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End users of technology are increasingly using consumer devices and applications at work and doing so without reference to or help from their IT departments or managed services provider who, in many cases, may not even be aware of what’s going on.

There are many types of WAN accelerators on the market right now, Riverbed has managed to stay ahead in the Gartner magic quadrant reports, and has led the field in this arena.

In summary, Riverbed devices are deployed on either end of a connection, typically a WAN or high latency connection, the devices will peer with each other and then build up tables in what Riverbed calls SDR (scaleable data referencing).

I was invited to 451 Research's Hosting & Cloud Transformation Summit (HCTS) Europe in London on Monday. The focus was the transformation of IT in supporting the business. The overall research showed that there was an increasing appetite for companies to do things faster with more flexibility and on more devices.

Great news for UK businesses, we hear that there has been a 40% reduction in cable theft in FY 2011/2012. For BT's year ending in March there were c. 2100 incidents across the BT network compared to c. 3650 last year.

I thought it was strange there was no initial outcry from the main IP voice players when Microsoft announced its planned takeover of Skype. Now it seems they really are scared according to this recent article from the BBC. The benefit of Skype to Microsoft means that not only can it take on the WebEx and Tandberg acquisitions but also their core Communications Manager IPT product set.

Interesting that an innovative company like RIM has lost its way. The main benefit of Blackberry has always been its ease of use from a user and support perspective,whether you're managing the process in-house or using a managed service. Nothing beats it. RIM should be focused on being a business tool for professionals and not get drawn into the consumer electronics world. You need to have deep pockets to take on Apple.

For the purpose of gaining clarity, it may be judicious in the first instance to provide a definition for TDA (technical design authority) as it’s an abbreviation that’s often bandied around in the IT industry but not always fully understood.

Essentially, TDA is the ability to review a solution in detail to ensure that it:

EF CoS on BT MPLS circuits can only be used for voice or video traffic (not signalling) the reason for this is that BT restricts the packet size inside EF to 960 bytes (so anything larger gets dropped).

Packet size on voice and video traffic itself is small and doesn’t exceed the threshold, however other traffic including voice signalling for example is larger and can exceed this restriction and so results in packet loss (and as a result call quality issues).

In heading up the  problem management team for SAS's managed services division I see a consistent volume of questions over ADSL performance and stability issues. From this experience I thought I would share some of my knowledge and explain what ADSL is, what it can do, and the limitations that ADSL can have within a modern business environment. Further many of these “issues” are just in fact the normal limitations of the ADSL product set.

On many business broadband circuits a provider will often throw in a router to run the circuit, however these aren’t always what we would call ‘business grade’ pieces of kit and can cause issues with reliability and ultimately frustration with the service.