Different factors are driving changes for businesses who need to continuously adapt to them. Not having the right talent available is a challenge in being able to adapt to those changes. Efficiently managing the talent pool is an important to businesses that is leading to numerous acquisitions in this space.
That observation leads me to IBM’s recently announced acquisition of Kenexa. With this purchase, IBM is getting into the HCM application space in direct competition with Oracle who acquired Taleo, Salesforce who acquired Rypple and SAP who acquired SuccessFactors for similar reasons. Demand for solutions in this space is also increasing due to the entry of millennial candidates into the workplace who are likely to look for job satisfaction in addition to typical benefits, likely to re-locate if they find the right position and also are very social. All these characteristics bring different expectations of HCM solutions by enterprises to cater to a different expectation of the workplace. In other words, in Kenexa, IBM picked solution focused on an area with a significant projected worldwide demand growth, as candidates are growing pickier in choosing an employer.
Study: 44.4% of IT Pros Say They Will Move to the Cloud In the Next Year
Qumu today announced the results of their 2012 IT in the Cloud Assessment Project. A survey of over 700 IT professionals conducted online by Toluna found that 44.4% of them will be moving applications to the cloud within the next 12 months, with up to 33.4% saying that this will include up to half of their applications.
54.5% of respondents touted the benefits of making the move to cloud-based applications. When asked what benefits they thought were most important, surprisingly, more than 30% of IT professionals said better security. This result indicates that companies are becoming more comfortable with the quality of security in cloud based apps. After security, other benefits identified are:
- Cost savings once deployed – 26.9%
- Better mobility support – 25.9%
- Time saved not having to update infrastructure – 22%
- Quick deployment – 18.5%
- Better for the environment – 12.6%
- Elasticity to scale up or down as needed – 11%
- Outsourced system support and maintenance – 10.9%
Even as IT professionals report they are planning to move applications to the cloud, many organizations already have. The survey found that fully 44.9% of IT professionals are already running some applications in the cloud. The top applications include email (25.9%), storage (24%) and document management (13.9%). Other applications include project management (11%), CRM (10.3%), marketing automation (6.8%), video communication (10.3%) and employee portals (11.3%).
Enterprises are adopting collaborative cloud-based solutions to enable their people to be more connected and productive. For many companies, video communications have become an integrated part of the corporate culture. 55% of respondents site benefits of using a secure YouTube-like service for enterprise video sharing. According to the survey, the biggest benefits that IT professionals see from using such services include:
- Increased access to training videos – 26.1%
- Gives employees a “voice” to share ideas – 24.3%
- Increased access to subject matter experts knowledge – 23.6%
- Better employee collaboration – 22.5%
- Improved organization and search of company video assets – 20.6%
Additionally, the survey found surprising differences between large enterprises and small to medium sized businesses. In all cases, large enterprises were more favorable to cloud-based solutions than SMBs:
- Running current applications in the cloud (51% vs. 42.4%)
- Seeing benefits in migrating applications to the cloud (59.5% vs.
52.5%) - Seeing benefits of using a secure enterprise video-sharing service
(63.3% vs. 47.3%)
“The results showing that large enterprises are more inclined to Cloud applications is somewhat surprising. Some may expect large companies to be concerned with Cloud security,” said Ray Hood, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Qumu. “We believe that larger companies have more history with IT outsourcing and see the Cloud as the logical next step.”
The survey results come alongside the release of Qumu’s latest whitepaper, Managing Business Video in the cloud and Hybrid Clouds, as well as Qumu’s attendance at IBC 2012, the premier annual conference and exhibition for professionals engaged in the creation, management and delivery of electronic media.
SYSPRO ERP Software Able to Facilitate Medical Device Unit Recalls
SYSPRO today announced that SYSPRO ERP software offers manufacturers extensive traceability capabilities to facilitate the ability of manufacturers to trace products from origin, through the manufacturing process, to their ultimate destination, fully maintaining assurance certification and tracking expiration dates. The reaffirmation of the extensive traceability functionalities inherent in SYSPRO ERP software was in reaction to the announcement that “over 123 million medical device units were recalled in the second quarter of 2012, reaching an eight-quarter high,” according to the quarterly ExpertRECALL Index released August 22, 2012.
SYSPRO lot traceability and serial tracking functionality afford extensive visibility up or down the supply chain, as well as providing specific component to parent tracking, thereby providing the means to expedite recalls, should the need arise. SYSPRO optionally allows specific traceable components to be reserved for specific work-orders, as well as providing the flexibility of specifying the parent traceable numbers at the beginning, during or the end of the manufacturing process.
The Associated Press article reporting the record number of recalls contains the following statement by Mike Rozembajgier, vice president of recalls at Stericycle ExpertRECALL, “The growing importance of this product category means that companies need to have a comprehensive recall plan in place that can be deployed within the blink of an eye and can effectively protect their customers…”
According to SYSPRO USA President Joey Benadretti, “The implementation of cost- effective SYSPRO software helps medical device manufacturers streamline their supply chains and also to employ extensive ‘backwards and forwards’ component and product traceability for speedy recalls.
Technology is changing faster than the methods of procuring it
Kevin Noonan, Research Director, Public Sector, Ovum
Many procedures for government procurement can be traced back through earlier stages of technology development. Over time, procurement has delivered substantial value and, like technology, it has developed and matured. However, the technology sector is changing at an increasing pace and procurement is struggling to keep up.
Business needs have also changed. Today’s corporate priorities are more about agency-wide productivity and consistency delivering better government outcomes. We recently discussed this phenomenon in the Ovum report Bridging the Gap Between IT Cost-Cutting and Agency Productivity. Some agencies are still chasing simple, across-the-board IT cost-cutting, while others are driving more sophisticated savings measures by focusing on agency-wide productivity. Of course, this approach also requires more sophisticated vendor relationships and a much lower tolerance of failure.
The changing technology landscape requires a rethink of requirements-gathering
Today there is a much richer set of engagement options …
Rackspace UK Achieves ISO 14001 Environmental Management Certification
Rackspace® Hosting (NYSE: RAX), the open cloud company, has achieved certification to the ISO 14001:2004 Environmental Management standard. The certification is based upon an external validation of the company’s environmental performance with regard to the design, implementation and support of hosting solutions in its UK data centre and office operations.
ISO 14001 certification among cloud data centre providers is still comparatively rare and Rackspace continues to be environmentally proactive in improving its operations. Adherence to the voluntary 14000 or 14001 standards is evidence of Rackspace’s efforts to both improve and formally systematise the company’s environmental management efforts.
Vietnam, Ghana, Senegal Among Developing ICT Leaders
I recently reported on overall and regional leaders in our latest research at the Tau Institute (which has offices in Illinois and Manila, Philippines). Now here’s a look at leaders by income tier – this is a way to compare similarly developed nations with one another, regardless of location.
We’ve been able to include 91 countries into the mix. The mission is to produce a sophisticated ranking that takes into account relative progress of the nations of the world when it comes to ICT. We integrate several publicly available factors into our own algorithm. There is thus transparency in the data we input combined with a specialized weighting system that we believe reveals new insight into the statistics.
We’ve integrated the following factors into a single, weighted formula:
* Per capita income (from the World Bank)
* Local cost of living (ditto)
* Gini coefficient (income disparity as measured by the United Nations and CIA)
* Perception of corruption (from Transparency International)
* Human development (according to the United Nations)
* Data servers per capita (adjusted for local income, as measured by the World Bank)
* Average bandwidth speed (from Ookla, Inc.)
* % of population with access to the Internet (from the International Telecommunications Union)
* % population with broadband connections (ditto)
In the end, we’ve created a “pound-for-pound” analysis that reveals the countries that are doing the most with what they have. Our method goes far beyond the normal rankings one sees that simply show wealthy countries on top, developing nations on the bottom.
We can view the datas in several ways. For today, I’ll list the countries that have been most successful on a relative basis so far.
Tomorrow, I’ll list the countries with the most raw potential. The “raw” ranking hits a middle ground of opportunity and development. Countries that have lagged regardless of income level (such as Norway and Libya) do not fare as well in this index as countries that have shown good relative ICT commitments (such as Jordan), even if they’re still impoverished (such as Ethiopia).
As a reality check and benchmark, we’ve created a “Perfect Land” which has optimal statistics in all categories. The idea is that no country should beat Perfect Land in the overall index, although many countries will beat it in the raw index, which is weighted toward potential.
Here are the Overall leaders, sorted by income tier.
Tier 1 (>$30K in per capita income)
New Zealand (#3 in the world overall)
Netherlands (#4 in the world overall)
Finland (#5 in the world overall)
Denmark
Sweden
Tier 2 ($13K-$29K)
South Korea (#1 in the world overall)
Estonia (#2 in the world overall)
Lithuania
Taiwan
Poland
Tier 3 ($6K-$13K)
Bulgaria
Romania
Latvia
Turkey
Serbia
Tier 4 ($2K-$6K)
Jordan
Jamaica
Ukraine
Mongolia
Morocco
Tunisia
Philippines
China
Armenia
Thailand
Tier 5 (<$2K) Vietnam Ghana Senegal Kenya India Each of these countries has a story to tell, as do all countries covered in our research. We are currently engaging with local resources in some of the places that emerge as leaders. We are also very interested in making new connections within any country – the Tau Index serves merely to start conversations about ICT and its role in increasing economic development and improving the lives of people. Follow me on Twitter
Managing the Explosive Growth and Consolidation of Big Data in the Cloud
IT departments are experiencing storage capacity needs doubling every 12-18 months, 50x the amount of information and 75x the number of files. IT managers are dealing with growing constraints on space, power and costs to manage their data center infrastructure. Intel is helping businesses and users realize the benefits of cloud computing technology by working to develop open standards that operate across disparate IT infrastructures and by delivering cloud-based architectures that enable federated, automated and client-aware cloud services. In his General Session at Cloud Expo New York, Tony Hamilton, Enterprise Marketing Manager at Intel, discusses how the foundation for this vision will be defined by an open approach that delivers best of breed technologies + flexibility + choice from data center infrastructure to client devices. and how Intel is bringing together a broad network of leading hardware and solution providers to build and enhance cloud solutions that are interoperable, multi-vendor and embrace open standards.
Big Data – Business Value
With every passing day, Big Data assumes new strength as a significant force in our industry. Someone even said that Big Data is transforming business same way IT did few decades ago.
The overall revenue (includes hardware, software, service) for Big Data is said to be around $5.1B in 2011 and includes players such as IBM, Intel, HP, Fujitsu, etc. This is hard to fathom! But pure-play revenue coming from players such as Vertica, Aster, Cloudera, Greenplum, 1010Data, etc. is valued at $468M in 2011. Then someone said the projected revenue from Big Data will reach an astounding $53B by 2017 (source- Wikibon), growing to $10B in 2013, $32 in 2015 and $48B in 2016. We can argue on these numbers, but let us agree that this will be quite big. Why is that?
Cloud Computing: Virtustream Gets Plum Cloud Job
Virtustream has snared a handsome contract to move Veyance Technologies’ complex global SAP environment to its xStream cloud platform where it will run in production.
Veyance, in case you don’t know, is the exclusive manufacturer and marketer of Goodyear engineered products worldwide and its SAP environment serves over 3,000 users.
Its legacy SAP R/3, SAP XI, TREX, Netweaver, ITS and WAS systems were previously deployed on physical hardware in a traditional outsourcing arrangement. It decided to move to the cloud to enable an extensive global data center and server consolidation initiative, which will cut its IT costs, and to let it scale dynamically as future expansion needs.
Veyance will still manage the multi-tenant environment with a single panel of glass.
Its requirements reportedly included true consumption-based pricing, guaranteed compute resources, data protection and industry-leading SLAs. The xStream platform will also provide comprehensive disaster recovery and data protection.
Software as a Service (SaaS), Security and Risk Management: Part 1
As cloud computing technologies and offerings mature and evolve in its services to customers, one common consumer use will be that of the Software as a Service (SaaS) model.
My earlier articles have touched on the various models, risks, security and forensics at several levels. There is also a plethora of resources available now that end users can educate themselves with that are freely available online.
This article will focus on aspects of security that impact the SaaS environment as developed, presented or augmented by me for several Cloud Computing projects.
Before we proceed in the subject matter, a brief clarification of what I refer to as the cloud follows. Keep in mind that this term “cloud computing” is now being used to describe a broad range of services to include product descriptors that sits outside the common definition of the cloud.