Perhaps the biggest obstacle to implementing converged and collaborative products is people. Instant messaging, videoconferencing, blogging and Internet audio are favorites among younger IT workers. Those at the entry level have spent their entire online lives using e-mail, IM and chat rooms. According to a Forrester report, people ages 18 to 34 are less intimidated by technology, believe technology has made life easier and are more likely to maintain a frequently updated Weblog.
This generation is also considered more likely to work in peer groups, multitask, prefer graphics to text and adapt more easily to changing environments, where collaborative communications like IM, streaming media, social networking and UM may represent a clash with the conventional office culture. Older workers are cited as engaging more often in individual work and digesting information before rendering an opinion. Your job, whether as a staff member or upper management, should be to understand the other generation's methods and integrate the best parts of them into your own.
Universal Translator
There aren't many standards fights in the messaging and collaboration space. For a while, there was a debate over whether EIM (enterprise instant messaging) would use SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) or XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) as a communications protocol. SIP was seen as working better with VoIP systems, while XMPP was perceived as the better data-transfer protocol. Microsoft and IBM, two of the biggest names in the EIM arena, choose SIP. Jabber, Sun Microsystems and much of the open-source community went with XMPP.
With big names supporting it, SIP appears to have won. XMPP is barely mentioned in the enterprise environment, even though SIP and XMPP aren't mutually exclusive. Some XMPP vendors have made SIP gateways so you can use both standards. We expect to hear very little news about XMPP in 2006 from an enterprise perspective.
Subsea cable alternatives can provide a level of comfort for those concerned about disruptions. Realistically, they will continue to play a small, but critical role in the short term.
Maintaining existing network infrastructures often incurs huge technical debt before newer technologies are adopted over time.
Amid ongoing regional uncertainties, telecom infrastructure in the Middle East has expand to include terrestrial low-latency network infrastructure, which offers resilience and agility in navigating political complexities without relying solely on undersea networks.
