones starting in May.

Skype COO Scott Durchslag commented:
"With Skype on BlackBerry smartphones, we are making Skype available in the briefcases and purses of BlackBerry users around the world. We have heard loud and clear that our users want Skype on whichever smartphone they choose to use.”

Extracting value from EA

I think by now most companies know that investments made to Enterprise Architecture are paid back after time. What most companies don't know unfortunately is how to extract value from EA. Here's a great report I came across on CIO Index that provides guidance on this tricky topic. This is definitely a must read for all architects.

Download paper

Twitter commercial accounts on the way

eWeek reported today that Twitter has announced that they will soon offer commercial accounts for an extra fee. This is just one step in what Gartner predicts that 80% of social software platforms will include enterprise blogging features by 2011. For the full story, read the article here.

Social Networking Within the Enterprise

Blogs, wikis, social networks is all the latest buzz, but has the enterprise truly caught on? The Burton Group recently conducted a study investigating whether companies are really using web 2.0 technology. Their in-depth research also helps businesses understand the business, organizational, and technical factors to consider when formulating social networking strategies and initiating internal projects.

Read the Burton Group Report

Business Process Management (BPM) - Leveraging Competencies and Streamlining Processes to Achieve Operational Excellence

This morning I came across this white paper written by IBM in which they go over a study of 354 end users which believe that their organization as a whole are at "process ignorance" rather than "process excellence" or "process acceptance". Take some time to view this 22 page white paper as I'm sure you'll find it informative.

Twitter now fastest growing social network

According to a new article at Read Write Web, Twitter had 7 million unique visitors in February of 2009, as opposed to 475,000 in 2008, which is a growth rate of 1382% over the year. Surprisingly, the largest age group using Twitter is between the ages of 35-49. The article also states that 62% of the users access the application from work. Read the full article here.