There are many facts that point to continuing growth in branch office deployments, and the realization that application delivery has become data-center and branch office focused. Delivering business innovation to branch office locations has always been challenging with few, if any, IT personal on site, in-consistent application and service delivery among branches and employee demands for higher levels of business services that are available at headquarter facilities. In the current difficult macro economic scenario managed services offers the favorable trade-off of capital plus salary cost for facilities cost; lowering operational spend. Joel Conover Sr. Manager, Network Systems Marketing at Cisco Systems joins me to discuss IT leader’s options to accelerate business innovation while lowering operational spend through managed services delivered by service providers harnessing the power of Cisco’s Empowered Branch solution. If you are looking for a new model to deliver branch office innovation and cut capital costs, then you have to listen to this podcast

Enterprise networks, especially branch office networks, have experienced a level of service integration over the past five years that has delivered lower acquisition and operational cost while increasing the number of services available to branch office employees. Branch office routers now include switching, WLANs, PoE, network security, WAN Optimization, VPN, unified communications and advanced routing which increase application performance over thin wide area network links. In this podcast we explain the next generation of branch office optimization, which is the integration of applications into the network fabric. The networking industry has started to open up its software in the form of SDKs and APIs. Cisco, Juniper, Extreme, 3Com and the open source routing initiatives are all allowing developers to write to defined router software interfaces. The concepts here are based upon research contained within an industry paper available for download at http://lippisreport.com/2008/09/increasing-corporate-value-through-integrated-networks-and-applications-a-new-approach-to-it-service-delivery-emerges-for-branch-office-operations/. We explain integrated networks and applications in this pdocast and provide business and IT leaders recommendations to exploit it for corporate advantage.

Avaya just hired Kevin Kennedy as its new CEO. Zeus Kerravala of The Yankee Group and I comment on Avaya’s pick and review the recent Avaya analyst conference with an eye toward which Enterprise Communication companies will survive the downturn. Enjoy, Nick

You can’t manage what you can’t measure and this could not be truer for virtualized data center infrastructure. Virtualized infrastructure reduces energy consumption, software license fees and provides a flexible data center that can spin up and down services as demand dictates. But the lack of network visibility to manage and optimize this infrastructure is giving many IT leaders pause. Virtual ports that support numerous logical flows to a single blade running across multiple virtual machines eliminate management, optimization and troubleshooting tools previous available. Stephen Garrison, VP of Marketing for Force10 Networks joins me to talk about strategies and tactics that deliver visibility into virtualized IT infrastructure. If you’re building or trying to manage a virtualized data center, then you need to listen to this podcast