Podcasts

Hybrid Cloud Strategy In The Developing Enterprise World

The evolution of connectivity has shown that hybrid cloud solutions are a cornerstone of the modern enterprise. While many organizations want to leverage the scalability of cloud, they also have requirements to maintain on-prem for security or latency reasons. Strongbow’s Hybrid Cloud practice Director, Alex Petrov, discusses some of the new market options that are on offer to customers, as well as the risks and rewards of various strategies.

5G Trends – Stagnant or Coming Soon?

In our recent company meeting, Strongbow’s own Barry Platzman presented some updates on a hot topic in recent years – 5G. This episode focuses on some questions on future trends and when/what we can expect from this buzz worthy technology in the future. Hank King (Strongbow’s Director of Business Development) and Barry discuss…

ONUG Review – Spring 2022

Some of our team members attended the Spring edition of ONUG (Open Network User Group) and we even had a chance to moderate some of the discussions on deck. Strongbow’s Barry Platzman and Alex Petrov got a front row seat and debrief on the trends emerging out of the conference for this year.

Women’s History Month – Female Leaders in IT Infrastructure

As we bring Women’s History Month to a close, we thought it pertinent to bring together two prominent members of our Strongbow team. Our Founder Cathy Horst-Forsyth discusses her career with Managing Consultant Peggy Tierney, along with some of the changing trends in IT Infrastructure leadership.

MPLS vs. Internet Pricing – A Decoupling

Traditionally the market had seen parity in the pricing between MPLS and internet pricing. But, as transformation and modernization is taking hold of a lot of large enterprises (SDWAN etc) this has meant that traffic tends to be more localized, creating a supply and demand based decoupling of the two services. Supplier diversity means that a large swatch of Tier 2 ISPs are delivering viable alternatives to the traditional big guys; Chris Woodward and Barry Platzman of our Engagement Management team discuss.

3rd Party MSP’s – Starting their own Party?

Our CEO Cathy Horst-Forsyth discusses historical trends of MSPs with Peggy Tierney, a managing consultant at Strongbow. Over time the market has evolved based on various factors, ranging from basic economies of scale to the leveraging of human capital resources. As this has gone on, the conversation may pivot to how MSP’s can best serve their clients in the long run.

Farewell to Phil – Our First Retiree

Although it is always hard when a team member decides to move to greener pastures, we feel it is appropriate to celebrate the career of our dear friend and colleague Phil Perinelli, who recently announced that he is embarking on his retirement. As an early member of our organization, Phil brought many years of experience to not only client work, but also in mentoring the next generation of team members – he shares some of his learnings in this episode, along with a few pearls of wisdom for the team left behind.

The 360 Degree Assessment

From commercial/financial to technical/operational, IT budgets are increasing at the highest rates in a decade. While it is always nice to find extra budget, executives need to understand where their dollars should be invested after this adjustment to the “new normal”. Strongbow’s managing directors Barry Platzman and Chris Woodward discuss the process of spend analysis in the wake of COVID required pivots.

How Cloud Adoption Has Affected Strategy

One common prediction for the year of 2021 and the Infrastructure/IT space was that we would see an increased adoption rate in the cloud space for large enterprises. Our team members Barry and Alex offer their own takes on not only the financial implications of a migration to cloud or hybrid, but also the technical constraints and political red tape involved with large scale companies.

Ethernet Economics

Having previously discussed the topic of TDM and its issues with speed, lack of efficiency and cost associated with maintaining an outdated technology, our team members Barry and Chris touch on ethernet and the benefits that our customers enjoy. While many large enterprises are focused on the problem of sitting on a large bundle of TDM, there are lots of reasons to get excited about the potential for transition and continued usage.

Cloud Economics and Developing Issues

With cloud on the rise; new SKUs, services and billing are taking up space in enterprise bottom lines. This yields some common issues to do with usage and pricing which become more and more difficult to standardize. Mass adoption of the innovative service has left gaps for providers to take advantage – Barry and Alex discuss.

The Broken Promises of Benchmarking

In this episode our CEO, Cathy Horst-Forsyth speaks about the motivation for founding Strongbow Consulting Group; some of the learnings and key takeaways from being a founder and a topic of particular importance in the IT infrastructure consulting realm – benchmarking.

Where is the “Unified” in UC?

In this edition, our team members Chris and Barry discuss the mass proliferation of Unified Communications. From Zoom to Teams, Slack to Webex, we have seen that enterprises are dependent on multiple platforms to continue operating a business as usual organization – we take a look at the trends evolving and some of the winners and losers of this shifting market.

ONUG Spring 2021 Review

Strongbow’s Barry Platzman and Alex Petrov recap the ONUG Spring 2021 Conference, its key themes, and its focus on enterprises’ transition to the cloud.

Cops & Robbers: Is Your Enterprise’s Copper Wiring Stealing Profits?

TDM (time division multiplexing) is a widespread method of copper wiring, used for access to data services. On the voice side much of the legacy technology has evolved, and while this is true on the data side as well, many large scale enterprises are finally arriving at the point of required transition and modernization. In this episode, we discuss the obstacles to TDM transformation, why they persist and what can be done about it.

Managing Cloud Exposure

In this second episode of our 2 part Cloud Series, we will be discussing how to managed large scale enterprise exposure to the cloud in a rapidly evolving environment. Where the use case may become clearer and clearer, how do you make sure that the finances are being given enough attention?

Cloud First vs. Cloud Fit

The race to the Cloud is becoming more real for medium-large enterprises; ensuring it’s done correctly should be prioritized over speed.