|
SAP customers fearing a maintenance price increase in early 2010 under the Enterprise Support programme will have a reprieve following the announcement that the increase will be postponed pending “intensified engagement” with customers and user groups to prove the value of the programme.
OpinionWire Articles - published 18/12/2009 - Angela Eager
|
|
The infrastructure-management market is becoming more competitive and the role of IT is at a tipping point, according to a recent major technology comparison report published by Ovum Butler Group ‘Infrastructure Management 2009 – driving increased business value through the strategic use of IT’.
OpinionWire Articles - published 18/12/2009 - Roy Illsley
|
|
The recent release by Microsoft of the Windows 7 OS, and middleware servers Windows Server 2008 R2, Exchange Server 2010, and (soon to go GA) Azure, indicate how critical the cloud is as an underlying strategy for Microsoft. These releases mark only the second time for the company that a new OS release has coincided with major middleware/platform releases, allowing synchronisation of delivery mechanisms and in particular, enablement of Microsoft cloud offerings. How much of a gamble this is for Microsoft…
OpinionWire Articles - published 18/12/2009 - Michael Azoff
|
|
Interviews with 15 large organisations based in the UK conducted by Plantronics, a maker of communications headsets, indicates that more than half of knowledge workers perform better outside the office and the normal hours of 9am to 5pm. The discussions also highlighted the importance for professionals to discover workspaces that best suit their role and work style.
OpinionWire Articles - published 18/12/2009 - Mark Blowers
|
|
The difference that server virtualisation has made to the data centre cannot be overestimated, but although benefits such as improved server utilisation and reduced operating costs are all well established, other benefits such as High Availability (HA), Business Continuity (BC), and Disaster Recovery (DR), are now receiving most of the attention.
OpinionWire Articles - published 14/12/2009 - Roy Illsley
|
|
The eyes of the world will be on Copenhagen for the next couple of weeks as the city hosts the United Nations Climate Change Conference. However, the continuing lack of consensus and joined-up action by governments to date suggests the conference is unlikely to result in much immediate action. Furthermore, a recent data breach at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit has sparked a row over the university’s climate-change data, providing sceptics with more excuses for procrastination. Amid…
OpinionWire Articles - published 14/12/2009 - Sarah Burnett
|
|
At a recent gathering of customer-service professionals at the RightNow Technologies conference, one of the recurring themes was the value of a good customer experience. While this is not a new realisation, it is clear that there has been movement in terms of execution, with a clear focus on proactive engagement with customers resulting in positive business value.
OpinionWire Articles - published 14/12/2009 - Angela Eager
|
|
As 2009 draws to a close, one cannot help think that it has been a year of ‘what should have been’ for the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) discipline of IT financial management (and in many respects for its ITIL v3 Service Strategy sibling Service Portfolio Management). This is not only an analyst-observed opinion, IT Service Management (ITSM) tool vendors are also reporting reluctance on the part of customers to invest in this ITIL discipline at what should be the ideal time to increase the level of IT…
OpinionWire Articles - published 14/12/2009 - Stephen Mann
|
|
At the Annual itSMF UK Conference on 9-10 November, I attended a presentation from PA Consulting called ‘Re-energising ITIL – what to do after the project has gone’. I listened to the presenters with interest but couldn’t help thinking more deeply on a theory I’ve had for a while: that organisations can’t, or won’t, continue to adopt ITIL after the project-employed third parties have left.
OpinionWire Articles - published 08/12/2009 - Stephen Mann
|
|
Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems for US$7.4 billion has met a stumbling block in the shape of the EU Competition Commission, which has concerns over, of all things, the fate of the MySQL open source database. This is something that doesn’t appear to have worried the US DoJ, which approved the deal after a long investigation.
OpinionWire Articles - published 08/12/2009 - Mike Thompson
|
|
In November, seven members of Hewlett-Packard’s call centre in Liverpool jointly won the jackpot of over UKŁ45 million in the EuroMillions lottery draw, and have each decided that their future plans no longer include working at the call centre. A jackpot win is unlikely, but it might be appropriate to consider a similar exodus of staff and its impact on business continuity, and on IT planning in particular.
OpinionWire Articles - published 08/12/2009 - Rob Hailstone
|
|
According to a survey organised by Credant Technologies amongst licensed London taxi drivers, passengers leave around 10,000 mobile phones a month in the back of taxis (which equates to one every two months per taxi), and more than 1,000 other handheld devices, including iPods, laptops and memory sticks. Statistically, a London taxi cab is good place to lose your mobile device, as 80% of cabbies managed to reunite passengers with their lost property; however, with the party season fast approaching, and m…
OpinionWire Articles - published 08/12/2009 - Richard Edwards
|
|
I’m beginning to wonder if our experience with consumer-oriented applications and services is setting an expectation that in-house and off-the-shelf enterprise applications can never live up to in terms of their ‘joy of use’. With ‘cool’ and ‘sexy’ now de rigueur for consumer apps, I sense that the time is fast approaching when line-of-business applications will be expected to be the same, albeit in a pin-striped suit and polished pair of Oxfords.
OpinionWire Articles - published 26/11/2009 - Richard Edwards
|
|
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has always been one of those concepts that only really makes sense in the presence of business endorsement, yet remains peculiarly difficult to explain in business terms. At the end of a recent SOA-focused event in The Netherlands, and following a series of discussions, a group of luminaries published their SOA Manifesto at http://www.soa-manifesto.org/.
OpinionWire Articles - published 26/11/2009 - Rob Hailstone
|
|
The idea of offering storage backup as a service is not new as there were companies at the turn of the century offering such services. However, the development of cloud storage has resulted in the growth of a new generation of vendors providing managed storage. Barracuda Networks has a slightly different approach to the cloud backup service. It offers a hybrid solution that combines the backup of data internally on an appliance owned by the organisation but supplied by Barracuda, with a storage subscript…
OpinionWire Articles - published 26/11/2009 - Sue Clarke
|
|
HP has made a new product announcement for its Data Protector backup and recovery software. Data Protector Notebook Extension provides protection for PC clients such as desktop PCs and laptops to enable organisations to protect data stored outside of the data centre, something not typically included in normal backup procedures. It provides two types of protection: Continuous File Protection, which is best suited to small files such as Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, as well as Adobe PDF file…
OpinionWire Articles - published 20/11/2009 - Sue Clarke
|
|
As we approach the end of the decade, the data warehousing market stands out as one that has become much more competitive and dynamic than before thanks to developments such as the low-cost data warehouse appliance. The trend for analytical databases has further increased choice and performance options. These and other more recent innovations are set to keep the data warehousing market dynamic for the foreseeable future.
OpinionWire Articles - published 20/11/2009 - Sarah Burnett
|
|
This week sees the formal unveiling of Microsoft Office 2010, with beta versions available to customers, partners, and third-party developers. When Microsoft Office for Windows was launched back in October 1989 there were already competing offerings on the market, and today is no different. However, today’s knowledge worker wants to use the Web as well as the desktop for office productivity applications.
OpinionWire Articles - published 20/11/2009 - Richard Edwards
|
|
According to widely reported statistics the UK economy continued to shrink between July and September this year making the recession the longest since records began. And while there is evidence that other European economies are beginning to show the first positive signs of recovery, all countries within the EU continue to suffer from rising levels of unemployment. At the beginning of the downturn it was recognised that businesses would shed staff, and that due to the technology skills that many employees…
OpinionWire Articles - published 20/11/2009 - Andy Kellett
|
|
At its recent Convergence conference in London, Microsoft delivered the cheering news that Dynamics CRM Online will finally be available outside of North America and Canada by the end of 2010, with Microsoft planning to outline in six months time the countries where it will be available and the launch timescales. It will not be moving into the world of SaaS ERP, however, at least not under a pure SaaS model, preferring instead a partner-led private cloud approach.
OpinionWire Articles - published 16/11/2009 - Angela Eager
|
|
Operational risk has been defined as the risk of loss resulting from inadequate or failed internal processes, people, and systems, or from external events. The entire range of processes and activities of an enterprise and its IT organisation, from strategic to operational management, face risks. While it is impractical to think of completely eliminating risks faced by the organisation, however carefully planned or managed, it is certainly possible to reduce risk to a level that can be borne by the organi
OpinionWire Articles - published 16/11/2009 - Sue Clarke
|
|
When Oracle announced its intention to acquire Sun Microsystems in April the general expectation was that the acquisition would be completed around the end of the summer holiday period. After all, Sun was not exactly fighting off Oracle’s advances as happened with some of Oracle’s acquisitions over the last few years. But it is now November and there is no immediate conclusion in sight. Apportioning blame is not very helpful, but the reasons for this are mostly as a result of delays in the regulatory app…
OpinionWire Articles - published 16/11/2009 - Rob Hailstone
|
|
Virtualisation technology and the higher-level ecosystem surrounding it have matured rapidly over the last two or three years, during which time adoption rates have rocketed. With the answers to the many ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions around virtualisation now being well and widely understood, much of the focus is necessarily on important enterprise considerations such as management and security. This month’s announcements from EMC have shown that the company is likely to be an increasingly important player a…
OpinionWire Articles - published 16/11/2009 - Alan Rodger
|
|
Recent financial figures published by a number of leading Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) enterprise application vendors show strong double-digit growth despite the global economic slowdown. The Business Intelligence (BI) market has always been closely linked to the enterprise applications market because BI traditionally taps into the vast amounts of data that enterprise applications generate. The increasing volumes of enterprise data on the cloud opens up opportunities for BI to follow suit.
OpinionWire Articles - published 12/11/2009 - Sarah Burnett
|
|
Requirements Management (RM) is one of the key disciplines in software engineering and Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) for achieving project success: ensuring that the requirements are captured, understood, and managed. The adoption of Agile processes and methodologies has now reached the mainstream and Agile requirements are created and managed in two ways that differ radically from traditional RM. First, the high-level project requirements are structured in terms of stories or business value fea…
OpinionWire Articles - published 12/11/2009 - Michael Azoff
|
