Category: Analysis

Technical knowledge is only part of the IT manager skill set. It’s also essential to be able to support the team, anticipate and resolve problems, and run interference when political issues arise.  IT pros tend to bristle at the idea of administrative skills, which many perceive as sitting in an office instead of doing work that really needs to be done. Nevertheless, administrative skills play a major role in getting IT work done. These skills are indispensable for IT managers, who constantly walk a line between enabling their staffs to…

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Our technology world is fascinated by disruptive innovation. Every tech startup says its new technology is disruptive and therefore it is bound to succeed. So it is with all-flash arrays which can answer data requests in microseconds, instead of the milliseconds needed by disk drive arrays. Startups such as Pure Storage, SolidFire and Violin say they have best-of-breed products in the networked storage array category because they are all-flash with software designed from the ground up to control their arrays. They provide flash speed at roughly the cost of the…

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We are at the very beginning stages of a new era of dramatic improvement in the way communications services providers (CSPs) are using information technology to support creation and delivery of services.  The first wave of step-function improvement (or first platform) started in the late 1960’s as the mainframe infrastructure was used to replace paper records for maintaining customer and network information. The next dramatic phase occurred with the emergence of the second platform: the client-server architecture in the 1980’s and 1990’s which ushered in the networked computing infrastructure world…

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Mobile marketing put on an exceptional show in 2013 and experienced a growth of 75%. With marketing gurus predicting that the number of smartphone and tablet users will touch 2 billion in 2014, we are expecting to see some sweeping developments this year too. These days, more and more people are using their mobile devices for local searches, to look up everything from a soup recipe to directions to a car showroom nearby. With this increase in user base, companies are going to have a lot of scope to push…

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Organizations’ emerging transformation to digital business models is driving the need for greater IT agility to meet changing business strategies and requirements in a highly digitalized world. Traditional sourcing strategies that are either too centralized or not centralized enough, too customized or too industrialized, actually reduce, rather than enhance, agility.  In today’s blog post, Susan Tan, research vice president at Gartner, explains how service providers need different core competencies to succeed in a digital world. Ms. Tan said: Businesses are embracing adaptive sourcing, which addresses shortcomings in existing traditional sourcing…

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Almost one in five small and medium businesses worldwide are exposed to major security risks as they are still using Windows XP after Microsoft ended support for the operating system, according to a three-month study by antivirus software provider Bitdefender. The research, conducted in countries such as the US, the UK, Australia, Germany, Spain and Brazil, proved that businesses still rely on the legacy Microsoft OS despite security concerns. Millions of malware attacks target companies every month and hackers try to steal confidential data by taking advantage of the system’s…

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Here are 11 security considerations that IT administrators should weigh as they approach that decision. When planning a cloud deployment, choosing a public-cloud or private-cloud model is one of the most important decisions to be made, especially from a security perspective. IT administrators should weigh 11 considerations as they approach making that decision. How significant are cost savings among the motivations for moving to the cloud? Generally speaking, greater cost savings can be achieved by moving to a public cloud; lesser savings are achieved in a private cloud. IT decision-makers should…

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Big Data is often associated with big vendors—the likes of IBM, Oracle and SAP. But the industry is also full of up and comers and niche specialists that could make an impact on a market said to be worth more than $32 billion by 2017. Gartner has released a list of five Big Data vendors to watch, as enterprises search for technology to draw intelligence from the vast amounts of information collected daily. Analyst Svetlana Sicular posted the list June 17 with the caveat that there are “many more companies…

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Oracle reported that new license sales were flat in the last quarter, evidence that CIOs are increasingly looking to the cloud for software. Oracle also reported June 19 that profits fell 4.2 percent on higher expenses in the fiscal fourth quarter, to $3.65 billion. Lack of growth in new license sales, a key metric for software makers, is what sparked a more than 6 percent drop in share price in after hours trading. “New licenses was a major culprit for the shortfall and will be a focal point of investors…

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We reached out to over one hundred industry experts and asked, “What don’t people understand about the costs of operating a network but should?” Here’s a collection of our favorite advice. “Networks are expensive, get a bad rap for reliability (even when they are meeting their technical specifications), and at the end of the day few businesses could operate without them,” said Matthew H. Podowitz, (@mpodowitz), Senior Director, Operations and Technology Advisory Services, for Pine Hill Group. Even when networks are so critical for business operations, the money that’s spent on…

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