Futurity Media

Our Expertise

We have written about technology and communications for 20 years

We cover a broad range of technology in our day-to-day work. To give you a flavour of our technology and industry expertise, we have drawn up brief sketches of a few of our key subject areas.

Enterprise IT

There is a new computing model in the ascendance: cloud computing. Delete the desktop and source your processing, storage and software as a service. Sounds great, but is it all hype? We’ve written about this a good deal, and other enterprise IT issues like consolidation of ERP/SAP, CRM etc, security and data loss prevention, so we know what we’re talking about. And our opinion? Well Cloud computing will become the dominant platform but there’s a lot to sort out first such as the Internet, corporate networks, pricing models, quality of services and security.

Mobility

We are all journalists of the mobile age, watching as the industry boomed on the back of standardisation through GSM, the issuing of 3G licenses and widespread rollout of HSPA mobile broadband. With clients like the GSM Association, we’ve got to the bottom of spectrum, Long Term Evolution (LTE), revenue assurance, roaming and the importance of mobile communications in the developing world. Machine-to-machine (M2M) communications excites us most: think of the possibilities of discrete devices talking to each other, mediated by intelligent agents (IA) – some call this the Internet of Things.

Collaboration & social networking

We write about collaboration and social networking, and actually use the stuff. Within Futurity Media, we use hosted Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint for project management, GoToMyPC for remote access and Evernote for collating all those visual and text notes, Wikis for project development, dashboards for measuring PR success and MovableType/TypePad for our blogging clients; we actively use social media like LinkedIn Groups, Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Del.i.cious and Posterous to help our clients to promote their message. Collaboration tools have made us more effective and productive.

Green IT

Green IT and green business is something close to our hearts. We truly believe that reducing the carbon footprint goes hand-in-hand with improved economic performance, especially in these challenging market conditions where revenues are flat yet energy costs continue to rise. We understand the key strategies for reducing IT’s own carbon footprint (data centre consolidation, virtualisation, energy-efficient hardware) and how technology can reduce carbon emission in fleets (using M2M telemetry & tracking), travel (using telepresence and collaboration) and buildings (using building automation, mobile working).

Networks

Underlying all of the great services promised in this technology renaissance is a network, both a physical and metaphorical enabler. We understand networks because we have been writing about them for years: MPLS IP-VPNs, Carrier Ethernet, fibre-to-the-home (FTTH), IPv6, WAN optimisation, DSL, next generation networks (NGN), WiMax, IMS and satellite broadband.

Telephony

We started in the technology business when deregulation heralded a new business model: low cost voice calls, new call centre technology allowed businesses to reduce their reliance on the High Street. It was at the catalyst for the emergence of CRM. At the same time, some bright spark recognised that Internet Protocol (IP) would be the ideal transport mechanism for voice. Over the last decade or so, we’ve written about Voice over IP, IP telephony (IPT) migration strategies, SIP phones, IP contact centres, unified communications and fixed-mobile convergence (FMC).

Telco

In our time, we’ve seen telcos rise up the value chain and become genuine service providers. We understand the core network technologies, the back office functions (billing, OSS, revenue assurance, provisioning) and the services that are delivering revenues right now such as IPTV. Looking to the future, we have written about how the next-generation of telco can be the enabler of the Smart City.