Taking the alignment of the CMO and CIO beyond strategy into IT Cost Optimization. Without operational excellence and cost optimization—specifically technology asset optimization, whether IT assets or marketing technology assets—cost pressures could limit funding for innovation.
With CMOs driving new investments in technology infrastructure, CIOs have new challenges in ensuring that IT costs are transparent, usage is metered and tracked, and savings are applied to fund increasing innovation, regardless of where the technology spend originates. Those organizations where CMOs and CIOs are «business-first» and aligned are strategically ready to outpace their competition. Funding potential innovation during a time of continued cost pressure is, however, a non-trivial challenge.
Amazon and Apple: Different Paths to Innovation
Every organization needs to consider innovation as part of their strategy.
Bernard Golden recently wrote a book titled Amazon Web Services (AWS) for Dummies, which I had an opportunity to review. One intriguing segment of the book came from a section offering 10 reasons to use AWS and one that stood out was AWS enables Innovation. Results from innovation are more immediate when it leverages the capability of cloud computing to change underlying processes across a broad segment of industries. AWS not only challenges legacy vendors in the enterprise but also help them to dominate areas of new IT revenue from start-ups funded by venture capitalists. For example, while discontinuing shrink-wrapped products, Adobe powers their cloud-delivered services with AWS.
LSI Corporation to Exhibit at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley
SYS-CON Events announced today that LSI Corporation will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 13th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 4–7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
LSI Corporation (NASDAQ: LSI) designs semiconductors and software that accelerate storage and networking in datacenters, mobile networks and client computing. Our technology is the intelligence critical to enhanced application performance, and is applied in solutions created in collaboration with our partners.
Getting Ready for the Future of Technology
The Open Group asks the pertinent question: How prepared are you for the coming together of such growing technical phenomena as cloud, mobile, social computing, and big data?
The convergence of technical phenomena such as cloud, mobile and social computing, big data analysis, and the Internet of things that is being addressed by The Open Group’s Open Platform 3.0 Forum will transform the way that you use information technology. Are you ready?
Mobile and social computing are leading the way. Recently, the launch of new iPhone models and the announcement of the Twitter stock flotation were headline news, reflecting the importance that these technologies now have for business. For example, banks use mobile text messaging to alert customers to security issues. Retailers use social media to understand their markets and communicate with potential customers.
GridGain Systems Named “Bronze Sponsor” of Cloud Expo Silicon Valley
SYS-CON Events announced today that GridGain Systems, a real time Big Data software company, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 13th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 4–7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
GridGain develops scalable, distributed, in-memory data platform technology for real time data processing. The company’s Java-based middleware products enable development of applications and services that can instantly access terabytes to petabytes of information from any data source or file system, distribute computational tasks across any number of machines, and produce results orders of magnitude faster than traditionally architected systems. GridGain’s customers include innovative web and mobile businesses, leading Fortune 500 companies, and top government agencies.
Couchbase CEO: Let Oracle, SAP, IBM play in the “old” database market
The database wars are about to kick off in spectacular style. Not just Oracle vs SAP – as Big Red announced its new in-memory database at the start of this week – but relational vs NoSQL.
Oracle and SAP have been making plenty of noise about their in-memory capability; SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott once claimed that its HANA technology was “the fastest growing software product in the history of the world”, whilst in his recent event keynote, Larry Ellison claimed that data would move at “ungodly speeds” in the Oracle 12c database.
But that’s all relational, SQL database technology – and the NoSQL brigade is coming up fast.
It doesn’t take a genius to work out which side Bob Wiederhold, CEO and president of NoSQL database provider Couchbase, sits on. And his company’s ready for the battle ahead, with the release earlier this month of Couchbase Lite, claimed as the …
IBM Smart Cloud Enterprise – The Smarter Move
IBM Smart Cloud Enterprise is offered as a service called IaaS to deliver the best infrastructure for any business. The user then gets access to IBM’s virtual server and all the resources that go with it. The services are flexible and the security is unmatched. It also provides a cloud for private and open cloud architecture, while giving software business solutions at the same time.
One would be mistaken if one thinks that all clouds have the same things to offer. That is simply not true and the IBM cloud is far superior in every way to the other clouds in the market.
Code from the Cloud: Are You Getting More Than You Bargained For?
It was at my very first job as a developer that I learned about code reviews (and that I intuitively hated them, a characteristic I share with many developers I’ve then since learned). We wrote and maintained software that automated tax preparation (yes, you may in fact be using services that contain code I touched long ago – caveat emptor ;-)) and going over code was an important part of the process. In addition to making sure we were following coding standards with respect to source formatting there was also the opportunity for improvements and to find potential mistakes that might be disastrous given the nature of the software we developed.
Fast forward a number of years (right, like I was going to tell you how many) and code reviews are still a part of the development process. The thing is that the reasons for reviewing source code have expanded, primarily thanks to the success of open source.
Cloud Security Alliance Releases Cloud Controls Matrix, Version 3.0
The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) Thursday announced the release of the CSA Cloud Control Matrix (CCM) Version 3.0, the most comprehensive update to the industry’s gold standard for assessing cloud centric information security risks. The CCM Version 3.0 expands its control domains to address changes in cloud security risks since the release of the CSA’s seminal guidance domain, «Security Guidance for Critical Areas of Focus in Cloud Computing version 3.0» while making strides towards closer harmonization of the two.
Examining disaster recovery by the numbers [infographic]
Disaster recovery, or IT Business Continuity as we like to think of it, is a space that’s riddled with traps. Or at best, it suffers from a number of myths and tendencies toward “fingers crossed.”
It’s not just about a fundamental difference between backup and disaster recovery; the idea that it’s one thing to have your data duplicated into a repository somewhere but quite another to be able to actually restore it — also downed applications and network configurations — rapidly…
Example 1: If you can’t test it, you don’t know it works
One can’t get serious about DR unless one acknowledges not just the criticality of testing, but also how it applies to a couple very distinct requirement areas:
Firstly, automation. At nScaled for security reasons our internal team doesn’t have log-in rights to client domains and servers. Our platform, however, automates IP address …