latoga labs

Today it dawned on me how some technology can have the unforeseen consequence of allowing us to get a view inside a person’s head.

While driving down the street today my radio station was overwhelmed by the broadcast of a nearby car’s iPod FM broadcast device. Curiosity took hold; I looked around and only saw one car close enough to be the source. I sped ahead at the next light to test my theory.  Yup, as I pulled away from the car, the car’s broadcast ended and my radio station came back in; they had to be the source.

When I pulled up to the next stop light I glanced over to see the driver; I was curious to see if my mental picture of the person who the music belong to was accurate.  Not even close.  Looking at the driver, I just couldn’t  quiet imagine them listening to the music I had heard.  And yet, the music had to be coming from her vehicle.

Sometimes you get a chance to see beyond the surface of a stranger. Thanks to the wonder of technology this can happen when you least expect it.

In general, I don’t like to post a link to someone’s blog post without providing something of additional value to the original post. Then there are those rare occasions where you just want to share something (thank goodness Twitter & FriendFeed are perfect for taking up the slack there!).

This is one of those in between cases.

All I have to add is that this is one of the technology industry’s dirtiest little secrets, not just Programming’s Dirtiest Little Secret.  It is also a huge pet peeve.  How can you work in an industry and not invest the time to learn the most basic skill of that industry?  Follow that link for a well written and humorous take on the subject.

(For the record, in the past I have freaked poeple out becuase I would do business interviews with various people from IT organizations and take all my notes touch-typing…while look at them, not at the keyboard or screen.  Maybe now I know why some of they really tended to squirm during those interviews…it wasn’t the questions…it was the feelings of inadequacy. 

I also freak my wife out when she watches or hears me type…  )

By now it should be no surprise to anyone that every business is looking to cut costs.  In an economic recession like the one we are in, even those business that are still doing well are cutting costs as the future is so unknown.  There is one area of cost cutting that is so simple and so close to everyone in a company…and yet most companies don’t really focus on it.

The Conference Call.

With so many remote employees, the conference call line is necessity of modern business.  As a career member of sales teams, I have always had my own personal conference line.  This conference line consists of both a toll free and a toll dial in number.  Most of the time when I get a conference call invite in my inbox, the location is the toll free conference line number.  And most of the time this is costing the company more money that it should.

At a previous company, an analysis was done of our telecom usage.  It was concluded that we were wasting over $100,000 a year on duplicate phone charges from our conference calls alone (and this was a company of less than 500 people).  Every time we would dial the toll free conference call number, we were paying substantially more than if we were to use the toll number.  Add on to that the fact that we were usually dialing that toll free number from a company phone, and we were getting double billed: once for the local phone change and once for the toll free conference line.

By raising the awareness of this situation to the entire company and by adapting user’s behaviors — we all started to include both the toll and toll free conference line number in meeting invites and always dialed the toll number when using a company paid for phone line — the company was able to save a substantial portion of this $100,000 per year phone waste.

Extrapolate this estimated wastefulness up (or down) to the size of your company and see how much money you might be wasting yearly.  Changing your corporate and personal behavior is an easy way to reduce this waste.

A helpful tip for companies of all sizes during these economic times.

Update:  A client of mine brought up an interesting point during a recent discussion on this topic.  His company uses IP Phones internally. With the phones leveraging the exising data network, calls within any location for the company world wide are free.  But, when someone dials a toll-free conference call number, they are routed outside the network and start to incure a phone charge.  This client happens to produce their own conferencing solution, so the costs really start to add up when the toll-free confernce numbers are called since the entire conference system is “free per use” as long as they don’t leave their IP network.

Tis the season, for giving and receiving.  And for a limit time, VMware (my employer) is allow me to give a special Friends and Family discount to all my readers.  If you haven’t discovered the joy of virtualization for your personal computer, running multiple operating systems on your home PC or laptop, now is your chance:

For years I have used VMware Workstation to run demos and test environments on my laptop and desktops (the snapshot capability has literally saved me weeks of work over the years).  Now, since I made the switch to the Mac, I use VMware Fusion to do the same.  With this 50% off coupon, you can enjoy the same benefits immediately.   (Remember, this discount ends on 1/15/2009!)

Recently, VMware View 3 was released.  And since it’s availability, I have been busy helping multiple customers architect virtual desktop deployments.  One word of advice on this front, regardless of your deployment size, make sure you architect the deployment as a repeatable, self-contained building block.  Build an architecture that can support 1000 or 5000 desktops as a stand alone pod.  Then scale out to support your enterprise’s size by just repeating the building block.

This is a best practice when architecting any large scale virtualization solution (even for cloud based architectures that I tweeted about last week.)  Have the pod contain all the servers, storage, switching, virtualization, and desktop infrastructure needed to support your target desktops.  Even if you are deploying to support a much smaller desktop footprint, having the ability to scale up to a pre-known size will save you down the road–especially when surprises happen like acquisitions or contractor shifts.

This is the first recommendation also given in the recently released VMware View Reference Architecture Guide.  This guide helps you to architect large scale enterprise wide deployments of VMware View.  Covering all the basics of VMware View deployment from design approach, components, design, and through validation this guide is a must read for anyone working on or thinking about a virtual desktop architecture.  You can download this guide and three other useful guides to desktop virtualization at the VMware website.  You will need to register using a valid email address but can always opt out of receiving any future updates.