The vision of convergence -- anytime, anywhere communications -- has been the holy grail of the telecom industry for almost 20 years in one form or another. Converged services combine voice, data and video and deliver them across a span of public, private, wired and wireless networks in a way that is seamless and consistent to the end user.  The problem with holy grails is not so much that they're so hard to find, but what we might miss out on while we're looking for them.

Since last year, "Green IT" has tipped over spectacularly in capturing the hearts, minds and maybe even wallets of IT managers and executives everywhere  Therefore, in a true spirit of enquiry, I've started reading "Green to Gold".  This is a 2006 book by Daniel Esty and Andrew Winston which some claim is the bible for businesses caught up in the current green craze.

In this article from Network World, we see an interesting example of how when marketing hype meets physics, physics generally wins until someone clever enough comes along to solve the problem.

During his keynote speech last month at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona John Chambers spoke of a shift Cisco is seeing from personalized communication to social networking.  As Chambers put it, "it's no longer about you, it's about us.".