The convergence of business and IT has offered the advantage of merging the respective strategies of each. This collaboration is a must when aiming to reach a competitive advantage through application IT. With increasing IT costs over the last year, there’s been significant pressure to deliver. By joining business and IT, the related business advantage is obvious; important decisions are jointly agreed upon by the board members, business management and the IT department.

In today’s market, organizations need to take proper steps to solve their IT governance problems. They must establish a focused management team and have control of projects, investments and IT services. This will create short term impact and better results for future success. Stringent IT Governance can improve the competitiveness and adaptability of a company. The establishment of IT Governance is a very challenging obstacle, but the end result is always a success.

Tags: BearingPoint, Marcel Nickler, IT governance, IT, convergence

Tags: CRM, John O’Donnell, Microsoft Dynamics, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, S + S, SAAS, SAVO Group, USISV

While the complexities of cross-industry M&A are even greater than those for intra-industry transactions, the similarities between the industries contribute to a compelling business case. The key is a deep understanding of market direction and growth, a well-planned approach to the transaction and, equally important, clear confidence as to what happens post-transaction, both inside the company and in the marketplace.

The convergence of banking, insurance and health is driving great opportunity to leverage strengths, capabilities and channels across market sectors to the benefit of consumers, companies and investors. But the risk of disappointing outcomes is especially high in inter-industry efforts without essential knowledge and planning. To improve the chances of a positive outcome, look well beyond the deep financial analysis applied to traditional intra-industry efforts. Finally, design and articulate a post-transaction operating model that can position you to take advantage of this dramatic U.S. economic shift.

Tags: BearingPoint, Kirsten Trusko, consumer-directed, mergers and acquisitions, M&A, private equity, venture capital, health banking, CDH

Friday’s announcement from Yahoo! Video touted a “wider viewing experience,” in addition to more content, bigger files and more sharing opportunities. And then there are those who ask whether another user-generated video site is what we really need.

Then there’s Apple TV Take Two. Steve Jobs and Apple continue to suggest that integration, convergence and usability might help consumers make the switch from TV as they know it to greater reliance on broadband and computing for downloadable video (including movie rentals).

Regardless of where things will ultimately end up, TV set sales are still big business (you may have seen coverage recently suggesting that men would still make considerable sacrifices in order to get a 50-inch TV display. We might as well ask: what would you be willing to give up for a big TV?

Tags: television, Internet, James McQuivey, Yahoo! Video, user-generated, Apple TV, Take Two, Steve Jobs, convergence

Tags: Ivan Seidenberg, Nancy Gofus, Fixed-Mobile Convergence, Verizon Business

Tags: IP Telephony, Verizon Business, Verizon, IP, PBX, Nortel, convergence

Tags: Verizon Business, Amanda Chesley

Tags: LSI, PC connectivity, convergence, digital access

Tags: Ken Salchow, F5 Network, IP Multimedia Subsystem, IMS, Fixed Mobile Convergence

Tags: Jay MacDonald, Bill Detwiler, social media, Convergence 2.0, The Deal

Tags: IPTV, Shelly Palmer, Scott Paterson, Tom Westdyk, Convergence 2.0, The Deal

Tags: SBC, Comcast, WiMax, BPL, Patrick Campbell, Partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, Broadband Alternatives, Third Pipe, Convergence 2.0, The Deal

Tags: Convergence 2.0, Leo Hindery, new media, The Deal

Tags: Convergence, Richard Morgan, The Deal, Edgar Bronfman

TechOne Episode 1

Tags: John Kneuer, Supernova, convergence, Digital TV, iPhone, TechOne Episode 1

Tags: Vloggies Show, Irina, David Prager, Revision3, online video, convergence, Internet

Tags: TechOne, convergence, disruption

Tags: Verizon, Mike Marcellin, Fixed Mobile Convergence, Wireless Office, Mobile Conference Connection

In this podcast with Gnanesh Dholakia, senior product marketing manager at CA, you will learn how to tackle these challenges of increasing complexity and heterogeneity through integrated network performance and fault management.

Tags: Gnanesh Dholakia, CA

Tags: Intel, Developer Forum, Beijing, Eric Kim, Core 2 Challenge, processors

Join BearingPoint technologist Rajiv Jain to explore how new transport technologies and related management must be integrated to support growing business application needs.

You’ll learn that on top of the business pushing for changes, the technology is constantly changing and putting pressure on the company network infrastructure group. MPLS could be the answer and provide new interaction and convergence of different network services like data, voice and video.

Tags: MPLS, BearingPoint, Rajiv Jain

Tags: Future Car, Discovery, Narrow Car, Naro, Hugh Kemp

This podcast was commissioned by Success Magazine.

(more…)

Tags: Mobile, Anita Campbell, Small Business Trends, Jeff Zbar, Pamela Baker, Success Magazine

This is an Intel podcast.

Related Stories: IntelDigitalHealth

Transcript:

Guest: Ann Williamson - UCSF Nursing
Guest: Scott Eckert – Motion Computing
Guest: Paul Otellini – Intel Corporation
Guest: Dr. Michael Blum – UCSF Nursing

Ann Williamson - UCSF Nursing
We are actually technology hungry here, having not had a lot of technology at the point-of-care. We were one of the early leaders in information technology and healthcare and have fallen behind a little bit; so we are actually very excited and pleased to be in with this particular product.

Scott Eckert – Motion Computing
What I have here is the Motion C5. The clinicians gave us extensive feedback and Paul mentioned all the work that Intel had done on research into the usability for a device like this. You’ll notice there is no rubber strap on the back that is a great example. The clinicians actually told us five things, make it disinfectable, make it durable, include a barcode scanner, include RFID technology, and include a camera.

Announcer
The C5 mobile assistant could revolutionize how healthcare is delivered in hospitals. Intel began developing prototypes of this mobile PC in 2005. Motion Computing was the first to actually build a real mobile clinical assistant.

Dr. Michael Blum – UCSF Nursing
None of the barcode scanners are RFID readers, camera is certainly not new. What’s new is appreciating the ecosystem in which they need to work. A nurse wheeling around a COW with a barcode scanner on it and an RFID reader, a camera, none of which talk to anything else particularly well has proven to be a miserable disaster. The IT shops cannot get this stuff in place, cannot support it fast enough, the vendors do not make them connect well enough and you end up with exactly what we have, a digital device that records blood pressures, heart rates, and O2 status, sitting there, someone writes it down on a piece of paper and hours later it ends up in a system.

Someone uses a digital camera and then carries the picture around until tomorrow when they remember they have to download it in the system. This is the first time we looked at those problems. The technology vendors came to us and said how do we do this better and we said look, put this all into one, get it all talking to each other, and give the clinicians a device that they can use to take care of patients and not try to figure out which piece of technology I am supposed to grab off a shelf to take with me to do this task.

Paul Otellini – Intel Corporation
You just look at the target market as being 13 to 20 million nurses or that was on the video. I would agree that is a relatively small number in the grand scheme of what Intel builds every year, but it is a much bigger quest that we are after. I mean this is about taking the world’s largest industry, healthcare and the world’s least penetrated industries as a percent of IT purchases and bring it into a more productive state by the application of IT.

To do that, you need to work on every edge of the problem, you do work in the back end, in the health IT systems, you need to work around common languages, which is our efforts in dossier (ph); you need to work on electronic medical records, which is our efforts there; you need to work on the home and we will talk more about that in a future session; and you need to work more in the clinics, where the data has actually accumulated and then brought to a place where it can actually be dealt with. So, from that perspective, this is a very critical linchpin in filling out the entirely of that system and I think it is a giant opportunity that is why we created a business unit around it.

Announcer
The medical industry is high-tech intensive with advanced devices that diagnose and treat crippling diseases, but hospitals have not fully benefited from the Information Technology boom that began with personal computing in the 1980s. Nurses and doctors often use some surprisingly old-fashioned networked equipment to create, store, and work with patient records. This is what many hospitals currently use, a COW, known as a Computer on Wheels.

Ann Williamson - UCSF Nursing
This is the current device that has -– there is no ability at least on (Inaudible) right now, for a barcode scanner we have to -– it could be done and when we first put this into place the nurses said, if I had to wheel to my (Inaudible), I’ll show you in a minutes and Dinamap, which is our Automatic Vital Sign Retrieval device; it is like why can I just have the Dinamap sitting here and just have it all interacted and that is what we are doing with this Tablet.

Speaker
This is the machine that we use for our patient assessment, all the information we need are in here and then we just add in more information to it with the Dinamap for the blood pressure reading. So, here I am going to push this to get that information, this will give the blood pressure, this will give the pulse, and this will give the oxygen saturation and this information we get from the little device on his finger and the blood pressure we get from the blood pressure cuff on his right arm. Okay, so we do have his readings, 155/67, his heart rate is 53, and his pulsoxymeter is 97%.

Copyright ©2006 PodTech.net. All rights reserved. Privacy policy

Tags: C5, IntelDigitalHealth

Transcript:

Host: Catherine Girardeau - PodTech
Guest: Gary Kim - IT Business Wire
Guest: Andy Randall - MetaSwitch

Catherine Girardeau - PodTech
This is PodTech.net. Gary Kim is Editor-in-Chief of IT Business and Andy Randall, VP of Marketing at MetaSwitch, join PodTech.net in conversation with Andy Randall and Gary Kim at a breakfast panel sponsored by MetaSwitch at the World Center Marriott in Orlando, Florida.

What we are going to focus this discussion around is what it means to be a service provider in the current climate for CLECs?

Andy Randall - MetaSwitch
I think it’s a really interesting time for service providers that you see the rise of Google, YouTube, all of these Internet based applications and service providers are really juggling within this to try and work out what is it that they are actually providing. Is the application that they are providing transport access to the Internet at large or can they really move up the value chain in terms of services? I think for lot of carriers they are finding it struggle to actually work out where they are on that ladder and even though they want to move up, it is a very different mindset and it becomes a different kind of challenge for them to build, build the applications and it’s all about how fast they can move. I think that’s the large part of it. Carrier tends to think in terms of years and Google thinks in terms of days or weeks. What do you think Gary?

Gary Kim - IT Business Wire
Another way to explain what Andy just said is that something really good or something really bad could happen to the entire global telecom industry, which is about a trillion dollars a year, in annual revenue. So, the really good thing would be that we succeed in creating applications that are like voice on your mobile phone or voice on your PBX at the office, or voice at your home phone, you get paid for providing that application. The really bad thing that could happen is we windup being just providers at the pipes that allow those things to be created. Those things get created by other parties that are not affiliated with you a business sense and you don’t capture much of the revenue from it. So, it’s a huge challenge, it faces all service providers not just the CLECs and it’s an issue we’re going to be facing for the rest of our professional career, that’s very clear.

Catherine Girardeau - PodTech
One of the things that came up in panel discussion had to do with differentiation or convergence between services for home use, mobile use and enterprise use. What are the challenges for service providers with regard to this kind of convergence?

Andy Randall - MetaSwitch
I think those are distinct areas of applications right now. I think the big difference we are seeing at the movement is in terms of video applications. The residential subscribers — the activity that’s happening there is all about video on demands, IPTV and the Internet based video sites. You’re seeing the content creators putting their shows up on the Websites for download. Now, this is completely disintermediating the whole distribution setup is being put in place over the last 75 years. That’s the huge shift in terms of the residential space. Different kind of dynamics happening in the business space, that where that overlap, this happening and this came up in the panel discussion and I think this is really important. I don’t think people are paying enough attention to this is that, the home workers and home office and the mobility of the worker to go beyond their cubicle to mobile space and into there home. I think the service providers that can really capture this dynamic both addressing all of those residential requirements and tie that back into the office environment, that for me could be a killer app, for any kind of service provider.

Gary Kim - IT Business Wire
One of the great inversions we might be seeing and I could be quite wrong about this, is that traditionally the really interesting things human beings can do with communications, start in the business sector, get use there, people get familiar with it and then start they using them at home, fax machines, best example then. What we have seen I think in the last couple of decades though is that the fax machine was about the last technology that actually originated in the office, so much brought home, I think everything else one can make an argument.

Catherine Girardeau - PodTech
Or email, well email.

Gary Kim - IT Business Wire
Sure, it starts in the home and then at some point so many people are using it the enterprise has to respond. I would argue to a certain extent broadband access itself, email, instant messaging, blogs, wiki’s, the use of Internet – open internet right, all of that was created by demand of users that found these things useful and then now the IT departments of the enterprises have to respond and that’s a pretty big shift. I think all of this in that the service provider community need to spend more time looking at how consumers use technologies because those things are going to wind up in our offices, there’s no question about that.

Catherine Girardeau - PodTech
And this is kind of where managed services comes in, especially maybe for small to mid size business, they don’t have the in-house expertise in their IT departments, nor perhaps the person power to deal with the IT demand of this rapidly changing environment.

Andy Randall - MetaSwitch
I was at the trade show the yesterday I was just talking to some customers who — I am talking to how they handle this kind of situation of particularly the kind of things David was talking about with quality of service, but not just in terms of the last mile to the enterprise, but actually going and replacing their network infrastructure, managing the local area network remotely over that wide area network and that’s I think even see more of that where service providers, point to demarkation of the service providers changing from where the T1 goes into the office building, right down to the desktop and they are taking on more of the management if it uses desktop of the network infrastructure and the entire IT applications of the small — particularly small business obviously at a point.

Gary Kim - IT Business Wire
One of the ways to illustrate what Andy is saying I think is that just as people customizes their cell phones by ringtones, we maybe moving towards world and hopefully we are, where end users can actually create their own custom applications, that maybe actually useable just by them personally at the office and it could be that Tom in the cubical next to me doesn’t want to do this, he may create entirely different applications and that’s just a fundamental shift in a way that we have always operated. Always before it’s been — we service providers will decide what you need, package it up, create it and sell it to you and now we maybe opening up our networks a little bit more and with that allows people to create the things that they decide they want without us having to intervene in the middle of it, which is a certainly great thing.

Andy Randall - MetaSwitch
This is the most profound time of challenge that I have ever discovered in all my years, being in the business and it’s a time of great opportunity, not just great risk, I mean both of them are present to you, but both of them are addressed.

Gary Kim - IT Business Wire
I think it’s all about carriers realizing that business model is changing. We could not to see a change in technologies, but also change in people are getting the services from based upon which of the carriers that are embracing those can build these today.

Catherine Girardeau - PodTech
Andy Randall of MetaSwitch and Gary Kim of IT Business, thank you so much for joining me on PodTech.net.

Gary Kim is Editor-in-Chief of IT Business and Andy Randall, VP of Marketing at MetaSwitch, at the World Center Marriott in Orlando, Florida, this is PodTech.net.

Copyright ©2006 PodTech.net. All rights reserved. Privacy policy

Tags: Gary Kim, Andy Randall, MetaSwitch, CLECs