This week, Colt launched its Ceano cloud services for SMBs with a particular focus on the reseller channel that actually services these businesses. As this announcement combines the business strategy of a telco provider with an innovative channel strategy, Forrester analysts Dan Bieler and Peter O’Neill have again combined (as in their previous blog on Cisco) to discuss their impressions:

Dan. Ceano is impressive in that it constitutes a true end-to-end platform, ranging from the network solutions provider to the channel partners and service enhancers, to the CIO of corporate clients, and all the way to employees – i.e., the actual users of Colts’ services. The main area of improvement of Ceano versus the previous customer engagement relates to the presentation of Colt’s portfolio.

Peter. Well, I had already called out their impressive channel strategy a few months ago, and this announcement continues that story. Leveraging the technologies from the ThinkGrid acquisition, Colt partners are now easily able to orchestrate, provision, and manage the Colt cloud services for their clients – and the system supports the partner’s own business processes from quotation to billing.

Telecommunications and mobility (T&M) technologies will play a critical role in the success of geographically distributed companies during the next ten years. Business professionals need their IT organizations to keep pace with their requirements related to globalization, virtualization, and bring-your-own technology. At the same time, the demand for unified communications (UC), collaboration (including room-based telepresence and desktop and video), and mobility is exploding (both in and out of the office). These business technology trends create a vortex of new challenges for business technology/IT sourcing and vendor management (SVM) professionals, who will need new skills to keep pace with everything from crafting technical and service-level specifications in RFPs covering multiple services to negotiating and governing complex service contracts to managing overlapping and interrelated vendor relationships.

Forrester’s Telecommunications and Mobility Sourcing Playbook provides insights about the "art" and the "science" of T&M sourcing in the rapidly changing technology environment. It explores the interplay of trends in technology adoption and management and also provides tactical advice for SVM pros regarding how-to build and review/revise your corporate sourcing strategy regarding advanced communications applications such as unified communications and collaboration, including accessibility using corporate-liable and personal (BYOD) connected mobile devices, selecting vendors and service providers, and achieving continuous improvement beyond cost savings.

In recent research, I have laid out some similarities and differences between tablets and laptops. But the tablet market is growing ever more fragmented, yielding subtleties that aren’t always captured with a simple “PC vs. tablet” dichotomy.  As Infrastructure & Operations (I&O) professionals try to determine the composition of their hardware portfolios, the product offerings themselves are more protean. Just describing the “tablet” space is much harder than it used to be. Today, we’re looking at multiple OSes (iOS, Android, Windows, Blackberry, forked Android), form factors (eReader, tablet, hybrid, convertible, touchscreen laptop), and screen sizes (from 5” phablets and to giant 27” furniture tablets) – not to mention a variety of brands, price points, and applications. If, as rumored, Microsoft were to enter the 7” to 8” space – competing with Google Nexus, Apple iPad Mini, and Kindle Fire HD – we would see even more permutations. Enterprise-specific – some vertically specific – devices are proliferating alongside increased BYO choices for workers.

Tell me you’ve had this problem. You wake up and stand in your closet, staring at all the different outfits to choose from and wondering which one is going to make just the right impression for whatever you have going on that day. Maybe you want to look authoritative and put-together for a client, be the cool parent to your kids’ friends, or be sexy to catch the attention of your objective's affection. Whatever the occasion, sometimes the wealth of options can be overwhelming and you end up panicking and trying to do too much or too little. And the next thing you know, that dream combo you had in your mind’s eye is out the window.

Monday’s The New York Times offers a defense of authors’ rights from bestselling author and head of the Authors Guild, Scott Turow. In the piece, Turow interprets a Supreme Court decision that allows the importation of books purchased abroad for resell in the US, making it seem like all of Western culture would henceforth be at risk. Later the same day, I read a brief statement from News Corp in which the company threatened to make the FOX broadcast network a premium pay channel in order to get its just compensation for its creative works ahead of the likely decision that Aereo is not illegally capturing and restreaming broadcast content.

These individuals and organizations have the right to do what they feel they must as they pass through the phase known as denial. But may I offer this one small suggestion to help them through the stages of grief yet to come: Stop pretending that the foe you face won’t eventually win because it will. That goes for all of you. Digital disruption will eliminate your structural advantages someday, too.

We’ve been through this before, dating back to the first time the music industry sued someone to prevent the future. No, it wasn’t Napster or the users of BitTorrent in the 2000s. It was actually Diamond Multimedia, makers of the new PMP300 MP3 players, and the year was 1998. The argument then was the same as it is today: We, the people who currently benefit from an artificial monopoly in either the creation or distribution of value, don’t want that monopoly to end.