All Posts Tagged With: "Business"
Throughout my 20 plus year career in IT consulting, I have noticed that the most successful businesses often have something in common – they run their IT like a business and they treat IT like a key part of the business, and not like an add-on function. I have been in Qatar for only just [...]
The problem with computing is everyone wants to make it uniform – fit it into a neat box, categorise it as ‘all the same’, make it autonomic, self-managing and move on. In fact, IT is anything but uniform, so these simplistic approaches fall at the first hurdle.
Smart CIOs understand applications need to be treated differently [...]
My old CIO at BT, Al-noor Ramji had a most delightful and endearing way of describing just how unimportant and disconnected IT Infrastructure is from reality by describing us as “The toilet cleaner’s toilet cleaners”. Like other successful CIOs Al-noor had the ability to cut through the noise and explain things as they are.
In every [...]
Both Seagate and Western Digital announced Q2 results last week perhaps signalling a return of confidence in the disk drive channel. Component manufacturers in the enterprise IT channel are an interesting bellwether of market confidence as orders need to be placed in advance of shipments of finished goods. There is a significant delay in revenue [...]
My good friend and ESG colleague Terri McClure @esganalysttmac recently blogged about a thought leadership piece I had presented at an analyst call last week. She made a very good job of explaining it and so I thought that I would write a little more about it here:
I call the concept the “Golden Triangle” and it [...]
My friend and colleague Steve Duplessie at ESG just blogged about an interesting court case happening in the USA on The Bigger Truth.
“An e-mail archiving company, ZL Technologies, Inc., has sued, been dismissed, and re-sued Gartner – basically claiming that ZL’s placement in Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant” has caused the company damage – namely, that since [...]
I attended a very interesting dinner event recently at The Boxwood Cafe in London hosted by Andrew Barnes from Neverfail. The objective was to have a discussion about Disaster Recovery and the implications for IT and business. It was a very well attended event with some great input from the CIO and IT Director attendees. Sarah [...]
There is cloud and then there is cloud. Cloud with take it or leave it service levels or cloud with service availability that supports the UK’s emergency services (911, 999, 112). I know about this life or death service level because a few years back I actually ran the BT IT operational department that supported the [...]
I visited IP Expo at Earls Court today and had a look around and concluded that everyone is on message about the cloud. If vendor push gets a technology going then cloud is moving at the speed of light.
I mostly went to interview VirtualGeek, Chad Sakac VP, VMware Technology Alliance at EMC who was hot [...]
I posed the question about why readers of the hot aisle were running more than one hypervisor. An earlier poll had shown that 44% of respondants behave in a non-intuitive way and run two or more hypervisors.
Early results are in – with a poll size of 1021 1141 readers and discounting those who only use [...]
My old firm, First Data, have teamed up with RSA, the security division of EMC (NYSE: EMC) to provide a new service called First Data Secure Transaction Management which is engineered to enable merchants to secure payment card data and remove it from their environment while allowing access when needed.
Regular readers of the hot aisle will know [...]
Telephone has Shortcomings – It was printed in a memo at Western Union in 1878 that
“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us”
Electric Light will Close as well – Oxford professor Erasmus Wilson predicted that
“When the Paris Exhibition [of [...]
My friend and colleague Steve Duplessie over at Steve’s IT Rants just recently wrote about Enterprise customers consolidating vendors. At ESG we have been conducting a Spending Intentions Survey for years and one of the recent outputs is that 34% of enterprise IT operations have a stated corporate objective to “reduce the number of vendors we [...]
Have you been noticing how unimportant hardware has become? Having the biggest. fastest, most reliable piece of equipment in the data center doesn’t cut it anymore. A few weeks back I was talking to Dave Hitz, one of the founders of NetApp and author of How to Castrate a Bull. He explained the phenomena really [...]
Microsoft just posted shocking year end results refelecting weakness in almost every area except for operating expenses where costs are also down by 10% reflecting strong fiscal management:
-Revenue down 17% y/y
-Revenue of $13.1 billion vs. street estimate $14.4 billion
-Net income down 29% y/y
-Operating expenses down 10% y/y
-Weakness in the business PC and server hardware markets
-Client [...]
This week CleanAnalysis – the research and analyst arm of my friend, Dan Ilet’s Greenbang (www.cleananalysis.com) – will be officially launched.
CleanAnalysis be looking at all sorts of cleantech products and markets with an aim to telling the public and private sector about what will really have an impact on their sustainability, marketing and bottom line [...]
I am used to writing online here at the hot aisle but yesterday, the 14th July 2009, I managed to deliver the lead story in a supplement on Efficient IT that was included in the Times, the UK’s leading newspaper.
In the article, I discuss where efficient IT goes from here and point to a new “super-charged” approach. I advises CIOs to look deeper [...]
Perhaps it’s old news now but the EMC acquision of Data Domain is big news in the IT Industry (despite a week been a very long time in technology).
I had lunch with Rena Fallstrom from NetApp today and asked her what the impact was on NetApps business in Europe. Given the huge customer acquisition opportunity [...]
I have just spent the last few days at EMC World in Orlando (Florida) getting wet hearing the cloud and virtualization story unfold. We saw lots of clouds in the skies over Orlando as we endured a pretty constant downpour from Sunday when I arrived.
There is no doubt that virtualization is warming up with lots [...]
The storage wars are hotting up with EMC the clear leader in block oriented product and with a huge portfolio of software that places them as the seventh biggest software company on the planet. NetApp hold onto the leadership position in the Network Attached Storage (NAS) market with a technically advanced set of products. Why [...]
I met with Phillip Petersen of Adinfa at a Green Data Center (what an oxymoron) event recently and he briefed me on the progress he had been making with his product – InSite that does real time power monitoring for Data Centers. He told me that they had really started to get some traction, real life big [...]
Long time disk manufacturer Fujitsu have pulled out of the disk business, selling their design and manufacturing facilities to Toshiba.
Toshiba and Fujitsu have concluded a definitive agreement on the transfer of Fujitsu’s hard disk drive (HDD) business to Toshiba. Under the terms of the acquisition agreement, Toshiba will acquire Fujitsu’s HDD design, development, manufacturing, sales [...]
Reports have surfaced that Tandberg Data is bankrupt, which are not really true. Tandberg Data ASA and Tandberg Storage ASA has filed for bankruptcy, but its subsidiaries around the world will continue day-to-day operations, including Tandberg Data Corporation in the US. The company will continue to manufacture product, and in fact, has a product launch [...]
Yesterday, Oracle announced its intent to acquire Sun Microsystems for $7.4B. While it is very clear Oracle wants to roll up and control the database software market, Oracle executives also stated their intent to invest in the server (Solaris) and storage businesses with the latter be an “expanding market for us over the years to [...]
According to Reuters, France’s parliament rejected a bill on Thursday that proposed disconnecting Internet users if they download music or films illegally, with the ruling UMP party failing to turn out in force to approve the law.
Backed by President Nicolas Sarkozy’s government, the legislation was meant to quell the flow of free songs and films [...]
