AT&T - Alright!

Sat, 01 Dec 2007 14:41:18 EST

AT&T - Alright! - by aandy20

AT&T Inc (NYSE:T)

Does iPhone ring a bell??? Buy the stock.

McKinsey Consulting warns the telecom operators that if the regulators encourage the further adoption of broadband, a vast market awaits VoIP providers because the cost of making calls is so much lower. Even in the absence of any additional impetus, VoIP will gradually erode fixed-telephony revenues. The market share at risk was then assessed on the assumption that half of them would consider switching. At current trends in the adoption of both broadband and VoIP, 10 to 20% of users in Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States may switch to VoIP in the time span of 2007 to 2010. For fixed-line incumbents, this translates into threatened voice revenues of approximately $2 billion to $2.7 billion in Japan, $500 million to $700 million in the United Kingdom, and $4.3 billion to $5.5 billion in the United States.

AT&T Inc., is a provider of telecommunications services in the United States and the world. The services and products that it offers vary by market, and include: local exchange services, long-distance services, data/broadband, Internet services etc.

Randall L. Stephenson is chairman of the board and chief executive officer. Before the current appointment he was the COO of the company and was responsible for all wireless and wireline operations. Under his watchful eyes the company outperformed its peers in nearly every category. He began his career with Southwestern Bell Telephone in 1982. In 1996 he became the controller for SBC Communications where in he progressed to take charge as chief financial officer for SBC. He helped the company reduce ts net debt from $30 billion to zero.

Rick G.Lindner is the Chief Financial Officer. He began his career with SBC through its subsidiary, Southwestern Bell Telecom, in 1986.

At & T's main competitors are Qwest Communications International Inc., Sprint Nextel Corp. and Verizon Communications Inc. Operating income increased $2.4 billion in the third quarter and $7.2 billion for the first nine months. This increase reflects the addition of BellSouth's revenues post acquisitions. Operating income margin decreased 18.7% in 2006 to 17.6% in 2007 in this quarter. But in the nine month period increased from 16.4% in 2006 to 16.8% in 2007. The positive impact of the BellSouth acquisition was offset by the continued decline in retail access lines, all because of competition. This means customers disconnected At& T's primary and additional lines and switched to competitors' wireless, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and cable offerings for voice and data. The highlight of wireless service revenue is the iPhone as the company has the exclusivity.

Operating revenues increased $14.5 billion or 92.7%, in the third quarter and $41.4 or 87.8%, for the first nine months. Also contributing to the operating revenue increase was continuing growth in data, primarily related to Internet Protocol (IP) data, partially offset by the continued decline in voice revenues. Wireless data growth has also been strong and is expected to continue.

AT&T has shown tremendous improvement in its finances mainly due to strategic tie up and other acquisitions. The company will aggressively push for more business through the same route. A long term investment in this company is advisable. So I say buy the stock!

VmWare IPO - Great long term investment

Sun, 18 Nov 2007 21:53:42 EST

VmWare IPO - Great long term investment - by aandy20

VMware IPO - Great long term investment value

For many who don't necessarily have a technology background, this post will offer some insight into the business value of the VMware product space from a working experience perspective. Being involved on the business development side & the vice versa side of a client, I will offer my take on this partial IPO and why I think it makes a killer investment value.

This post will get somewhat technical - to truly understand why this technology is of great value we must dig deep into its ability.

The challenge that IT departments have is how to keep IT cost down while business and service level requirements continue to increase? The computing infrastructure plays a foundational role in most business processes. Industry surveys indicate that 70%-80% of TCO is consumed by the people and processes used to maintain existing systems and applications.

Traditionally, companies have deployed applications with separate development teams from different business units. But to serve customers, the business requires cross-organizational communication from different business units. So there exist two directions of views: horizontal view from business and vertical view from IT.

The tiered silo infrastructure complexity brings the following problems:

Lack of consistency among platforms, configurations, architectures, management tools and processes

Inefficient resource utilization (infrastructure & staff)

Inefficient to reclaiming and re-purposing hardware and software that is underutilized

Inefficient to provision new services

A virtualization layer enables application mobility and a hardware-agnostic dependence, which make it possible for application to not be bonded to underlying computing infrastructure, and additional resources to be provisioned on demand with the growth of the business. Virtualization allows for an underutilized physical server to be partitioned into several virtual servers (server partition) to improve utilization. Multiple physical servers can be provisioned as one virtual server with more processing power (grid computing).

Virtualization is often integrated with automated infrastructure management software (Like OpsWare, or many others) to provide the following benefits:

- Improve IT resource utilization and ROI by reducing idling computer power

- Aggregate hardware and software to reduce TCO by eliminate overlapping and underutilized resources

- Improve business agility through quicker time-to-market for new service and capacity due to more efficient resource provisioning (dynamically performed by automated management software)

- Improve operational efficiency due to simplified, automated management for server and application provisioning, change management

- Improve IT service due to IT staff being able to focus on value-added business processes while complicated infrastructure administration is managed by automated software

- Improved SLA due to reduced frequency and downtime for applications with the advantage of data and application mobility in the virtualized environment

- Provide better cost-effective high availability and disaster recoverability with dynamic resource allocation and application mobility due to eliminating dedicated stand-by system for fail-over

- Facilitate IT audit for regulatory compliance due to centralized management system for change management as well as policy-based automated provisioning

The competitive advantage for enterprises is built with dollars spent on business services and applications to efficiently and effectively satisfy customer needs. With a fixed amount of IT budget, any technologies and best practices which can reduce cost on infrastructure operation and maintenance will leave more dollars for business services and applications.

Aggregation and consolidation on standardized infrastructure through server virtualization and automation will reduce hardware and maintenance cost as well as operational cost, hence reduces TCO. Meanwhile, virtualization and automation improves business agility in response to market changes, quicker time-to-market, as well as enhanced application availability and recoverability, hence an improvement in ROI. This helps the business gain competitive advantage.

For customers, the following are excellent questions to ask when looking for a virtualization solution:

Service Level Management

- What & how many applications are being used today?

- Do you have an inventory for those applications?

- What are the interdependencies between applications?

- Do you have defined SLA for your applications?

- How do you measure SLA for those applications?

- How & when are those applications used?

- Does the usage have a particular pattern?

- Does user experience performance degrade during peak usage?

Capacity Management

Service capacity:

- How do you monitor the usage of those applications?

- Do you measure the performance of those application?

- How does application usage peak impact your network?

- Do you have scarcely used applications that tie up dedicated server resource?

Resource capacity:

- How do you measure server utilization for applications?

- Are those applications CPU intensive or data intensive?

- Are servers experiencing CPU or memory constrains during peak usage?

- Do you measure software licensing usage?

- Do you have overlapping of software licenses?

- Are you interested in audit of software license usage to eliminate overlapping and thus reduce cost?

- Are you interested in software license consolidation project?

- Are you interested in aggregating servers for scarcely used applications?

- Are you using dedicated servers for develop/test/staging/productions?

- Are you interested in using virtualized servers for application development/testing?

- Are you interested in automated system for repurposing, reclaiming servers for different projects?

- Are you interested in policy based on demand infrastructure that enables automatic provisioning during peak usage and automatic decommission after peak?

Scalability:

- How do you plan to address the scalability request? Scale up or scale out?

Availability Management

- What is the business criticality of those applications?

- In case of failure, how are they recovered? And how long does the recovery take?

Continuity Management

- How do you recover those applications in the event of disaster?

- Are your current disaster recovery backup infrastructure costly but mostly idling?

- What do you think of server and storage virtualization to help improve recoverability?

- Would you like to evaluate and implement cost-effective disaster recovery infrastructure with virtualization technology?

Financial Cost Management

- Do you have a bill/charge-back module for your IT resource utilization?

- Would you like to conduct a proof-of-concept to evaluate the benefits of server virtualization technology on operational efficiency and financial savings?

Compliance

- How do you keep track of change on your server configurations?

- How do you demonstrate compliance to regulatory requirement for those applications?

- Are you interested in a centralized automated system to track compliance for your resources?

Now lets look at the competitive vendor space:

Out of these vendors, VMware has proven itself to be the reliable, and most importantly, selected by customers. Strategically, VMware has done excellent moves such as releasing the VMWare server free of charge to allow customers try out the technology. However, to really gain a benefit the ESX line provides the full horsepower of what VMware can offer. I have seen environments that run 2 high end 4U Dell systems that are partitioned with 4 Linux Operating systems each, and each server has a 4 port NIC interface. Each OS has a dedicated NIC. This allowed for load balancing of a website with 1 million+ visitors/day on 2 optimized systems - as opposed to 8 physical machines.

John Premus, CTO of Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation gave a public presentation on how VMware helped his large environment. According to the presentation: 309 servers have been consolidated in the US and more in Europe & Asia.

The summary of his message:

Reduce IT COST:

Reduce Server numbers by 82%

Reduce server rates to 17 to 6

Provide 3 year TCO calculated to be in Millions

GOALS:

Increase utilization (CPU, Memory)

Quarantine Legacy Apps

Improve Service Delivery

Improve Business Continuity

Given that IT infrastructure continue to get larger and applications become more complex, and with the information provided here (and research firms like Gartner have plenty of their own) I think this is a worthwhile investment.

Fingad.com

AT&T - Alright!

AT&T Inc (NYSE:T)

Does iPhone ring a bell??? Buy the stock.

VmWare IPO - Great long term investment