By Andrew Carr, CEO Bull UK & Ireland @acarr_bull

Businesses today increasingly look at technologies like big data and software-defined networking as being disruptive in the sense that they force organisations to evaluate new business models and new routes to market.

Rather than having negative associations, disruptive in this context means having an impact through a different way of thinking about business issues and challenges, as opposed to the traditional dictionary definition of ‘throwing into confusion or disorder’.

This new interpretation of the word is focused on the development of new ways of working, ultimately leading to new revenue streams and enhanced competitive edge. Indeed, truly disruptive technologies will have a lasting impact on the IT and business landscape and will ultimately be absorbed into the mainstream.

This is what is happening today with one of the most celebrated disruptive technologies of all: cloud computing, which is now widely seen as …

As anyone with a vested interest in cloud computing will know, the perception of the data centre has evolved considerably, from isolated resource centres to more connected pools, helping maximise IT efficiency.

Not surprisingly, with the potential available, the numbers are growing. 60% of server workloads are set to be virtualised by 2014, compared to only 12% in 2008m, with total investment in data centre infrastructure growing 5% on average year on year.

There are, of course, pros and cons to virtualisation, with companies continuing to balance out efficiency and agility against security considerations.

Network solutions provider Ciena, in an infographic, has stated that “the cloud is only as good as the network that supports it,” calling its solution a “data centre without walls”.

Find out the journey from data centre to cloud in the infographic below (click to enlarge):

Tony Baer, Principal Analyst, IT – Enterprise Solutions

With the X3 generation of the Oracle Exadata and Exalogic engineered-systems platforms significantly upping the amount of Flash (SSD) and memory (DRAM), Oracle is now cranking up the speed on its applications portfolio. With Flash and DRAM prices plummeting, it is now cost-effective to persist, rather than temporarily cache, data. Oracle claims that much of its existing application portfolio can run up to 16x faster, unmodified, on the X3-2 Oracle Exadata and Exalogic models.

Oracle is now taking the next step in optimizing portions of its application portfolio to take full advantage of the new X3-2 line. Oracle’s Fast Data approach to enterprise applications follows SAP’s release of SAP Business Suite and CRM on the in-memory HANA platform. Ovum believes that Oracle’s approach is a logical first step, and would like to see this eventually yield a new generation of …

You may have heard that cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) models can turn software technology into a pay-as-you-go utility that businesses can “plug in to” and use like electricity?

Perhaps — however, software technology is far more varied, nuanced and diverse than electricity. You don’t win customers by having better electricity than your competition. Software, by contrast,…

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Activist shareholder Elliott Management, the hedge fund that pushed Novell

and BMC into selling out and has Compuware on its list, is muscling in on

NetApp.

According to Bloomberg it has taken a “significant” position still under 5%

in the data storage house, meaning to push for changes to the board and a

cash return strategy.

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Organizations across the world are increasingly starting to see the benefits of moving more and more services to the cloud. The focus on the cost-saving potential of cloud is rapidly shifting to completely transforming the business with cloud. As organizations are investing enormous sums on technology they are starting to realize that in order to maximize the return on investment and accelerate the business transformation process the first area of focus should be people. By ensuring the organization is ‘cloud-ready’ the organizational adoption will be much faster and much better. A workforce ready and eager to maximize the potential value and benefit will more readily embrace a cloud strategy.

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