This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.

If network infrastructure is not your organization’s core competency or you have outsourced the environment, you lack control of equipment and transport services and probably struggle with complex pricing and non-standard billing. Worse yet, if your service provider owns either all or components of the processes, procedures, staffing and tools, it limits the changes you can make.

If that describes your environment, a network infrastructure cost optimization consultation can help you drive infrastructure costs down, capture the network environment processes, identify systemic issues and leverage best practices.

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This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.

Overprovisioning has been the go-to approach for ensuring infrastructure and application performance. But when performance degradations and unplanned outages occur, even the most experienced teams move into “react-and-guess” mode.

Where to start? Every level of the infrastructure stack comes with its own possible issues, and tracking the culprit down takes time. And with IT infrastructures growing at an exponential pace and workloads to the cloud, the typical approach of overprovisioning and reacting-and-guessing is no longer a viable option.

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Perhaps the single-most significant standards based technological advancement in the field of unified communications over the past year has been the completion of Web Real Time Communication (WebRTC) standard and the appearance of several WebRTC based implementations.

WebRTC 1.0 APIs are defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the IETF (Internet Engineering Taskforce) RTCWeb Working Group, and they make it possible for Web browsers to support voice calling, video chat, and peer-to-peer connections.

There has been considerable stabilization of the WebRTC browser implementation over the past year or so, enabling much more robust WebRTC apps to be developed. On the other hand, there still remains considerable and substantial work to be done on the IETF protocols for WebRTC.  

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Studies show that around 40% of products fail. But what if product designers could understand what features are most and least popular, which components tend to fail sooner than others, and how customers actually use products versus how designers think they use them? And, what if product developers could then utilize these insights to develop products that perform better, potentially cost less and, most importantly, are aligned with actual customer needs?

Innovative product development teams in pretty much every industry are beginning to look at ways to translate enormous streams of real time machine data into actionable information to improve the product development process by understanding where product innovation is necessary, which features are most desirable, and how to lower their overall cost of ownership.

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This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.

After careful consideration you’ve decided it’s time to migrate a major on-premise software solution to the cloud. But how do you create and execute a plan to make sure your migration stays on time, on budget, and delivers on your expectations? Effective planning is critical, and it should start with a thorough assessment of your infrastructure by an experienced vendor who understands your specific objectives.

Usually available as a service engagement from a hosting vendor or, better yet, from the software vendor whose solution is being migrated to the cloud, this cloud readiness assessment is part checklist and part roadmap. It audits the entire environment so you can plan and execute an efficient and effective migration.

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This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.

Thousands of customer support agents will go to work today and do the exact same thing they did yesterday: pick up the phone, answer a common question, hang up the phone, pick up the phone, answer the same question, and hang up the phone again. And tomorrow get up and do it all again. It’s no wonder the average company loses 27% of its agents each year to attrition.

If you run a customer support center at your company, consider your ultimate goals: faster time-to-resolution, increased customer satisfaction, better employee retention, and higher rates of employee satisfaction and happiness. These are the Holy Grail of our industry—and while daunting, they are attainable. Here are five key steps to becoming a higher-performing support organization:

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This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.

Organizations are excited about the business value of the data that will be generated by the Internet of Things (IoT). But there’s less discussion about how to manage the devices that will make up the network, secure the data they generate and analyze it quickly enough to deliver the insights businesses need.

Software defined networking (SDN) can help meet these needs. By virtualizing network components and services, they can rapidly and automatically reconfigure network devices, reroute traffic and apply authentication and access rules. All this can help speed and secure data delivery, and improve network management, for even the most remote devices.

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This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.

f you’ve been clinging to Windows Server 2003 trying to ignore the fact that Microsoft will officially end support July 14, 2015, you’re playing with fire. One the updates stop, you’ll be exposed to troubling security and compliance risks. Take note that in 2013 alone, 37 updates were issued by Microsoft for Windows Server 2003/R2.

Yet upgrading servers is a resource challenge as well as a mindset issue. The top barrier for migration, according to a survey, is the belief that existing systems are working just fine, and many users worry about software incompatibility.

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This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.

Many companies face the dilemma of how to get the most out of legacy IT equipment and applications while taking advantage of the latest cloud advances to keep their company competitive and nimble.

A hybrid approach to IT infrastructure enables internal IT groups to support legacy systems with the flexibility to optimize service delivery and performance thru third-party providers. Reconciling resources leads to improved business agility, more rapid delivery of services, exposure to innovative technologies, and increased network availability and business uptime, without having to make the budget case for CAPEX investment.

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