Are you willing to make a decision that will lose your company $16 million a year, damage brand and corporate reputations, and risk the loss of customer confidence? I am pretty sure that most enterprise’s response to that question would be the same – “absolutely not”. However, these are the consequences that unplanned IT downtime can have on any enterprise.   As a marketer and executive, I know first-hand the financial commitment all companies dedicate to building their brands. In today’s economic environment, where users demand 24/7 access to information and…

Historians of the technology industry observed a pattern that was predictable with regard to new computing platforms. In the early days of a computing segment, like mainframes, minis and desktops, there was a great deal of platform fragmentation. These early computing systems often ran proprietary software and operating systems with little interoperability. Eventually, a standard emerged — Windows. Even though Macs stuck around, their market share stayed well below 3 percent for much of the build-out of the PC era. Here is a visual to show how platforms started fragmented…

If you’ve been dragging your feet on migrating your company’s email to a cloud service, here’s why it’s time to reconsider. Earlier this month, Gartner reported that cloud email adoption is picking up significant steam in the enterprise. Additionally, the research firm said that those who haven’t yet looked into migrating their internal email to a cloud provider “should question assumptions that public cloud email is not appropriate in their region, size, or industry.” In other words, the benefits of a cloud-operated email system likely outweigh the drawbacks. Gartner reports that 13%…

CEO says Windows 10 demand isn’t high enough to help HP Inc HP Inc has blamed Windows 10 for a 12 per cent drop in its latest financial revenues to $12.2 billion (£8.76 billion) year-over-year. Dion Weisler, CEO of HP Inc since HP split into two divisions (the other being Hewlett-Packard Enterprise) last year, claimed a lack of demand for Windows 10 products has hit HP’s hardware business. “I still believe [Windows 10 is] a tremendous operating system,” Weisler told investors on conference call this week, transcribed by Seeking Alpha.…

Application performance management and road trips have a lot more in common than you think. When you’re getting ready for a long drive, you gas up your car, check your tire pressure and plan the most scenic or the most time-efficient route. But there are many things you can’t possibly know or take into account—a sudden accident blocking an off-ramp or a traffic light outage that backs up traffic for miles. User Experience Transformation The same experience can hold true for developers and DevOps teams. You create and test an…

One of my favorite things to do is to talk to Cisco customers, partners and industry analysts about common trends they are seeing in their business and the overall market. We look at trends similarly to why we conduct analytics, not only to see what is happening now but to also help predict what will happen next. This ability to “see around the corner” helps us be more agile as we adjust data and analytics strategies, and therefore our business. As we head into 2016, today I’d like to share a few…

Whether big or small, there’s an argument for businesses staying open to innovation. Here’s are some tips on staying agile. Analysts in a recent session with IBM delivered a clear message: More large companies need to reinvent themselves with startup thinking if they are going to survive an unexpected and perilous turn of events in their industries. The slang term that is going around for this phenomenon is uberization. It is a derivative from ride sharing service Uber, which revolutionized the taxi and chauffeur industries instantly and now threatens their…

Commerce is no longer just about selling to customers—it’s about businesses earning the right to be part of a continuous stream of customer engagement.  According to new research from IT services provider Mindtree and Vanson Bourne, only 28 percent of decision-makers from about 900 companies surveyed said their organizations are investing in personalization features that consumers want, including improved search and compare/aggregate functions. Instead, they’re focusing on features such as shopping lists, wish lists and social features. The report, Winning in the Age of Personalization, also found that when businesses…