Could E-rate be going away for education? Economy and miss-spending could do it.

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Predictions for the next few months, Riverbed and Nortel get purchased plus more

Yes, I said it and this is what I am thinking. Juniper is looking at Nortel as a buy, buy, buy (as Kramer would put it) to compete with Cisco in voice and unified communications. Also they would get the optical unit at Nortel which would just get under the skin of the Cisco people. But there could be another company who might buy Nortel, remember that Nortel does allot of carrier class switching. This could be a great time for AT&T to buy a vendor or even Qwest.

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Arizona's Department of Economic Security is notifying the families of 40,000 children that their personal data may have been compromised following the theft of several hard drives from a commercial storage facility. The information lost includes social security numbers, addresses, names and phone numbers. The data on the disk was password protected but not encrypted; knowing state employees it is 1234 for a password. The disks were stolen from a leased extra space storage facility.

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The economy in a toilet and large VAR's laying off sales and engineers, the SMB partners are doing much better but why?  We have been seeing many large VAR's that sell many different vendors laying off staff as they are not selling product, this is good for SMB partners and even better for customers. I know that did not sound good but what we are seeing is that customer are getting better pricing now from vendors on goods since they want to sell and the SMB partners are showing more value for the dollar.

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I was asked last night what my opinion was on the new Cisco Public Telepresence Suites from a CIO in New York. So today I thought I would share my view on the subject, it is all not that bad. After I read this post below I tried to contact Cisco for a few days over email with no luck, bad email address. So I contacted Susan Bostrom and she put in me contact with the right people. I told them I was interested in the project and was looking to become a partner as they said they were looking for on their web site.

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Ohio Secretary Of State's Web Site Hacked

Well here we go, now the true state of this administration is coming out. Voter fraud and now the state voting web site gets hacked? How does this happen? Does this prove that some state workers are just punching the time clock to get a check and a pension? Does this prove that the governor really needs to listen to some people outside the state for technology decisions and security? Who will be fired for this breach? No one, that's the way the state works !!!!!

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George Kurian, VP of Cisco's application delivery division, recently held a conference call where he provided a state of the WAN optimization market along with an overview of Cisco's WAAS 4.1 release.  Riverbed's Bob Gilbert had some interesting comment in his blog below.

http://blogs.riverbed.com/thinkfast/2008/10/cisco-vp-lets-u.html#more

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Many years ago I was involved in a project that looked into the e-voting systems when they first came in to the state of Ohio. I broke into two free standing systems within two minutes and within ten minutes to the collector or database holding all of the reports. Now we have politics playing a very big role in this election because of these systems and how people vote. I am not a voter, I have never voted in my life by choice. Why you ask? Well I have never found any person who I have wanted to vote for in twenty years.

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I really wish the government, local and state organization really had someone who knew what was going on with Security. Another laptop stolen and since they are worried about the contents that means it was not encrypted. I don't understand how we have CIO's VP's and IT Manager that don't get it. It is not that hard to by a full disk encryption software package that would take care of laptops and also usb drives.

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Gartner tells us all what we already knew about the Cisco WAAS, it is immature.

A recent post on my blog asking me for comments on the latest Gartner Publication about the Cisco WAAS, prompted this posting.  The title of the Gartner article was Cisco WAAS Update: Client Feedback Suggests to Proceed With Caution and the date was September 17, 2008. A summary of the article says a few things that we most of us who see past the Cisco Marketing spin knew already, the WAAS has issues. Please remember before all of the bashers jump on the blogger, this is from Gartner and customers not me. I have my own comments at the bottom.

Gartner put this paper together after getting feedback from Cisco WWAS customers, so this is not a competitive company saying these items below. Gartner said problems with software quality and stability issues should make customers wary and that the product is still immature when compared with its competitors, and successful deployments can be difficult to predict.  They reported that customer are having issues with the Cisco WAAS and that is does not meet the Cisco standards and it has taken some accounts six months or more to resolve significant bugs.

Gartner said they have spoken with many customers both large and small that continue to have serious problems with the software of the WAAS. They went on to say that this poses a serious question with regards to the quality and reliability of the software.  They said technical issues that customer have reported such as the product stability is an issue, some large scale customer work well but other even smaller ones don't work well. Even with new releases of the software the problems have got worse.

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Below is the Cisco statement on the purchase, is Cisco worried that Microsoft is moving ahead? I think that Microsoft has a better interface for its Client product and now that they have drawn off the Nortel MCS5100 it is even better. Cisco is looking to make its client better and not so blah. 

 http://biz.yahoo.com/iw/080919/0435650.html

With not to much fan fare, Riverbed has added VMware to the Riverbed Service Platform. This is a huge more forward for Riverbed in its Riverbed Service Platform. It will be interesting to see if companies look now to the Riverbed Product as it does a good job of accelerating the VMware applications (riverbed.com/images...virtualization_large.gif). The question now will be how do the other players in the WDS space respond to this announcement?

riverbed.com...press_releases/press_090908a.php

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Reader's email on Full Disk Encryption prompts testing by me to look for answers

I received an email last night from a friend in France, his company made them install Full Disk Encryption on to all laptops and also software on cellular phones. See the email below,

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The story below is true and just another reminder than backups, storage and running a hot or duplicate site in this day and age are very necessary. Even the people and companies who you would think would have the right people running things get it all wrong. Just think about how many companies you need on a daily basis and what would happen if they were down for the whole day due to an outage.

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Last week I received a post on an old blog, please see below.

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Submitted by Tito M. (not verified) on Tue, 08/26/2008 - 1:53pm.

Larry,

I still have not seen this new Cisco Wide Area Application Engine (WAE) 674 and Cisco WAAS v4.1
that won Best of Interop at any customers sites or being sold. I ask my Cisco AM and he said its available if I wanted it but was trying to get me to not call the bluff. This was suppose to be the new end all against Riverbed at Interop, but seems Cisco was just all smoke and mirrors.

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Manufacturers' inside sales versus Channel Partners; the good, the bad and the ugly

I received a call from a CIO this weekend while playing golf, the call started on the 11th hole and went to the 17^th hole. He has been working with a good channel partner but received a quote from the manufacturer inside sales group on a renewal purchase. First he was confused as to why they would have inside sales agents working with customer when they have channel partners and why would the cost be less than the channel partners cost. He was confused of whom to go with and asked me if this was a trend that I was seeing where manufacturers would be going with more inside sales and moving away from the channel partners, just using them for warranty work if needed.

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I was really not looking forward to this when Cisco starting moving engineers and account managers away from the SMB channel and moving in Linksys teams to those positions. First hand I can tell you it has not been a great start, the new Linksys people who are taking over the current SMB roles from Cisco teams are not really up to date and do not really answer emails. This is not just one person but more than a few that I have sent emails to in different areas and never received an email back when asking for help or asking questions.

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I received this email from Cisco today offering a free retake on exams if you don't pass. Seems they are hurting from the bad economy and need to generate business. My questions to our readers are is in the last year how many Cisco exams have you taken and have many times did you need to retake a test? Do you think that tests are too expensive and the prices should be reduced? How about $125 for a CCNP and that would include all tests? What would Cisco do if everyone just stopped taking the test?

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