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Public Council Teleconference: Application Rationalization — Hidden Costs and Smart Decisions
November 17 at 11:00 am US/Eastern (GMT-5)
Join Honorio Padrón, of The Hackett Group, who will share the drivers for companies to tackle application rationalization and the results of research that define the hidden cost of complexity. Additionally, we will discuss key decision milestones—to start or not, holding the course steady and fulfilling expectations.
Virtual Desktop Cost-Benefit Analysis — Michael Jacobs, Catlin Group
The analysis contained in this presentation measures the cost of everything from the machines and licenses to the infrastructure for virtual vs. traditional desktop environments.
Honor your best senior team members - Apply for the CIO Ones to Watch Award
Get well-earned public recognition for your top up-and-coming team members, your IT organization and your enterprise. Award winners will be announced, publicized and feted in May 2010, great timing to help attract new IT recruits to your company.
Learn more about the CIO Executive Council »February 01, 2008 — CIO —
For the third time this week, a big internet pipe has had an underwater mishap: Today, it's a cable off the coast of Dubai, with officials offering no word on what caused the problem, according to CNN reports. For most enterprise IT groups, however, this series of Net traffic accidents has been more watch and wait than headache, so far.
When word spread on Thursday that bandwidth in India had been cut in half thanks to some sliced sub-Mediterranean cables on Wednesday, global IT leaders and their vendors quickly went about the work of mitigating the potential effects of the disruption. (For more on the situation, see Internet in India Slowed by Middle East Outage .)
"We were able to route traffic through Hong Kong," says Steve Bandrowszak, CIO of Nortel. As a result, the $11.42 billion telecom provider—which has a technology center of excellence in Bangalore, satellite operations in several other Indian cities, and outsourcing partnerships with Wipro, Tata Consultancy Services, and Infosys—experienced no business disruption.
For most, it was a watching-and-waiting game. Bill Maguire, CIO of Virgin America, began monitoring the Burlingame, Calif.-based airline's traffic and performance the minute he heard about the problem Thursday morning, but saw no impact. John Stadick, director of IT at Sunbelt Rentals, a construction equipment rental company in Fort Mill, S.C., was also on alert. Sunbelt's parent company, Ashtead Group, is based in the U.K. and runs a private trans-Atlantic link to usher data traffic between the U.S. and London. When Stadick heard about the India problem, he had his network manager put automated traffic monitors on the Atlantic lines "just to be safe," he says. "We don't send a huge amount of traffic through it, but it's still a vital link back to our parent company."
"You really need to know more about the route your traffic goes over. I suspect a lot of companies (could have felt) it on the east coast. Their traffic flows that way because it is a shorter distance so response times are reduced," says Virgin America's Maguire. "You have to lean on your telco provider. They own the relationship with the companies that manage the ocean based lines."
Ultimately no major disruptions related to India's decreased bandwidth were reported as of Friday. "India has redundant connections to the rest of the world," says Dean Davison, vice president of marketing and research for offshore outsourcing consultancy neoIT. "Ten years ago, this would have been a big problem (for India). It was kind of like when Blackberry has an outage: all the Blackberry users are upset, but that was only a subset of the market. The countries that were impacted the most only have one major link to the rest of the world. I really don't think that it was much news for India, but it was a very big deal for the Middle East."