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| August 2008 |
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Out Front What's Ahead: I was lucky enough to represent the Advocate Networks team at the National Cable & Telecommunications Association's 57th annual convention in Like other parts of the economy, cable and telecommunications is seeing a fresh series of mergers and acquisitions. Deals like Verizon's proposed purchase of Alltel for $28.1 billion are reshaping the competitive landscape and setting the stage for new packaged services targeting residential and business customers. The consensus seems to be that more deals are likely as the strong players attempt to round out service portfolios and build market advantage. Equally interesting is the continued growth of data and voice services among nontraditional service providers. Comcast, for example, now has more data and voice customers in aggregate than traditional cable subscribers. Moving forward, I expect we'll see even more blurring of the line for what it means to be a cable operator, phone company, or wireless provider. Keeping up with these market changes will undoubtedly be a challenge, but I agree with the Cable Show experts that these developments are a potential plus for organizations that want to improve service quality and reliability while lowering costs. Tim Wise, |
 In This Issue
Tech Community Involvement The Advocate Networks team attended the National Cable & Telecommunications Association's 57th annual convention in New Orleans. The Cable Show, which is the industry's biggest event, ran May 18 to 20 and drew more than 400 exhibitors and 14,000 attendees. See Tim Wise's Out Front column for our take on some of the biggest news to come out of this year's convention.
Telecom Strategy in Four Steps For organizations to effectively manage their telecom infrastructure, a telecom strategy is required. But what is a strategy and how is one created? Four steps form the basis to create one. Read more about Telecom Strategy Equity Firm Arcapita Advocate Methodology Cuts Telecom Expense and Boosts ValuationTrim overhead significantly and an almost magical thing happens to your corporate valuation. It goes up–sometimes way up. That financial reality prompted Johnny M. Campbell, a director for Arcapita, a global private equity firm, to engage Advocate Networks in 2004. "We oversee a portfolio of companies," Campbell says. "They operate separately, but we saw an opportunity to leverage their combined spending. Based on a recommendation from one of our strategic partners, Insight Sourcing Group, we asked Advocate to help us with the telecom piece of the cost-cutting effort." Read more about the Value of Strategic Sourcing Tailoring a Data Center Facility to Your Needs
We know that the systems themselves can be architected with high-availability configurations. Autonomous failover of network connections, clustered server environments, and so on are ways that the systems can sustain operation even if, say, a server crashes. What the Tier Levels of a data center refer to though is the capability of the facility itself to support the systems it serves. Utility power can fail, the temperature in the building can rise to cause damage to equipment, and so on. These are facilities issues, and are the foundation upon which any amount of data processing fault-tolerance stands. Want to learn more? Read our whitepaper on data center tier classifications or contact Tim Wise or Scott Fogle for more information. What's new at Advocate Networks? Updated Tool Brings New "Clarity" to TEM Analytics A successful telecom expense management (TEM) strategy requires two things: a great software tool and exceptional auditors who know how to put it to work. At Advocate Networks, our tool of choice is the Rivermine Software Suite, the industry's premier TEM package. Out Front recently sat down with two of Advocate's TEM experts, Afshin Yamin and Phyllis Adrian, to find out what makes Rivermine's new 5.0 release an even better tool for optimizing telecom expenses. Read the Interview about TEM Analytics Look For Us! ILTA 2008 International Legal Technology Association Conference: Atlanta Telecom Professionals: State of the Telecom Industry: Technology Association of Georgia:
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Clients often come to us for help with data center consolidation or new data center implementation projects. The discussion quickly comes around to the appropriate “Tier Level” for their IT facilities. What we’re talking about here is an industry standard way of describing the availability of the data center facility. Availability, in this case, is referring to the degree to which the facility can support constant uninterrupted operation of the contained data processing systems. 
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