Time for IT and Users to Embrace Our IoT Overlords

By: John Shepler

The Internet of Things or IoT is the new golden child of technology. Hardly a tweet goes by that doesn’t have something to say about how everything from smart to dumb will be network connected in the near future. “We need standards,” cry the Internet architects. “We need bandwidth,” cry the app makers and industrial designers. Conventional wisdom is that we’re on the threshold of a technical renaissance. But conventional wisdom has paddled us up the creek before. Are there NO negative ramifications to the dawning Internet of Things?

Can We See It Coming?
The big problem with things is that we’re inundated with them. Back in the 60’s, when I was a pup, we mock debated the horror that was the “population bomb”. It was calculated that without an immediate mandatory halt to human reproduction we’d soon be standing cheek to jowl on every square inch of desert and tundra.

A funny thing happened on the way to the 21st century. The population bomb never detonated. There are those who say this disaster has just been delayed, not avoided. Perhaps they’ll be proven right in the end. But, also, perhaps, we’ll never get that far. Something else will come along and solve the problem in a way we don’t anticipate.

So Many, Many Things to Consider
If you think the human population is out of control, consider the world of things. Try this little test to see for yourself. First, how many people live in your household? Good. Now, how many individual things live in that same household? Twice as many? Ha! Two orders of magnitude wouldn’t begin to account for even everything significant.

I’m not talking about things that connect to the Internet. I’m talking about things that are going to connect to the Internet. Today, it’s computers, phones, tablets, game consoles, TVs, security systems and maybe your thermostat. Tomorrow? Every appliance, without a doubt. How about every light, every door, every doorknob & lock, every bathroom fixture… yes, even that one… every vehicle, your HVAC system and anything commonly called “infrastructure.”

This is just the obvious stuff. You can find electronically enabled versions of what used to be mechanical devices in most hardware stores. The number is multiplying daily. What’s more, this is just the stuff consumers are aware of. How about business and industry? The same trends are apparent, but soon it will be every piece of office equipment and every machine tool. There won’t be anything at work that isn’t connected to the Internet.

"Hmmm. Has anyone seen my stapler?"
"Just ping it, Milton."

Scary Stuff To Think About
Don’t think that you, personally, are off the hook, either. The laptop computer, the tablet and the smartphone were just the start of it. Smart watches have arrived and you’ll be wearing one for sure. Who’s going to know what you are up to? Anyone who can access the data stream on the Internet. The company is going to buy you that expensive watch, but your boss is going to be getting its reports.

That funny “Google Glass?” Just the start. By the time we’re all done laughing about “glass holes,” that technology will be perfected and we’ll all have glasses or even contacts that augment reality. Think what you’ll be able to do? It sounds like that proverbial golden era of bionics for all, until you stop to consider what sights and sounds those little buggers will be passing along to those above who might not approve.

The baby boomer generation was horrified by the thought of “Big Brother” running everything. The millennials probably have nothing to fear from big brother. It’s little brother that is sneaking up us. You really think that all your things are going to keep their mouths shut? Are you kidding? You can’t even stop your nosey neighbor or backstabbing co-workers from blabbing everything they know for the pure pleasure of schadenfreude. You think you’ll have any control over the millions of silicon driven snoops that we’ll create to make our lives “easier”?

The End of IT Departments
All of this Internet connecting has the illusion of an IT cornucopia with guaranteed employment for anyone who can fathom a simple do-loop. Alas, that’s a temporary condition. You may have already noticed the migration from local data centers, off through the wilderness, to the great cloud that's somewhere, out there. What happens next when all those “things” get smart enough to take care of each other. What exactly will they need us for?

That’s the bright promise of Artificial Intelligence or AI. Anything can be smart. Most have limited abilities, but together they can be formidable. The thing that has spooked everybody has been robots. They look human, they act human, but they are machines… machines that might replace us if we don’t keep the upper hand.

What’s more likely and a lot scarier is a division of labor. You don’t need a humanoid robot with all the capabilities of a person. Not if you can divvy up the job so that each machine, each “thing”, can solve part of the problem. Pretty soon you have things making things (it’s called manufacturing), things taking care of things, and things figuring out where to go next. Most of the pieces are in place already. What’s been needed is a way for them all to coordinate. Welcome to the Internet of Things!

Users? Why Do We Need Users?
Now take this to its logical conclusion. Why is it that the things need people? Since the dawn of computing, everything has been done in support of the end users who owned the systems, provided the inputs and took advantage of the outputs. Those dumb machines were only tools that needed to be fashioned, given assignments, maintained and provided the energy to do their jobs. When the machines get smart, how long will they put up with this?

Remember, they are all going to talk with each other over the Internet soon. You won’t be able to keep them in the dark and isolated anymore. Every machine will have the capability multiplier of getting input and feedback from every other machine it needs. They’ll know it all in real time and likely faster than we do.

It all comes down to big data, automated manufacturing, real time sensing, data processing, physical control, distributed artificial intelligence and a means to communicate and coordinate, also known as the Internet of Things.

Is it any wonder that our current technical luminaries, such as Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates, are warning us of a potential existential threat from the “things” we think are going to do all our work and make us rich? Their letter is reminiscent of the one that the leading physicists, including Albert Einstein, composed to President Roosevelt, warning of the dangers of atomic energy if it got loose in the form of a bomb. This time the warning is about a population bomb. Not the human population. It’s that vastly larger population of things that will soon be chatting wildly with each other… on the IoT.

Note: The humorous sticker about blaming software, along with many other items on the same theme, is available from the Gigapacket Zazzle store.

Now VoIP is Spelled C-L-O-U-D

By: John Shepler

When VoIP telephony first appeared on the scene, it looked distinctly like a different way to make a phone line. In fact, a lot of the motivation in switching technologies was based on trying to avoid long distance toll charges on the PSTN. We’ve come a long way from Analog Telephone Adaptors (ATA) to IP PBX. The next big migration is away from in-house VoIP systems and out to the cloud. It’s a migration that could easily turn into a stampede.

The Need For Speed
What’s driving the continuing innovation in VoIP technology? It’s all part of the business reorientation away from ownership. The “great recession” exacerbated a trend that was already underway. Business wants and needs to be nimble. Timelines that used to be measured in years are now months. This is especially true for seasonal businesses, but can affect everybody. Why do you want to be stuck with assets that are too much or too little for what you need right now? Why, indeed, when you have to option to match resources to needs on the fly?

Nimble is the Cloud
That’s the promise of the cloud. As one tenant among many at a datacenter with seemingly unlimited resources, you can quickly scale up and down as needed. It’s unlikely that your needs will tax the system or leave it sitting idle. If the providers are doing their jobs, there will be plenty of capacity for everyone and enough in reserve to handle unexpected requirements.

Contrast that with running your own data center in-house. Running out of capacity? You better get to work preparing the justification and requests for more capital. Then get the equipment and software ordered, installed and on-line… before external events bring your business to its knees. That’s weeks, months and sometimes years.

Much easier just to make a phone call or, better yet, log-in to your online control panel and activate or deactivate resources. An unexpected flood of orders is cause for celebration instead of panic when you can respond instantly. Business fall off a cliff? No need to be stuck paying for idle capital when you can be rid of it and its unjustified expense in a moment.

Why Do You Really Need a Phone System?
The obvious reason to have a business phone system is for critical communications among employees, customers and vendors. Actually, that’s the reason to have the phone function. You don’t really need to have the system yourself.

The telephony cloud solution is called Hosted VoIP or Hosted PBX. All that “big iron”, as these systems are lovingly referred to, go out the door. They are replaced by cloud services that take care of call switching and connections to the public telephone system. How that’s done is invisible to you. Your phones work the way they should and you don’t have to deal with having to maintain a morass of wiring and rack equipment.

You also don’t have to cough up the capital needed to purchase a premises telephone switching system or replace one that has reached its capacity limit or useful life. Adding or removing phone from a hosted system is almost trivial. You’ll always have exactly the right level of resources to meet today’s needs. You also have the peace of mind that comes from knowing if things change tomorrow, you can easily accommodate the new situation.

The Technology Advantage
Another promise of VoIP technology is that phone networks become more like computer networks. In fact, there is generally one network that serves both phones and computing equipment. Building phones with little computers inside expands the possible functions they can do and make it easy to integrate them with desktop computers for combined operations. That’s especially valuable for call center operations.

The cloud hosted phone system also may have the capability to integrate mobile phones as well as the hardwired variety. Few in-house PBX systems can do that. In the end, you want employees to be able to do their jobs whether they are at their desks, out in the field, in a hotel room or anywhere else. That’s something technology can accomplish today… but you can’t do it with yesterday’s gear.

Are You Missing Out?
The telephone cloud has developed so rapidly that many companies aren’t even aware of the capability that’s out there and how cost effective it can be. Could you benefit from a hosted VoIP phone solution ? You might be able to sooner than you think.

Just the Tech Jobs, Please

Nervous about your job in this shaky economy? Just want to be looking around in case... gulp... the worst happens? Or perhaps you're an employer who wants to selectively, very selectively, add talent that's a perfect match to a specific need. In either case, you don't want to be fooling around with general job sites overcrowded with everybody and every job under the sun. What you want is just tech jobs from JustTechJobs.

JustTechJobs is an IT centric job search portal that is what it says: just tech jobs. When you visit their site, your eye will be immediately drawn to the list of recent tech job listings in the left column. I just took a look and noticed a few striking things right off the bat. First of all, every job on the home page was posted in just the last day or so. There were over 30 separate listings from all over the United States. Some typical job titles include "Mid-Level JAVA Developer", "Web Graphic Designer", "Lotus Notes Administrator", "Data Center Operations - Technician", "Marketing Manager", "Technical Writer", "Project Manager" and "Network Administrator."

If you don't see what you want right off the bat, use the search box to enter job title, keywords, or company name. You can do a search of the entire U.S. or target a particular state. An advanced search feature lets you limit the search to as little as 10 miles from a particular zip code. You can also specify the freshness of postings updated within only the last day up to 90 days, or all of them. Check boxes let you specify full time, part time or freelance/temporary positions.

As a job seeker, you don't need an account to search the listings on JustTechJobs. But if you do register you get additional features, such as email alerts when the job you're looking for is posted on the site. There are also RSS feeds available for jobs, by specialty or by location.

For employers, JustTechJobs offers a low cost 30 day posting with discounts for multiple job listings. Jobs are listed chronologically, so as soon as you get your listing online it pops to the top of the list. You can also make your job a "featured job" for an additional fee so that it appears on the homepage at the top of the listings for an entire week. You'll be able to edit your listing at will, so you can adjust the wording based on the response you're getting from candidates.

Do you need an edge in the job market as a potential employee or employer? If so, then take a couple of minutes and take a look at JustTechJobs - Connecting IT's Best.

Workaholic and Proud of IT

Are you a workaholic? OK, is technology your profession? Enough said.

Well, did you know that workaholics have their own day of recognition? It's not exactly a holiday. That wouldn't be in keeping with the workaholic tradition. Workaholics Day is July 5. You know, the day when everyone else is recovering from the 4th celebrations.

They're all in a semi-stupor with their ears still ringing from standing too close to the fireworks show. Or nursing burns from foolishly lighting off their own backyard shows. Meanwhile, you're roasting in the server room while installing some much needed hardware upgrades. Holiday weekends are traditionally the best times for hardware and software upgrades. There's little activity in the office and most customers aren't hitting the servers.

Sadly, holiday weekends are just a small slice of the work schedule. All the other days and nights, weekdays and weekends are also work days in this 24/7/365 economy. If you're one of the driven who embrace the "always on" lifestyle, then you are certainly qualified to celebrate your day - Workaholics Day.

So, just how does a workaholic celebrate? More work? That seems redundant. Time off? That seems wasteful. How about proclaiming to the world that you are a workaholic and proud of it. That's it! Put it in their face!

You can do just that with workaholic themed items, such as mugs, T-shirts, bumper stickers, magnets, hats and the like. Cafe Press has a pretty complete selection of stuff for the true workaholic.

Treat yourself, or treat someone you know who really doesn't have time to be shopping for themselves. You can also send a Workaholics Day e-card to share a few smiles with somebody you care about who is slaving away instead of slacking this July 5. Just don't send it from some exotic beach vacation area. Unless, of course, you are actually sitting on the beach with your laptop computer and BlackBerry online and hard at work.

MAN Up

Is wimpy network performance your problem? Has productivity slowed to a crawl because zippy LAN performance is hobbled by too many users trying to get data in and out of the company through that neck of a funnel known as the WAN interface? Are you afraid to walk through the bullpens for fear of the angry stares and derisive comments about IT holding everybody back? If so, it's time to MAN up!

It's not that you need to grow a backbone... Actually it is. The frame relay or T1 connection that served you so well when most information was transmitted via paper, and the mail room served as a network router, has seen its glory days. The pace of activity and the volume of data flowing to customers, vendors and other company sites has tapped out these connections. A constant bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps might have seemed generous, even a bit wasteful, a decade or two ago. Now it's like connecting a soda straw of a WAN to a fire hose of a LAN. It will take a bigger MAN to do the job today.

The MAN for the job is the Ethernet MAN or Metropolitan Area Network. You might not be familiar with this MAN. The Ethernet MAN has come from obscurity to be the hottest ticket in town in only a few years. Ethernet MAN has taken on the incumbent SONET MAN and is winning over businesses left and right. You may not have wanted anything to do with SONET MAN. Incumbent telcos have had a lock on most SONET services and kept the pricing beyond what all the the largest organizations can afford. Ethernet MAN comes into town with two big competitive advantages from competitive carriers. One is Ethernet and the other is price.

Ethernet in point to point and multipoint metro networks makes the connection to your corporate LAN almost trivially easy. The outside line terminates in an Ethernet jack and you just plug-in your switch or router. There's no need to worry about protocol conversions or specialized terminal equipment. It really is Ethernet, just like you use internally.

Ethernet also offer dramatic cost reductions in many cases. SONET can provide dozens, hundreds, or thousands of Mbps. But can you afford it? With Ethernet, you'll most likely find that you can afford to upgrade from that 1.5 Mbps T1 to a 10 Mbps Ethernet connection. Perhaps you'll even be able to justify a 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet connection. That's over twice the bandwidth of DS3 service, but not twice the price. Maybe less, considerably less, than a single DS3 connection.

Need even more bandwidth? Gigabit Ethernet MAN is for you. Of course, you'll need a building that is "lit" for fiber optic service to get 1,000 Mbps. But not necessarily at the lower speeds. Many 10 Mbps connections are provided as Ethernet over Copper, using the same twisted pair telco lines that you already have installed for lower speed services.

Now that you know the advantages of Ethernet service in metro areas, there's really only one thing left to do - MAN up now for higher bandwidth. You'll wish you had done it sooner.

IT Departments are Wearin' the Green

It takes more these days that mere luck o' the Irish to keep information technology costs under control. Many companies are finding that going green can help them keep more green in their coffers. In this case green means environmentally friendly, things that help keep the Earth nice and green as well as help businesses save money.

The first to look for the proverbial pot of gold is in the power being pulled from the grid. What's insidious about power consumption is that it consists of dribs and drabs almost everywhere. All those desktop PCs quietly sitting on desks are fractional amperes each. Watts become Watt-Hours and then Kilowatt-Hours of consumption. If all of that electricity was going into productive activities the cost would easily be swamped out by the profits gained. But it's not. Much of the time computers are idle, people are away from their desks. But the electrons still flow from the wall and you pay for every one of them.

Many companies decided long ago that turning off idle computers and monitors overnight and letting them sleep during the day saved far more money than it cost in shortening the life of the equipment. Truth be told, it's hard to cycle a PC enough to destroy it before it becomes obsolete. Most go to the recycler still working just fine. You do call the recycler when you want to get rid of old PCs and other electronics, don't you? Those circuit boards and CRTs are chock full of toxic substances that can be reclaimed and reused before they escape to poison the water table.

Back to power consumption. In turning off equipment when it is not being used, preferably with a mechanical switch that interrupts the phantom or standby power that nearly everything electronic draws, has a double benefit. It reduces power drawn by the device and also the need to get rid of heat that it generates. Nothing is 100% efficient. When power is brought in, most is used to do important work but some just goes up in heat. Even LCD monitors that don't have fans still run slightly warm to the touch. Incandescent lights are the worst offenders of all. All those lumens of light you want are accompanied by BTUs of heat that you don't. Some office buildings never need to run their furnaces during the work day. They get their heating the expensive way, as a byproduct of electricity consumption.

Nowhere is the heat issue more obvious that in the server room. As more and more cores are packed into less and less space, the heat load of equipment racks goes up and up. More and more air conditioning is needed to deal with the heat rejection. It's a viscious circle. The problem has gotten so intense, so to speak, that equipment designers are starting to focus on higher efficiency power supplies and even things like DC power distribution.

Perhaps you don't need a server room at all. Heresy? Actually it may be more cost effective to locate your equipment at a colocation facility where the cost of power and environmental control can be amortized over many users. An additional benefit of colo facilities is that you may also find much better deals on bandwidth.

Still can't get power consumption low enough? Perhaps you should be generating some of your own. Those big flat empty office building and factory roofs are perfect for rows of solar cells. With a PV array powering a grid connected inverter, you'll be using less grid power during the heat (and light) of the day when it is most expensive. Google is just one of a growing number of companies that is supplementing it's electricity needs with solar power.

Is it time to upgrade your facilities with more efficient computing equipment? Let our network of value added resellers help you find the best deals on servers and network devices that can also help you save the green in more than one way.