An Apple supplier known for making iPads has
been penalized by Chinese authorities for turning a nearby river in
Shanghai "white" after dumping pollutants during the nation's Spring
Festival holiday.
The supplier, RiTeng Computer Accessory,
had wrongfully dumped waste water used for cleaning processes due to
suspected staff negligence, according to a Friday statement from a
parent company.
Authorities first became aware of the problem after residents had reported that the river's water had turned white, a local environmental protection bureau reported. The water was then traced back to RiTeng's facilities in the area.
The
bureau's preliminary investigation found that the waste water including
cutting fluid and oil had flowed from the company's storm drain. Other
environmental problems were also found including noise levels exceeding
standards.
The environmental bureau has penalized the supplier,
although it is unclear if the company was fined. RiTeng's parent company
Casetek made its Friday statement in response to a news report that
said the supplier would be forced to pay 270,000 yuan (US$43,000).
The
RiTeng facilities, however, are still operating normally. The supplier
is complying with the authorities' investigation, and working to resolve
the problems, Casetek added.
RiTeng was previously in the news for a factory explosion
that sent 61 workers to hospital in December 2011. One of the factories
there is known to assemble iPads. Company workers have complained of
chemical smells and unpaid overtime.
Apple, however, has been
making progress in keeping its suppliers in line with environmental
regulations, said Wang Jingjing, vice director for China's InstituteA of
Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE). The group had previously been critical
of Apple for failing to monitor its suppliers. But the company has
since stepped up audits and increased pressure on suppliers to comply,
she said.
"Apple has opened up and you can see they have taken a
great effort to push their suppliers to take corrective action," Wang
said. The group released a report last month documenting the improvements.
IPE
has already informed Apple about the wastewater dumping by RiTeng, and
the U.S. company is sending staff to investigate, according to Wang.
Apple did not respond to a request for comment.
Friday, February 22, 2013
Microsoft gooses Windows XP's custom support prices as deadline nears
Microsoft is wielding the big stick of
dramatically higher custom support costs as it pushes enterprises to
abandon the 11-year-old Windows XP, an analyst said today.
Custom support plans, which Microsoft negotiates on a company-by-company basis, provide critical security updates for an operating system that's officially been declared dead. Windows XP, which still powers about 43% of the world's Windows PCs, is slated for support retirement on April 8, 2014. That leaves 410 days from today for XP users to move on.
According to Michael Silver and Stephen Kleynhans, a pair of Gartner analysts who published a report on XP custom support last month, some companies won't meet the deadline. "Many will not have Windows XP totally eliminated before support ends," Silver and Kleynhans wrote, echoing earlier estimates by Silver that between 10% and 15% of enterprise PCs will still be running XP when Microsoft pulls the plug.
However, Microsoft offers a failsafe of sorts -- "Custom Support" -- that lets companies pay for security patches beyond the normal support lifespan.
But Silver and Kleynhans said that Microsoft has quoted significantly higher prices for Custom Support than in the past.
For some time, Microsoft capped custom support at $200,000 for the first year, payable quarterly so that if a firm finished its migration in less than a year, it would pay only for support through the end of that quarter. In 2006, Microsoft switched to per-device pricing, with a floor of $200,000 and a ceiling of $500,000. Four years later, in 2010, Microsoft modified pricing yet again by capping it at $200,000 for the first year if the corporation had signed up for Software Assurance, the annuity-like program that guarantees companies access to the newest version of a product.
Those prices got tossed out the window, said Silver in an interview today. Microsoft has returned to a per-device model -- $200 has been typical -- and reinstituted floor and ceiling amounts. But those amounts for the first year are closer to what Microsoft was previously charging for the third year of support.
"It's certainly not pretty," said Silver of the custom support quotes for XP, which have ranged from $600,000 to $5 million for the first year.
The higher prices put to rest speculation by some experts last year that Microsoft, faced with enormous numbers of XP PCs still in use next year, would have no choice but to extend free support.
An IT manager, who wished to remain anonymous because he was not authorized to speak on the matter, told Computerworld that Microsoft had quoted his company $1 million for the first year of custom support to cover 5,000 Windows XP machines, $2 million for the second year, and $5 million for the third.
Silver pointed out that the $1 million fit with what he'd heard from other organizations of Microsoft charging $200 per PC for the first year of post-retirement support.
"It is hard to fault Microsoft for wanting to end support for its older products and migrate users onto newer versions that provide a better experience, and potentially revenue for Microsoft," said Silver and Kleynhans in their report.
Custom support plans, which Microsoft negotiates on a company-by-company basis, provide critical security updates for an operating system that's officially been declared dead. Windows XP, which still powers about 43% of the world's Windows PCs, is slated for support retirement on April 8, 2014. That leaves 410 days from today for XP users to move on.
According to Michael Silver and Stephen Kleynhans, a pair of Gartner analysts who published a report on XP custom support last month, some companies won't meet the deadline. "Many will not have Windows XP totally eliminated before support ends," Silver and Kleynhans wrote, echoing earlier estimates by Silver that between 10% and 15% of enterprise PCs will still be running XP when Microsoft pulls the plug.
However, Microsoft offers a failsafe of sorts -- "Custom Support" -- that lets companies pay for security patches beyond the normal support lifespan.
But Silver and Kleynhans said that Microsoft has quoted significantly higher prices for Custom Support than in the past.
For some time, Microsoft capped custom support at $200,000 for the first year, payable quarterly so that if a firm finished its migration in less than a year, it would pay only for support through the end of that quarter. In 2006, Microsoft switched to per-device pricing, with a floor of $200,000 and a ceiling of $500,000. Four years later, in 2010, Microsoft modified pricing yet again by capping it at $200,000 for the first year if the corporation had signed up for Software Assurance, the annuity-like program that guarantees companies access to the newest version of a product.
Those prices got tossed out the window, said Silver in an interview today. Microsoft has returned to a per-device model -- $200 has been typical -- and reinstituted floor and ceiling amounts. But those amounts for the first year are closer to what Microsoft was previously charging for the third year of support.
"It's certainly not pretty," said Silver of the custom support quotes for XP, which have ranged from $600,000 to $5 million for the first year.
The higher prices put to rest speculation by some experts last year that Microsoft, faced with enormous numbers of XP PCs still in use next year, would have no choice but to extend free support.
An IT manager, who wished to remain anonymous because he was not authorized to speak on the matter, told Computerworld that Microsoft had quoted his company $1 million for the first year of custom support to cover 5,000 Windows XP machines, $2 million for the second year, and $5 million for the third.
Silver pointed out that the $1 million fit with what he'd heard from other organizations of Microsoft charging $200 per PC for the first year of post-retirement support.
"It is hard to fault Microsoft for wanting to end support for its older products and migrate users onto newer versions that provide a better experience, and potentially revenue for Microsoft," said Silver and Kleynhans in their report.
HP's first 'Project Moonshot' server due next quarter
Hewlett-Packard's first low-power server for
hyperscale computing environments, developed under a project it calls
Moonshot, will go on sale next quarter, CEO Meg Whitman said on
Thursday.
Project Moonshot is an effort to build low-power servers based on alternatives to Intel's Xeon processors for use in mega data centers like those operated by Facebook and Google.
HP announced the project in 2011, and the first server platform it talked about, known as Redstone, was to be based on an ARM-type processor from Calxeda.
HP switched gears last year, however, and showed another Project Moonshot server design dubbed Gemini, the first version of which was to be based on an Intel Atom processor.
It could be that Atom server that HP plans to release next quarter, though Whitman didn't say and an HP spokesman declined to comment. The server would be a bit behind schedule, since an HP executive originally said Gemini would be out late last year.
"We expect this to truly revolutionize the economics of the data center with an entirely new category of server that consumes up to 89 percent less energy, 94 percent less space and 63 percent less cost than a traditional x86 server environment," Whitman said on HP's earnings call Thursday.
It's HP's attempt to capitalize on a growing market for very low-power servers used by companies delivering online services on a large scale. Other players include Dell, which was quick to jump on the market, and AMD, which bought low-power server vendor SeaMicro and plans to license its technology to other computer makers.
The servers aren't designed to run traditional enterprise applications, however. They're intended for programs written specially for such environments, including Web applications and big data software such as Hadoop.
Gemini gets its power savings from a new Intel Atom chip known as Centerton, which Intel has said consumes 6 watts of power, far less than its Xeon chips. Calxeda isn't necessarily out in the cold, however: HP said Gemini uses a "processor cartridge" that will allow it to use other processor types in the future.
Project Moonshot is an effort to build low-power servers based on alternatives to Intel's Xeon processors for use in mega data centers like those operated by Facebook and Google.
HP announced the project in 2011, and the first server platform it talked about, known as Redstone, was to be based on an ARM-type processor from Calxeda.
HP switched gears last year, however, and showed another Project Moonshot server design dubbed Gemini, the first version of which was to be based on an Intel Atom processor.
It could be that Atom server that HP plans to release next quarter, though Whitman didn't say and an HP spokesman declined to comment. The server would be a bit behind schedule, since an HP executive originally said Gemini would be out late last year.
"We expect this to truly revolutionize the economics of the data center with an entirely new category of server that consumes up to 89 percent less energy, 94 percent less space and 63 percent less cost than a traditional x86 server environment," Whitman said on HP's earnings call Thursday.
It's HP's attempt to capitalize on a growing market for very low-power servers used by companies delivering online services on a large scale. Other players include Dell, which was quick to jump on the market, and AMD, which bought low-power server vendor SeaMicro and plans to license its technology to other computer makers.
The servers aren't designed to run traditional enterprise applications, however. They're intended for programs written specially for such environments, including Web applications and big data software such as Hadoop.
Gemini gets its power savings from a new Intel Atom chip known as Centerton, which Intel has said consumes 6 watts of power, far less than its Xeon chips. Calxeda isn't necessarily out in the cold, however: HP said Gemini uses a "processor cartridge" that will allow it to use other processor types in the future.
Gaming Shoot-Out: 18 CPUs And APUs Under $200, Benchmarked
Now that Piledriver-based CPUs and APUs are widely available
(and the FX-8350 is selling for less than $200), it's a great time to
compare value-oriented chips in our favorite titles. We're also breaking
out a test that conveys the latency between frames.
At least on the desktop, dual-core processors rarely helped bolster performance when they were first introduced. Most mainstream apps simply hadn't been optimized for multiple cores; that sort of technology was principally enabled in the server and workstation space. You had multi-socket motherboards with single-core chips cranking on complex problems in parallel. But games were almost exclusively written to run on a one core.
Programming with threading in mind isn't easy, and it took developers years to adapt to a world where CPUs seemed destined to improve performance through parallelism rather than then 10 GHz clock rates Intel had foreshadowed back in 2000. Slowly, though, the applications most able to benefit from multiple cores working in concert have been rewritten to utilize modern hardware.
Want proof? Just have a look at our benchmark suite. We test something like two pieces of software that are still single-threaded: Lame and iTunes. Everything else, to one degree or another, is threaded. Content creation, compression, and even productivity apps tax the highest-end four- and six-core CPUs.
Games, on the other hand, have taken longer to "get there." With a primary emphasis on graphics performance, it's not surprising that single-threaded engines still exist. However, spawning additional threads and utilizing a greater number of cores allows ISVs to implement better artificial intelligence or add more rigid bodies that can be affected by physics.
Increasingly, then, we're seeing more examples of games exhibiting better performance when we use quad-core processor. They're still the exception though, rather than the rule. And that's why the great single-threaded performance of Intel's Sandy Bridge architecture (and later Ivy Bridge) dominated most of our processor-bound game testing. Back in the day, dual-core Pentiums went heads-up against quad-core CPUs from AMD, and came out in the lead.
It's now clear that gunning for higher and higher clock rates is not the direction AMD and Intel are going. They're both building desktop-oriented CPUs with as many as four modules (in AMD's case) or six cores (in Intel's). In turn, game developers continue getting better about utilizing available on-die resources. We're clearly at a point where you need at least a dual-core CPU to enjoy today's hottest titles, if for no other reason than sticking with a single-core chip would put you about eight years back in processor technology. But is there a reason to skip over the dual-core models and jump right into the world of gaming on a quad-core CPU?
That's what we're hoping to answer today, and we have a new tool to help us.
At least on the desktop, dual-core processors rarely helped bolster performance when they were first introduced. Most mainstream apps simply hadn't been optimized for multiple cores; that sort of technology was principally enabled in the server and workstation space. You had multi-socket motherboards with single-core chips cranking on complex problems in parallel. But games were almost exclusively written to run on a one core.
Programming with threading in mind isn't easy, and it took developers years to adapt to a world where CPUs seemed destined to improve performance through parallelism rather than then 10 GHz clock rates Intel had foreshadowed back in 2000. Slowly, though, the applications most able to benefit from multiple cores working in concert have been rewritten to utilize modern hardware.
Want proof? Just have a look at our benchmark suite. We test something like two pieces of software that are still single-threaded: Lame and iTunes. Everything else, to one degree or another, is threaded. Content creation, compression, and even productivity apps tax the highest-end four- and six-core CPUs.
Games, on the other hand, have taken longer to "get there." With a primary emphasis on graphics performance, it's not surprising that single-threaded engines still exist. However, spawning additional threads and utilizing a greater number of cores allows ISVs to implement better artificial intelligence or add more rigid bodies that can be affected by physics.
Increasingly, then, we're seeing more examples of games exhibiting better performance when we use quad-core processor. They're still the exception though, rather than the rule. And that's why the great single-threaded performance of Intel's Sandy Bridge architecture (and later Ivy Bridge) dominated most of our processor-bound game testing. Back in the day, dual-core Pentiums went heads-up against quad-core CPUs from AMD, and came out in the lead.
It's now clear that gunning for higher and higher clock rates is not the direction AMD and Intel are going. They're both building desktop-oriented CPUs with as many as four modules (in AMD's case) or six cores (in Intel's). In turn, game developers continue getting better about utilizing available on-die resources. We're clearly at a point where you need at least a dual-core CPU to enjoy today's hottest titles, if for no other reason than sticking with a single-core chip would put you about eight years back in processor technology. But is there a reason to skip over the dual-core models and jump right into the world of gaming on a quad-core CPU?
That's what we're hoping to answer today, and we have a new tool to help us.
Tahiti LE, Tested: PowerColor's HD7870 PCS+ Myst Edition
Today, we look at a card between two worlds. Despite a model
number that suggests Pitcairn lineage, this board is based on AMD's
Tahiti GPU. Does it behave more like its namesake, or the powerful
engine actually under its hood? Read on for more!
One man's trash is another man's treasure, right? This proverb isn’t new, so it shouldn’t come as any surprise that not all of AMD's Tahiti GPUs are fully-functional and can be turned into Radeon HD 7970s. In fact, some don't even have the working bits to become stripped-down Radeon HD 7950s. But that doesn't make those chips worthless.
The blocks of functional logic on those handicapped graphics processors should work just as well as those in AMD's better-manufactured GPUs. And that's why we're starting to see companies like TUL Corporation using Tahiti LE parts to create special versions of the Radeon HD 7870. Three companies are selling the TUL-based boards: PowerColor (owned by TUL), VTX3D (also owned by TUL), and Club 3D. Today, we’re going hands-on with the PowerColor card.
The question that begs to be answered is: What exactly is the difference between one of these special Radeon HD 7870s and a true Radeon HD 7950? To begin, let's look at a block diagram of the Tahiti LE graphics processor.
One-quarter of the Graphics Core Next (GCN) clusters are disabled, taking the chip's 2,048 ALUs and cutting that number down to 1,536 active shader units. Each GCN compute unit has four texture units tied to it. So, when eight of the GPU's 32 CUs get switched off, so too do 32 of its texture units. A Tahiti LE consequentially exposes 96, rather than 128 texture units.
The GPU's back-end is independent of the shader cores, so AMD chooses to leave all eight ROP clusters turned on, fielding up to 32 full-color raster operations per clock cycle. It cuts back, however, on Tahiti LE's peak memory bandwidth by bypassing two of six 64-bit controllers. Instead of the 384-bit aggregate interface you get from a Radeon HD 7950 or 7970, these boards make due with 256-bit connections. Narrowing the memory bus has a second effect: cutting capacity from 3 GB to 2 GB of on-board GDDR5. To help compensate, PowerColor increases the memory clock rate from 1,250 MHz to 1,500 MHz, pushing peak bandwidth all the way to a respectable 192 GB/s.
A 925 MHz base core frequency isn't bad either, compared to a Radeon HD 7950's 800 MHz. AMD's Boost feature keeps the new chip running at 975 MHz more often than not, though.
Naturally, a comparison between this card and the original Radeon HD 7950 is going to be interesting. Have a look at their respective specifications, along with some of the other boards competing for space in your mid-range to high-end gaming PC.
One man's trash is another man's treasure, right? This proverb isn’t new, so it shouldn’t come as any surprise that not all of AMD's Tahiti GPUs are fully-functional and can be turned into Radeon HD 7970s. In fact, some don't even have the working bits to become stripped-down Radeon HD 7950s. But that doesn't make those chips worthless.
The blocks of functional logic on those handicapped graphics processors should work just as well as those in AMD's better-manufactured GPUs. And that's why we're starting to see companies like TUL Corporation using Tahiti LE parts to create special versions of the Radeon HD 7870. Three companies are selling the TUL-based boards: PowerColor (owned by TUL), VTX3D (also owned by TUL), and Club 3D. Today, we’re going hands-on with the PowerColor card.
The question that begs to be answered is: What exactly is the difference between one of these special Radeon HD 7870s and a true Radeon HD 7950? To begin, let's look at a block diagram of the Tahiti LE graphics processor.
One-quarter of the Graphics Core Next (GCN) clusters are disabled, taking the chip's 2,048 ALUs and cutting that number down to 1,536 active shader units. Each GCN compute unit has four texture units tied to it. So, when eight of the GPU's 32 CUs get switched off, so too do 32 of its texture units. A Tahiti LE consequentially exposes 96, rather than 128 texture units.
The GPU's back-end is independent of the shader cores, so AMD chooses to leave all eight ROP clusters turned on, fielding up to 32 full-color raster operations per clock cycle. It cuts back, however, on Tahiti LE's peak memory bandwidth by bypassing two of six 64-bit controllers. Instead of the 384-bit aggregate interface you get from a Radeon HD 7950 or 7970, these boards make due with 256-bit connections. Narrowing the memory bus has a second effect: cutting capacity from 3 GB to 2 GB of on-board GDDR5. To help compensate, PowerColor increases the memory clock rate from 1,250 MHz to 1,500 MHz, pushing peak bandwidth all the way to a respectable 192 GB/s.
A 925 MHz base core frequency isn't bad either, compared to a Radeon HD 7950's 800 MHz. AMD's Boost feature keeps the new chip running at 975 MHz more often than not, though.
Naturally, a comparison between this card and the original Radeon HD 7950 is going to be interesting. Have a look at their respective specifications, along with some of the other boards competing for space in your mid-range to high-end gaming PC.
Republic Wireless Lowers Cost of Entry for No-Contract Service
Republic Wireless is now offering the option of a $99 Android phone with unlimited service for $29 a month, instead of its usual $19 a month.
Republic Wireless today addressed what can be the major pain point of the contract-free wireless service model—the unsubsidized devices that tend to go with them. The carrier, which has an unusual business model and the lowest monthly price point in the wireless industry—$19 a month for unlimited talk, text and data, with the purchase of a $249 Motorola DEFY XT smartphone—has lowered the cost of entry. Subscribers now have the option of paying $99 for the DEFY XT, if they instead pay $29 a month for service. "People love Republic and the tremendous savings we offer consumers, but the up-front $249 price point for the Motorola DEFY XT was cost-prohibitive for some," David Morken, co-founder of Republic parent company Bandwidth, said in a Feb. 20 statement. "Today's announcement provides the option for shoppers to save now with a lower price for the phone, or save over time with a lower monthly cost for service." Republic Wireless estimates that a family of three, each with a Motorola DEFY XT, saves an average of $2,715 over two years when they go with the $19 plan. When they choose to save on the phone and pay $29 monthly, average savings during the same time would be closer to $2,445."In today's challenging economy," said Morken, "there is no reason the monthly cell phone bill should be one of the highest household expenses."
And in today's world, you should expect to get what you pay for.
The Republic Wireless model depends on users spending the majority of their time within range of a WiFi hotspot and using voice-over IP to place calls. When users aren't close to a usable WiFi signal, the phone turns instead to the Sprint network. Republic reserves the right to break up with users who spend too much time on Sprint's network—though it won't say what "too much time" constitutes—and adds that it has yet to break up with anyone. In a Feb. 11 review, Consumer Reports telecom engineer David Toner, who spent time with the DEFY XT in the New York City area, said he found the phone decent but limited and the service acceptable but sometimes irksome. The ideal scenario, he said, is to place a call while at home and staying put or else out and about, as transitions are an issue.
"The person at the other end of the call must hit the flash button to maintain the conversation or he'll lose the call," said the Consumer Reports blog, reporting on Toner's review. It added, "The phone did not do a very good job of recognizing when the WiFi signal was becoming too weak to maintain the call, resulting in dropped calls or poor performance. David had better luck manually forcing the phone to switch from WiFi to cellular." A shortcoming of the phone, which runs the Gingerbread version of Android, is that it can send and receive text messages but not messages with videos or photos. Toner also found it to be "small but chunky." (Republic's Morken said additional devices will be made available "later this year.") Pointing out that Republic's savings are potentially greater for someone who decides to take the company up on its $99 phone offer and stay for only a year (there's no annual contract), Toner said, in summary, that Republic is certainly not for everyone. However, he said, it might be an acceptable option for perhaps college students with continually good WiFi reception or else "penny pinchers" who are still carrying around flip phones and "reluctant to pony up the higher monthly cost for a smartphone from a conventional carrier."
Microsoft Forges Skype, Lync into Enterprise Communications Platform
This summer, Microsoft will connect Lync 2013 and Skype in a move that the company hopes will disrupt and "humanize" enterprise communications market.
Microsoft's unified communications platform, is undergoing some major changes that according to Giovanni Mezgec, general manager of Lync, will bridge the disparate worlds of enterprise and consumer communications. In June, Microsoft will enable voice and chat along with presence reporting between Lync and Skype. It's a move by Microsoft to shift the concept of communications from one that is dependent on place, device and professional context to one that is anchored by people. "At home, at work... We have the tendency of focusing on the environment," Mezgec told eWEEK in New York City Feb. 12. "But fundamentally, it's the people that we want to make productive, and that's the core focus," he added. Lync 2013 represents an opportunity to bridge Microsoft's business communications platform with the massive user base the software giant inherited when it acquired Skype in 2011 for $8.5 billion."By bringing the assets that we have on the consumer front with Skype and on the enterprise front with Lync, we can have a unified platform that really brings communications from the living room to the boardroom in a way that makes sense and is rationalized and connected rather than having disconnected islands," said Mezgec.
Connecting Lync and Skype wasn't only an endeavor in the technological sense. It also involved some significant structural changes for Microsoft. Mezgec revealed that Lync, formerly in the business software group at Microsoft, is now part of the new joint Skype division.
At Microsoft's inaugural Lync Conference in San Diego on Feb. 19, Tony Bates, former Skype CEO and current president of the Skype division, took to the stage to reiterate the theme of "putting people first" by integrating both technologies. Part of Microsoft's goal is "the re-humanization of communications," said Bates during his keynote speech. In support of that mission, Lync 2013 sports a streamlined, Windows 8-like interface that at-a-glance emphasizes contacts, their status and methods of communicating with them (video, voice or chat). A standalone Windows 8 app is "optimized for touch" and features support for extensive gesture-based interactions. Lync 2013 also gets some significant under-the-hood updates. According to Mezgec, it can now accommodate up to 250 attendees per virtual meeting and supports smart video feeds that automatically switch their focus to up 5 speakers. Even the codec, which was changed for improved efficiency and improved streaming fidelity, got a makeover, reported Mezgec. These enhancements and the fact that Lync 2013 will seamlessly "talk" to Skype, add up to a new humanized era of business communications, claims Microsoft. In a company blog post, Bates, explained, "This move will begin to enable what we call B2X. B2X places the focus of business communication on enabling human interactions. B2X puts people first and looks at communications in a unified way, not as disparate technology silos focused on one task or protocol."
Cisco Launches UC Blitz vs. Microsoft
Cisco is looking to highlight differences in its approach and Microsoft’s as the two companies compete to offer complete solutions.
Cisco Systems officials are kicking off a campaign aimed at highlighting what they say are significant shortcomings in rival Microsoft’s enterprise collaboration efforts. Cisco’s initiative—launched Feb. 18, on the eve of Microsoft’s Lync Conference 2013 in San Diego, Calif.—includes a survey conducted by the networking giant that officials say illustrates the differences in approach to collaboration by Cisco and Microsoft, and how Cisco’s strategy dovetails better with the demands of businesses. The release of the survey results is just the beginning of an effort to mark the differences between Cisco and Microsoft that officials say could last weeks. “Customers tell us time and again that a modern collaboration platform needs to deliver more than the basics like IM, conferencing and VOIP,” Rowan Trollope, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Collaboration Technology Group, said in a Feb. 18 post on the Cisco blog. “It needs to offer flexibility and choice in support of trends such as BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), high-quality video, and cloud-based deployments (private, public, hybrid,and hosted). The modern collaboration platform needs to be usable not just by office workers but by anyone, from physicians to customer care agents, executives, mobile and desk-less workers. And it needs to be as complete of a solution as possible. … Which brings me back to Microsoft and Lync. We believe that a solution that’s primarily been developed for a desktop PC user experience is less able to meet these wider post-PC requirements than one that has been designed and optimized for them from the outset.”“We’re taking a software-based approach to unified communications, an industry that’s been [based in] hardware,” Giovanni Mezgec, general manager of Lync product marketing for Microsoft, told eWEEK.
Forrester Research analyst Henry Dewing said it’s not surprising that Cisco and Microsoft are eyeing each other as they expand their enterprise collaboration offerings. “Microsoft and Cisco in particular are the poster children for a single-vendor solution,” Dewing told eWEEK. “Both are working very hard to create a soups-to-nuts solution.” In addition, while each offers strong offerings, neither has a complete solution. There are weaknesses in both. “At the end of the day, both of these have holes,” he said. “Neither one of them is as broad [a solution set] as they think they are. … The truth lies somewhere in the middle.” Christian Stegh, vice president of strategy at Enabling Technologies, a UC consultancy and Microsoft’s UC partner of the year in 2012, struck a similar tone in a post earlier this month on the No Jitter blog site, which focuses on communications and networking. “We would contend that, when a company embraces the full suite of Cisco or Avaya products, the breadth of skills needed to understand and manage the various components is only slightly smaller than the breadth of skills needed in a Microsoft environment,” Stegh wrote. “While the logos on the boxes and CD-ROMs may be different, Lync's architecture is the sum of the same parts that make up an Avaya or Cisco infrastructure, and can be handled similarly.”