MICHAEL FINNERAN
President, dBrn Associates
Michael has appeared at hundreds of trade shows and industry conferences including VoiceCon, InterOp, and Mobile Business Expo; he also helps plan the Wireless and Mobility track at VoiceCon. In the consulting area, he has provided assistance to carriers, equipment vendors, end users, and investment firms in the US and overseas. His clients have included: AT&T, Sprint, Foundation Capital, IBM, RIM, Prudential Insurance, McGraw-Hill, and Merrill Lynch.
A prolific writer, for twenty-three years he wrote the Networking Intelligence column for Business Communications Review. He now contributes on wireless and mobility to UC Strategies as well as NoJitter. He has published numerous articles and white papers and has contributed to Computerworld, Data Communications, The Ticker, and The ACUTA Journal.
Well respected as an educator, Mr. Finneran has conducted over 2000 seminars on networking topics in the US, Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. He taught in the Graduate Telecommunications program at Pace University, and conducted programs at the Center for the Study of Data Processing at Washington University in St. Louis. His programs are now offered through Telecom+UC Training.
A long-time member of the IEEE and the Society of Telecommunications Consultants, Mr. Finneran holds a Masters Degree in Marketing and Management Information Systems from the J. L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University.
Blog Entries by Michael Finneran
We are not only watching the birth of new businesses, but of new business models that are driven by the technologies we helped create.
This new offering from Sprint and Tango is the first glimmer of an intelligent interface to the mobile world.
Like the tablet computers that preceded it, the iPad appears to suffer from the dysfunctional Three-Bears problem (too big, too small, and too useless).
Undoubtedly, there will have to be a regulatory decision to determine if the MagicJack innovation violates the carriers' licenses.
Enterprise FMC will continue to be the topic most discussed and least implemented.
A new company has published results of their study of 3G wireless coverage and performance for the four major carriers (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile).
Cisco should be beating the pants off of the other guys. They have the fullest line-up of wireless, UC, and collaboration, but seem unable to get their left and right feet to work in tandem.
The poster child of dual mode and one of its most vocal advocates is moving to other opportunities in mobility. They will now be offering a Web-based mobility solution that depends entirely on cellular connectivity.
In the end, what is most interesting is whether the vendors are treating mobility as a core capability or simply "window dressing."
Enterprises have been waiting for Cisco to make some significant announcement in the wireless area, and we’re still waiting.
Will these feature enhancements be significant enough to finally move dual mode (or any of the IP PBX vendors' mobility solutions) into the mainstream?
We can make some pretty sound projections about what stays and what goes.
So good luck Mr. Genachowski, and please exercise good sense. Wireless is one market that is poised to leap to another level.
"The better consumers feel about their iPhones, the worse they feel about AT&T."
The Samsung announcement means that DiVitas will now have a stable and fully-supported Windows Mobile capability.
Microsoft gets a strong mobile partner in those areas where Nokia dominate, but for the US market it still looks like OCS in the data center, Outlook on the desk, and BlackBerry in your pocket.
For real creativity to flourish in the mobile space, we have to take the decision making out of the hands of the monopolists.
It appears that mobility is important, but the PBX is a small and easily replaceable part of that picture.
When are these guys at Apple going to figure out that you're not making any friends target-bombing people’s electronics?
"Sprint is embracing Wi-Fi in all its major devices going forward."
If this UC thing is going to fly, we’ve got to tailor it to the way work happens in the real world, and there's a lot that needs to be done.
It's time to realize that the "circle the wagons" mentality that drives the cellular business is a sign of weakness, not strength.
Agito recognized the importance of having the most popular smartphone on their device list, and they predict it will take their competitors at least a year to catch up.
You can now access a map that shows the location of your lost iPhone, and there is also a remote wipe capability. They also support a cut & paste function.
You can't have everything, but it looks like they got a lot of it right.
There are still plenty of gaps in UC product capabilities. The question is whether those deficiencies can be addressed more quickly by one big company (Cisco) or two (HP and Microsoft).
The big question here is: what kind of "devices" will Cisco develop and what impact will they have on the star-crossed development of WiMAX?
The adoption of virtualization solutions has been spotty in telecom and UC, but Meraki may have a winning angle by applying the concept to WLAN infrastructure.
If you’re a 100% BlackBerry shop, they've got an answer for you. If you are the more typical mixed environment, you're still looking for an FMC solution for non-BlackBerry users.
The discussion should start with a vision of the mix of service configurations we plan to support; along the way the role of wired & wireless LANs will work themselves out.
The iPhone remains one of the great CONSUMER PRODUCTS of the decade.
We've got to turn this conversation around and start looking at in terms of what the users need rather than what the vendors have.
This isn't yet a distribution agreement, but they are already running a significant pilot of the OnRelay gear in Austria.
A joint agreement with Avaya will be a significant boost for DiVitas and will plug a hole in Avaya's product line as well.
There's no joy in Mudville and there's no iPhone in Podunk!
In reality we're actually dealing with two questions: What does a mobile user need? and How should we mobilize them?
The WLAN market is still pushing the limits of the technology in some very creative ways.
To really penetrate the enterprise market, the cellular carriers are going to have to get over the idea that they can just sell consumer services to businesses.
The reason we don't have mobile unified communications is that enterprises are simply not organized to capitalize on the potential.
Anyone planning WLAN deployments today should be focusing on 802.11n, and most importantly they should be planning how it can best be deployed.
Many of the original Palm zealots have moved to other platforms, with RIM being at the top of that list.
It seems that saving money will be a recurring theme for 2009, and in the mobility space the cellular budget will be the best place to start.
If you’re an AT&T customer, they will now be willing to charge you for the privilege of using your own broadband Internet connection to address the deficiencies of their wireless network coverage. Yeah, that’s right--the femtocell works over your Internet connection.
The Blackberry Storm's preliminary reviews have been inconclusive. However, let me be definitive: for the enterprise user, the Storm will be a major winner and should have enough pizzazz to take much of the iPhone pressure off IT departments.
Where White Space gets interesting in its potential to develop into a real competitor to WiMAX and to the cellular carriers. Carriers traditionally pooh-pooh the idea of “real” services operating on unlicensed frequencies, but smart radios that sense and avoid other transmissions add a new element to the equation.
Microsoft’s OCS 2007 Release 2 has a bunch of features that it hopes will make it a somewhat less deficient PBX offering, but the advances on the mobility front don’t mount up to much. For now their best hope for a mobile OCS deployment seem to involve someone else’s mobile device and someone else’s PBX.
Siemens Enterprise Communications made their first significant product announcement since their acquisition by the Gores Group, and it provides some major upgrades to their mobile UC product lineup. Siemens’ product enhancements slipped under the radar while their business prospects were...
We are seeing a gaggle of new cell phones. The good news is that these products continue to demonstrate the creativity that has characterized the consumer electronics business. The bad new is that they are forced to operate under a business model that harkens back to the Soviet Union’s planned economy.
The rumor mill is buzzing that Juniper Networks has its sights on an expansion in the wireless LAN market. FT.com carried a story Monday that Juniper’s new CEO Kevin Johnson, is looking to acquire either Aruba Networks or Meru Networks...
If you want to know what’s happening in the voice over wireless LAN area, the one guy to ask is Ben Guderian, the Vice President for Product Marketing for WLAN voice products at Polycom. Ben has been around the WLAN...
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