|
...
Technology Audits - published 23/08/2010 - Balachandar Ganesh, Richard Edwards
|
|
We all fill out paper forms at some time, when opening a bank account, filling-out a job application, or completing a survey. From a data-processing perspective the downside of paper forms is that the extraction and collation of the data gathered via paper forms is costly, time-consuming, and error-prone. Electronic forms solutions address these issues, and enable organizations to do things differently while improving business efficiency as they do so. The business benefits from these often specialized s…
Technology Audits - published 23/07/2010 - Balachandar Ganesh, Richard Edwards
|
|
Digital pen-and-paper technologies have been around for several years in various guises, yet no single offering has managed to break into mainstream use. Pen-input devices and handwriting-recognition technologies are featured on a range of handheld personal digital assistants (PDAs) and tablet PC designs, but they are seldom used. You only have to look around a typical meeting room to see that pen and paper is still the preferred option when it comes to capturing ad hoc information. In the last couple of…
Technology Audits - published 08/07/2010 - Balachandar Ganesh, Richard Edwards
|
|
Alfresco’s enterprise content management solution Alfresco Enterprise Edition 3.3 provides an open-source platform for document management, web content management, records management, image management, and digital asset management. It provides functions such as aspect support, automated rules and actions, a simple scripting environment, and integration with CIFS, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Office, and Lotus Notes.
Technology Audits - published 01/07/2010 - Balachandar Ganesh, Mike Davis, Sue Clarke
|
|
Corporate IT functions are being squeezed, not only by the enterprise-wide mandate to “deliver more with less”, but also by IT-specific drivers, to demonstrate business value through business alignment and the need to maximize the availability of business-critical services. IT departments within medium-to-large organizations have also long faced the increasingly complex task of provisioning IT services to business users (via multiple IT teams or functions acting in unison) to support business priorities....
Technology Audits - published 14/06/2010 - Balachandar Ganesh, Stephen Mann
|
|
The impact of client devices within an IT strategy is becoming more significant as desktop virtualization and cloud computing adoption accelerate. Wyse Technology is addressing this with its Cloud Client Computing product portfolio, which brings together thin-client technology, new categories of zero clients, and cloud PCs, with virtualization and infrastructure software.
Technology Audits - published 02/06/2010 - Balachandar Ganesh, Roy Illsley
|
|
With increasing volumes of information both internally and on websites, organizations, their employees, and customers require search technologies to retrieve the most relevant information. Funnelback Enterprise and Funnelback SaaS are comprehensive enterprise search and retrieval (ESR) solutions that can be used to search multiple heterogeneous sources, including intranets, enterprise applications, and websites, to provide highly relevant results. The design includes the ability to tune the search functi…
Technology Audits - published 20/05/2010 - Balachandar Ganesh, Mike Davis
|
|
IT service management is applicable to most enterprises, given the criticality of IT to modern business operations. Related management thinking and enabling technologies are both at a high level of maturity, with ITIL adoption in particular continuing to gain a foothold in enterprise IT organizations worldwide. These levels of maturity, however, somewhat belie the real level of IT service management capabilities within enterprises. While ITIL adoption continues to grow, it is all too easy for enterprises…
Technology Evaluation and Comparison Reports - published 04/05/2010 - Balachandar Ganesh, Stephen Mann, Vamshi Krishna Mokshagundam
|
|
IT departments face challenges when it comes to delivering corporate desktops. The CIO is expected to deliver what the business needs in terms of flexibility while at the same time mitigating security risks and reducing the costs and complexities involved. UKN Group aims to tackle this issue, and offers a suite of services that enable organisations to transition from the traditional desktop management model to a more flexible model.
Technology Audits - published 22/03/2010 - Balachandar Ganesh, Roy Illsley
|
|
In this technology-dependent business world, IT functions are not only subject to the enterprise-wide mandate to ‘deliver more with less’, but also IT-specific challenges that include the demonstration of the business value delivered by IT and the need to maximise the availability of business-critical services at an optimal cost. CA’s portfolio of IT service management (ITSM) solutions is an IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) v3-aligned, fully integrated software suite that can help an IT organisation addr…
Technology Audits - published 24/02/2010 - Balachandar Ganesh, Stephen Mann
|
|
IBM Tivoli Service Management is a suite of IT Service Management (ITSM) products, based on IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) v3 best practice, aimed at helping organisations to effectively manage complex IT infrastructures. It is suitable for all organisations irrespective of size and industry vertical, with the ability to scale from a small IT deployment to a global enterprise with multiple data centres. Tivoli Service Management is feature rich; for instance it provides access to relevant information, …
Technology Audits - published 03/02/2010 - Balachandar Ganesh, Stephen Mann
|
|
CA Spectrum Service Assurance offers organisations a business-service-centric view of IT management and performance. It uses service definitions and service models, defined in a Configuration Management Database (CMDB), or other Management Data Repository (MDR), to build a unified real-time service model of business-critical services and the underlying infrastructure elements that support them. CA Spectrum SA collects operational performance information from domain management tools to report at a busines…
Technology Audits - published 01/02/2010 - Balachandar Ganesh, Stephen Mann
|
|
Akamai provides a distributed computing platform for global Internet content and Web application delivery. The company uses its EdgePlatform, a globally distributed network of 50,000 servers across 1,500 locations and 70 countries, and a set of patented software tools, to provide what it calls an Application Delivery Network (ADN). Akamai argues (and Ovum agrees) that the majority of performance degradation while delivering rich and/or dynamic Web content over the Internet occurs as a result of problems …
Technology Audits - published 01/02/2010 - Balachandar Ganesh, Mark Blowers
|
|
Enterprise IT Management (EITM) is a Web-based Programme Management solution from Sterling Key for the management of IT activities and resources where project-based management is needed for increased visibility and control. This fills the gap that exists between day-to-day IT operations activities and enterprise-level projects, which are often handled by corporate portfolio management tools. EITM integrates with an organisation’s Service or Help Desk tool to provide a joined-up approach to managing IT pr…
Technology Audits - published 27/01/2010 - Balachandar Ganesh, Stephen Mann
|
|
Citrix XenDesktop is a virtual desktop delivery solution that offers a serious alternative to traditional ‘fat-client’ desktop infrastructure. While the complexities involved in managing the fat-client-based enterprise desktop landscape have been well documented, technologies such as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) have failed to offer a viable solution that lends itself to most user groups. Citrix XenDesktop offers a new approach to virtual desktop delivery by using Citrix’s proprietary FlexCast te…
Technology Audits - published 20/01/2010 - Balachandar Ganesh, Roy Illsley
|
|
Neptuny Caplan™ is a capacity-management solution for frequent and comprehensive business-oriented capacity planning with minimum resource investment. Caplan™ is agentless, and the solution uses standard and custom connectors based on both ETL and Web services technologies to populate a data warehouse with performance and workload data from systems-monitoring and management tools, and business-related data drawn from business applications. Caplan™ correlates the data between infrastructure and business K…
Technology Audits - published 20/01/2010 - Balachandar Ganesh, Roy Illsley
|
|
The levels of inefficiency that many IT infrastructures are operating at today have become completely unsustainable. The constraints on IT spending, as well as the desire to reduce the environmental footprint of IT have increased the pressure on IT departments to become more prudent in the allocation of resources to technology requirements. Furthermore, many IT departments are approaching the physical limits of their legacy infrastructure. Enterprises need to become more efficient in order to scale up th…
Technology Evaluation and Comparison Reports - published 08/12/2009 - Alaa Owaineh, Balachandar Ganesh, Roy Illsley
|
|
AppliDis, the flagship product from Systancia, offers a range of options to use virtualisation to streamline the delivery of business applications and desktop environments to end users. In doing so, AppliDis aims to ease desktop and application management overheads while at the same time demonstrating business value around increased data security, regulatory compliance, a longer hardware refresh cycle, and aiding a reduction of carbon footprint. The application delivery capabilities are based on a server…
Technology Audits - published 08/12/2009 - Alan Rodger, Balachandar Ganesh
|
|
The Thinkmap SDK is a Java-based platform for developing applications that aid organisations in visualising sets of dynamic, complex, structured data. The solution offers native support for relational databases, XML, and flat files, and ships with a flexible data source API that lets organisations integrate the application with any underlying source data set. Once developed, Thinkmap applications can be embedded as a Java applet and published via any standard Web browser, or can be embedded within Java-b…
Technology Audits - published 25/11/2009 - Balachandar Ganesh, Richard Edwards
|
|
Unstructured content accounts for approximately 80% of an organisation’s total data, yet many organisations are still failing to manage it adequately, despite having implemented a Content Management system. This suggests either that insufficient planning has gone into the implementation or that an inappropriate solution has been selected. Defining the objectives for a new solution and planning the implementation are critical; a badly implemented solution can be more damaging to the company than not deployin I?i nknown] = Forms!Add!text29, 5 [Unknown] = Forms!Add!check31,...
Technology Evaluation and Comparison Reports - published 23/11/2009 - Balachandar Ganesh, Sue Clarke
|
|
Pitney Bowes Business Insight’s Sagent Data Flow is an ETL (Extract, Load, and Transform) solution for the creation of enterprise data warehouses. Sagent Data Flow extracts structured and unstructured enterprise data from various sources, then applies a set of rules-based transformation policies, and loads the manipulated data into the target database. It offers connectors to third-party Business Intelligence (BI) solutions that use the information in the enterprise data warehouse to aid strategic busine…
Technology Audits - published 08/10/2009 - Balachandar Ganesh, Sarah Burnett
|
|
IBM Tivoli is a suite of products under the Tivoli brand that enables organisations to effectively manage the complex infrastructure required to support businesses today. As the demands on CIOs increase, the effective use of human resources becomes a critical factor in any IT department; Butler Group likes the ability that IBM Tivoli has to automatically correct predicted problems before the end user is aware of the problem. However, we believe the packaging and marketing of these products can appear ove…
Technology Audits - published 05/10/2009 - Balachandar Ganesh, Roy Illsley
|
|
Novell, through the Service Driven Data Centre (SDDC) portfolio of products, offers capabilities that are aimed at building, managing, and measuring the performance of a heterogeneous data centre. Novell offers three modular, yet integrated, solutions that deliver against the three aforementioned aspects: the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (build), the PlateSpin range of workload management solutions (manage), and the Novell Business Service Management (BSM) portfolio (measure). Novell’s acquisitions of Pl…
Technology Audits - published 30/09/2009 - Balachandar Ganesh, Roy Illsley
|
|
Jive Social Business Software (Jive SBS) 3.0 is a Web 2.0-based enterprise social collaboration platform that can be deployed as an internal-facing employee collaboration tool or as an external, customer-facing social media solution. A differentiator for Jive SBS is a bridging module that combines the ability to bridge internal employee collaboration with external partner and customer communities and deliver them as a single application suite, thereby enabling Jive Software to position SBS as a solution …
Technology Audits - published 14/09/2009 - Balachandar Ganesh, Sue Clarke
|
|
When it comes to Enterprise Collaboration, many organisations remain 'land-locked'; restricted by the architectures, deployment models, and functionality of solutions that were conceived in another age - an age when there was no Web 2.0, no mobile Internet, no impending pandemic, and no economic crisis. Of those organisations that are trying to move ahead in the 'new world of work', many IT departments are struggling to keep pace with the rapidly-changing world of information worker solutions and with th…
Technology Evaluation and Comparison Reports - published 09/09/2009 - Angela Eager, Balachandar Ganesh, Chandranshu Singh, Mark Blowers, Richard Edwards, Rob Hailstone, Sarah Burnett, Sue Clarke
|
