Great customer experience is an elusive goal

Every company says it wants to provide a top-notch customer experience; how many actually do is another matter.To wit: Although improving the customer experience is a strategic priority at a full 73 percent of businesses surveyed for a new Forrester Research report released Monday, only 1 percent of companies currently deliver an excellent experience, the study found.That’s a problem, Forrester says, because customer experience (sometimes called CX) has become a more strategic imperative than ever.“Growth is now the top priority for business leaders, and to achieve that you have to improve customer experience,” said Kyle McNabb, a vice president of research strategy with Forrester. “Traditionally we’ve all worked toward metrics like ROI, but now the metric is impact on experience.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM sales dip 12 percent despite lift from new mainframe

IBM reported a 12 percent drop in revenue for the last quarter despite a big boost from its new z13 mainframe, which went on sale last month.Revenue for the quarter ended March 31 was $19.6 billion, with profit down 5 percent to $2.4 billion, IBM announced Monday.Two-thirds of the company’s business comes from overseas, and the strong U.S. dollar weighed on its results. Without the currency impact, and adjusting for businesses that IBM recently sold off, revenue would have been flat from a year ago, CFO Martin Schroeter said on IBM’s earnings call.Like its rival Hewlett-Packard, IBM has been watching its business shrink for several quarters as customers spend less on expensive hardware and IT services and devote more to cloud computing and mobile.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

VMware prepares its virtualization stack for Docker

VMware may have pioneered enterprise virtualization, but until Monday it had been relatively quiet when it comes to Docker containers, the popular lightweight form of application virtualization.Now it’s addressing the market for Docker with two open source software packages that will allow its customers to more easily deploy containers in their existing VMware infrastructure.The company has released a Linux distribution, called Project Photon, which was designed to run within a VMware virtual machine hypervisor and contains only the barest essentials that an operating system would need for running containers. The company has also released access management software, called Project Lightwave, that gives system administrators a way to control the access to their containers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Are you ready for Google’s ‘Mobilegeddon’ on Tuesday?

Google said in February that it was going to make mobile-friendliness matter more to its search-engine rankings. On Tuesday, it makes good on that commitment—and webmasters who didn’t heed the warning may see a steep drop in traffic.It’s a shift so potentially fraught with peril for those who aren’t ready that it’s being called “Mobilegeddon.” Essentially, Google is expanding its use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal when it compiles search results. Sites that are mobile-friendly will be ranked higher in search results; those that aren’t will suffer.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Nokia wants back into the mobile phone business?

Nokia sold off its mobile phone business to Microsoft last fall, but now one of Nokia's remaining business units is eyeing a return to the consumer mobile phone market next year.Nokia Technologies, which controls thousands of technology patents, plans to re-enter the mobile phone market in 2016, according to unnamed sources cited by Re/code.Such plans would be ambitious, especially given the super-competitive global smartphone and feature phone market. It isn't clear precisely what Nokia Technologies is up to, and at least two analysts are skeptical it will work.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

VMware just created its first Linux OS, and it’s container-friendly

VMware Monday announced its first operating system, and it’s designed to run containers inside the company’s virtualization management software. In announcing the Linux OS, named Project Photon, VMware is attempting to convince users who are curious about using containers that they can do so while still using the company’s software. + MORE FROM NETWORK WORLD: Will containers kill the virtual machine? + VMware As container technology has gained popularity in recent months there’s been a debate in the cloud computing and virtualization market about whether it is best to run containers on bare metal, meaning without a hypervisor, or in virtual machines. If containers run on bare metal, it could remove the need for VMware’s virtualization software.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Live streaming apps pose legal risks for users

Live video is messy. It’s raw, unedited, and with new mobile apps, it’s now capable of capturing many more people who aren’t aware they’re being recorded. And in some cases, that can add up to legal problems. Meerkat and Periscope aren’t the first tools to offer live-streaming capabilties, but they have captured attention due in large part to the ease with which they allow video to be recorded on the fly, from a smartphone, and shared publicly on Twitter. Twitter owns Periscope, while Meerkat is the indie player, a breakout hit at this year’s South by Southwest technology festival in Austin, Texas. And both are positioned to spawn a crop of disputes, and even lawsuits, around alleged privacy violations or copyright infringement.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

PQ 48 – Multi-Tenant DC with ALE & NEC – Sponsored

Subash Bohra from Alcatel Lucent Enterprise and Toshal Dudwhala from NEC America join Packet Pushers Greg Ferro & Ethan Banks in a discussion about SDN in the data center.

Author information

Ethan Banks

Co-host at Packet Pushers

Ethan Banks, CCIE #20655, has been managing networks for higher ed, government, financials and high tech since 1995. Ethan co-hosts the Packet Pushers Podcast, which has seen over 3M downloads and reaches over 10K listeners. With whatever time is left, Ethan writes for fun & profit, studies for certifications, and enjoys science fiction. @ecbanks
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The post PQ 48 – Multi-Tenant DC with ALE & NEC – Sponsored appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.

Why the journey to IPv6 is still the road less traveled

The writing’s on the wall about the short supply of IPv4 addresses, and IPv6 has been around since 1999. Then why does the new protocol still make up just a fraction of the Internet?Though IPv6 is finished technology that works, rolling it out may be either a simple process or a complicated and risky one, depending on what role you play on the Internet. And the rewards for doing so aren’t always obvious. For one thing, making your site or service available via IPv6 only helps the relatively small number of users who are already set up with the protocol, creating a nagging chicken-and-egg problem.The new protocol, which is expected to provide more addresses than users will ever need, has made deep inroads at some big Internet companies and service providers, especially mobile operators. Yet it still drives less than 10 percent of the world’s traffic. This is despite evidence that migrating to IPv6 can simplify networks and even speed up the Web experience.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why the journey to IPv6 is still the road less traveled

The writing’s on the wall about the short supply of IPv4 addresses, and IPv6 has been around since 1999. Then why does the new protocol still make up just a fraction of the Internet?Though IPv6 is finished technology that works, rolling it out may be either a simple process or a complicated and risky one, depending on what role you play on the Internet. And the rewards for doing so aren’t always obvious. For one thing, making your site or service available via IPv6 only helps the relatively small number of users who are already set up with the protocol, creating a nagging chicken-and-egg problem.The new protocol, which is expected to provide more addresses than users will ever need, has made deep inroads at some big Internet companies and service providers, especially mobile operators. Yet it still drives less than 10 percent of the world’s traffic. This is despite evidence that migrating to IPv6 can simplify networks and even speed up the Web experience.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why the journey to IPv6 is still the road less traveled

The writing’s on the wall about the short supply of IPv4 addresses, and IPv6 has been around since 1999. Then why does the new protocol still make up just a fraction of the Internet?Though IPv6 is finished technology that works, rolling it out may be either a simple process or a complicated and risky one, depending on what role you play on the Internet. And the rewards for doing so aren’t always obvious. For one thing, making your site or service available via IPv6 only helps the relatively small number of users who are already set up with the protocol, creating a nagging chicken-and-egg problem.+ Also on Network World: iPhone 7 rumor rollup +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why the journey to IPv6 is still the road less traveled

The writing’s on the wall about the short supply of IPv4 addresses, and IPv6 has been around since 1999. Then why does the new protocol still make up just a fraction of the Internet?Though IPv6 is finished technology that works, rolling it out may be either a simple process or a complicated and risky one, depending on what role you play on the Internet. And the rewards for doing so aren’t always obvious. For one thing, making your site or service available via IPv6 only helps the relatively small number of users who are already set up with the protocol, creating a nagging chicken-and-egg problem.+ Also on Network World: iPhone 7 rumor rollup +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Want to be open to all direct messages? Twitter will let you

As part of Twitter’s larger push to give more people a reason to use its service, it is changing its direct messaging function to let users receive missives from people they don’t follow.Previously, users could only send the private, direct messages to those who followed them. By letting more users message each other privately, Twitter hopes to more strongly compete against messaging apps WhatsApp, with roughly 800 million monthly users, and Facebook Messenger with 600 million users who log in monthly. Twitter had 288 million users as of the end of last year.Importantly for those who worry about spam and abuse, Twitter is letting would-be recipients of the DMs decide if they want to change their account settings to accept direct messages from people they do not follow. A new direct message button will appear on the profiles of people who turn this on.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Oceania Redundancy: Auckland and Melbourne data centers now online

The genesis of our 33rd and 34th data centers in Auckland and Melbourne started a short hop away in nearby Sydney. Prior to these deployments traffic from all of New Zealand and Australia's collective 23 million Internet users was routed through CloudFlare's Sydney data center. Even for those in faraway Perth, the time necessary to reach our Sydney PoP was a mere 55ms of round trip time (RTT). By comparison, the blink of an eye takes 300-400ms. In other words, latency wasn't exactly the pressing concern. The real concern was a failure scenario in our Sydney data center.

Fortunately, our entire architecture starts with an assumption: failure is going to happen. As a result, we plan for failure at every level and have designed a system to gracefully handle it when it occurs. Even though we now maintain multiple layers of redundancy—from power supplies and power circuits to line cards, routing engines and network providers—our ultimate level of redundancy is in the ability to fail out an entire data center in favor of another. In the past we've even written about how this might even play out in the case of a global thermonuclear war. In this instance, the challenge Continue reading

Google’s push to encrypt ads will improve security, but won’t kill malvertising

Google plans to serve most of its ads over encrypted HTTPS connections by the end of June, a move that will protect against some ad hijacking attacks and will encourage website owners to enable encryption on their Web properties.However, malicious advertising attacks that direct users to Web-based exploits will still be possible and, because of the new encryption, it will be harder for security researchers to pinpoint their source.Last year, Google announced that it will give more weight to HTTPS-enabled websites in search rankings in order to encourage the adoption of encryption across the Web. HTTPS (HTTP Secure) allows Web communication over a channel encrypted with the TLS (Transport Layer Security) protocol.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Deploying VMware NSX on Cisco Nexus 9000 & Cisco UCS Infrastructure

As VMware NSX gains broader adoption, we have heard many customer requests for guidance to help them run NSX on top of the latest Cisco infrastructure, namely Cisco UCS and Nexus 9000 series switches.

With customers choosing the benefits of VMware NSX along with the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC), the underlying hardware (Ethernet fabric, x86 compute, etc) provides reliable, resilient capacity, but the configuration, state and advanced features move to faster, more flexible software. The requests were for deploying NSX with Cisco infrastructure running in a standard IP-based fabric with the Nexus 9000’s in standalone mode (NX-OS Mode), as opposed to the proprietary ACI Mode. As with any IP fabric, VMware NSX works great with Nexus 9000 as the underlay. The combination of VMware NSX and Nexus 9000 in standalone mode enables the benefits customers have chosen to embrace with the SDDC.

We had previously put out a design guide on deploying VMware NSX with Cisco UCS and Nexus 7000 to help deploy NSX in current environments. Today we are putting out a new reference design for deploying VMware NSX with Cisco UCS and Nexus 9000 infrastructure, providing an easy path to the SDDC while incorporating the latest Cisco Continue reading

Xperia Z4 launch reflects Sony’s timidity in smartphones

Sony’s decision to launch its new high-end smartphone, the Xperia Z4, only in Japan, shows its hesitancy about this market and puts into question its commitment to it.Monday’s introduction of the Xperia Z4 stands in stark contrast to the arrival of competing products like the HTC One M9 or the Galaxy S6 and S6 edge from Samsung Electronics, which were launched with much fanfare at Mobile World Congress. And when LG premiers the G4 on April 28, it will do so at events around the world.But considering the very challenging position Sony’s smartphone business has found itself in, the low-key unveiling doesn’t come as a shock.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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