During the Covid pandemic lockdowns in 2020, many enterprises were forced to buy thousands of laptops (in a big hurry) to enable their people to work from home. Now, a bit more than 3 years later, supply chains have somewhat stabilized, PC prices have returned to normal-ish, and it’s just about time to think about replacing those 3+ year old devices as their warranties expire and the hardware starts showing its age. Most of our clients default to the same old mental model that the Microsoft – Intel duopoly have been selling for decades: Buy a full-power, full-featured, high-performance Windows 11 PC for every employee. Load your core ...
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In a monumental move, Cisco Systems, known for its networking equipment, has announced its intent to acquire Splunk for $28B USD ($157/share), the San Francisco-based company renowned for its software platform that monitors, searches, and analyzes big data along with a full suite of cyber security offerings. Both companies have significant histories in the tech industry, with Cisco having a footprint in network management and cybersecurity, while Splunk focuses on real-time data processing and analytics. The acquisition makes sense for Cisco as they have been reshaping their business from hardware-centric to higher margin software-centric. ...
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Networking giant Cisco offers a range of solutions to client organizations of all sizes, including network infrastructure, security and collaboration solutions, Internet of Things (IoT) devices and cloud-based services. Cisco's fiscal year-end is July, making it one of the best times of the year to negotiate non-standard concessions from your Cisco agreements, investments, and relationships. Clients consider Cisco maintenance compulsory, not realizing that these costs can absolutely be optimized, frequently resulting in reduced costs with no diminution of business value. Here are 5 ways to save money on Cisco that you should consider this ...
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Like a party no one wanted to go to, the COVID pandemic dragged many IT Executives into (over) spending on technology that was not planned for. In the frenetic pace to ‘keep the lights on’, expenditures were made without the scrutiny they may have normally received pre-COVID. Supporting all the work from anywhere (WFA) initiatives including conferencing, PCs, and remote access software and hardware were all added to the mission critical initiatives already underway, like digital transformation and cloud migrations siphoning money away from those other priorities. As you start planning for your 2022 budgets, you may just now be realizing and ...
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Changes in the market forcing clients to embrace Work-from-Anywhere (WFA) employees creates opportunities for clients to transform technology enablement; improving collaboration, increasing productivity and corporate knowledge management, while reducing security threats and end user computing costs (by as much as 67-75% in ideal cases). The 2020 scramble to re-equip and upgrade workers to enable productivity “from home” or “from anywhere” has changed the nature of end-user computing, maybe forever. However, our clients continue to seek ways to help employees, contractors, suppliers, and customer ecosystems to collaborate better, boosting ...
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“The biggest risk is not taking any risk. In a world that’s changing quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.” – Mark Zuckerberg, Founder and CEO, Facebook If you’ve been avoiding risk or waiting for the right time to take bold action in reducing both your reliance and cost structure with Cisco – the wait should be over. The market readiness to reduce or eliminate your Cisco dependence is at an all time high with suppliers who are stable, reliable, innovative and eager to win your business. Below we’ll outline how: The Cisco ecosystem is set up to work against the economics of its own customers Why their ...
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Unlike consumers who have been panic-buying bathroom paper products in bulk over the last few weeks, IT executives have prepared for security threats and natural disasters for many years and have deployed highly resilient solutions with varying degrees of business continuity. Clients have spent millions for things like network redundancy, contact center contingency planning, remote workforce support, and business application and underlying compute and storage infrastructure availability. The list could go on. In fact, there is a whole industry set up to help IT leaders face this business continuity challenge. What many of those plans fell ...
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Do you have AWS Zombies lurking in your environment? If you are an AWS customer, probably you do. AWS Zombies are likely roaming your cloud instances gaining power, destroying all they touch, and if you don’t kill them off soon, they may take over your bills altogether. What are AWS Zombies? AWS Zombies are described as unused (and often hidden) assets that keep contributing to the ongoing costs of your AWS Cloud without producing any value. What are the four most common types of AWS Zombies? 1: Unattached EBS Volumes Clients should seek out and kill AWS Zombies like unattached EBS Volumes: When you provision an Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) ...
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The more I work with Cisco lately, the more I’m reminded of the television commercial made famous by the Wendy’s hamburger chain in the United States, wherein an elderly woman and her friends open their giant hamburger bun only to find a tiny piece of meat inside and ask, “Where’s the beef!?” When I review Cisco EA agreements, our clients and I are asking the same question, but in this case the EA is the giant bun and the beef is the value. What’s getting presented to us on this nice Cisco plate appears to be a lot of hamburger (i.e. the “best deal!”), but often when we lift the bun, the value (beef) is elusive and hard to find. The “Best ...
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Many of you may be waiting and watching to see how the trade issues between China and the United States are resolved, and specifically its impact on Huawei. With current and future Telecom & Network infrastructure projects under consideration, what are the critical things to know when considering Huawei? Despite all the political turmoil for Huawei, most of it originating out of the United States, the company has quietly become one of the largest telecommunications equipment manufacturers in the world. Huawei expects revenue of about $100 billion annually for the next two years, compared with $105 billion in 2018 including a $30B ...
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