Mike Sapien, principal analyst with Ovum, will address these very issues in a complimentary webinar on Tuesday, October 5, 2010. Sapien and his cohorts at Ovum talked with enterprises about their global service needs and requirements and compiled their findings in a white paper titled “Business-Class” Service for the Global Customer, which serves as the foundation of this webinar.

In addition to highlighting some of the key findings from Ovum’s research, Shaun Ledgerwood, Director, Europe Sales and Global Convergence Support, Sprint, will join Sapien to discuss how all global enterprises can receive the same level of support and account management as the top-tier global companies.

Martin Cooper, Global Network Services Manager with Mentor Graphics, will also be part of the webinar. Cooper will share how his company has been able to streamline its global telecom operations, which support offices in multiple countries, and generate greater value from both their network and their service provider.

If you work for a global enterprise you won’t want to miss this discussion. Register now to reserve your space.

In this industry, we’ve been drawing clouds on whiteboards ever since there were whiteboards to draw them on. The cloud represented this amorphous thing at the center of all networks. We all understood that there was stuff hiding behind the cloud, and we didn’t need to know the details. This makes me wonder who was the first person to draw a cloud to hide the complexity they didn’t want to explain?

So, what’s a well-educated guy supposed to do in trying to define cloud computing? He references that repository of human knowledge and truth, Wikipedia. As of this second (not as you read this, but as I write this which is 1283267777 in Unix Epoch time), the ever-changing battle of free-market knowledge says Cloud Computing is “Internet-based computing, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices on demand, like the electricity grid.” Among the noteworthy opinions was that “details are abstracted from the users, who no longer have need for expertise in, or control over, the technology infrastructure ‘in the cloud’ that supports them.”

In that sense then, the sky is getting cloudier. More and more intelligence is being hidden behind the cloud. This makes sense; after all, every inventor stands on the shoulders of a previous inventor. As such, the cloud analogy is appropriate, but will it become so overused that it will have no meaning? I don’t think so. 

“The Cloud” is another way of saying “a bunch of stuff too complex to explain.” As someone who has occasionally tried in vain to explain future paradigms for communication to an audience of one or several, I realize that for many people, “the cloud” can never be explained. That said, I am confident that for new generations, “the cloud” paradigm will become intrinsic to them, something that doesn’t need to be explained. They will accept it as a given and not question it. 

Metaphorically, clouds are a great way to hide anything you don’t want to explain.  I recently showed my oldest son the very first episode of Mission: Impossible. It started with the lead character putting a record on a phonograph and playing a track at the middle of the record before it self-destructed. I tried to explain to my son how the man knew where the track began on the record, but that brought on more questions, so I eventually “hid it all behind a cloud” and gave up trying to explain the fine detail about how a record has microscopic wiggly lines scratched onto its surface. After all, this is a kid who, when he learned that Toy Story 1 was made 15 years ago, asked “was it in black and white?” Ah, from the mouths of babes.

He looked at five key trends, based on Nemertes’ extensive interviews with enterprise IT leaders. Some of these trends are ones you might expect–but not all. What surprised us was the interest in UC among contact centers. A vast majority of companies surveyed are planning for UC in the contact center, where it can give agents the tools to resolve issues quickly and decrease the need to escalate the calls.

Another surprise was that three out of four companies surveyed have plans for virtual desktops. Lazar pointed out that this means that people planning for UC implementations have to accommodate thin-client interfaces for most business applications, which presents other challenges for voice and video streams.

Not surprisingly, the Nemertes survey found that cost savings (hard ROI, if you will) is still extremely important in the face of flat IT budgets. SIP Trunking, for example, draws huge interest because it can offer immediate cost savings thanks to the elimination of local exchange trunks. Here’s a factoid for you: 96 percent of companies surveyed are either deploying, planning to deploy, or evaluating SIP Trunking.

Mobility is one of the few areas where enterprises expect to increase spending next year. We see this trend as well, particularly with the prospect of incorporating mobility into enterprise UC systems, through solutions such as Sprint Mobile Integration.

Finally, social networking is continuing to make inroads into the enterprise. As we’ve discussed here, incorporating social networking with UC will be a priority for many enterprises, especially those providing goods and services to the mass consumer market. UC offers the tools that enable companies to respond rapidly to what’s being posted about them on Facebook and tweeted about them on Twitter–and that trend is just warming up.

Not only are employees mobile and working in dynamic environments, they are connecting to the corporate network using two or three different devices. The new Mobile Workforce survey reports that nearly 97 percent of mobile employees carry two or more mobile devices, and almost 50 percent carry three or more. Many are personal devices and not corporate-liable or corporate-approved devices. 

IT is challenged to balance the need to protect corporate data and network security, yet allow the mobile workforce to access corporate data and applications from any device at any time. How can IT best manage this environment? Here are five tips:

1 – Virtualize the desktops and applications in the data center and make the interface available from a browser on any device – BlackBerry, iPhone, iPad, Mac, PC, tablet PC, laptop, or netbook.

2 – Require users to access applications inside the virtual desktop. This has two primary benefits. First, the enterprise makes available the most current corporate-approved applications and second, the employee is required to use network storage, helping keep sensitive data within the company.  

3 – Focus on the applications, especially those in the cloud. Anyone can access the cloud with any mobile device connected to the Internet. This device-agnostic combination of cloud computing and ubiquitous access is in itself a powerful enabler for business.  Gartner believes cloud computing and the mobile web are becoming the primary enterprise IT strategy. 

4 – Integrate security at the device level. Require a trusted digital certificate to be installed on any system accessing VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) sessions to ensure that the person accessing the virtual desktop is doing so from a trusted device. This is in addition to the basic security of access controls (i.e., passwords) and the VDI portal URL to access a virtual desktop. 

5 – Plan for the future. Says one systems integrator, “While users can access virtual desktops, it’s not very functional to try to put a desktop on the screen of an iPhone.  However, using the iPad’s Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR technology, users can opt to connect a wireless standard keyboard to tablets. Smartphone manufacturers see the potential of selling devices as thin-client nodes for VDI. In the next few years, many intend to add HDMI ports for connectivity to flat-screen TV monitors; that and a wireless keyboard coupled with 4G network access will turn the smartphone into a road warrior’s dream.”

In a speech I gave at Cisco Live not too long ago, I asked the audience how many people felt comfortable “selling” a project internally that had a payback of six months. As you can imagine, almost all the hands went up. A six-month payback project is an easy sale because it can typically be done without expending any capital (perhaps by leasing capital gear) and it usually pays for itself by the end of the fiscal year – when one would otherwise have to explain being over budget.

In fact, a number of IT professionals tell me their company only invests in IT projects with paybacks of six months or less. This tells me a lot about the challenges an IT professional might face in trying to sell a project with a longer payback. Telling IT people that no projects with paybacks over six months will be funded helps ensure that cash flows are so near-term and so likely to occur as a result of the investment that the investment can be made with far less scrutiny and financial rigor. 

But all a “six-month payback rule” really means is that any project with a longer payback merely needs to go through the more complex company-wide capital budgeting process. And this is indeed a process that can be quite intimidating without a finance degree. Once you start investing money (capital funds) in one fiscal year that is expected to pay itself back with reduced costs (operating funds) in future fiscal years, you enter the realm of needing to ignore “payback” and focusing on discounted cash flows.

Payback is the simplest of ROI calculations. You simply identify the up-front cost to take an action (renting or buying a piece of hardware, for example) divided by the monthly savings that result. For example, a $250 purchase that saves you $50 a month has a payback of five months. The math is very simple. However, when you get into capital budgeting, things can more complicated, often requiring calculations such as “net present value” or NPV.

NPV is a more complicated ROI calculation, because one has to recognize that because of inflation (aka the “time value of money”) the value of a dollar today is worth more than a dollar will be next year or significantly more than a dollar will be 10 years from now. If you need to calculate an NPV, the up-front cost to buying a $5,000 piece of hardware costs you 100 percent of that $5,000 in “today’s dollars.” However, when it comes to calculating the benefits of that investment, those might get paid back over 10 years. So depending on inflation rates, the $1,000 annual savings realized at the end of year one might only be worth 90 percent (or $900) in “today’s dollars” and the $1,000 realized in year 10 might be worth only 38 percent (or $380) in “today’s dollars.”

Beyond the more complex math, the business cases behind these kinds of longer-term investments are even more intimidating because the further out into the future you go, the less accurate your predictions would be about the status quo had you not made the investment. These might be predictions about the future of your company, the economy, or even the various assumptions about the future prices of the current technology. At its most extreme, this can often require estimating the probability distribution of the possible range of a number of expected future values.

Fortunately, when we come back around to most technology investments, it rarely has to be this difficult.

In one of Dan’s examples, he had a potential customer in the Chicago area with 25 sites that could easily save 50 percent off the monthly cost of their old-school PSTN voice trunks by moving to SIP trunking. But the customer had not planned ahead for the capital investment in new PBX and telephony gear, so they could not move ahead with the project regardless of the savings. This shows the importance of planning now for next year’s (or the year after’s) capital budget allocations, to secure the capital for new equipment and take advantage of the savings currently being missed out on because of the failure to invest in SIP trunking technology.

No one expects IT (or anyone else without a finance degree) to build an entire business case on their own. To help the finance folks help you build your case, create a year-by-year table showing the initial capital outlay as a negative number in “Year 0″ at 100 percent of its “today’s dollar” value. Then simply show the savings in “Year 1″ as a positive number at 90 percent of its “today’s dollar” value, “Year 2″ at 80 percent, and so on. If your payback is five years or less, this gives you a pretty good approximation of the discounted cash flows or NPV of the project. If the finance guys ask what “discount rate” you used for the “cost of capital” in your calculations, tell them it’s about 10 percent; but then ask them for their help to further flesh out the business case in line with how your company does capital budgeting requests. 

Any strategic investment in technology is going to require capital, and the earlier you get your project into the capital budgeting process of your company, the more likely you are to secure the funds for the needed investment six to 18 months down the road. It might seem intimidating because you have to compete against other capital projects, but the great thing about IT investments is that they touch every aspect of your business. If you can also articulate the soft benefits of your project to all the other groups that want money, you might actually get them to start supporting your project as well.

What are the primary options for the enterprise?

First, consider the type of cloud service:  IaaS, SaaS, PaaS

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is the most fundamental, providing the basic infrastructure that applications require: servers, storage, and networking. Rather than incurring the cost of hardware, provisioning, and maintenance, companies can rent what they need from a cloud provider, in a pay-for-use model. Amazon is one of the leading IaaS providers. But Yankee Group notes that while enterprises want to make their IT infrastructure like Amazon’s or even Google’s, they don’t necessarily want to use either vendor.  

Software as a Service (SaaS) is the most prevalent cloud computing model, allowing companies to access key applications over the Internet from an external provider, rather than deploying and managing the applications in-house. Salesforce.com is one of the most well-known such applications. Enterprises benefit from SaaS cost savings by no longer needing to acquire, install, manage and upgrade the software internally. The primary limitation, however, is that an enterprise may not be able to fully customize the application. 

Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a model where the vendor provides the infrastructure needed to build and run applications over the Internet, in the form of both open (.Net, Java) and custom (salesforce.com platform) applications. This model is also subscription-based, and allows enterprises to build powerful applications and deploy them easily to users around the globe.  

 Second, consider the type of cloud implementation: Public, Private, Hybrid

Private clouds are hosted using in-house resources, so companies can maintain control over the network, maintenance, and security of the cloud. This option may be ideal for companies handling sensitive data and customer information. Public clouds, on the other hand, are provided by third parties. These clouds are more elastic, freeing the enterprise from the concern of utilization.   

Ecommercetimes.com highlights the hybrid approach, which “allows an organization to split its workload, for example, putting Web content in a public cloud, but respecting compliance concerns by keeping the payment system for the Web service in its own private infrastructure.” Also, when resources are in high demand, hybrid environments allow for cloud bursting, in which workloads are moved from a private cloud to a public cloud. 

Cloud computing is an enabling technology that seems more than ready to serve the varied needs of enterprises. It requires only some thoughtful consideration to find the optimal combination.

Catalyst

In reading August 12th’s UC Communications News article on mobility and UC, I was struck by how some architectures are better suited to certain types of calling patterns (vs. others).  The article begins by discussing a business whose FMC functionality depends on employees to update their presence status and preferred connectivity profile on an ongoing basis. The article then goes on to provide several examples of recent improvements in FMC solutions like the Blackberry MVS and Agito’s Roam Anywhere UC client to use GPS triangulation to improve automating location-based rules.

Examining Pros and Cons

There’s no question that these enhancements provide for an improved customer experience.  But they still pose significant limitations because they treat mobile devices like dumb phones, in which the intelligence, like presence and location (coupled with routing), is derived from the customer’s specialized server or router.  Remember, we are talking about mobility—a capability that inherently is unassociated with, and unconstrained from, premises-based architectures.  Let’s look at some of the limitations such assumptions impose:

Special equipment. Both systems obviously require that customers purchase special gear (like the Blackberry MVS server or Agito Mobility Router), so they could have problems being cost effective in circumstances in which business customers want to support a minority of employees. The same problem exists for smaller companies.

Weak signals. Both will encounter real-world limitations like weak cellular signals or lack of WiFi availability.

Device limitations.  Both limit the types of handsets one can use (compared to RIM, Agito supports a wider universe of smartphones). 

Routing inflexibility.  Both require that users provide call routing instructions in advance—they aren’t extremely flexible in allowing users to modify routing instructions in real time.

Lack of strong business continuity.  Both won’t know about incoming landline calls that can’t terminate to the PBX if the PBX or the carrier access lines aren’t working properly.  The FMC server can be working fine, as can mobile devices.  But the FMC server can’t relay call routing instructions if it is unaware of the existence of an incoming call.

But on the plus side, since these are premises-based solutions, they are carrier agnostic (although all require 3G services and smartphones).

Sprint SMI Benefits

I’m familiar with Sprint’s Mobile Integration service (SMI).  Compared to premises based solutions like the two above, its strengths include:

SaaS-based model.  Companies decide how many employees they want to equip, and they pay for this as a monthly service.  SMI requires a minimum of only 50 subscribers.  This price model can make FMC more affordable for smaller companies, or for companies that want to support a relatively small group of employees.

No applications-specific premises equipment.  Sprint uses network-centric intelligence (driven by IMS) to track presence information and coordinate call handling with SMI/SIP Trunk certified gear for every subscribed phone.

Wider device choice.  SMI doesn’t require smartphones (and associated 3G services).  Since the signaling intelligence is shared between the network and customer premises, feature phones work just fine.

Wider equipment choice.  Sprint has certified some popular makes and models of IP PBX for use with SMI and SIP Trunks.  But SMI doesn’t require an IP PBX.  Thus, other types of customer premises equipment, like some IAD, gateway and SBC makes/models have also been certified.  This allows customers with TDM PBXs to enjoy the benefits of SMI today.  The certification process is ongoing—depending on the functionality of the CPE, it can take advantage of some advanced SMI features (see Business Continuity discussion below).

Business Continuity.  SMI uses SIP Trunks to communicate readiness status, call control functions, etc. between the SMI-compatible customer premises equipment and the IMS feature server.  Customers have the option of using a SMI feature to automatically route incoming calls to the mobile device.  This is especially useful in the event the SMI-compatible customer equipment or the SIP Trunk is not functioning properly.

Sprint SMI Requirements:

Customer use of Sprint’s SIP Trunk service and SIP/SMI-compatible CPE. TDM or PRI connections won’t cut it.  Most companies that are knowledgeable about UC recognize the value of SIP in supporting collaboration on a multi-site or even multi-enterprise basis, and are in the process of migrating to SIP.  Moving to SIP is a question of “when”, not “if”.  Features like SMI provide customers with another reason to move now.

Customer use of Sprint MPLS.  One MPLS port is required at the site where the SIP/SMI-capable CPE is housed.  Deploying Sprint’s MPLS service isn’t required companywide.  Many MPLS customers prefer to use two providers, so those that aren’t using Sprint now have another reason to consider Sprint – SMI.
Customer use of Sprint cellular services. Two points:

• It’s true that SMI only needs 2G service, but it must be available.  If the signal is weak, SMI suffers from the same limitations as the premises-based solutions discussed above.

• Since 3G can be used to route important signaling information, in theory customers could employ a multi-carrier architecture.  I’m not aware of anyone who has.  Thus realistically, SMI-equipped employees would be using Sprint.

Recommendations: Weigh Each Solution’s Functionality vs. Pros and Cons

In considering FMC solutions, customers should become familiar with all the available alternatives, and weigh pros and cons accordingly.  Those who expect to find a perfect solution, without compromise, will be waiting a long time.  Companies who see great values in deploying FMC in the near to mid-term can determine which alternatives provide the most acceptable trade-offs by (1) identifying which employees will use FMC, and (2) understanding the circumstances under which they will be using these features.  By all means, do your homework, because you’ll likely be pleasantly surprised by the functionality you can deploy to boost employee and business productivity today.

-Lisa Pierce is Founder and President of Strategic Networks Group and an expert on emerging business-class network services, including unified communications, VoIP, FMC, MPLS, Ethernet, and 4G. She was formerly Vice President of Telecommunications Research at Forrester Research.

How can the enterprise capitalize on all this captured data and knowledge within its organization? The August 2010 McKinsey Quarterly Report offers advice: 

1 – Rethink how people are organized
Employees are a company’s strongest assets. Traditionally, employees are organized around business units (finance, IT, marketing, etc.) What if employees were instead organized around critical tasks? Dow Chemical, an example in the report, set up its own social network to help managers identify the talent they needed to execute projects across different business units and functions. To broaden the talent pool, Dow even extended the network to include former employees, such as retirees. Furthermore, companies are leveraging web technologies and unified communications solutions to bring people together across organizational boundaries. 

In this example, the organization was able to quickly identify and access the best talent and resources through the network. Not only that, but these resources could collaborate to innovate and solve problems, making the network and its people a true competitive advantage. 

2 - Understand how data/information flows within your organization
For organizations to take advantage of intellectual capital and for technology to be effective, organizations need to understand how knowledge sharing and transfer take place.  First, an organization must identify the type of information needed. With so much data, you want to pay attention to the useful and relevant data. Then enterprises can begin by mapping informational pathways through which information travels, observe how employees interact, and identify wasteful bottlenecks. 

3 – Pay-as-you-go for applications that make intelligent use of data
There is no shortage of web applications, software, and other resources that can help an organization capture, organize, and make sense of its data. What is new is paying for services rather than hard physical assets that require large capital investments. These service offerings are the new assets that allow companies to purchase units of service and account for them as a variable cost. The real benefit is that businesses pay only for what they use. This becomes especially relevant for businesses with seasonal spikes and those wanting access to the latest technology and upgrades, for example. 

Cloud computing best represents this new model, as companies are now accessing computer resources provided through networks. 

4 – Leverage IT as a tool to reduce environmental impact
Interestingly, the environmental footprint of all this data is growing. McKinsey says electricity produced to power the world’s data centers is generating greenhouse gases on the scale of countries such as Argentina or the Netherlands. However, McKinsey research also shows that the use of IT in areas such as smart power grids, efficient buildings, and better logistics planning could eliminate five times as many carbon emissions as the IT industry produces. The demand for IT capacity and services will continue to explode; enterprises should be looking for IT-enabled solutions in other areas of the company to offset the environmental impact of the ever-increasing demand for data. Also, by harnessing the power of cloud computing, enterprises lessen their environmental footprint by using only what they need.

5 – Use acquired data for a new revenue stream
As data is captured within an organization and externally mined, enterprises should consider if and how a new source of revenue may be generated. McKinsey encourages businesses to ask themselves these questions, to assess a new opportunity:

• “Who might find this information valuable?” Can the company sell information related to consumer behavior or preferences? 
• “What would happen if we provided our product or service free of charge?” If a company increased its online customers or membership significantly, a new revenue stream may come from advertisers or other companies who want access to this community of customers. 

By capitalizing on all this captured data, enterprises can quickly and smartly invent new ways of doing business and create new market opportunities. The bottom line is that data can be a competitive advantage and a profit creator.

It was almost four years ago that Sprint IT was going through this same budgeting exercise and like most IT organizations we face similar challenges - how to do more with less, especially in these tough times. Most IT departments receive project funding for just a few reasons: 1) something is broken 2) to resolve an identified security risk or 3) to develop a business case with a compelling ROI that will ultimately drive costs out of the annual OPEX budget.
 
In 2006, Sprint IT thought the answer was a simple VoIP replacement strategy to eliminate an aging TDM PBX infrastructure that consisted of 490 decentralized switches scattered across the United States. After 3 failed attempts at preparing a business case that yielded an ROI of well over five years, we realized we needed to develop a different strategy altogether.

The first thing we looked at was a way to eliminate the most expensive part of our business case, which were the VoIP telephone handsets themselves. This made up nearly 70 percent of the capital request. We solved the challenge by enabling our user’s personal computers with soft VoIP clients and inexpensive USB headsets. This reduced our average user cost by nearly $300.

Second, we reviewed our annual LEC PRI TDM expenses. In Sprint’s case the LEC costs to support 490 PBX’s was nearly $9 million annually. To solve this challenge we deployed a centralized Unified Communications solution along with Session Initiated Protocol (SIP) trunking that allowed us to disconnect the legacy TDM circuits. We also leveraged Sprint’s GMPLS data network to deliver our enterprise voice calls to our users. When the UC conversion project is complete in 2011, Sprint will realize a projected annual savings of $6.7 million. To date we’ve already achieved $2 million dollars in annualized savings.

Third, we looked at the ongoing costs of supporting the software and hardware of the existing PBXs. Traditionally we would spend anywhere from $2 -5 million semi-annually for upgrades. This doesn’t include the man power or travel expenses necessary to schedule and perform the physical upgrades.

Next we examined our costs to perform moves, adds and changes. In 2007 Sprint IT performed nearly 8000 internal move requests. On average you can plan on a simple move taking as little as 15 minutes if it can be done in software or up to as much as an hour if a technician has to physically go to the IDF closet and move cross-connects.

Finally, and maybe most importantly, we looked beyond traditional PBX voice communications and took into account other collaboration modalities such as audio/video/web conferencing. This is where we found the quickest ROI opportunities and where many enterprises can find the necessary ammunition to support their UC business case. At Sprint we average more than 5 million minutes a week in audio conferencing alone. By leveraging the internal audio conferencing bridge that was included in our UC solution, Sprint IT was able to eliminate over $5 million annually from the OPEX budget. 
 
Since our UC business case was approved nearly two years ago, we’ve realized two additional benefits not included in our ROI projections.

1) In an unrelated effort Sprint’s Real Estate team performed work space utilization studies. They learned that much of the cubicle and office space in our portfolio was empty 50-60 percent of the time. Why? Over the years our work force has become more mobile, they are spending more time in the field with our customers, working remotely, participating in teaming sessions. In short, they are working in other places than their assigned office locations. Unified Communications has become an enabler of Sprint’s real estate team’s efforts to eliminate nearly $20 million in office space across the United States.

2) “Green” dollar savings - The costs to power and cool the legacy PBX infrastructure is estimated at $700K annually. To date we’ve achieved approximately $200K in annualized savings.

All told Sprint forecasted nearly $13 million in annualized savings directly attributed to Unified Communications, but from lessons learned since the start of the UC deployment, additional saving can be found a variety of areas.

In days of old, if you wanted something from the king, you first waited in queue to present your request at Court. In a similar manner, with early smartphones, if you wanted to quickly turn off the ringer, you’d have to wait in queue for the OS to grant you permission to use the mute button — or you had to do what I did and quickly rip the battery out. The problem with older operating systems is that the OS always gave priority to the last task you gave it, even if it was no longer important to you. Making the user wait in queue for what he or she wants to do right now is no longer acceptable. In any new device operating system, the user must now be king.

Brad’s commentary highlighted what a crowded field the Torch is moving into, but what that indicates is the booming popularity of that user interface. The instantly responsive touchscreen is prima facie proof that users are demanding instant and immediate control from their mobile devices. Touchscreen gestures such as “flicking” wouldn’t work if the touchscreen wasn’t given the right priority in an operating system. The most recent command of the user must take priority, even if that directly contradicts a command given by that same user one second earlier. If I started a task but suddenly need to change tasks that change must happen NOW.

The new breed of smartphones are wonderful. They are the electronic equivalent of Swiss Army knives, able to record high-definition video and play games with people around the world. I have a lot of programs installed on my phone and I fully expect those programs to work in the background when the phone is in my holster or on my charging stand. But when I flick a touchscreen, I expect an immediate response, because what I need to do now is more important than what I told the phone to do two seconds ago or what some program I installed two months ago wants to do.

The new era of operating systems in which the user is king is more obvious on touchscreen phones than any other type. When the user wants to do something now, the operating system must be able to immediately set aside its former priorities and focus on the task at hand: answering a phone call, muting the phone, recording a new video, taking a picture, or turning off the ringer in church. As you might have guessed, this is kind of a personal issue for me (I now remove the battery before I walk into church). I just wish these modern operating systems wouldn’t take so long to boot after I put the battery back in.