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Going Mobile

As the year comes to a close, I realized that I had not accomplished one of my personal goals – working more references to legendary rock band The Who into my blog. I had pondered blending references to BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) with Who song titles (potential candidates included “My BYOD Generation,” “BYOD O’Reily,” and my personal favorite –  “You
BYOD, You Bet.”), but I could never pull the trigger.

Fortunately, Mary Meeker’s December 2012 Internet Trends Update rescued me from pushing the limits of taste and puns.  This year’s report highlighted the tremendous progress of mobile and potential for further growth in the near future.

Highlights from the report include:

  • Mobile traffic growing to 13% of all Internet traffic as of 11/12; up from 1% in 12/09
  • Smartphone and tablet shipments installed base estimated to surpass PCs by mid-2013
  • More smartphone users to come –  While there are 1 Billion Smartphone users, there still remains five Billion mobile users who have not upgraded.

These finding are intriguing when combined with the results from a recent survey by Cisco Internet Business Solution Group entitled BYOD and Virtualization, the findings of which included the following:

  • Seventy-eight percent of U.S. white-collar employees use a mobile device (e.g., laptop, smartphone, tablet) for work purposes.
  • On average, mobility initiatives will consume 20 percent of IT budgets in 2014, compared to 17 percent in 2012.

With the growth of mobile, the question is no longer “If” but “When.”  Cisco solutions including Jabber and WebEx allow businesses to stay at the forefront of mobile trends and productivity, allowing employees to collaborate and work regardless of location. They also prove the lyrics to The Who song “Going Mobile” prophetic.

Out in the woods

Or in the city

It’s all the same to me

When I’m drivin’ free, the
world’s my home

When I’m mobile

TBL No. 1100 on the Inc. 5000

Richmond, VA, August 23, 2012 – Inc. magazine has ranked TBL Networks, Inc. number 1100 on its Inc. 5000 list, an exclusive ranking of the nation’s fastest-growing private companies. The list represents the most comprehensive look at the most important segment of the economy — America’s independent entrepreneurs. This is TBL’s second straight year of being recognized on the prestigious list.

TBL Networks is a major source of expertise for the technology sector in Central Virginia.  Earlier this year, TBL Networks was named to the 12th spot of Virginia’s Fantastic 50 and included on CRN’s Tech Elite 250 channel partner list.  TBL’s CEO was recognized as one of Richmond’s Top 40 Under 40 in 2011. TBL Networks is the only technology integrator in Virginia with four Cisco Voice CCIEs, employs Central Virginia’s only VMware VCDX, and had two engineers recognized as 2012 VMware vExperts.

TBL Networks has experienced remarkable expansion in the marketplace, with a three-year sales growth of 289% that earned them their ranking.  “It is an honor for TBL Networks to be recognized by Inc. two years in a row,” said TBL President and CEO Alan Sears.  “This award is a testament to the hard work and expertise of our team of employees.  Their dedication to providing exceptional customer service to our clients is a major component of our success.”

In a stagnant economic environment, median growth rate of 2012 Inc. 5000 companies remains an impressive 97 percent. The companies on this year’s list report having created over 400,000 jobs in the past three years, and aggregate revenue among the honorees reached $299 billion.

The 2012 Inc. 5000 was unveiled on the company’s website at http://www.inc.com/inc5000/list/2012.

About Inc.
Founded in 1979 and acquired in 2005 by Mansueto Ventures, Inc. is the only major brand dedicated exclusively to owners and managers of growing private companies, with the aim to deliver real solutions for today’s innovative company builders.  Total monthly audience reach for the brand has grown significantly from 2,000,000 in 2010 to over 6,000,000 today. 

About TBL Networks, Inc.
TBL Networks is about moving forward with innovative technology.  With over 60 years of combined technical expertise, we empower clients’ collaboration, virtualization and data centers to do more with less. TBL delivers these advanced solutions directly where it counts the most – the desktop.  Building secure and reliable solutions that introduce efficiencies in human interaction is how we see the future.  Let us take you there at http://www.theblinkylight.com.

Building the Case for Corporate Video Collaboration

Video technology has evolved over the past ten years to allow people to communicate and collaborate better in both their personal and professional lives. Applications like Skype or Facetime are useful for adding a video element to remote conversations with your friends and family. But the requirements by businesses for lifelike and interactive systems are driving the development and adoption of more robust solutions for connecting with internal and external stakeholders.

The latest high-definition video systems enable real-time communication while also bringing a personal level of interaction through face-to-face conversation. Video collaboration or telepresence technologies provide an efficient solution for training sessions, meetings and collaboration across geographical boundaries. Organizations of all sizes have realized that they can deploy these technologies within their existing network infrastructure to help quickly influence growth and success.

Here are a few of the specific benefits that can be realized by integrating video for communications within your organization:

– Improve productivity by enabling quicker decision making.
– Reduce expenses associated with corporate travel.
– Strengthen relationships with clients and business partners.
– Demonstrate a commitment to sustainability and energy savings.
– Increase collaboration and interoperability based on open-standards.
– Scale quickly based on the evolving needs of employees.

Our business partner Cisco offers an extensive portfolio of video systems to meet the needs of your employees while also supporting your IT team with intuitive technologies that are easy to integrate within the framework of your existing infrastructure. These range from a dedicated, large room series to desktop solutions. So which one makes the most sense for your business? A better understanding of the three telepresence “experiences” – Immersive, Multipurpose and Personal can help answer that question.

Cisco’s immersive systems deliver all of the necessary elements for your meeting room or training facility including lighting, cameras, surfaces and audio equipment. The fully-appointed solutions provide a high quality, life-like meeting experience. They are also designed for simplicity and ease of use.

The multipurpose experience can be used to enhance your existing meeting spaces. They provide a collaborative user experience for dispersed teams to meet and communicate face-to-face. This series of systems offers simplified installation, use and management. Your IT team will appreciate how the design delivers framework that supports easy integration, large-scale adoption and rapid deployment.

Their personal telepresence solutions offer all of your employees the power of video collaboration delivered to their workspace. These systems fit on a desktop and can operate on PC or Mac platforms. The personal systems are also ideal for home offices and telecommuting.

If you’re interested in learning how video Collaboration can positively impact your business let us know. We can begin discussing which combination of the three telepresence experiences listed above fits your needs and applications.

Is It Time for a Private Cloud?

You probably remember from my recent post on What “The Cloud” Means to Your Company that there are both public clouds and private clouds. We defined private clouds are resources shared by one organization. More specifically, private clouds offer dedicated server space that is hosted either internally or externally. The platform can be managed in-house or a third party can support and maintain the hardware and applications.

A private cloud provides your company with a pool of IT resources that can be allocated across departments. This allows you to quickly and easily deploy services based on the needs of your employees. The old process of buying a new server to support the requirements of a specific business unit has been replaced with a system that allows you to create virtual servers and carve out the necessary resources to support your team.

Understanding how other organizations use private clouds to optimize their business is helpful to identifying opportunities within your own business. The state of New Mexico embraced this model to cut costs, accelerate service provisioning and reduces its carbon footprint. The first video on this page offers a look at why and how they built a private cloud network.

Another example is CareCore National, a specialty benefit-management company that collaborates with healthcare providers and insurance firms to authorize an average of 45,000 medical procedures daily. They needed the ability to analyze very large data sets while also helping to lower healthcare costs and improve quality of care at the same time.

Implementing VCE’s Vblock Infrastructure Package, built with industry-leading technology from Cisco, EMC and VMWare, allowed them to realize the following results:

-Reduced time to launch new lines of business from six months to two weeks
-Increased time software engineers can devote to development from 50 to 80 percent
-Built foundation for multi-tenant HSX cloud service

For a little more detail you can download the CareCore National case study.

The private cloud methodology allows your IT team to create a single virtualized set of resources that can be offered on-demand as a service across your organization. Your infrastructure becomes easier to scale and quicker to deploy without major considerations given to hardware installations and integration. It also establishes an architecture that enables secure transactions, measured service and accountability for specific cost centers.

Contact us to learn more about our partnership with VCE and discuss how we can provide your organization with a converged infrastructure solution that delivers a complete private cloud along with pervasive virtualization.

Two Years of Cancer Research

On July 1, 2010 TBL Networks began a partnership with the World Community Grid. The World Community Grid allows organizations with idle compute capacity to donate it for use in research projects ranging from cancer research to clean energy. When idle, a member computer will request data on a specific project from World Community Grid’s server, and perform computations on this data, sending the results back to the server, and then ask the server for new work. Each computation that a computer performs provides scientists with critical information that accelerates the pace of human discovery. In 2010, TBL Networks fired up a 40 machine Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environment using VMware View on our Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) dual B-series blade farm and dedicated all of those machines’ computing power to find a cure for cancer.

On our first anniversary, we reported that the 365 days of donated capacity had resulted in 18 years, 352 days and 6 hours of computing power.  With 95,993 results returned, TBL Networks was ranked 546 out of 561,794 members throughout the world.

Today, after two years or partnership with the World Community Grid, I am happy to announce that TBL’s VMware View cluster has computed 43 years, 311 days and 3 hours of runtime towards finding a cure for cancer. That amount of CPU cycles has generated 215,463 results for medical researchers around the globe, which now ranks TBL # 267 out of the now almost 600,000 members.

Dr. Igor Jurisica, Senior Scientist at the Ontario Cancer Institute, will be conducting a live webcast to discuss the Help Conquer Cancer project and how the project will ultimately help researchers who work on finding cures for cancers.

The webcast will take place on August 22, 2012, starting promptly at 12:00PM Eastern Time. You will be able to access the webcast by clicking here. Whether or not you are able to join for webcast, please let your friends know about this easy way to participate in helping humanity! That’s what we call techumanity, and we think it’s pretty cool.

Increase Employee Engagement with Cisco Quad

Collaboration is changing the way businesses operate. As I’ve mentioned in previous blog posts it helps increase productivity, improve teamwork and enable decision making. Smart organizations have embraced collaborative technologies to connect and build relationships with prospects, clients and partners. But they are also realizing that these technologies can be used to improve engagement with and between their employees.

The workplace is dramatically shifting due to the adoption of mobility, changing workforce demographics and application delivery options. Employees are becoming more comfortable with social media and virtual interaction in the course of conducting business. And the latest mobile devices and applications have left all of your stakeholders expecting to conduct business through their preferred means.

In response, companies need flexible software and communication services to facilitate employee collaboration. Cisco, offers a solution for linking your enterprise collaboration tools, the Cloud and your employees. Cisco Quad is a platform designed for today’s workforce: social, mobile, visual, and virtual. It helps connect your team to the information and expertise they need, when they need it.

Here are a few of the corporate applications that Cisco Quad can help support:
– Human Resources – Provide new employee orientation and training by offering one-stop access to mentors, corporate videos, documents, demos and peer communities.
– Product Development & Innovation – Improve the exchange of ideas through the ability to dynamically form communities for idea generation, brainstorming and discussions.
– Project Management – Enable more visible and streamlined communication flows while also sharing access to critical resources and shared collaboration tools.
– Sales Support / Sales Engineering – Assist with proposal development and RFP responses by creating cross-functional communities to help answer questions, locate relevant documents and co-author responses.
– Crisis Management – Maintain continuity thorough a crisis event through the ability to contact co-workers, share information and offer coordinated responses.

Cisco Quad also helps save money and decrease  the need for support from your IT team because it is delivered as cloud services eliminating the need to deploy and manage them in-house. It also provides enough flexibility so that end users can personalize their collaboration environment to support their work styles, instantly form communities to support organizational goals and collaborate in real time using their preferred communications tools.

If you’re interested in learning more about how establish and support a collaborative environment within your workforce let us know. We can provide you with an overview of how Cisco Quad integrates your existing collaboration tools with a broad set of social features that engage employees and quicken information access. We can also talk about some of the additional services available to increase collaboration with your clients and business partners.

What “The Cloud” Means to Your Company

There has been plenty of buzz about “The Cloud” over the past few years. The hype seems to have peaked recently with companies buying TV ads to highlight the benefits to consumers. For a price you can now access all of your personal content like music, documents and photos remotely. In addition, you can sync up your information between mobile devices and home based-based networks through intermediary technologies known as “The Cloud.”

But what does that mean for your company?

First, it is helpful to understand what The Cloud actually is. We define cloud-based computing as technologies that deliver computing over a network as an on-demand service. The model allows for sharing of applications, resources and data with computers and mobile devices almost like a utility.

There are both public clouds and private clouds. Public clouds are accessible in a broad public domain to individual users or multiple organizations. Private clouds are resources shared by one organization. Clouds have a few distinguishing characteristics; resource pooling, self-service, rapid scalability, measured service and in the case of a public cloud broad network access.

For small and medium businesses the reality is that cloud-based computing is a great opportunity to optimize your IT infrastructure and spending to allow for a renewed focus on revenue-generating opportunities. If implemented correctly private clouds can be used to deliver IT resources to your end users quicker with more reliably and at a lower cost. From both a business and technology management perspective these technologies can provide the following benefits:
-Business Continuity
-Disaster Recovery
-Improved Security
-Increased Scalability
-Rapid Deployment
-Reduced Operations Costs
-Simplified IT Infrastructure

Many vendors are only able to offer the individual components associated with cloud computing. However, our partnership with VCE allows us to address a client’s needs with a converged infrastructure solution that delivers a complete private cloud along with pervasive virtualization.

VCE brings together technologies from industry leaders Cisco, EMC and VMWare to make deployment quick and easy for your IT team. Their Vblock Infrastructure Platforms come pre-configured with computing, networking, storage, management and virtualization components built into scalable solution.

Let us know when you’re ready to talk about how The Cloud can help your business. We can also provide you with an assessment to determine which offering makes the most sense for your organization.

TBL in Virginia Fantastic 50

TBL Networks a Virginia Chamber Fantastic 50 Company

 
Richmond, VA, April 27, 2012—The Virginia Chamber announced TBL Networks as the 12th fastest growing Virginia company at the 17th annual Virginia’s Fantastic 50 Awards Banquet on April 26 at the Westfields Marriott in Chantilly. TBL Networks was the only Richmond company to make the list, an achievement as Richmond was not represented at all the prior year.  Nearly 400 attendees at the ceremony saluted the winners for their entrepreneurial success and contribution to Virginia’s economy.  The evening’s keynote speaker, Lieutenant Governor Bill Bolling, gave an inspirational address recognizing the pivotal role of small businesses and entrepreneurs in growing Virginia’s economy.

To be eligible for the list of fifty businesses, a company must be privately held with headquarters in Virginia, show sales between $200,000 and $100 million, and demonstrate positive revenue growth and positive net income in its most recent fiscal year over the previous year.  Companies are judged on four-year sales revenue history.  The professional service firm Dixon Hughes Goodman verifies all award entries.

“Small businesses are the backbone of the Virginia economy, creating jobs and opportunity across the Commonwealth, said Virginia Chamber president and CEO Barry DuVal. “We are proud to recognize the achievements of our entrepreneurs at the Fantastic 50 banquet.”

TBL Networks is a major source of expertise for the technology sector in Central Virginia.  In 2010, TBL Networks was named Collaboration Partner of the Year for Cisco’s East Area as well as RichTech’s Emerging Company of the Year. Last year, TBL Networks was ranked 406 on the 2011 Inc. 500 list.  Recently, TBL was named to CRN magazine’s Tech Elite 250 list for 2012. TBL Networks is the only technology integrator in Virginia with four Cisco Voice CCIEs, employs the area’s only VMware VCDX, and had two engineers recognized as 2012 VMware vExperts.

“On behalf of TBL Networks, I am honored to have accepted the award for the Virginia Chamber’s Fantastic 50,” said Dan Griles, Sales Manager at TBL Networks.  “This distinction reflects TBL’s commitment to offer the best information technology solutions to small and medium businesses, while delivering the highest level of customer service.”

About the Award
Virginia’s FANTASTIC 50 award program is a signature event of the Virginia Chamber of Commerce.  The FANTASTIC 50 awards recognize leading businesses across the Commonwealth in all types of industries, and are the only statewide awards of this type in Virginia.  Nominations for the 2012 FANTASTIC 50 were sought last fall from local chambers of commerce, economic development organizations, and through the sponsors’ networks; companies may also nominate themselves. 

About TBL Networks, Inc.
TBL Networks is about moving forward with innovative technology.  With over 60 years of combined technical expertise, we empower clients’ collaboration, virtualization and data centers to do more with less. TBL delivers these advanced solutions directly where it counts the most – the desktop.  Building secure and reliable solutions that introduce efficiencies in human interaction is how we see the future.  Let us take you there at http://www.theblinkylight.com.

Embracing Technology to Support Collaboration

Collaboration is critical to an organization’s success. It helps drive innovation, improve customer service and support a communicative corporate culture. How you embrace technology will help define the impact of collaboration on your employees and your customer base.

To that point our partner Cisco offers an entire suite of collaboration tools that help improve engagement with all of your stakeholders. These include Collaboration Applications, Customer Collaboration, TelePresence and Unified Communications. Their products will help your team make decisions, solve problems, reduce costs and accelerate time to market. In addition, their solutions offer the flexibility to accommodate new developments as your needs evolve and help protect existing IT investments related to their technologies.

Collaboration Applications like WebEx can help add an online component to your capabilities. The application brings voice, video, and web conferencing capabilities individuals spread out at different locations. It can be used for real-time communication for meetings, sales, training, customer support and events. WebEx conferencing solutions will also help optimize the IT resources you already have in place as they are delivered through the SaaS model to support easy implementation and scaleability throughout your organization.

The Customer Collaboration suite of resources will establish or expand the foundation for an improved customer experience. We already touched on how SocialMiner offers support for customer interactivity in this recent blog post. But additional products like the Unified Contact Center and the Customer Voice Portal will help increase customer satisfaction and loyalty by offering sophisticated call routing, contact management and speech-enabled self-service capabilities. In addition, they can provide an alternative to the mostly reactive mode of traditional call centers while helping you build a platform that supports engagement and proactively with your customers.

Cisco’s multiple options for TelePresence add a component that brings attendees face to face even if they’re in different offices. This suite of products offers a new way to support collaboration through high-quality video conferencing. By embracing TelePresence to support collaboration your organization can reduce travel costs, speed up decision making and provide highly engaged service for customers and partners. The systems also offer interoperability based on the industry standards meaning less support will be required from your IT team to assist with connecting to customers, suppliers and partners who are running on different types of systems or networks.

Then you can add in their Unified Communications solutions to make sure that what we discussed above runs effectively over a single converged network. This suite of products helps extend collaboration by offering reliable communications support for delivering multiple applications like voice, video and presence services to various types of devices and IP endpoints. It also addresses the growing need to support mobility at an enterprise level. Implementing Cisco’s Unified Communications platform allows you to view, optimize, and manage the entire communications system from one screen.

Each of these tools will enable your team to work together more efficiently, build new channels to communicate with customers and improve the way your organization communicates. We’ll provide a more in-depth look at each of the solutions individually in future blog posts to provide a better understanding of the platforms Cisco offers to support collaboration.

Two at TBL Named vExperts 2012

 TBL Networks is very proud to announce that two of our Data Center Solutions Engineers, Sean Crookston and Harley Stagner, have been named as vExperts for the second year in a row by VMware. Sean and Harley received this designation as recognition of their contributions to the VMware, virtualization, and cloud computing communities.

According to VMware, “the vExperts are people who have gone above and beyond their day jobs in their contributions to the virtualization and VMware user community. vExperts are the bloggers, the book authors, the VMUG leaders, the tool builders and town criers, the tinkerers and speakers and thinkers who are moving us all forward as an IT industry.”

TBL Networks Solutions Engineer Sean Crookston also has the title of VMware Certified Advanced Professional in Data Center Administration (VCAP-DCA). Sean is only the 47thperson worldwide to achieve this elite virtualization certification.

TBL Networks Solutions Engineer Harley Stagner is the only VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) in Central Virginia, and just the 46th person worldwide to hold this title.  The VCDX is the highest certification available from VMware.

Congratulations again to Sean Crookston and Harley Stagner – vExperts again in 2012.