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.

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…  )

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.

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!)

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.

I see this as being a nice usability upgrade to the compability guides.  What do the rest of the users of this guide think?

(Note: the Link on my VMW Launchpad has been updated….)

The first being that all three of the VCs agreed that if you can bootstrap your company and or drive to profitability with taking very little money, then do it! This isn’t what you would expect to hear from a VC, but when you consider that most VCs are “businesses” that are structured to do large deals, this makes sense. Smaller business opportunities exist all around us that could be grown to a $10M-$50M exit. Most VC’s can’t invest the time into those opportunities when these entrepreneurs are looking for under $500k of investment. Those are the deals that a few dedicated entrepreneurs could bootstrap and grow by staying focused and end up with a very nice payout with the majority going to the entrepreneurs.

The other topic that jumped out at me (but by no means surprised me, I agree with it) is that fact that most entrepreneurs or managers in startups and small companies don’t dream of taking their company public anymore. There is so much overhead and pain involved with being a public company today with regulations, requirements, and value being driven by those who don’t focus on long term fundamentals of a company that it isn’t really worth it unless you are large enough or have a unique and defensible enough value proposition. Add on top of this the increased public distrust and angst toward senior executives of public companies that the reasons for being an executive in a public company are far out weighed by the headaches involved.

On that same thread, I find it amazing how some very large companies who are sitting on Billions of dollars of cash are completely abusing their employees right now in order to increase their stock price. I have heard some scary stories as of late that take cost cutting to new highs and lows, and employees are having to take some of these cost cutting measures directly to their bottom line. It’s one thing when the company is fighting for it’s survival, but another when the company is sitting on Billions in cash and has growing revenues. The reason for this in my opinion is that stock prices currently are not being valued based upon the fundamentals of the company. Yet the senior executives of a public company can’t follow their best business sense to do what’s right toward their employees and customers because they have to cow tow to wall street analysis and fund managers who are are influencing their stock priced based on the macro economic situation.

Who wants to be a public company CEO in this climate?

(Though with the right company, right now is the time to invest with these artificially deflated stock values…)

Today, every enterprise is looking at ways to save money and help the environment…turning off the computers (in this case expensive power sucking servers) when they are not needed is an easy way to achieve both.

Update: For some reason the formatting of the blog theme is messing with the embedding of the video. I’ll work on fixing this in the next day. Until then, click through on first link for video directly from YouTube.

Update 2: Formatting was adjusted, the inline video should no longer looked “squished”.

Second, that the service they are creating, a “global hosted operating system” is essentially the concept of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure for the masses.  While VDI has classically been used by enterprises for their internal desktops, the idea behind g.ho.st is to extend the reliability of VDI to the consumer.  Imagine moving not just your data but your entire desktop into the cloud.  And then being able to acess that desktop from any web browser (or cell phone?)…that’s the idea behind g.ho.st.

While it’s not a solution for everyone (I doubt a power user like myself will be moving their desktop up to the cloud anytime soon), the general idea does have value to many computers users today.  This is something that will take some time for users to adopt, even longer than cloud based apps in my mind, but is what I believe to be the wave of the future.

I’ll try to take a closer look at g.ho.st in the coming weeks and post more more thorough review based upon what they have in their current alpha state.

Just not sure how the privacy laws would apply to this.  The law is always the lagard in technology innovation like this…

VMware View 3 is the solution that allow corporate desktops to be centrally managed and run from within the data center.  VMware View consists of the following pieces:

• VMware View Composer - utilizes Linked Clone technology to speed the creation of virtual desktops while reducing the operating cost of the desktops through utilizing less storage
• VMware ThinApp - enables simplified application packaging and deployment to virtual desktops and allows the application layer to be separated from the Operating System layer
• Offline Desktop - provides the flexibility to intelligently and securely move virtual desktops between the data center and a local laptop or desktop (experimental mode only)
• Unified Access - provides end users with a single point of access to seamlessly connect to their desktop environment and administrators with a single point of administration
• Virtual Printing - enables end users to print to any local or network printer without installing specific printer drivers
• Multimedia Redirection - improves the user experience with rich multimedia playback capabilities processed remotely in the data center and delivered to the end user’s device

In the past few weeks I have been briefing a number of my Fortune 500 clients on the VMware View solution for managing their desktops.  VMware View allows them to reduce not only their capital expenditures but also their operational expenditures while providing a much more secure and robust desktop experience to their end users.  These same benefits can be applied to companies large and small.  VMware even provides a TCO/ROI calculator that incorporates all the new benefits of VMware View 3, so you can measure the benefits yourself.

I’ll be sharing more of my experiences working with these customers and VMware View in the comming months.