Discover how mastering email communication can boost business efficiency, avoid common pitfalls, and ensure secure, respectful online interactions.
Turkey Revenge
The turkeys are pissed this Thanksgiving they are seeking revenge.
Germs Infest 60% of Americas Phones
60% of Americans sleep with their phones, harboring germs. Cleaning regularly with UV sanitizer or alcohol wipes can help keep your phone and bed germ-free.
Smartphone Sanitizing: A Practical Guide
Securely erase personal data from your old smartphone before recycling. Protect your identity from hackers—easy steps to follow.
Why Soft Skills Matter in Today’s Job Market
Boost your career with essential soft skills like communication, teamwork, and emotional intelligence. Learn why they’re crucial for workplace success.
Is Smilodon Holding Back Your Career?
In case you have not noticed the world is changing. People who know this stuff say our brains have not changed as much as our surroundings. Our brains are hardwired to keep us safe. It is called “negativity bias” which means we focus on the potential pain more than the potential good. This is why change is scary.
These legacy fears are the result of millions of years of our ancestors being prey, not predators. Giant hyenas, cave bears, cave lions, eagles, snakes, other primates, wolves, saber-toothed cats, false saber-toothed cats, and maybe even giant, predatory kangaroos ate early humans. But in our knowledge-based world, the potential pain we expect (a tough meeting with the boss) won’t kill us– but we feel the same fear and pain as our primal ancestors did when they heard the saber-toothed cat roar.
And so we run the other way. At work, we miss more potential good because we’re hard-wired to avoid potential bad. Taking specific, intentional career risks helps us overcome our ancient hard wiring.
In fact, avoiding risk is one of the most dangerous things you do for your career long term. After all, if you’re not being proactive about creating success on your terms–whatever and however that looks to you–no one is going to do it for you.
This infographic from Go Jump Las Vegas lists some of the positive influences that risk-taking has on our overall well-being. Step out of your comfort zone and start seizing amazing opportunities.
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Think about your fears as the right response at the wrong time. The fear worked 50,000 years ago. It’s simply out of date. You’re using outdated software in your brain.
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Avaya LBO Buzz
Avaya is back in the news. Followers of the Bach Seat will recall that Avaya declared bankruptcy in 2017. Now the buzz is that Santa Clara, California-based telecommunications equipment and software firm is considering a leveraged buyout offer.
Reports are circulating that Avaya’s (AVYA) board of directors is evaluating an offer from an unnamed private equity firm. Reportedly the offer values the Lucent spinoff at more than $20 per share, people in the know told Reuters. The private equity firm values Avaya at more than $5 billion, including $3.2 billion in debt.
Avaya is one of the world’s largest providers of telephony systems. It was spun off from Lucent Technologies Inc in 2000, which used to be part of AT&T (T). The LBO comes 15 months after Avaya emerged from bankruptcy protection, with a $8.3 billion debt legacy from a previous leveraged buyout by private equity firms TPG Capital and Silver Lake in 2007.
Avaya has tried to shift its revenue model to focus on cloud-based communications solutions with recurring software and subscriptions fees and not its traditional hardware business. Its legacy business is becoming more commoditized and dated. Much of Avaya’s new focus involves cloud services like unified communications as a service (UCaaS) and Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS). A new Device as a Service (DaaS) offering has also surfaced.
Avaya’s contact center business has also attracted acquisition interest in the past from private equity firms, including Clayton Dubilier & Rice LLC, Hellman & Friedman LLC, and Permira Advisers LLP. Hellman & Friedman and Permira own Genesys an Avaya competitor.
As of September 2018, Avaya had about 8,100 employees worldwide, including 2,800 in the U.S.
Private equity firms have recently focused on communications businesses. Among those companies are Aspect Software, Mitel, and PGi, each privately held by such firms. Note, too, that Polycom had been a Siris Capital property until its recent acquisition by Plantronics.
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Category: Uncategorized |
Tags: 2019, Call center, Cisco, Cloud computing, CSCO, Genesys, Merger, Microsoft, Mitel, MSFT, Plantronics, Polycom, Private equity, UCaaS
Bespoke Coffee Maker
If your idea of a good coffee is frozen coffee blended with a sugary concoction picked up at the drive-thru window, move on. If you take your coffee really really seriously, this is the coffee maker for you. The Royal Coffee Maker is a balance siphon coffee brewer. Siphon coffee brewers were first seen in the 1850s. The King of Hungary wowed his guests with one during a royal banquet, transforms coffee-making into a high ceremony.
The handcrafted Royal Coffee Maker could be the most extravagant coffee maker in the world. French sculptor Jean-Luc Rieutort designed this precision machine which includes 24-karat gold (or silver) and crystal and semi-precious stone. Only eight of the bespoke coffee makers are produced by hand each month. Each coffee maker takes more than 50 hours of painstaking workmanship to complete. The Royal Coffee Maker costs $24,000.
The Royal Coffee Maker is a fully automated system. It is designed to allow heat, steam, and gravity to brew the coffee at the perfect temperature. Coffee grounds are placed in the Baccarat crystal carafe, along with an optional touch of Grand Marnier or other liqueurs. Hot water is poured into the 24-karat boiling pot and the Baccarat burner vase lit. Perfectly heated water travels to the grounds before suction pulls the finished brew back into the pot. The coffee maker also comes with a matching custom-made coffee scoop. And you can have your family crested engraved on it.
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Intrigued? Prepare to skip your next 4,800 Starbucks to afford the most self-indulgent coffee maker on the planet. Of course, if you are going to be Trumpian about it, you might as well brew up some Kopi Luwak coffee beans in your 24-karat gold balancing siphon coffee brewer.
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Category: Uncategorized |
Tags: 1%, 2019, Baccarat, Coffee, Coffee maker, Gold, Grand Marnier, Kopi Luwak, Paris, Starbucks
Holy Sell Out Batman
The Caped Crusader has sold out. While the full benefits of next-generation wireless – 5G won’t be realized until at least mid-2020, Batman is being used to pimp 5G. AT&T used The guardian of Gotham to create demand for mixed-reality at last month’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Spain. The mixed-reality experience featured DC Comics Batman and the Scarecrow battling it out on the MWC show floor.
Fierce Video
reports that AT&T (T), Ericsson (ERIC), Intel (INTC), and Warner Bros., with DC, are using 5G technology and edge computing to build a location-based mixed-reality experience. For the walk-in experience at MWC, visitors put on an augmented reality headset. There they witnessed a 2 to 3-minute experience.
Ade Kushimo, director of business development, IoT, and emerging business at Ericsson told Fierce Video, “The really cool part of the experience is going to be the fact that you have this virtual, digital content being embedded into your physical space. That gives you that mixed reality experience.”
Mixed reality experience with Batman
Doug Matheson, vice president of strategic business development at Ericsson, said the proof-of-concept experience demonstrated that 5G technology (both radio and core) could be combined with intellectual property to create a mixed reality experience that’s both mobile and untethered.
In order to create a good mixed-reality experience, image lag has to be kept to a minimum. Image lag will make you dizzy and ruin the experience. That means that compute power has to be pushed out to the edge of the network to reside closer to the end-user. The compute power needed to process a mixed reality experience can’t live in a centralized data center somewhere.
The cloud and edge network architecture allows for heavy computing to be done away from the device. So, the goal is to shift processing to the cloud and transport it there using a 5G network. The Batman demo ran on a fully integrated 5G network using Ericsson radio base stations 5G network technology will help supply the lower latency and higher speeds and enabled by Intel Xeon processors and the Intel 5G mobile trial platform.
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Mobile Marketer says that 5G will have a huge impact on AT&T’s mobile network. Its data traffic has grown more than 470,000% since 2007, with video making up half of the mobile data. Video may expand its share of data traffic to more than 75% by 2022, according to the company’s estimates.
Batman now works for AT&T following its acquisition of Time Warner who owned Warner Brothers, which owned DC Comics, the home of Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Harley Quinn, the Joker, Lex Luthor, Oswald Cobblepot, and the Flash.
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Category: Uncategorized |
Tags: 2019, 5G, AT&T, Batman, Cloud computing, ERIC, Ericsson, INTC, Intel, IOT, Mixed-reality, T, Virtual reality, Warner Bros.
VMWare Crossing the Streams
The Ghostbusters warned us. Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis) warned us not to cross the streams. You should not cross the streams because as Raymond Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) explained it would cause total protonic reversal. Despite the warning, VMware is crossing the streams.
Rumors have it that Dell/EMC/VMware and Microsoft (MSFT) are crossing their streams with a VMware Cloud NSX on Microsoft Azure partnership could be coming soon.
VMware’s (VMW) multi-cloud approach combines the core VMware technology stack with services delivered through partnerships with other service providers including Amazon (AMZN) Amazon Web Services (AWS) Google Cloud and IBM Cloud. As well as an emerging development environment centered on the open source Kubernetes container orchestrator. Chennele2e hypothesizes,
The two companies are jointly developing software that will let their customers more easily run computing jobs, which rely on VMware software, inside Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service … could be announced … in the coming weeks … move computing chores from their own private data centers, where VMware’s software is a critical ingredient, to Microsoft’s “public” cloud service.
In the past, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger described a range of cross-platform work — including:
- Azure: NSX and VDI with more VMware management products for Azure are on the way.
- Google Cloud Platform: VMware has partnered with Google and Kubernetes. Also, Android- and Chromebook-related offerings.
As the slide below shows, the deal with Microsoft links VMware to most of the enterprise VM’s in the cloud. What impact will the VMware-Microsoft deal impact the VMware-AWS relationship? Will AWS continue to enjoy “most favored nation” status in VMware’s public cloud partner ecosystem?
The Redmond Channel Partner points out that former VMware executive Ray Blanchard, who was in charge of the VMware partnership with AWS joined Microsoft a year ago.
Related articles
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Category: Uncategorized |
Tags: 2019, Amazon, AWS, Azure, Cloud computing, Dan Aykroyd, Dell, Egon, EMC, Ghostbusters, Harold Ramis, Kubernetes, Microsoft, MSFT, Total protonic reversal, VMware