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…

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…

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…

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…

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…