Jim Burton of UCStrategies.com, the leading consulting firm for Unified Communications, is having an impressive gathering of industry execs the here on the first night of VoiceCon San Francisco 2008. Fellow bloggers Alex Lewis, Blair Pleasant, and I are covering the wine tasting event as part of our normal dedicated commitment to blogging

What’s amazing is the quality of executives attending Jim’s event. We are talking shop with senior execs from IBM, Microsoft, Alcatel-Lucent, Nortel, Cisco, and others. What’s striking is that deals are getting done. I’m writing this now and overhearing conversations of bus dev deals being discussed. ROI…

Gloomy news in a down economy abound. Signs are everywhere in many sectors of the technology spectrum.

The Social Networking site Linkedin is laying off 10% of its workers. Dell has asked personnel to voluntarily take unpaid leave. Apple is supposedly scaling back its Iphone production. John Furrier earlier reported on Cisco’s earnings problems.   Many mid-size companies have discovered placing their infrastructures in managed hosting environments has given them cost advantages.   Other companies are pre-emptively behind-the-scenes cutting back, canceling planned expenses for the quarter, scaling back hiring goals, postponing projects, etc.

Plenty of the problems are based on uncertainty and faith in the economy in…

The Measurement Factory, experts in performance testing and protocol compliance, today announced results from the fourth-annual survey of domain name servers on the public Internet.

Top-line results indicate that despite the fact that most organizations are running recent versions of BIND and no longer using Microsoft DNS Servers for their external DNS servers, many organizations have not taken the necessary precautions to limit access to recursion or secure zone transfers. In addition, many still have not upgraded to the latest DNS software to protect against the…

Excerpted from SYS-CON Media Report by Krishnan Subramanian

The technology blueprint of President-Elect Barack Obama, if implemented as promised, bodes well for the future of cloud computing. His proposals include:

Protecting the openness of the Internet: In other words, supporting net neutrality. This is crucial for innovation in the field of cloud computing and it is also very important for ensuring vendor diversity. In the absence of net neutrality, big vendors can easily crush smaller players and establish monopoly in the cloud computing marketplace including the SaaS marketplace.

Safeguarding our right to privacy: One of the biggest concerns for consumers and businesses when…

Excerpted from Zeropaid Report

From BitTorrent throttling to net neutrality, it’s important to see where our President-Elect stands so that we know what to expect in the future.

“Because most Americans only have a choice of only one or two broadband carriers, carriers are tempted to impose a toll charge on content and services, discriminating against websites that are unwilling to pay for equal treatment,” read his position as initially outlined in Barack Obama on Technology and Innovation.

“Barack Obama supports the basic principle that network providers should not be allowed to charge fees to privilege the content or applications of some websites and…

Excerpted from Ars Technica Report by Nate Anderson

Comcast engineers have just released the first-ever real-world data on P4P technology - and it appears to be a massive success. While only a trial, the results show that P4P’s iTracker technology can increase P2P download speeds by 80% on ISP networks without materially increasing the network load.

P4P, which is being designed under the aegis of the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA), is meant to “localize” peer-to-peer (P2P) transfers. P2P users generally grab data from all around the world, putting tremendous cost and bandwidth pressure on ISP peering and transit links with other networks.

P4P uses an…

Paul Otellini keynote at Day 2 of Web 2.0. Paul gives a speech to web 2.0 crowd while the Intel stock is crashing or should I say all stocks are crashing. What does this mean for future innovation from Intel?

Video below…

I am waiting for the enterprise keynote on Cloud The Apps.

Silicon Alley Insider has the details from the Cisco earnings call. Thanks Dan Frommer.

Cisco (CSCO) was the first company to sound the alarms about the recession. So what do they have to say now?

Things aren’t getting better, and CEO John Chambers says October was especially terrible — a 9% year-over-year drop in orders.

Cisco expects Q2 revenues to shrink 5% to 10% year-over-year. It’s also aiming for $1 billion in cost savings via a six-part plan that includes a hiring “pause,” reduced travel, events, prototyping, etc.

Specifically, Cisco’s guidance suggests Q2 sales of $8.85 billion to $9.34 billion, way below analysts’ expectations of…

Google announced on the Google blog this morning that they’re dropping the deal with Yahoo. Instead of standing up to government antitrust scrutiny, they’ve chosen to simply walk away. Personally I think they’ll wait for a “friendlier” government and try again next year; after all they’ve been calling Obama “the Google president” internally for months. However, let’s pretend for a second that doesn’t happen. Google has really left yahoo at the altar for good…

Where does this really leave yahoo? Yahoo must have been counting on this $800 million in revenue to help it float while three feet of sunshine himself,…