Andrew Brosnan, Senior Analyst, Health Sciences

Life sciences companies are faced with significant economic challenges that necessitate a change in their business model: the cost of developing new drugs is too high, and the current cost of healthcare is unsustainable. As a result, big pharmaceutical companies must leverage new technologies to extract greater value from their data while reducing the cost of drug development.

At this year’s Oracle OpenWorld conference, Oracle and Accenture outlined the R&D IT platform that they are developing to provide pharma companies with enhanced analytical capabilities while streamlining the industry’s drug development operations.

A complex environment and increasing trial costs necessitate change

The cost of clinical trials has been steadily increasing, and the thresholds for the commercialization of new drugs have been raised. Clinical trials are becoming more difficult to run and more complex in nature, particularly with the increasing application of personalized …

Sitting in a familiar coffee shop outside Victoria Station in Central London, I await the arrival of David D’Orazi, one of the foremost consultants within the cloud computing and virtualization industry.

Having spent the last five years analysing the way business technology has changed, I’m excited to meet D’Orazi who has over thirty years’ experience in enterprise technology solutions having held positions for a range of managed services vendors such as Selection Services and Commensus as well as being involved in several start-up firms.

My expectations are of a mature man who has witnessed the transition from the mainframe computer years through to the PC era and latterly through the dotcom boom to the rise and stagnation of cloud technologies; but as I meet D’Orazi again, I’m overwhelmed by the knowledge and expertise that he possesses and how the transition of technology has left a …

IBM’s bid to derail Amazon’s awarding of a lucrative $600m CIA cloud computing contract has been rebuffed after a federal judge ruled in favour of Amazon.

The ruling from Judge Thomas Wheeler, which was posted on PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) earlier this week, puts to an end – in theory anyway, IBM can of course still appeal – a saga which has been played out in courtrooms and behind closed doors throughout the summer.

For Jeff Bezos and company, it will certainly appear that justice has been served, after the original contract was handed to Amazon only for IBM to appeal.

Big Blue’s reasons at the time were straightforward enough; Amazon’s proposal was $50m a year more expensive, and the procedures used to rank Amazon’s proposal as being technically superior were wide of the mark, IBM claimed.

A report from the Government Accountability Office …

Earlier this year Infor CEO Charles Phillips claimed that enterprise apps and software “sucked” – but not so according to Hewlett Packard’s Paul Evans who is part of the company’s Application Transformation global marketing division.

“Enterprise apps can be beautiful. For us mobile apps are enterprise apps,” says Evans, who is speaking at Apps World Europe at Earls Court 2 on October 22-23. However he admits that they have evolved hugely from their more cumbersome origins.

“When enterprise apps came out they weren’t designed to be fun or intuitive. Now with a better design people can do all sorts of things without that level of training. Enterprise apps going forward can be fun and intuitive and that will be done by giving people a very design led environment,” he says.

The worry of course about the greater proliferation of enterprise apps comes from their wider adoption both in …

Enterprises are defining their own cloud strategies, their own way, ignoring vendor hype and requiring metrics that reflect security (61%), mean-time-to-recover from outages (57%), number of data center outages (51%).

This and many insights were gained from attending the 451 Research Hosting and Cloud Transformation Summit at the Bellagio Resort & Casino in Las Vegas last week. 451 Research provided a free pass to the event but did not cover travel, hotel or meals.

What’s refreshing about 451 Group’s conferences is that each of their companies including 451 Research, Uptime Institute, and Yankee Group rely on solid methodologies to research their coverage areas and markets. This results in presentations that are packed with insight and are based on a solid foundation of interviews and research.  

I had a chance to catch up with SoftLayer’s Lance Crosby, Simon West and Andre Fuochi for an update on how the IBM …

BYOD security is and has been a major point of interest (perhaps hype) in IT for some time now. The desire for employees to use their own smartphones and devices frames an opportunity for businesses to cut capital expenses and increase efficiency.

Despite the potential upsides, and while there are many companies that have come to embrace such an approach, there are major hurdles where security and compliance are concerned.

As an added layer of complexity, many companies are also balancing the cloud and network requirements of BYOD with the degree to which they have outsourced their infrastructure to managed service providers or other outsourced cloud and infrastructure providers.

What primary concerns of BYOD do managed services figure in?

Security: One of the chief challenges to BYOD, and a major component of maintaining compliance, security on the technical end benefits from seasoned practitioners. Most companies instituting BYOD policies and procedures …

With executives satisfied that they can get a return on investment for low-level apps in the cloud, 2014 is going to be the year when enterprise mission-critical apps will take charge, according to cloudy infrastructure platform provider Virtustream.

The findings have been released in a report, entitled “ERP – The Cuckoo in Cloud Land”, and gives insight both into the ERP (enterprise resource planning) landscape as well as the position of mission critical apps in the cloud.

The report initially shows that SAP still dominates the ERP space. 84% of respondents said they used at least one form of ERP, with SAP comprising 55% and rival Oracle 44%, forming something of a duopoly.

Further, SAP users have a more advanced cloud strategy according to the research. Almost nine in 10 (89%) SAP users have utilised cloud in their organisation, compared with 77% of overall respondents.

The report argues that each company …

Around the world, market leaders in all industries have already deployed managed cloud services. Seeking to use business technology as a strategic lever to advance past their competition on multiple fronts, the senior executives at these leading companies are eager to learn about the next phase of cloud service development.

Worldwide spending on public IT cloud services will reach $47.4 billion in 2013 and will reach more than $107 billion by 2017, according to the latest market study by International Data Corporation (IDC). Over the 2013–2017 forecast period, public cloud services will have a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23.5 percent, that’s five times the IT industry growth as a whole.

As one of the key technologies enabling the industry-wide shift, cloud computing has played a crucial role in changing the way companies consume and use business technology. IDC believes that there are signs that …

Gartner has been gazing into its crystal ball once again, and now the smoke signals have cleared the message is simple: get going with a hybrid cloud solution, because half of big enterprises are going to be deployed by 2017.

The analyst house puts hybrid cloud where the private cloud was in 2010; plenty of companies wanting to get on board, but the actual uptake remains low.

But it’s not going to be available instantly: Gartner recommends chief execs should consider the cloud because of its agility rather than lower costs, a complete change of priority for cloud adoption.

“Virtualisation reduces capital expenses, and standards and automation reduce operational expenses,” noted Thomas Bittman, Gartner VP and distinguished analyst. “However, taking the next step of adding usage metrics, self-service offerings and automated provisioning requires investment in technologies without a significant reduction in operational cost.

“With this in mind, the driving …

When I first discuss security in our Licensed ZapThink Architect (LZA) SOA course, I ask the class the following question: if a building had 20 exterior doors, and you locked 19 of them, would you be 95% secure? The answer to this 20-doors problem, of course, is absolutely not – you’d be 0% secure, since the bad guys are generally smart enough to find the unlocked door.

While the 20-doors problem serves to illustrate how important it is to secure your Services as part of a comprehensive enterprise IT strategy, the same lesson applies to enterprise Cybersecurity in general: applying inconsistent security policies across an organization leads to weaknesses hackers are only too happy to exploit.

However, when we’re talking about the entire enterprise, the Cybersecurity challenge is vastly more complex than simply securing all your software interfaces. Adequate security involves people, process, information, as well as technology. Getting …