New Video Conferencing Options for Telecommuting

We've been testing and playing around with ideas related to telecommuting and video conferencing for quite some time now. We just released a new product offering related to using webcams for telecommuting. One of the problems we had always dealt with was just getting sufficient bandwidth in order to use the systems. Then the systems were always in a conference room somewhere that everyone had to share. With this new product, we are using H.264SVC which allows us to monitor and adjust to the user's available bandwidth and provide excellent quality. We are using Logitech webcams on PCs. Now, I can go anywhere and have a video conference (audi and video) with my staff or other employees.

Below is a picture of a meeting I held a few months ago. The picture doesn't show the real quality of the picture. We had 3 guys with older single processor laptops and 3 guys with new dual core process laptops. The dual core processor laptops performed much better. The video does put a load on the processors, but that will change over time. In this picture we all used headsets, but most of the time I use a USB speakerphone (ClearOne Chat 50) that does wonders.

















Today was one of those days that I just wasn't feeling as well. Instead of being in the office at 7:30am (70 minutes from home), I had my directors join me on a video con call instead. I was at home on a cable modem and they were in their respective offices. I was able to complete the call, get status updates on all projects, and then go back to bed. Pretty cool (other than I wasn't feeling well). It is changing the way we are working and will hopefully help our customers as well.

We are starting to hear lots of new ways to use the technology. We use it for meetings. One customer talked about using it as a way to put their mascot in front of kids at schools without having to actually make as many trips to the school. Now the mascot can "visit" 10-20 schools in one day instead of 3-4.

Have ideas on how this might help others? Just let me know.

Wayne

Innovation

Today I started an internal competition to find innovative tools to increase our effectiveness and efficiency. It will be interesting to see how well the various employee teams react. I laid out the problem, a set of basic requirements, and the reward.

So far I have had responses from Sales and our Network Operations Center (NOC). The responses range from basic links to a program and to detailed thought on how to better use various tools. It's a good start. More important than the tools that everyone brings to the table, I really want people to think about how to improve their jobs. Too often people get used to the way things used to be. The current processes and procedures were put in place because someone identified need. Everyone that followed, did just that. They followed. I want the leaders to step out of the crowd, think on their own, and find the right solutions. We'll see what happens in the next few days. I'll try to keep you updated on our progress.

Wayne

Which is more important, technology or the product?

I regularly talk with people about what matters. In life, at work, with your family, friends, or in general. What really matters to all of us? When you work in the technology field (engineering or IT or whatever), you have a tendency to think that technology will solve the latest problem. The latest software or gadget could very well solve all the problems. Well, it doesn't.

People don't buy technology. They use and buy what solves the problems with their circumstances. Take a look at technologies that didn't work out even though they were probably the best thing around. If you look at PDAs, the best PDA to come out at the time was the Apple Newton. Apple spent a great deal of money on the product. It gained some recognition, but was way ahead of it's time. The product was cool, had problems, but was not wanted by the user. Then came along the Palm. With the right mix of features, everyone wanted one. It solved the "job" that was needed by business folks. A whopping success. What was the better product, the Newton or the Palm? We could debate this for several hours, but the Palm hit the mark with a good combination of calendar and contacts. At that point, people started paying upwards of $400 for this device.

Another great story is that of Nucor steel. Nucor actually started as a company dealing with other products and services. They bought a scrap metal company. As the company was looking at what they wanted to do and where they wanted to go, they realized that they could never be the best or greatest in their market. Instead, they moved into producing a lower quality steel solution. The steel companies didn't think they had to worry. Why would the customers ever buy a lower quality product. But they did because the lower quality product served their needs at a lower price point.

Look at broadband services. I sat with a customer in the early adoption days as they were considering deploying DSL or cable modems in a rural community. As we discussed the DSL solution, they wanted to know how much capacity to deploy to the customer. They wanted to deploy the full capacity of the DSL equipment. Having spent considerable time looking at customer usage, I could only give them one answer. If you give your customer the full capacity, they will use the capacity. Not everyone, but lots of them. The problem was not the last leg to the customer. The problem was the upstream of this carrier to my network. They didn't want or expect much of an increase in their Internet transit pipe to me. I warned that they would see explosive growth over time. And they did. The broadband connections increase from 3MB in 2000 to multiple Gigs today. The consumer found what they wanted on the Internet and it grew and grew and grew.

What about VoIP? At first, VoIP was a techie toy. A cool gadget. However, once the quality issues were resolved, it became useful. Like cell phones, it provided voice services at, initially, a lower quality with a lower price. Most telephone companies couldn't see that VoIP would take off. However, the consumer saw a need for a service. They had broadband, were willing to suffer a lower quality, and wanted a lower price for all the features provided. Now even the carriers are deploying VoIP as a product. It provides them a new product for customers and helps to lower their own costs.

How about the heart issue? The consumer will buy from their heart quicker than they will from a technology. Take the iPod and the iPhone. You have to ask the questions as to why these products have taken off. First the iPod. Consumer MP3 players had been around for some time. However, the iPod came the consumer a product that was slick, worked well, and solved a need. More importantly, once the consumer bought an iPod, you didn't dare take it away. You should see the the looks I get from my son when I have taken away his iPod as punishment for something he did wrong. People love their iPods. Second, the iPhone. The iPhone obviously built off the success of the iPod and was an overwhelming success. It has issues when it was first rolled out, but people loved the product so much that they were willing to accept the issues. Why else would people move from $45/month cell plans in a tough economy to a $70/month ATT iPhone plan. Because no other product could provide the ease of use, the functionality, and garner the love the iPhone has.

The key to a successful IT project or consumer product or anything else for that matter is to appeal the need of the person. If you can find what solves their immediate problem, they will not only be willing to use your solution, they are willing to pay more for it.

Positive News in a Sour Economy

The Wall Street Journal had an article that I reviewed this morning where they interviewed multiple CEOs to ask them what was more important - strategy or execution. A CEO's focus should be first on strategy and then on execution. You can't have one without another. However, strategy needs to come before execution so that you can actually move in the right direction.

Last year we spent a great deal of time working as an executive team focusing on how to cut costs and increase revenue. Prioritization. Measurements through metrics. Innovation. All of these elements allowed us to push through some very difficult times with great success. As we ended the year, we were already watching and getting ahead of the economy. We started 2009 with a plan to greatly increase revenue even in a down economy. It seems that our hard work last year is already paying dividends this year. Revenue may be even higher than expected and we are still finding optimization elements where we are increasing capacity while lowering costs. Definitely a good mix. We are quite aware that we could easily lose more customers as everyone listens to the news and buckles down to ride out the recession. Obviously, this would put a damper on any positive aspects.

In the meantime, it was great to see Spirit with positive feedback on the local Charlotte news channel where we were mentioned as only 1 of 2 companies hiring this year. If you follow this link and click on the video on the right, you can see how the businesses in Charlotte are viewing the opportunities that 2009 has to offer.

http://www.wbtv.com/global/story.asp?s=9754142

(The question for another blog is: Are the news agencies to blame for the economy by constantly telling everyone how bad the economy is?)

Conficker or Downadup, large anti-virus downloads can take your Internet connection down

We have seen multiple instances lately where customers have called and complained that their Internet connection was going down at various periods of the day. The customers were absolutely sure that something was wrong with their circuit and called our NOC to ask for troubleshooting assistance. Interestingly enough, we have traced the failures back to a single issue with each of these customers.

1. The first key we found was that the customer thought their internet connection was going down for short periods of time on a regular basis. It never seemed to be for more than a few minutes.
2. Once we proved that the circuit was not going down but was receiving a large increase in the volume of bandwidth, the customer wanted to know why they were receiving a denial of service attack. The source of the increased bandwidth did come from a small set of IP addresses.
3. Working with several customers, we were able to positively identify that the source IP addresses were a cluster of servers from Akamai on our network. We were also able to identify that the receiptient of the increased bandwidth, in each case, was a PC, server, or set of PCs downloading virus definition updates. This was accomplished by having the local IT department actually verify that the target IP was in fact a PC downloading the virus definitions/engine.

One particular customer who had a 20mb Ethernet connection was actually receiving 27mb of bandwidth during the downloads. I hope that this post can help other network providers or enterprise customers to pinpoint these short term specific issues.

Internet integrity, or should I say, fragility

How reliable is the Internet?

Our team is working on metrics for last year and it gave me a chance to reflect on what works well and what doesn't. As I looked at the statistics, I was quite pleased and definitely proud of our team. We had several hardware issues that were difficult to push through as we worked with the hardware vendors. The goal of any carrier is to maintain a core network that meets or exceeds 99.999% reliability. The reality of that number is less than 6 minutes of total downtime in a year out of potential 525,600 minutes in a year. I actually have held our team accountable to 5 minutes and 18 seconds per year. We were able to meet 99.999% (around 3 minutes total downtime) on our Internet core and 100% on our other networks. Does this mean that we didn't have any customers go down? Unfortunately, no. On the core network nodes that all customers cross, we hit our numbers. On direct links, we did have customers go down. As copper plants (DSL, T1s, DS3s) continue to age, the number of failures will continue to grow over time. :-(

So how does this relate to fragility on the Internet core? That question takes us to the basic infrastructure of how an enterprise or carrier network is setup. Most large networks are setup using OSPF and BGP. There are multiple ways for network engineers to configure the network and I rarely find one engineer that agrees with another. (Can you say "standards"!) To understand how this is setup using two protocols, you need to understand how BGP determines a best path. Imagine you are headed to Washington D.C. to watch the presidential inauguration. When you get to DC, you ask for directions. Here are your two sets of directions:

Person 1: To get to the party, go down this street and you should get there in about 30 minutes.

Person 2: To get to the party, take a right on Johnson Street and go 2.3 miles. Then turn right on Constitution Avenue, go 1.4 miles and merge onto X street. Go .7 miles down X street....

Which set of directions would you want to follow? The Internet is the same way. Routers will look at their neighbor and choose the more specific path. I watched another carrier in early 2001 take a large percentage of my carrier Internet traffic to Europe by mis-configuring their BGP tables. They announced a more specific route for large portions of our routing table. It took a while, but we finally got them to notice what they had done. On the other end, I've watched customers mis-configure their own routers and try to suck down as much traffic as they could. We could handle the traffic easily, but they could not. We configure our customers with very specific elements to prevent these types of mis-configurations. I can't, however, stop another large carrier from fat-fingering a configuration. When they do, we work with other carriers to blackhole their routing announcements to minimize any issues.

The Internet is amazing in its resiliency to handle traffic the way it does. When you are configuring BGP on your network, make sure that you understand that your configuration does have the potential to impact those around you.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

I listened last night to a presentation on Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDI). Interesting thoughts from Chris Horton from Yorel (www.yorel.com). He discussed the history of moving from "green screens" to the current options of how and when to deploy virtual desktops. I'm not sure that I want to go back to mainframe types of services, but are the new solutions going to be the same? Chris reviewed the details and options, vendor agnostic, and covered what would work best. There doesn't appear to be any Capex savings, only Opex savings. I don't see a large rush for people moving to virtual desktops. In a market where everyone is working to cut costs in both Capex and Opex, there needs to be a difinitive ROI and IRR in order to justify the expense or cost cut.

If anyone has good feedback on how they have implemented virtual desktops in the new VDI environment, I would love to hear what works and does not work.