Category: Analysis

Manufacturers will attract and retain more millennial customers than their competitors if they implement ERP software today. Tork, a professional hygiene brand owned by Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget (SCA), recently completed its sixth green business survey andproduced crucial information for any business currently dealing with millennials. Millennials, or Generation Y, include young people born between the early 1980s and the early 2000s. The Gen Y population is not only the group most dedicated to the purchase of sustainable products, it will also pay a higher price for them and has done so more consistently than…

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Security Solutions Offer MSPs a Great Opportunity for Business Growth, But Service Providers Must Address the Licensing Issues Managed services providers (MSPs) are experiencing a world of change these days, as cloud computing and the “as-a-service” trend continues to grow and have a huge impact on virtually every aspect of IT. Consider the impact that the growth of public cloud services from Amazon Web Services and other providers has had on IT operations. And think about how much virtualization technologies from vendors such as VMware has changed the way data…

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IDC Health Insights today revealed a new methodology to help healthcare organizations navigate the challenges of Big Data and analytics (BDA) projects aimed at supporting the achievement of integrated care objectives. As European health systems face increasing pressure on care services due to resource constraints and an aging population with chronic diseases, integrated care seems an ideal solution to address health system sustainability challenges. Integrated care pathways, involving greater collaboration between hospital and primary care as well as social care settings, will require information to be relevant to the context in…

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One purpose of prediction is not to know the future, but to be able to change it. That’s fine—but incomplete data or sloppy models inevitably lead to unintended consequences. There’s a human irony in the fact that a natural disaster is somehow less painful than one we cause inadvertently: once you mess with something, you are responsible for the outcome. For better or worse, Big Data is taking the concept of “messing with something” to a level that humanity has never experienced before. How much of what we put in…

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A new report offers a snapshot into the deployment preferences of some smaller companies when given the choice of on-premise or cloud-based software. Take a look at the numbers. Dr. Noel Radley, Managing Editor at Software Advice, wrote a report titled Cloud vs. On-Premise Software: Changes in Preference From 2008-2014. The report kicks off by saying, “There has been a radical shift in deployment preference over the past six years: 88 percent of buyers preferred on-premise solutions in 2008, while 87 percent preferred cloud solutions in 2014.” That’s quite a statement. What…

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It’s all about the money as we run down the top ten richest people in tech For whatever reason, most likely because they wield various forms of power over the general populace, we remain obsessed with the wealthy. And humans love to categorise, hence the endless lists of stuff, including the richest persons inhabiting our little planet. Here’s our list of the top ten richest people in IT, which will be updated regularly. 10. Masayoshi Son (Worth: $18.2bn) Japan’s richest man, Masayoshi Son is founder and CEO of ISP and…

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Every business must have a unique niche if you wish to separate yourself from others to compete in the marketplace. This is especially true if you are competing in an industry that is very crowded with competition and low price is a driving incentive for the customer. It used to be that a cup of coffee was just a cup of coffee. Then a company came along and completely changed the rules. They violated every marketing rule. They overpriced their product. They changed the language – a small is actually…

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Surveying the business landscape over the past five years makes me especially optimistic about growth. Strangely, that’s because so many U.S. businesses are failing—but failing successfully. As unexpected as that sounds, the best organizations and business leaders are now adept at failing and then quickly applying lessons learned from those misfires to fuel future successes. Today’s problems are incredibly complex. Few can be solved on the first try. But we find that clients who seek to understand what does and does not work ultimately make more confident, grounded decisions. The insurance industry…

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SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud services) technologies are complicating an already complex IT services value chain. Here’s how to tame this multisourcing beast. Multisourcing — parceling out the IT services portfolio among a number of vendors — is the new normal in IT outsourcing. And as social, mobile, analytics, and cloud (SMAC) services become increasingly important to the IT environment, companies will find themselves managing an ever larger pool of smaller deals that are, in many ways, different from their traditional outsourcing relationships. And, says Lois Coatney, partner with outsourcing consultancy…

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Gartner research director Darryl Carlton gives a preview of his presentation at the Gartner Application Architecture, Development and Integration Summit, 21-22 July 2014 in Sydney. Over the last few years, we have seen an increasing number of high profile government IT projects end in spectacular failure. Take the British Child Support Agency for example, which ranks as one of the worst public administration scandals of all time. Not only did the system have an 85 percent error rate in calculating payments but, seven years after it was introduced, there were…

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