Category: Comments & opinions

By now, nearly every CIO must appreciate how mobility and bring your own device adoption is ultimately good for their organizations, especially when it comes to increased employee productivity. For starters, employees in the field complete mission-critical tasks in real-time; they no longer gather information in one place, and then return to an office to transcribe what they learned on the road. Because workers are constantly connected, they’re always able to communicate, and are more likely to keep working even during off-hours. (Of course, this can be a good and a bad…

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We’re all consumers in one way or another. So how can we redefine the way we do business?  It’s all about mobile: self-service, information on-the-go and the convenience to access information where and when we need it. Mobile has changed expectations of consumers today. So what do consumers expect today in terms of mobile?  They expect real-time responses and want to quickly remove bottlenecks to provide accurate and fast service capturing information at the point where it originates, and to deliver this information to enterprise applications for processing to accelerate…

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Rackspace is going to stop distinguishing between the money it makes from public cloud and what it derives from “dedicated” cloud, a category that encompasses a bunch of options. Rackspace President Taylor Rhodes                                                         Credit: Rackspace Well that’s one way to sidestep the whole “is private cloud dead?” debate. The move may show a fanatical obsession on managed cloud or indicate that Rackspace is giving up on public cloud where leader, Amazon Web…

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Private clouds are doomed to fail, and OpenStack may not be the answer. Matt Asay explains. No wonder private cloud vendors have started calling themselves “hybrid” clouds: the private cloud vision has failed — utterly and completely. Gartner analyst Tom Bittman asked why 95% of private clouds are failing, but the answer seems clear: the very notion of a privately provisioned cloud service is contradictory and nearly always doomed. Unfortunately, the odds of failure may skyrocket when enterprises turn to OpenStack. Fail early, fail often Roughly five years ago, Amazon Web Services (AWS)…

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Implementing a customer relationship management (CRM) system is no proverbial walk in the park. The failure rate for CRM adoption hovers between 47 percent and 70 percent, according to analysts. To be a part of the minority of businesses that do succeed in their CRM initiative, following best practices is crucial. What to Do and What Not to Do  1. Don’t Lump All of Your Customers Together: Instead, Focus Only on the Best Ones. Chances are, if you’re implementing a CRM system, you’re looking to adopt a customer-centric approach to business. If that’s…

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It’s that time of year again! Well not really, but it’s that time of my career at least. For those of you keeping track I’ve been at EMC now for a bit over 4 years. I was part of the vSpecialist team for 3 years, and last year around this time I moved into the Office of the CTO (and from Stockholm to Boston with my wife). I’m now moving to yet another interesting opportunity within EMC, but perhaps not a role traditionally associated with EMC. I’m sure you all have…

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Swiss watchmaking company Swatch has decided that it wants to get into the smartwatch business after all. In an interview with Bloomberg, company CEO Nick Hayek said that his company will be going head-to-head with Apple when the Apple Watch launches in April. If Hayek’s claims about the device’s capabilities are right, it seems like it will be an interesting competitor to the other smartwatches now on the market or coming soon. Hayek said that it will connect to the internet, but won’t require a charge. The as-yet-unnamed device will be compatible with Android…

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Companies look to IT to develop systems to improve the relationships with their customers. Yet when it comes to building relationships with the rest of the business, IT often seems to be out in the cold. Isn’t it ironic? Developers build and enhance CRM systems so that companies can track every customer interaction. The CRM system can know what products a customer has purchased and what offers he has been given. It can be aware of how the customer prefers to interact and a bit about his decision-making process. The…

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If Microsoft’s General Counsel has his way, 2015 will be a “year for solutions” when it comes to the intersection of the internet and international law. Brad Smith told an audience at a an event organized by the Center for European Policy Studies in Brussels, Belgium that the regulations governing how internet companies handle user privacy and government requests for data are woefully outdated and ready for a refresh. “Here in Europe the data protection directive was written mostly in the early 1990s, when I spent seven years living and working here…

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A financial website unexpectedly changed its log-in process and revealed a paper-thin commitment to the narrative of online security. …  … Security controls are only helpful when the users and the service agree on what they mean. In this case, a financial services company’s customers must ignore the fact that the new log-in prompt does exactly what the old system vehemently warned them against.  Image: Paco Hope  Verifying a site vs. verifying the purchaser of a certificate In the past, their login prompt used personalized security images. Customers would select…

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