Unfiltered

Is IMS no longer a dirty word? Infonetics Research this week said the IMS equipment market was up 87% in the second quarter versus the year before, driven by a very varied bag of market drivers. In some ways it’s not surprising: carriers, both wireline and wireless, surely can’t deploy next generation IP networks without a healthy dose of IMS software elements. At the same time, after years of being the “next-big-thing,” it is somewhat ironic for IMS to now be somewhat of an overnight success. (more…)

Less than three weeks after assuming the top spot at Verizon (CP: Verizon pulls trigger on Mcadam for Seidenberg), Lowell McAdam last night had the opportunity to experience the downside of the CEO position as hundreds of Verizon strikers picketed his suburban New Jersey home. (more…)

Geneva is beautiful in October—and any creative thinkers involved with information or communications technology (ICT) who may want to experience the Swiss city should consider entering a competition announced recently by the International Telecommunications Union. (more…)

The cloud is a busy place this week.

Microsoft launched Office 365 yesterday, and Apple has opened its iCloud.com Web interface to developers.  Tech site 9 to 5 Mac, apparently giving the bird to Apple’s NDA, has posted a number of images of the beta site, which reportedly features a very iPad, iOS-like interface and includes a number of new Web apps, including Mail, Calendar and Contacts. There’s even a Find my iPhone Web app, underscoring how Apple — in way that neither Microsoft nor Google has or perhaps can — created a cloud solution that feels to be very much about users’ devices, not just their software. The more iOS-running devices you own, the more of a boon iCloud is likely to be (CP: With iCloud, Apple changes definition of ‘cloud’ to fit own needs).

There are reportedly no ads in iCloud (an area where Microsoft last week took a nice jab at Google for its related links-style text ads in Gmail) and pricing, Apple revealed, will be as follows:

• take up less than 5GB of storage and it’s on the house;

• add 10GB, for 15GB total, and it’s $20 a year;

• add 20GB, for a total of 25GB, and it’s $40 a year;

• add 50, for a 55GB total, and it’s $100 a year.

While Apple will have millions of consumers to court when it publicly launches the iCloud in the fall, Microsoft will more aggressively be going after the enterprise set — where it may face conflicting ideas between executives and IT professionals, according to a Marketing Solutions survey sponsored by Dell.

The survey found 57% of IT respondents to harbor fears about security in the cloud, 32% to be leery of industry compliance or governance issues, and 27% to harbor disaster recovery concerns — and they’re the ones more excited about the cloud.

More interestingly, the IT professionals were asked about their thoughts — and their perceptions of the thinking of the senior executives around them. For example, while 47% viewed the cloud as an “extension of long-term trends toward remote networks and virtualization,” only 26% thought their “business leaders” felt the same.

Just as personal smartphone use (hello, iPhone) prepared business professionals for mobile deployments (and in many cases increased their likelihood) perhaps the arrival of iCloud in homes will help to make off-duty executives more aware of and comfortable with the idea.

This could help to bridge what Steve Schuckenbrock, president of Dell services, calls a “lingering disconnect in expectations between IT professionals and senior business executives,” in order to “drive transparency and focus on business results and outcomes to help bridge that communications gap.”

China was “a big part” of Apple’s through-the-roof iPhone sales, Apple COO Tim Cook shared during the company’s latest earnings announcement. (Unfiltered: Apple’s record-breaking iPhone sales came thanks to developing markets.) (more…)