Quick quiz for all you Cloud aficionados out there: what’s missing from the NIST definition of Cloud Computing? To make this challenge easy for you, here’s the definition: “Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”

Give up? What’s missing is any mention of data centers. Sure, today’s Clouds typically consist of resources in data centers, running one way or another on racks full of physical servers. But there’s nothing in the definition of Cloud that specifies anything about the physical location of Cloud resources.

Look at the NIST definition again. If you’ve seen this definition before, you may notice a new word that NIST presumably added after their …

Workforce engagement with enterprise mobility solutions is critical if the projects are to deliver the efficiency and productivity intended, but new research suggests many companies are failing to consider the factors that affect employee buy-in when implementing these systems.

Research firm Vanson Bourne discovered and alarming trend when it polled 1000 IT and business decision makers on their mobilisation strategies. It found that while 42% of businesses claimed to be actively developing a mobile app for employees, only a quarter believed that their mobile systems had been embraced by the majority of employees.

Additionally, and despite firms over 500 employees planning to spend an average of £390,000 on mobility software in the next 12-18 months, 41% of respondents reported that take up of such schemes had been limited to less than a quarter of the workforce.

Ken Parmelee, senior director of product management at Antenna Software, one of the …

If you believe that you’ve had to learn more about the safe online operation and ongoing management of your PC than you ever wanted to know, then you’ll be pleased to discover that there’s relief on the horizon. According to the latest market study by Gartner, the reign of the personal computer is coming to an apparent close. By 2014, the personal cloud will replace the personal computer — and this transition will likely include greater use of media tablets, chromebooks or other similar devices.

Gartner analysts said the personal cloud will become the foundation for a new era that will provide users with an increased level of flexibility with the devices they use for daily activities — leveraging the strengths of each device, ultimately enabling new levels of user satisfaction and productivity.

However, Garner says that it will require enterprise IT leaders and their staff to fundamentally rethink …

The latest round of SaaS ERP market forecasts are more grounded in the reality of CIO priorities and committed projects in 2012 than ever before.  And this is good news for the many vendors competing in the Financial Management Systems (FMS), Human Capital Management (HCM) and Manufacturing segments of the SaaS ERP market.

Two weeks ago in Houston I interviewed twenty-five different CIOs, IT Directors, CEOs and CTOs as part of a persona research study I am doing.  Their take on SaaS ERP was consistent with what this round-up shows, namely this type of SaaS application is best suited for extending beyond, not replacing, the main ERP systems and platforms.   I concentrated on SaaS ERP adoption in manufacturing and learned the following during my interviews:

• Of the CIOs I spoke with, SaaS ERP is getting the most traction on the Financial Management Systems side.  The majority of CIOs I spoke …

By: Kevin Kern, CEO at Innotas

In Baseball, no one knows what to call the player who stashes several gloves in his locker, shows up each day oblivious to where he’ll be on the field, if he plays at all.  Is he a utility player, a super-utility player, a super sub, or simply multi-dimensional? 

We think a recent article written by PCWorld’s Lucas Mearian supports the point why utility players are so valuable within IT. We think the multi-dimensional tag is appropriate for IT professionals with more than one skill set.  One of the issues that IT organizations are facing today is how to manage not only time of a resource, but how to catalog the various skill sets of each resource so that one can appropriately match time and skill set to project or task.

The article points out several examples of how companies invest …

I went to dinner last night with my pal, EMC big wig Rich Napolitano, and a startup he knows called Plexxi.  I’ve known Rich for many years since his startup Pirus (acquired by Sun for way too much money, god bless them).

Now Plexxi is still in stealth mode so I won’t unwrap them yet, but suffice to say they are entering the world that I love – an enormously disruptive ($$) market ripe for inevitable change (the networking space) because of powerful, long-term secular trends (that they didn’t have to create).  All the pieces required for mega-change.

I can’t say that Plexxi will be the next VMware, Facebook, or other smash, but at least they are smart enough to make sure the market they went into has the characteristics that make a mega-outcome possible.  Most don’t.

Which gets me to the point du jour – we still …