The Lippis Report

October 27th, 2008

October 27th, 2008

Many business thought leaders are exploring strategies to leverage their branch assets to increase revenues and improve the branch office customer experience by mitigating branch office constraints. These thought leaders are collectively thinking in terms of Branch 2.0, which from a real estate and staffing point of view is a smaller footprint but rich in information technology (IT). Branch 2.0 offers a solution to the business challenges of staff skill levels, right here, right now customer transaction requirements, broad lack of loyalty thanks to increased competition and using the large branch office footprint to up- and cross-sell customers while gaining new ones. The communications industry is driving new value in branch offices with Branch 2.0, which leverages communications and IT to remove the above branch office constraints and improve corporate performance. The combination of business and communication technology trends is creating the next generation branch office. The Branch Office 2.0 concept and its associated business value are developed in white paper available for download at http://lippisreport.com/2008/08/business-value-creation-through-branch-20/ which contains industry recommendations so that business and IT leaders may exploit it for corporate advantage. We use retail and financial services as examples, but Branch 2.0 may be applied to any branch or store facility in any geographic theater.

October 20th, 2008

While it looks like the US economy has averted the Great Depression 2.0 scenario, business leaders are preparing for what now seems to be a slow motion downturn to a deep and potentially long recession. All eyes and ears will focus on this quarter’s earnings reports, unemployment numbers, rate of credit market thaw and stock market volatility. Special focus will be on the $1T of consumer credit looking for signs of much larger than normal defaults as the next shoe to drop. But a $10T valuation loss on the Dow, unemployment at 6.1% and 10,000 home foreclosures a month (both of which are climbing fast) leaves little room for optimism unless you’re Warren Buffet who’s buying depressed equities. With 70% of the economy based upon consumer spending it’s easy to see how double digit unemployment levels and consumer credit defaults, which increased 54 percent in Q208 from Q207, according to Federal Reserve, adds doubt to a V-shaped recovery scenario. Consumer credit defaults at 7% will be a drag on economic recovery as it’s estimated to reach $100B in 2009. What an awful macro economic scenario. But there is a bright spot; IT can and for some will lead the economy out of this funk.

Read the rest of this entry »

October 20th, 2008

By Force10 Networks

Wiring closets in the enterprise LAN are undergoing a number of significant changes. Perhaps the most important transition stems from the emergence of the enterprise IP network and IP/Ethernet LAN as the converged infrastructure for both data networking applications and real-time communications applications. This convergence is driven not only by the cost reductions achievable through network consolidation, but also by the productivity gains that can be achieved through innovative linkages among communication and data applications, resulting in converged applications such as unified messaging. As application convergence gains further momentum, the LAN infrastructure must continue to evolve to support a widening range of real-time applications, including:

• IP telephony
• IP video conferencing (bi-directional and multi-directional)
• Wireless LAN mobility solutions
• IPTV multimedia conferencing
• Instant messaging (IM) with presence determination

Learn how Force10 Networks is delivering a new generation of wiring closet switch/routers by downloading this white paper.

October 20th, 2008

By Avaya

Teleworking is on the rise—transforming the way companies do business and delivering benefits that can lead to competitive differentiation. But are organizations making as much of their telework initiatives as they could? This is a critical question as the number of teleworkers continues to grow. Unfortunately, many companies are unable to fully realize teleworking benefits as teleworking initiatives tend to be a patchwork arrangement involving multiple devices, contact points, and communications links, which negates the advantages companies are seeking. What’s needed is a way to ensure the ability of teleworkers to communicate quickly, reliably, and accurately at all times. A comprehensive, unified approach comprising products, services, and partners can answer this need—helping organizations maximize the business benefits of teleworking while reducing IT management complexity.

October 20th, 2008

by Foundry Networks

CIOs and IT experts are facing ever increasing new requirements from the business experts for extending their services to be available everywhere around the world. They still need to consolidate data centers and business applications to lower costs, pay attention to new compliance rules and give access to business applications to new business end users. “The network” becomes the increasingly important glue in between more and more globally distributed and used business application components and end-users. Foundry Networks and SAP present jointly in this paper how modern application and network technologies could be combined to form productive SAP business application landscapes, which perform well and securely when used globally.

October 20th, 2008

By Cisco Systems

The financial services marketplace has always been fast-moving and relentlessly competitive. It’s no longer enough just to handle branch transactions efficiently in today’s business cycle. To have any chance of growth, you need to retain and nurture existing customers and acquire new ones—and that requires interacting with the consumer. The broadest success goes to those who can best sense customer needs and respond instantly to them.

October 6th, 2008

In Part One of Deploying Teleworking Solutions in Scale we discussed business and IT problems plus the benefits of teleworking. Here we provide business and IT leaders with an architectural view of today’s teleworking solutions that scale to home and small office environments. These environments may be home workers, call center agents working from home, small branch offices equipped with a few people, small retailers, etc.

Read the rest of this entry »