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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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Start with your business needs, not your software’s features. A good CRM plan starts with your business and its needs. What are your business goals? What are your weaknesses where CRM can help? What do you need to do to make your business a success by your definition? Stated that baldly, it seems obvious. Unfortunately many businesses implementing CRM put the cart before the horse. Instead of starting with what their business needs, they start with the features of the CRM package they’re installing. At best this is suboptimal and at…

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My ZDNet colleague and PC hardware expert Adrian Kingsley-Hughes wrote an interesting speculative piece today about Apple’s future and whether augmented and virtual reality hardware is where it is likely to make significant future investments. In the past I’ve touched on where AR and VR is likely to play out in consumer as well as in enterprise and vertical tech, and in particular I have been interested in the overall impact on our society that this technology is likely to make — good or bad. I don’t know for certain that Apple is going to go…

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One of the most persistent questions I hear about Windows 10 involves what happens when the free upgrade offer ends. Is Microsoft going to start charging subscription fees? After a close look at the company’s financials, I’m convinced the answer is an emphatic no. We’ve had this advice drummed into our heads for years: If a deal sounds too good to be true, it probably is. That guideline is usually correct, which probably explains why I continue to hear from skeptics convinced that Microsoft’s free Windows 10 offer is a…

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