Mobile Music Revenue To Hit $5.5 Billion In 2013

iPod silohuette Revenue from streamed music and full-track downloads on mobile phones will grow from $2.5 billion to $5.5 billion worldwide in the next five years as increased applications, all-you-can-eat data plans and more user-friendly services combine to drive up sales, according to a new forecast by Juniper Research.

Windsor Holden, an analyst at the U.K.-based mobile research firm, points to a widening array of mobile music initiatives from music streaming service Pandora, with 2 million mobile users, to T-Mobile's Mobile Jukebox to Samsung's Beat DJ, as evidence of increased consumer uptake.

"These are just snippets, but they are not isolated cases," he wrote in a blog post. Holden went on to argue that wireless operators are increasingly convinced that not only are customers willing to use their mobile phones for accessing music, but that a significant proportion view music as a key component of their mobile service.

While traditional mobile music services such as ringtones and realtones are in decline, the report notes that more sophisticated music offerings are taking their place. "Recent positive developments, such as Apple announcing that iPhone customers can use the 3G network to download full-tracks, will offer a further stimulus to growth," according to Holden.

Juniper wasn't as optimistic about ad-supported music services as a result of the global economic downturn. Because of ad budget cutbacks, it warned that ad spend could amount to only half of pre-downturn estimates under the worst case scenario.


Geographically, the report predicts that the Far East region and China will account for the largest share of mobile music revenue through 2013, followed by Western Europe. A separate new report from Forrester Research found that while only 6% of online European consumers streamed or downloaded music on mobile phones, that figure jumped to 18% among smartphone owners, and 32% among smartphone owners with unlimited mobile Web access.

Juniper Takes 'Control' of High-Speed Networking

New control-plane architecture set to help carriers with time to market on new services.

High-performance carrier networks are about more than just moving high volumes of data; they're also about control of the services and protocols the data relies upon.
Yet, for the most part, data and control have been combined in routing platforms often resulting in a performance trade-off. Juniper Networks is taking a different tact with its new JCS 1200 Control Plane Scaling platform.

The idea with the JCS 1200 is to separate data from the control plane, which in allows the control plane to scale independently. Juniper claims that for control-intensive services the separation of the control plane from the data plane provides greater service scalability for service providers.

"We are the ones taking the bold move of a separate control platform," Alan Sardella, Juniper's senior product marketing manager for high-end systems, told InternetNews.com.
"The main competitive advantage that it gives us and our customers is that you don't diminish control plane capacity as you add forwarding capacity."

Sardella explained that a typical router is made up of two primary components, a data plane and a control plane. The data plane is the packet-forwarding engine, and it is responsible for moving packets in and out of the router and into the destinations of the network.

The control plane is responsible for running protocols as well as creating and managing the forwarding tables. "It provides the intelligence to the router," Sardella said. According to Sardella, the control plane also provides direction to the data plane and to where packets need to be forwarded.

On the data-plane side, last June Juniper announced its T1600 Terabit router.

Sardella commented that the T1600 provides lots of capacity on the data side but in some cases the control plane can be a bottleneck. The JCS 1200 is designed to relieve that bottleneck, allowing the control plane to scale without having an impact on data-plane capacity.

Sardella argued that without a separate control plane architecture, as services are added, an impact on the data plane could occur. He noted that services such as MPLS (define) can sometimes require a lot of control resources and as such are well served by a separate control plane.

That said, Sardella added that many existing T1600 customers already have plenty of control-plane capacity.

"All networks are designed a little differently, and we're seeing some cases where this (JDS 1200) will give us more flexibility if we can do some separation," Sardella said.

"We're not saying the T1600 doesn't have enough capacity for most cases, but this is for select cases where the service provider needs something extra."

Will Cisco ever catch Riverbed or should they just get out now?

Source: CiscoSubnet

I want to start off with an excerpt from a Gartner paper by Mark Fabbi, it was put out back on March 15, 2007. This paper was written for the Cisco Applications Network Services, an before we go farther the Cisco WAAS is a part of this service. Plus we can look at it as a standalone product.

From a product perspective, Cisco's progress through 2006 has been, at best, mixed and largely disappointing. Cisco is a late entrant to an innovative and dynamic market, and it is "playing catch-up" across all market segments. Despite new product announcements during 2006, Cisco still lags behind the market.

I answer so many questions each week from Cisco customer with regards to the Cisco WAAS, what they are told by their Cisco Sales teams and the Riverbed Steelhead. Being a partner of both products it puts me in a unique position with my customers, it allows to me to what is right for my customer. Many VAR’s do not have this opportunity and are looking just to sell a customer more equipment. I always remember the excerpt above that was put out by Gartner and keep waiting for a change, but I have been disappointed just like customers.

From a VAR stand point I think it is time for Cisco to cut its losses and put the WAAS on the shelf. Right now it is not even in the top two of the product category, Riverbed Technologies and Juniper are one and two. If you are asking why would I say this? Well I have been involved in many bake off’s with customers using every product in this category, when it is an unbiased test Riverbed has never lost. By unbiased I mean that that the VAR just does not drop off equipment to the customer and says go test. You cannot just do that with customers or customers will pick based on culture or who gives them more free stuff than who really is the best.

Case in point, I will give two examples of what has happened to me when I was involved in two evaluations using Cisco, Riverbed (product demo) and Juniper. The first was a state organization that would not allow our engineers to be present when they did the testing; they just wanted the equipment and us out of the way. They said that if we were there we would influence the decision and that they were a state organization, let me say the biggest in the state. Now I have performed many bake offs and with the applications they were using, Riverbed would have no trouble winning.

It came to be that the customer said that Juniper and Cisco both did better than Riverbed, but they would not show us the data. Another bake off was with a very large company in which they were drinking the Cisco Kool-Aid way to much and an engineer sabotaged the evals so that Cisco would win. . If they were so up on putting the wrong product in, you might was well let them and we did. Some people will only put Cisco in and they do not care about anything else. There is an old rule with IT Managers and Directors; you never get fired for putting Cisco in your network even if it does not work. This same company called me one month later wanting help with the WAAS when they could not get it to scale or work like they did in the testing.

So as you can see, even if you are number one with Gartner you still have a huge mountain to climb when going up against Cisco. Now back to another reason why Cisco needs to drop the WAAS, the new mobile client from Riverbed is leaps and bounds above anything anyone else has in the network space. Cisco is years away to catching up with Riverbed on the WAAS and another three to five on to that just to get a mobile client that could compete with Riverbed.

I have copied the cautions from the 2007 Gartner report on WAN Optimizations Controllers; both of these were with reference to the Cisco WAAS:

* Successful implementation often requires multiple days by on-site Cisco engineers, dueto the solution's complexity. There is no single view of configuration, policy or WANoptimization features that are split across Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) andseveral router-based Internetwork Operating System (IOS) software options.

* Cisco has been slow to understand emerging market needs, resulting in WAAS featurereleases usually following other vendors' innovations. For instance, WAAS lacksadvanced features such as acceleration for HTTPS and Messaging ApplicationProgramming Interface (MAPI), and Cisco does not offer a software WOC client. Each ofthese features is available from other vendors.

Now I know things change and Cisco has fixed some issues, but even in this December 2007 Gartner Report they did not even mention the lack of a mobile client from Cisco. Now just to be fair I am going to show what Gartner put in about Riverbed:

* Less-capable QOS and reporting features than some leading vendors.

* Steelhead lacks UDP support.

Now I have to say that it looks to me like Gartner could not find anything else to write about Riverbed since they have great reports and have no issues with QOS (Quality Of Service)for any customer using a Cisco or Juniper network.

Let’s think about this for a second, what would happen if Riverbed took my ideas of which I have told the CTO and published a Windows Mobile Client, Blackberry Client and then got into the home user market?

This is my unbiased opinion being a partner of both vendors and doing many bake off’s. I hate to say this about any Cisco product or any product one of my vendors have but if you want to bring order to chaos within your network, don’t use the WAAS. Going back to my comment above it is about doing what is right for your customer with any product; give them the best product for the money.

Time to get out Cisco, maybe a Cisco Iphone?

IF YOU NEED TO PURCHASE HARDWARE FROM RIVERBED PLEASE CONTACT ME BY PHONE +31650730710 OR BY MAIL DESIGNFORIT@LIVE.NL

WAN optimization: Money for nothing, clicks for free

Application Acceleration and WAN Traffic Optimization : Market Trends

Optimization technology can slash the cost of WAN bandwidth and improve app performance

Source: Network World

WAN optimization technology is a way to save money — take that to the bank. For instance, custom machinery manufacturer Curt G. Joa in Sheboygan Falls, Wis., avoided the cost of adding a server to its German office by installing WAN-acceleration gear from Silver Peak.

Joa engineers in Germany needed to access engineering applications, but the applications performed so slowly over the WAN that it could take an hour just to open a Novell directory.

The initial plan was to install a server in the German office for $100,000 including time, hardware and licenses. Instead, the company spent $17,000 on a Silver Peak NX appliance that solved the problem by speeding application performance over the WAN.

In another example, Riverbed gear that cost $20,000 reduced the need for bandwidth between a Millard Lumber site in Omaha and a second site in Lincoln, Neb., from three T-1s to one, saving $3,000 per month. That’s a payoff within seven months.

In addition, WAN-optimization devices improve transaction times between sites by as much as 90% or more, reducing user frustration and in some cases making it possible for applications to perform at all over long distances.

Despite their impressive results, these devices often are overlooked, mainly because potential users worry they might remove chunks of data, block visibility of traffic through firewalls, or fail and stall out networks altogether, says Eric Siegel, an analyst with the Burton Group.

These concerns are groundless, Siegel says. “They should do it now. You can really save money on these things. And there’s soft benefits like happier customers and more cooperation,” he says.

In the grand scheme of things, a paltry amount of WAN optimization gear has been sold, says Mattias Machowinski, an analyst with Infonetics. This year, vendors will sell about $300 million worth worldwide.

Even so, the optimization gear is catching on. Sales this year have increased 27% compared with last year, and Machowinski projects double-digit increases in each of the next three years.

These devices help save money in two ways. First, they reduce the need for WAN bandwidth, which translates into buying smaller WAN pipes or staving off the need to add more.

Second, they enable businesses to consolidate servers in data centers, saving money by reducing the number of servers in corporate networks that need to be purchased, installed, maintained and repaired.

Optimization appliances use a variety of means — compression, caching, boosting TCP efficiency, protocol optimization, imposing QoS — to reduce the amount of traffic that crosses WAN circuits, compress the traffic that is sent and make sure it does so efficiently to avoid congestion.

Vendors — Cisco, Citrix, Expand Networks, F5 Networks, Juniper, Packeteer, Riverbed and others — use varying blends of WAN-optimizing technology, so one vendor’s gear might do a better job on a particular traffic mix than another’s. Consequently, the single most important thing customers can do is test gear made by more than one vendor on live networks.

IF YOU NEED TO PURCHASE HARDWARE FROM CISCO, JUNIPER, RIVERBED, PLEASE CONTACT ME BY PHONE +31650730710 OR BY MAIL DESIGNFORIT@LIVE.NL

How will Juniper's Hurricane-based Ethernet LAN switch affect Cisco's market?

The Ethernet LAN switching market is about to get very interesting if Juniper next month launches its highly anticipated enterprise networking switch based on a custom ASIC codenamed Hurricane.

Jim Duffy at Network World reports that Juniper is expected to make the announcement at a Jan. 29 event in New York City, where it will unveil its "vision, strategy and technology innovations" for the enterprise market.

Duffy quotes Zeus Kerravala, an analyst at The Yankee Group, as saying that the data center switches are "supposed to be '10G ready,' meaning he expects each slot in the modular form factors to support 100Gbps of bandwidth. Kerravala expects the 6-, 9- and 13-slot modular switches to eventually support line cards with 10 10Gbps Ethernet ports, but not at initial launch."

Juniper's entry into the Ethernet LAN switching market is bound to affect the market for Cisco. Even if you stick with Cisco, Juniper's entry into the market should help drive prices down. Isn't this what usually happens? Or will customers adopt a wait and see approach with a relatively unproven Juniper in the enterprise market?

Speaking of Juniper, remember back in August it launched an aggressive campaign to nab Cisco certified engineers by offering them free training to become Juniper-certified. The offer closes at the end of this month. Here's a recent update from Juniper:

"The Juniper Fast Track Program for Cisco Certified Professionals has really caught fire. As of the end of October, nearly 8,000 Cisco Certified professionals have signed up to become JUNOS certified. More than 1,000 people have actually completed certification."

The battle between Juniper and Cisco is definitely going to get interesting in 2008 ... Don't you agree?

IF YOU NEED TO PURCHASE HARDWARE FROM JUNIPER, CISCO PLEASE CONTACT ME BY PHONE +31650730710 OR BY MAIL DESIGNFORIT@LIVE.NL

Juniper sparks Westcon deal

Networking and security vendor Juniper could activate its pan-European distribution contract with Westcon Group in the UK as soon as this week.

Source CRN

The move would represent a double victory for Westcon after it inked a UK agreement with anti-virus goliath Trend Micro this week. The signings will further reduce its reliance on Cisco, which currently represents 57 per cent of its global turnover.

Sources close to the deal suggest Juniper will immediately drop one of its existing distributors, with several pointing to Azlan. An insider said: “An addendum between Juniper and Westcon to add the UK and Ireland as a territory has been finalised.” It is understood that both Westcon’s Noxs and Westcon Convergence arms will have direct access to the vendor.

Andrew Shepperd, vice president technology solutions group Europe at Azlan, said: “It’s not a surprise now Noxs is a part of Westcon that Juniper is extending the relationship. But as far as we’re concerned we’re the only distributor that can supply Juniper with SMB breadth.”