Stories by Johna Till Johnson

  • The mobility business case

    A hot topic among my clients these days is defining a mobility business case. The rationale is simple: Mobility budgets have been rising more than 10% year over year for the past three years — even though IT budgets overall have been declining.

  • The future holds much promise

    Last year, IT budgets declined by 10 per cent to 20 per cent, depending on who you believe. Jobs were lost. And the pool of vendors is constantly shrinking, given the tsunami of bankruptcies and mergers over the past few years. (Adios, Nortel.)

  • Data-leak lessons learned from the 'Climategate' hack

    In case you've missed it, someone recently dumped a large cache of e-mail files and documents from the University of East Anglia University's prestigious Climactic Research Unit onto the 'Net. The CRU is one of the leading climatology research institutions, and its data and models provide much of the infrastructure on which the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is based.

  • The battle over voice, the war of UC

    Last week, I wrote about the possible implications of the new lineup of FCC commissioners. They certainly haven't wasted any time: On Aug. 3, the FCC launched a full-scale investigation into the decision by Apple and AT&T to reject Google's voice application for the iPhone. As Sanford Bernstein telecom analyst Craig Moffatt notes, "The issue of application suppression affords the Administration a back door route to Wireless Net Neutrality, something that has been openly espoused by new FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski."

  • The Internet sky really is falling

    Many folks are familiar with the modeling we've done over the past few years highlighting the fact that Internet demand is outstripping capacity, specifically access capacity. The findings were, to put it mildly, controversial: We've been called everything from carrier shills to nut-jobs. (No, the research wasn't sponsored. And we never claimed your fillings were receiving extraterrestrial radio signals).

  • Today's IT is all about enabling experience

    A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, there were two basic models for selling IT: Equipment vendors sold hardware or software. Services vendors sold maintenance contracts, professional services or connectivity. And IT practitioners didn’t sell at all – they delivered infrastructure, applications and support that their organisations (hopefully) found useful.

  • About those 'Net capacity issues: There's more

    A little over a year ago, my colleagues and I modeled current and projected Internet capacity and anticipated demand to see if the curves ever crossed. The short answer: Yes, sometime before 2012, access (though not core) capacity would no longer be enough to serve demand.

  • Going green, virtually speaking

    Broadly speaking, there are two main reasons for companies to go green. The first is to reduce energy costs, thereby saving the company money. As one IT executive put it to me recently, "Green computing is all about saving greenbacks."

  • A virtual workplace poses new IT challenges

    One of the interesting things that's been happening over the past few years is that just as workforces have become less centralized, IT departments have gotten more so. The vast majority of companies I work with consider themselves virtual, meaning that employees work together on teams from widely distributed geographies. Yet fewer IT teams are virtual in the same sense -- in many cases IT teams are increasingly consolidated into a few central sites.