Strategies and Trends for Information Technology Leaders
It’s prediction time again. Looking back on last year’s prediction column, I had one of my best years (as far as predictions go anyway) yet. Last year I forecast a continuingly troubled economy, slow growth for IT spending and a mostly jobless recovery. According to Gartner, enterprise IT spending grew by only 2.9 percent in…
Once you have decided to outsource your infrastructure support and have done your due diligence selecting a service provider, it is time to implement the plan. There are several steps that you will go through with your vendor to ensure that you get what you expected when you signed the outsourcing contract. 1. Establish and implement…
Cutting IT budgets may not be easy, but when you know where to slice, the savings can add up. Here are some tips from six experts on how it can be done: Do an inventory. Just maybe the biggest IT savings come from “cleaning out the closet,” says Peter S. Greis, principal, IT Planning &…
Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, speaking at PDC 2008 LOS ANGELES – The introduction of Windows Azure Monday at the Professional Developer’s Conference seems to put Microsoft on a collision course with every app hosting vendor on the market, in particular Salesforce.com. Doug Hauger, general manager of the cloud infrastructure services unit at Microsoft…
Staples, the world’s biggest office products supplier, is jumping into the IT sourcing market offering up security, on-site tech and data back-up services for small-to medium-sized (SMB) businesses. The move puts the $27 billion retailer shoulder to shoulderwith tech titans EMC (NYSE: EMC), HP and IBM that are battling to increase SMB market share given…
To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of Windows Vista’s demise have been exaggerated. Somewhat, at any rate. Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. recently released a report that indicated Vista still isn’t ringing many bells with major IT shops. “A year of overwhelmingly bad publicity, coupled with opportunities for continued XP ‘downgrades’ or potentially skipping over Vista…
The trend is social networking, and conventional wisdom says that the enterprise needs to figure out how to take advantage of it—and quick. The trouble is the hype surrounding social networking focuses only on the upside while ignoring some pretty obvious risks. Yes, social networking opens up new marketing opportunities; it provides more immediate customer…
Enterprise CIOs typically have to make a platform decision about whether they will run enterprise applications on JavaEE or .NET 2.0. It’s a decision that can also limit the development options available to developers. Software vendor Mainsoft has been offering an open source Mono-based .NET solution called Visual MainWin, which helped solve the issue for…
NEW YORK — Sizing the Linux market ecosystem is no easy task. Downloads of Linux operating systems and applications are not an accurate measure. Analyst firm IDC, however, has a handle on the market and its size, and it’s large. At the Linuxworld Open Solutions Summit, which kicked off Wednesday in New York, IDC analysts…
I remember the reactions I would get from IT managers in the early days of the Internet. Two memorable statements come to mind; one from a VP. When I showed him my business card with an email address on it and predicted that he would soon have one too, he said “I will never need…