Latest News from Dana Gardner

Mule ION iPaaS Connects Cloud to On-Premise Apps

Wed, 16 May 2012 10:28:00 EDT

New tools and services for swift software-as-a-service integration in the cloud lowers the barrier to SaaS adoption for SaaS providers and developers. MuleSoft this week launched Mule iON SaaS Edition, providing a broad set of new tools and services for swift software-as-a-Service (SaaS) integration in the cloud, and lowering the barrier to SaaS adoption for SaaS providers and developers. In recent commentary, Ross Mason, founder and CTO of Mulesoft, said, "The world today is moving at lightning speed to SaaS and cloud applications, and the idea of gaining competitive advantage through legacy enterprise applications is no longer relevant."

IT Investments Have Big Payoffs

Tue, 15 May 2012 09:30:00 EDT

Fascinating new findings from a recent survey uncovers what distinguishes leaders from laggards among businesses, and identify which IT approaches and solutions are driving the most powerful business results these days.

HP Discover 2012 Offers Education and a Chance to Network

Mon, 14 May 2012 16:03:00 EDT

HP Discover 2012 conference promises insights, information and user networking as businesses face a crossroads in IT delivery

Data Centers Must Do Whatever It Takes to Make Businesses Lean & Agile

Mon, 14 May 2012 16:00:00 EDT

Modern support services need to be able to empower the workers and IT personnel alike to maintain peak control over data centers, and to keep the systems and processes performing reliably at lowest cost. In this discussion, hear recommendations from Esmanech on improving support, the new spectrum of support options and details on how HP is revolutionizing support to offer new innovations in support automation.

Media Company Employs the Latest in Collaborative Commerce

Thu, 10 May 2012 12:35:00 EDT

Mediafly, a startup company, delivers cloud-based applications for content management and distribution on mobile devices for Fortune 500 companies. Mediafly is the leader in the presentation platform market. What that means is that we’re the company that helps bridge the gap between large Fortune 1000 companies, their internal systems, and primarily mobile applications, but also things like Internet-connected televisions, and so forth. Large companies create lots of video. It could be live broadcast, sales presentations, training videos, and TV and movie industry content. When they're trying to distribute that content to make it available on all of these emerging devices, particularly at that large scale, they need a provider like Mediafly. Think of all the TV and movie productions that are going on the studios. Those companies have thousands of video files that they're housing inside of their four walls. They're trying to expose that content to all of their executives and staff, everybody from the makeup artist that needs to watch the last three dailies to the CEO and the president.

Proper Security and Protection Measures Enable Rapid Cloud Adoption

Wed, 09 May 2012 09:00:00 EDT

Cloud computing has clearly sparked the imagination of business leaders, who see it as a powerful new way to be innovative and gain first-mover advantages. It now falls to CIOs to not only rapidly adapt to cloud computing, but to find the ways to protect their employees and customers as they adopt cloud models – even as security threats grow. This is a serious -- but not insurmountable challenge. Cloud computing has clearly sparked the imagination of business leaders, who see it as a powerful new way to be innovative and gain first-mover advantages -- with or without traditional IT's consent.

Online Collaboration Improves Procurement

Mon, 07 May 2012 10:45:00 EDT

Cox Enterprises, through the Ariba Network, manages multiple ERP systems for an improved eProcurement strategy. We'll learn how Cox, through the Ariba Network, manages multiple ERP systems for an improved eProcurement strategy, and has moved toward more efficient indirect spend efforts to improve ongoing operations and drive future growth across more than 50,000 employees. We have six separate ERP systems spanning major subsidiaries, including Cox Communications, Manheim, Cox Media Group, and AutoTrader.com. Cox is a very interesting company in that our business units are very diverse and very unique. Across four divisions and our holding company we have those six ERP systems.

Strategic Approach to Disaster Recovery and Data Lifecycle Management

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 09:45:00 EDT

Business standards and compliance services provider SAI Global is benefiting from a strategic view of IT enabled disaster recovery. When we started to get into DR, we handled it from an IT point of view and it was very much like an iceberg. We looked at the technology and said, "This is what we need from a technology point of view." As we started to get further into the journey, we realized that there was so much more that we were overlooking. We were working with the businesses to go through what they had, what they didn’t have, what we needed from them to make sure that we could deliver what they needed. Then we started to realize it was a bigger project.

Virtualization Simplifies Disaster Recovery

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 08:00:00 EDT

Myron Steves, a small- to medium-sized business, developed and implemented a modern disaster recovery and business continuity strategy based on a high-degree of server and clients virtualization. When Hurricane Ike struck Texas in 2008, it became the second costliest hurricane ever to make landfall in the U.S. It was also a wake-up call for Houston-based insurance wholesaler Myron Steves & Co., which was not struck directly but nonetheless realized its IT disaster recovery (DR) approach was woefully inadequate. Supporting some 3,000 independent insurance agencies in the Gulf Coast region, with many insured properties in that active hurricane zone, Myron Steves must have all it resources up and available, if and when severe storms strike.

Microsoft Teams up with Ariba on B2B eCommerce Front

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 07:15:00 EDT

Ariba is now teaming with Microsoft in business streamlining to empower buyers and sellers to better connect and collaborate across Microsoft applications and Ariba's commerce cloud services. Microsoft Dynamics offers productivity tools and built-in contextual business intelligence that help decision-makers move faster. There are 300,000 businesses that use Microsoft Dynamics applications and 10,000 Microsoft Dynamics reselling partners worldwide. The Ariba Network leverages cloud-based invoicing, supplier discovery and spend management services and an online trading community to drive collaboration and efficiency in business-to-business ecommerce.

The Business Aspects of Cloud: Let's Get Started

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 14:38:53 EDT

The cloud discussions have been changing rapidly over the last months, focusing away from infrastructure to applications, services and industry requirements. I’ve spent the last several weeks addressing some of the business aspects of cloud and why/how companies move to the cloud. It’s time now to wrap this series up. The cloud discussions have been changing rapidly over the last months, focusing away from infrastructure to applications, services and industry requirements. Implementations in larger companies typically started with development & test activities within the IT department, while business teams used “shadow-IT” approaches to source services from external parties, potentially putting the enterprise at risk. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.] The main reason is the perceived lack of responsiveness and agility of IT. As I pointed out, it is increasingly becoming clear that one size does not fit all, in cloud computing and that the CIO should become a “strategic service broker”, sourcing services from a series of cloud environments going from private to public clouds and from IaaS to SaaS services. To achieve a successful transition to cloud computing, the CIO needs to address three areas

Top 10 Ways HP Is Different and Better When It Comes to Cloud Computing

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 08:57:00 EDT

HP is poised to excel from its unique position to grow right along with the global cloud market for many years. Tuesday HP filled out its cloud computing strategy, a broad-based set of products and services, that set a date (finally!) for its public cloud debut (May 10). By waiting to tip its hand on how it will address the massive cloud opportunity, HP has clearly identified Cloud as a Business (CaaB) as the real, long-term opportunity. And HP appreciates that any way that it can propel CaaB forward for as many businesses, organizations and individuals as possible, then the more successful it will be, too.

HP Announced Major Components & Details for Its Converged Cloud Strategy

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 08:45:00 EDT

HP's new Converged Cloud strategy targets enterprises, service providers and small- and medium-sized business with a comprehensive yet flexible approach designed to "confidently" grow the cloud computing market fast around the globe. HP has clearly exploited the opportunity to step back and examine how the cloud market has actually evolved, and taken pains to provide those who themselves provide cloud-enabled services with an architected path to business-ready cloud services. From its new Cloud Maps to HP Service Virtualization 2.0, HP is seeking to hasten and automate how other people's cloud services come to market.

How Can Companies Exploit Cloud's Promise But Also Retain Rigor & Control?

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 09:15:00 EDT

Cloud computing has sparked the imagination of business leaders, who see it as a powerful new way to be innovative and gain first-mover advantages -- with or without traditional IT's consent. This now means that the center of gravity for IT services is shifting toward the enterprise’s boundaries – moving increasingly outside their firewalls. And so how can companies have it both ways - exploit cloud's promise but also retain rigor and control that internal IT influences and governance enables? The cloud is an exciting environment, and it's changing things in quite incredible ways. We're going to be focused now on how cloud is enabling data center transformation.

How Networked Economy Benefits Spring from Improved Cloud Processes

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 10:00:00 EDT

To gauge the potential business benefits -- and threats -- from cloud, we also need to examine the confluence of these developments and how together they change businesses and business ecosystems. It's impossible to factor the implications of cloud computing without examining the context of all the other major business and technology trends in play today. To gauge the potential business benefits - and threats - from cloud, we also need to examine the confluence of these developments and how together they change businesses and business ecosystems. To help better understand the complex drivers of the next wave of business productivity, BriefingsDirect interviewed Ariba’s Chief Marketing Officer, Tim Minahan, in advance of the conference. The networked economy comes as a consequence, says Minahan, of the major business and IT trends of the day -- those being cloud computing, mobile, social, and big data.

Cloud, Mobile, Social Networks, & Big Data Are Changing the Role of IT

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 12:39:40 EDT

Now is a fascinating time for businesses the world over, and the role and impact of IT is a big part of what's causing the changes that all of us are feeling and adjusting to. Many of the changes involve the speed of change and rapid adaptation to dynamic markets. Clearly, the speed of business has never been faster, and it's getting even faster. Those that can't keep up are in a perilous situation. Embarcadero Technologies is hosting a live discussion on how the major business and IT trends of the day -- cloud computing, mobile, social networks, and Big Data -- are changing the role of IT, and ways that IT can fight back.

Study: Cloud Computing Becoming Pervasive

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 08:00:00 EDT

Business units' demand for speed and agility is leading them to circumvent IT and acquire cloud services, more than half of them from unmanaged clouds. Cloud computing may be taking the business world by storm, but its success could mean a "perfect storm" that endangers the role of IT. As a result, IT needs to step up now and change its approach to cloud services. This includes building trust with the lines of business, beginning to manage public cloud services, and pursuing increased automation for service provisioning and operations. These are the key findings of a survey commissioned by BMC Software and conducted by Forrester Research. The study, "Delivering on High Cloud Expectations," shows that business units' demand for speed and agility is leading them to circumvent IT and acquire cloud services, more than half of them from what were termed "unmanaged" clouds. Brian Singer, Lead Solutions Marketing Manager for BMC, said his company commissioned the survey in an effort to confirm what the company was hearing anecdotally from customers. "Cloud and software as a service (SaaS) are in enterprises in a big way," Singer said, "and we wanted to see how IT was dealing with them."

HP Offers Products & Services to Deal with Mobile Computing & Social Media

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 06:00:00 EDT

HP this week announced a suite of products and services aimed at overcoming the challenges presented by the convergence of some of today's hottest business trends, mobile computing and social media. The four software products and three services are designed to help enterprises leverage traditional systems of record, while creating an improved and extended presence and engaging better with customers, partners, and even employees. IT-driven systems of record, while they serve up useful information, are usually commodities and in themselves don't create business differentiation. The new offerings, however, provide systems of engagement, which change the way enterprises interact with those people now using tablets and smartphones in increasing numbers, as well as through social media.

HP Rolls Out IT Support Services Architected for Modern IT Infrastructures

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 08:00:00 EDT

In a move to help enterprises address problems before they arise, HP this week rolled out IT support services architected for modern IT infrastructures.

Prevent Security Concerns from Being a Roadblock on the Way to the Cloud

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 15:04:13 EDT

Business leaders want to exploit cloud computing values fast, but they also fear the security risks in moving to cloud models too quickly. Just at the time that companies want to leverage cloud, they know that security threats are growing. Indeed, according to recent HP-sponsored research, the volume and complexity of security threats has continued to escalate. Analyst firms such as Forrester place security and privacy as the top reasons for not adopting cloud. Yet by better understanding cloud security risks, gaining detailed understanding of your own infrastructure and following proven reference architectures and methods, security can move from an inhibitor of cloud adoption to an enabler.

HP Offers First Batch of Servers in Proliant Gen8 Series

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 09:00:00 EST

HP's new generation of servers, part of a two-year, $300-million effort, benefit from ProActive Insight archtecture, including lifecycle automation, dynamic workload acceleration, automated energy optimization, and proactive service and support. Manual operations and facilities management can cost companies more than $24 million over three years, while unplanned downtime is estimated to cost companies as much as $10 million an hour. As a result, data center managers must rely on more intelligent, self-sufficient technologies that eliminate the time-consuming, error-prone processes that consume valuable resources and can cause both failure and data loss.

Cloud Computing Exposes the Duality Between IT and Business Transformation

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 07:00:00 EST

Why do business people think they have a revolution on their hands, while IT people look cloud computing as an evolution of infrastructure efficiency? We define the role of IT and give it the responsibility and the accountability in the business in a way that is quite strongly related to internal practice. It’s all about how we manage the company’s transactions, how we reduce the cost, how we automate business process, and generally try to make our company a more efficient internal operator.

The Open Trusted Technology Provider Standard (O-TTPS) Snapshot

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 07:45:00 EST

The Open Group has announced the publication of the Open Trusted Technology Provider Standard (O-TTPS) Snapshot, a preview of what is intended to become the first standard developed by The Open Group Trusted Technology Forum (OTTF). The snapshot provides an early look at the standard so providers, suppliers and integrators can begin planning how to implement the standard in their organizations, and so customers, including government acquirers, can differentiate those providers who adopt the standard's practices.

Enterprise Architecture and Enterprise Transformation

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 09:30:00 EST

Open Group experts discuss relationship of enterprise architecture to enterprise transformation. Do you need EA to succeed in transforming your business or do you risk conflating two distinct concepts? For some, if you want enterprise transformation, you really need the organizing benefits of enterprise architecture (EA) to succeed. For others, the elevation of enterprise architecture as an essential ingredient to enterprise transformation improperly conflates the role of enterprise architecture, and waters down enterprise architecture while risking its powerful contribution. So how should we view these important roles and functions? How high into the enterprise transformation firmament should enterprise architecture rise? And will rising too high, in effect, melt its wings and cause it to crash back to earth and perhaps become irrelevant? Or is enterprise transformation nowadays significantly dependent upon enterprise architecture, and therefore, we should make enterprise architecture a critical aspect for any business moving forward?

App Store Technology Helping Businesses Manage Software

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 07:30:00 EST

Enterprise app stores help companies manage the thousands of applications they have across numerous users and devices. There's a huge productivity gap between modern software and the aging manner in which most enterprises still distribute and manage applications on personal computers. At a time when business models and whole industries are being upended by improved use of software, IT providers inside of enterprises are still painstakingly provisioning and maintaining PC applications in much the same way they did in the 1990s. Furthermore, with using these older models, most enterprises don’t even know what PC apps they have in use on their networks and across thousands of computers. That means they're also lacking that visibility into how, or even if, these apps are being used, and they may even be paying for licenses that they don’t need to.

Learn How to Keep the Move to Cloud Models Organized and Rational

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 10:02:53 EST

Cloud computing trends are now driving the need for a different approach to data center transformation. The disruptions caused by the slack economy, data explosion and Big Data analysis, mobile computing, and social interactions are having a profound effect. Enterprises sense a need to move quickly in pursuit of their business goals. This need to react quickly is also prompting the business side of the organization to exploit cloud computing – with or without IT’s consent. Forrester Research reports that business groups are adopting cloud 2.5 times faster than the typical organization's IT groups.

Architecture and Change: The Proper End Is Fitness for Purpose

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 10:20:00 EST

We have to be careful that we don’t make change an end in itself. We have to remember that change is a means to the end of getting something we want that is different from what we have. In the enterprise context, that something has been labeled in different ways. One is “alignment,” specifically “business/IT alignment.” Some have concluded that alignment isn’t quite the right idea, and it’s really “integration” we are pursuing. Others have suggested that “coherency” is a better characterization of what we want. I think all of these are still just means to an end, and that end is fitness for purpose. The pragmatist in me says I don’t really care if all the parts of a system are “aligned” or “integrated” or “coherent,” as long as that system is fit for purpose, i.e., does what it’s supposed to do.

HP Announced a New Generation of Automated and Efficient Hardware

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 08:15:00 EST

HP on Monday took direct aim at the ever-increasing costs of data centers and managing an explosion of data by announcing a new generation of automated and efficient hardware. The new generation of ProLiant servers includes better internal management, powerful automation features, and improved energy conservation. The ProLiant Gen8 servers are part HP's Converged Infrastructure strategy, and represent the first step in the company's Project Voyager, a two-year, $300-million effort to redefine the economics of the data center. At the heart of the new generation of servers is ProActive Insight architecture, which includes integrated lifecycle automation, dynamic workload acceleration, automated energy optimization, and proactive service and support. Data has become a differentiator in business, and with an ever-expanding growth in storage needs, enterprises are feeling the pinch in personnel costs, energy, and facilities. Supporting data as a lifecycle may be IT's fastest growing cost worldwide.

Clustrix Delivers Software-Only Kit to Demo Shard-less MySQL Scaling

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 07:15:00 EST

On Tuesday, Clustrix announced the availability of the free Clustrix Development Kit, allowing users to try out the NewSQL system that it's backers say scales to an "unlimited number of users, transactions or data." There's a lot to like about MySQL databases if you're a start-up, until success comes knocking a bit too fast. When big data demand soars then MySQL can sour on making the transactions needed on time. Sharding the application and data resources has been about the only answer, other than to painfully and expensively cut and run to another data base like NoSQL. This was the problem facing Massive Media when its social networking site Twoo rapidly grew to four million users in six months. By using the Clustrix distributed relational database system, Massive Media gained high scale-out transactional performance and automated fault tolerance, said Clustrix. And that has now made Twoo the poster child for Clustrix, a San Francisco start-up funded by Sequoia and USVP and its co-founder, Paul Mikesell, also co-founded Isilon, which was sold to EMC for $2.25 billion.

Designing by Choice Is Better Than by Chance

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 09:45:00 EST

Designing an enterprise architecture is much like building a house. It's better not to leave things to chance. To build a house right, you need a blueprint that details what is to be built, where, why and how based on the home owner's requirements (including cost). As the story goes, Sarah Winchester's priorities were different. However, if we don't follow this systematic approach as enterprise architects, we are likely to land up with some Winchester IT houses as well. Or, have we already? Enterprises are always tempted to address the immediate problem at hand with surprisingly short timelines. Frequent implementations of sporadic, tactical additions evolve to a Winchester Architecture. Right or wrong, Sarah Winchester did this by choice. If enterprises of today land up with such architectures, it can only by chance and not by choice.

Cloud May Mean Different Security for Different Organizations

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 09:30:00 EST

Is cloud a positive or negative when it comes to cyber security? And what of hybrid models that combine public and private cloud activities, how is security impacted in those cases? For some, any move to the cloud -- at least the public cloud -- means a higher risk for security. For others, relying more on a public cloud provider means better security. There’s more of a concentrated and comprehensive focus on security best practices that are perhaps better implemented and monitored centrally in the major public clouds. And so which is it? Is cloud a positive or negative when it comes to cyber security? And what of hybrid models that combine public and private cloud activities, how is security impacted in those cases?

HP Provides More Picks and Shovels to Cloud Miners

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 10:00:00 EST

In two separate recent announcements, HP has affirmed its goal of being the neutral supplier of choice for all things cloud. Last week, HP delivered HP Discovery and Dependency Mapping Advanced (DDMA) Content Pack 10, bringing with the ability to better manage cloud instances across the enterprise-public cloud continuum, including deep discovery of virtualized workloads' performance inside of Amazon and VMware vCloud clouds. Then this week, HP on Tuesday further thrust its global market-leading LoadRunner performance testing suite -- via partners -- into development clouds, known as platform as a service (PaaS) providers. This is clearly aimed at the fast-growing mobile development and greenfield SMB development spaces.

Enterprise Architects Play Key Role in Transformation, Data Analytics

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 10:00:00 EST

Good data management, analytics, and helping to shape the goals of the business are keys to transforming the enterprise through impactful enterprise architecture (EA). Coming from the siloed past in IT, companies are now moving to business service-driven processes across various resources, Ross said. But they need to recognize the forces around consumption of such services, not just the implementation. Making good data management a priority, a "single source of truth" is also at the heart of making EA valuable, said Ross. Ensuring the quality of data and the speed of data refresh will help enterprise architects rise in performance appreciation more than just about anything else, she said. Ross studies how firms develop competitive advantage through the implementation and reuse of digitized platforms.

Scribe Boosts Cloud Offering with GUI Synchronization Services

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 16:00:00 EST

Scribe Software, a customer relationship management (CRM) data integration provider, will launch next week Scribe Online Synchronization Services (SYS). According to the Manchester, NH-based company, Scribe Online provides a cloud-based alternative to integration middleware, and simplifies the integration experience without sacrificing performance or functionality. The goal is to allow companies to reap the benefits of integrated CRM data from a variety of sources and technologies in days, rather than months.

HP Ecosystem Provides Support for VMware Virtualized IT Environments

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 12:00:00 EST

Advanced and pervasive virtualization and cloud computing trends are driving the need for a better, holistic approach to IT support and remediation. Virtualization isn’t just server-by-server, but really impacts the entire data center. You need to think about it more holistically, particularly in regard to things like security, performance and how your brands and businesses are perceived across the globe. Many of the companies that I deal with day in and day out are up at 80 percent and even 90 percent virtualized. When they think about virtualization, they go beyond just server virtualization. It’s really now looking at storage, applications, networks and even the end-user desktop experience, or desktop as a service (VDI). Successful virtualization is no longer just about servers, it’s about managing complexity when you get beyond the 20 percent or 30 percent level and expand into converged infrastructure virtualization without failures.

The Open Group Releases SOA and Cloud Computing Standards

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 10:00:00 EST

The Open Group has announced this week the availability of two new industry standards to integrate fundamental elements of service oriented architecture (SOA) and cloud computing into a solution for enterprise architecture (EA).The new standards are: SOA Reference Architecture (SOA RA) and the Service-Oriented Cloud Computing Infrastructure Framework (SOCCI). The Open Group has released updates to The Open Group Service Integration Maturity Model (OSIMM), which has now been ratified as an ISO and IEC (ISO/IEC 166880) International Standard. OSIMM gives organizations a common model for developing a roadmap for achieving the right level of service adoption to meet business objectives.

How IT and Enterprise Architecture Support Enterprise Transformation

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 09:15:00 EST

Jeanne Ross, Director and Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Center for Information Systems Research says adoption of enterprise architecture (EA) leads to greater efficiencies and better business agility. Ross explains how enterprise architects have helped lead the way to successful business transformations. Today, there remains kind of a leap of faith in recognizing that companies that are well-architected will, in fact, perform better, partly because you can be well-architected and perform badly. Or if we look at companies that are very young and have no competitors, they can be very poorly architected and achieve quite remarkably in the marketplace. But what we can ascribe to architecture is that when companies have competition, then they can establish any kind of performance target they want, whether it’s faster revenue growth or better profitability, and then architect themselves so they can achieve their goals. Then, we can monitor that.

Case Study: New Approach Improves End-User Satisfaction

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 08:00:00 EST

The latest BriefingsDirect case study podcast discussion centers on how Nottingham Trent University gained strategic operational efficiency and improved IT management. We were very, very good at moving forward and doing lots and lots of things, but delivering products at the end of that period was more difficult. We seemed to be running around in circles, and didn’t quite meet customers’ expectations. So we were doing a lot, working really hard, but not really delivering the last mile. We found that our processes were not really defined well enough. We really weren’t getting sign-off from the business, and the expectations were never really met. So it was clear that we were not doing something well, and we didn’t quite know what that was. And our teams within the department weren’t gelling that well together either.

Genuitec's MobiOne Eases Way for Windows Development of iOS Apps

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 09:56:39 EST

Genuitec, LLC has revamped its MobiOne development tool to allow Windows operating system users to design and build App Store-ready iOS apps without using a Mac. This means there is no longer an additional expense to buy a Mac machine or learn Objective-C to design apps that operate natively on iOS devices. “By removing the barriers to entry for iOS app design and building, MobiOne is truly at the forefront of making mobile technologies accessible to the masses," said Wayne Parrott, vice president of product development. "If a Windows users has enough skill to design a PowerPoint slide, they can design and build iPhone and iPad apps with ease. Web developers with HTML5 and CSS3 skills will see even greater productivity.”

Managing Virtualized IT Workloads and Private Clouds

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 10:00:00 EST

Better managing virtualized IT workloads and private clouds is a top concern for IT leaders going into 2012. They may want to follow the lead of global travel and tourism giant TUI Group. The IT organization there, TUI InfoTec, has found ways to manage highly virtualized IT operations better, especially in mixed environments like hybrid clouds. The critical need to better identify performance issues and outages prompted TUI InfoTec to find ways to cut time to troubleshooting, resulting in a 50 percent reduction in the time needed to identify the causes of such problems.

The Cyber-Crime Landscape

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 08:00:00 EST

Joe Menn explores the current cyber-crime landscape, the underground cyber-gang movement, and the motive behind governments collaborating with organized crime in cyber space. Maybe you can make your enterprise a little trickier to get into than the other guy’s enterprise, but crime pays very, very well, and in the big picture, their ecosystem is better than ours. They do capitalism better than we do. They specialize to a great extent. They reinvest in R&D. On our end, on the good guys’ side, it's hard if you're a chief information security officer (CISO) or a chief security officer (CSO) to convince the top brass to pay more. You don’t really know what's working and what isn't. You don’t know if you've really been had by something that we call advanced persistent threat (APT). Even the top security minds in the country can't be sure whether they’ve been had or not. So it's hard to know what to spend on.

Provisioning Private Clouds that Support Complex & Critical Training Apps

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 06:15:00 EST

Worldwide enterprise applications leader SAP has designed and implemented a private cloud infrastructure model that supports an internal consulting and training program. By standardizing on a VMware cloud platform, SAP has been able to slash provisioning times for multiple instances of its flagship application suite in the training setting, as well as set the stage for wider adoption of cloud models. Expanding a bit on the use case, there is a specific challenge here. In the training business, people book their courses, and we know only on Friday evening who is attending the course on Monday. So we have only a very short amount of time over the weekend to set up the systems. That was one of the big challenges that we had to solve.

Metadata-Driven Data Virtualization and Improved Orchestration

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 05:00:00 EST

This discussion then examines how metadata-driven data virtualization and improved orchestration can help provide the inclusion and scale to accomplish far better data management. Such access then leads to improved integration of all information into an approachable resource for actionable business activities. Perhaps half of those enterprises actually have a strategy for improving on this dismal fact. But business leaders are now recognizing that managing and exploiting information is a core business competency that will increasingly determine their overall success. That means broader solutions to data distress are being called for. This discussion then examines how metadata-driven data virtualization and improved orchestration can help provide the inclusion and scale to accomplish far better data management. Such access then leads to improved integration of all information into an approachable resource for actionable business activities.

Case Study: Standardizing a Cloud Environment for Game Development

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 08:30:00 EST

SEGA Europe is standardizing its cloud infrastructure across its on-premises operations, as well as with a public cloud provider. The result is a managed and orchestrated hybrid environment to test and develop multimedia games. Typically, in the early stages of development, there is a fair amount of testing going on, and it tends to be quite small -- the number of staff involved in it and the number of build iterations. Going on, when the game reaches to the end of its product life-cycle, we’re talking multiple game iterations a day and the game size has gotten very large at that point. The number of people involved in the testing to meet the deadlines and get the game shipped on date is into the hundreds and hundreds of staff.

Efficient Data Center Transformation

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 09:15:00 EST

You don’t need to go very far in IT nowadays to find people who are diligently working to do more with less, even as they're working to transform and modernize their environments. One way to keep the interest high -- and those operating and investment budgets in place -- is to show fast results, and then use that to prime the pump for even more improvement -- and even more funding -- with perhaps even growing budgets.

Embarcadero Brings Self-Service App Store Model to Enterprises

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 10:00:00 EST

Embarcadero Technologies, a provider of database and application development software, recently announced AppWave, a free platform that provides self-service, one-click access to PC software within organizations for business PCs and even personal employee laptops. Available via a free download, the AppWave platform gives users access to more than 250 free PC productivity apps for general business, marketing, design, data management, and development including OpenOffice, Adobe Acrobat Reader, 7Zip, FileZilla, and more.

HP Hybrid Cloud to Enable Telcos and Service Providers

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 07:00:00 EST

HP at the Discover 2011 Conference in Vienna last week announced a wide range of new Cloud Solutions designed to advance deployment of private, public and hybrid clouds for enterprises, service providers, and governments. Based on HP Converged Infrastructure, the new and updated HP Cloud Solutions provide the hardware, software, services and programs rapidly and securely deliver IT as a service. I found these announcements a clearer indicator of HP's latest cloud strategy, with an emphasis on enabling a global, verticalized and marketplace-driven tier of cloud providers. I've been asked plenty about HP's public cloud roadmap, which has been murky. This now tells me that HP is going first to its key service provider customers for data center and infrastructure enablement for their clouds.

Harnessing the Power of Social Media

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 10:00:00 EST

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how businesses need to respond to a marketplace changed by social media mechanisms.

Big Data Meets Complex Event Processing

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 09:00:00 EST

The conversation examines how AccelOps has developed technology that correlates events with relevant data across IT systems, so that operators can gain much better insights faster, and then learn as they go to better predict future problems before they emerge. That's because advances in big data analytics and complex events processing (CEP) can come together to provide deep and real-time, pattern-based insights into large-scale IT operations. The data has to be analyzed in real-time. By real-time I mean in streaming mode before the data hits the disk. You need to be able to analyze it and make decisions. That's actually a very efficient way of analyzing information. Because you avoid a lot of data sync issues and duplicate data, you can react immediately in real time to remediate systems or provide very early warnings in terms of what is going wrong.

Complex IT Security Risks Can Only Be Treated with Comprehensive Response

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 06:45:00 EST

In just the past year, the number of attacks are up, the costs associated with them are higher and more visible, and the risks of not securing systems and processes are therefore much greater. Some people have even called the rate of attacks a pandemic. The path to reducing these risks, even as the threats escalate, is to confront security at the framework and strategic level, and to harness the point solutions approach into a managed and ongoing security enhancement lifecycle. As part of the series of recent news announcements from HP, this discussion examines how such a framework process can unfold, from workshops that allow a frank assessment of an organization’s vulnerabilities, to tailored framework-level approaches that can transform a company based on its own specific needs.