Inside the Briefcase
By Joe McKendrick, Author and Independent ResearcherFor the past two decades, there has been an informal segregation of duties seen in the BI and analytics world, with three primary classes of users. Read More >>>
By Joe McKendrick, Author and Independent ResearcherIn recent times, there has been no end to the chatter about the emerging “social business.” Going social means all kinds of great things, they say – from achieving greater collaboration between employees internally to more interaction with customers externally. Read More >>>
By Joe McKendrick, Author and Independent ResearcherIf you’ve been to any IT conference in the past two years, or picked up any analyst report, or read any trade journal, you can be forgiven for thinking that the entire world is being swept clean of traditional PCs by mobile devices. Read More >>>
By Joe McKendrick, Author and Independent ResearcherBig Data is now the term du jour, thrown about at conferences with wild abandon, often sneered at, but more often that not greeted with a mix of nervousness and fascination. Read More >>>
By David A. Kelly, Upside ResearchAs we gear up for what promises to be a busy year around cloud computing, I thought it would be helpful to take a look at a cloud-related technology that is still emerging, but shows tremendous potential for making its mark on the enterprise. The technology is known as SDN – software-defined networking. SDN is an approach for building networks that separates and abstracts elements to allow for greater flexibility and agility. Read More >>>
By David A. Kelly, Upside ResearchIn the first of two columns this month that take a closer look at what’s new in the cloud computing space for the enterprise, I thought it useful to take a look at a company that is trying to set the bar for how to fully bring ERP into the future. Read More >>>
By David A. Kelly, Upside ResearchIt’s that time of year again, when the entire technology community is abuzz with predictions for the coming year. What will change dramatically in enterprise computing? What will be the hot-button items? I feel compelled to add my hat to the ring, and make the assertion that 2013 is going to be the year of the Cloud. Here are a few ways I see the Cloud impacting enterprise computing. Read More >>>
By David A. Kelly, Upside ResearchIt’s been a busy year for Social Business, and as 2012 draws to a close, it is worth another look at how this enabling technology is becoming more firmly implanted in the enterprise IT fabric. Read More…
By David A. Kelly, Upside ResearchThere is no doubt that the enterprise computing landscape has been forever altered with the arrival of mobile devices. The ubiquity of mobile devices is startling, with Gartner Group reporting that 75% of companies allow employees to use personal devices at work, and that number is predicted to rise to 90% by 2014, less than two years away. Read More >>>
By David A. Kelly, Upside ResearchYou’ve heard it before: Location, location, location. It matters for real estate and for weddings. The latest thought to ponder is whether the cloud is becoming the stylish location du jour for enterprise software mergers? We are about to test the theory with the most recently announced blockbuster merger between JDA Software and Red Prairie. Read More…
By David A. Kelly, Upside ResearchThere is no doubt that mobile has arrived in the enterprise in a big way. Beyond issues around mobile governance in the enterprise (managing the growing cadre of employees who have company-issued smart phones), mobile devices are fast becoming a replacement for significant portions of traditional application development time inside enterprise IT. Read More
By David A. Kelly, Upside ResearchCloud maturity is only in its infancy, according to a recent study by the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and ISACA. Released last month, the study, 2012 Cloud Computing Market Maturity Study Results, presents a helpful view into where cloud services lie on the maturity scale, and the positives and negatives of its current position. Read More >>>
By David A. Kelly, Upside ResearchThe landscape for data backup and storage is shifting dramatically, thanks to some of the recent developments on the data and technology front. It used to be that most data was structured, or semi-structured, and easily stored in databases, or as the volume grew, data warehouses. Read More >>>
By David A. Kelly, Upside ResearchIn recent posts, I’ve talked about the potential “marriage-made-in-heaven” for cloud and big data, most notably being put forth by Hadoop and its brethren. I’ve also touched a bit on how big data is being used by savvy CIOs to more effectively identify and address security issues within a company. Today, I wanted to spend a little time on the idea of “toxic data” and the impact it can have on the big data explosion. Read More >>>
By David A. Kelly, Upside ResearchIT mobility has taken the enterprise by storm, much in the same fashion as cloud and SOA. While the presence of mobile devices being used in business is not new (who didn’t own a Blackberry through their company 10 years ago?), the meteoric rise of the smart phone as an integral component of all aspects of working is pushing mobility into a completely new stratosphere. Read More >>>
By David A. Kelly, Upside ResearchContinuing on the theme of Big Data, there has been a lot of talk recently about how Big Data can be used by Security experts within an organization for a number of positive outcomes. Just as Big Data promises to provide marketers and sales leaders with troves of valuable information about potential and existing customers, their buying behaviors and preferences, so too, the theory goes, can Big Data provide IT Security Mangers troves of useful information about security events that end users experience. Read More >>>
By David A. Kelly, Upside ResearchA spate of recent cloud outages have raised new concerns about infrastructure vulnerability when it comes to running business-critical services on the cloud. Given the recent push to move Big Data to the cloud (reference last article on Hadoop), we are at an important inflection point regarding the viability of the public cloud and what enterprises should be doing. Read More >>>
By David A. Kelly, Upside Research There is no doubt that Big Data and Cloud Computing are taking the enterprise computing landscape by storm hand-in-hand. Big Data — the ability to effectively capture, manage, and utilize large swaths of different-structure data – has companies with their head in the clouds, as the first enterprise-grade version of a Big Data software platform became available in January. Read More >>
By David A. Kelly, Upside ResearchIn my last blog, I covered some of the recent acquisitions heating up the social marketing space. Major enterprise vendors like SAP, Oracle, and Salesforce.com are on spending sprees to acquire the hottest technologies in the social space as they aim to round out their enterprise offerings with social tools for the workspace. Now, Microsoft is upping the ante considerably with its recent announcement regarding Yammer. Read More…
By David A. Kelly, Upside Research Four recent acquisitions in the social marketing and collaboration space highlight the move by enterprise platform vendors to take a bigger piece of the action. First, SAP announced its $4.3 billion acquisition of Ariba, which provides cloud-based collaborative commerce applications as well as facilitating a B2B e-commerce market. Next, Oracle Corp. announced its plans to buy Vitrue, a provider of tools for running marketing campaigns through social media, for $300 million. Read More…
By David A. Kelly, Upside ResearchIn recent posts, I’ve discussed the various efforts by enterprise software vendors to offer cloud services. Initially they were based on private clouds, either internal for an enterprise or dedicated hosted. But, most recently I discussed HP’s public cloud offering, which takes cloud adoption to a new arena for the enterprise…Read More >>
Recently, HP announced its first public cloud services available as a public beta, and it is creating a stir in the cloud arena. On May 10, 2012, HP released three beta services that are the first of their kind under the company’s Converged Cloud portfolio. Read More…
By David A. Kelly, Upside ResearchThe goal of business intelligence is to support better decision-making in business. The direction of modern healthcare is evidence-based medicine driven by the proper use of data. Clearly, the combination of business intelligence in healthcare would seem to be a match made in heaven. Read More…
By David A. Kelly, Upside ResearchIn an effort to cover cloud computing in a holistic fashion, I’ve been paying attention to what’s out on the blogosphere in addition to the vendor announcements that I’ve covered on the topic. While I did raise (in a previous article) some of the issues that indicated that perhaps cloud computing isn’t a panacea, it is clear that the market for cloud is moving forward at breakneck speed. Read More…
By David A. Kelly, Upside ResearchIBM recently announced new offerings under its SmartCloud Foundation. According to a study published recently by IBM, the number of enterprises who use cloud computing to transform their existing business model will more than double in the next three years. Read More…
By David A. Kelly, Upside ResearchSocial Media within the organization can be two-fold: using social media to reach and interact with customers or using social media technologies inside the four walls to encourage collaboration among employees. Many of the recent posts I’ve made regarding social media have focused on the latter, or how enterprise social media technology is impacting businesses. Today, I’m taking the other view, how social media giant, Facebook, is engaging with businesses to promote new ways for them to interact with their customers. Read More…
By David A. Kelly, Upside ResearchThe last year has been busy for enterprise social media and networking vendors, as they continue their land-grab efforts in the Enterprise Social Networking Land Rush. Here are a few highlights from recent announcements by some of the more popular social networking vendors: Read More…
By David A. Kelly, Upside Research Today’s organizations have plenty of options when it comes to managing business processes, from informal or manual methods to software-based collaboration and workflow solutions. The past decade has seen a rise in every type of business process management solution imaginable: vertically focused, task-focused, cloud-based, adapted to the mobile workforce. Read More…
By David A. Kelly and Heather Ashton, Upside Research With the rise of virtual and private cloud computing environments, response time becomes critical, and all users of applications have heightened expectations for performance levels. Having looked at the application performance management (APM) market from the perspective of tools that help identify performance issues in production applications, we’d now like to turn our attention to applying APM tenants to pre-production applications, specifically in the software testing aspect of application development. Read More…
By David A. Kelly and Heather Ashton, Upside ResearchBusiness intelligence has performed well as a corporate housecleaning agent – reducing the inefficiencies related to manual data entry for report creation and corporate ‘Excel farms’ creating one-off reports to satisfy individual stakeholders. Stories and examples abound counting the ways that automated reporting and analytic dashboards have provided an insight previously not possible across the distributed global enterprise. Read More…
