Inside the BriefcaseBy 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 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…
By David A. Kelly and Heather Ashton, Upside ResearchThings continue to pop in the enterprise sustainability arena. Now, we’re seeing the emergence of enterprise social networking tools for furthering sustainability initiatives. Read More…
By David A. Kelly and Heather Ashton, Upside ResearchIn two recent blogs, we introduced both some of the trailblazers to enterprise social networking as well as enterprise entrants. This final installment of our Enterprise Social Networking Roundup includes some additional enterprise providers that have created some intriguing social networking solutions. Read More…
By David A. Kelly and Heather Ashton, Upside Research A while back, we wrote a blog about the application performance management space, covering the recent acquisition of dynaTrace by Compuware dynaTrace’s technology, branded PurePath, focuses on providing visibility into the user experience, round trip from the end user’s browser through various levels of enterprise middleware, and back to the end user. The goal is to help improve application performance, across the traditional and cloud infrastructures. Read More…
By David A. Kelly and Heather Ashton, Upside ResearchThe march of cloud computing across the enterprise continues, as IBM recently announced a portfolio of private cloud offerings. These offerings have been designed from the ground up for enterprises, and seek to allay some of the concerns that large enterprises have over the security and readiness of the cloud for business-critical computing. Read More…
By David A. Kelly and Heather Ashton, Upside ResearchIn a recent blog, we introduced a few of the trailblazers to enterprise social networking, including Yammer, Socialcast, and Signals. This column covers another early space-shaper, Jive, as well as three of the enterprise entrants, Salesforce.com, Cisco and SAP. Read More…
By David A. Kelly and Heather Ashton, Upside ResearchThe Enterprise Social Networking Market is anything but stationary. It feels very much like the Business Process Management market felt ten years ago, full of energy, new entries, and mergers and acquisitions as the space sorts itself out. Read More…
By David A. Kelly and Heather Ashton, Upside ResearchThe path for an enterprise toward sustainability is a long one, driven by a number of influencers, including regulatory groups, shareholders, and customers. In fact, many industry experts on sustainability believe that regulatory groups and government mandates will be needed to achieve the higher goals for sustainability as set forth by some industry groups. The logic follows that most corporations will not be willing to spend the time and money required to initiate and implement sustainability programs until it becomes a necessity. Read More…
By David A. Kelly and Heather Ashton, Upside ResearchSocial networking is still very much front and center on the enterprise computing radar. While companies continue to search for the best way to incorporate the new collaboration functionality into an already crowded enterprise software environment, software vendors are adding new combinations of technology to their offerings. Recently, computing giant Cisco announced an acquisition that moves it ahead several steps in the race to develop the killer unified communication platform. Read More…
By David A. Kelly and Heather Ashton, Upside Research Much attention has been paid in recent years to sustainability initiatives. We believe there are some important distinctions to make within the sustainability category, and some specific decision points that can impact an enterprise sustainability project. Here are a few key points to consider…Read More
By David A. Kelly and Heather Ashton, Upside Research Application performance management is more important now than it ever has been, with applications that reside both in house and in the cloud, and applications that have components that are split across applications, systems, and environments. Organizations need to pay attention now more than ever to how well their applications perform under a wide range of potential operational issues. Read More >>
By David A. Kelly and Heather Ashton, Upside Research It is nearly impossible to exist in today’s world without some mention of “green” or “eco” initiatives. Corporate IT has not been immune to this sustainability movement, and in many cases hold the key to transforming a business into one that reflects the new goals for reduced consumption of resources like energy and water. Read More >>
