Some things go together like peanut butter and jelly. Others are more like peanut butter and motor oil. The joining of tech titans is no different. Here we discuss whether six high-profile mergers have made a tasty combination or a gross one.
Hollywood isn't afraid to bend the truth to tell a tale. The data centers depicted in five popular movies prove this point -- as do the ways characters get into them and steal data from them.
IT is full of shorthand. (Hey, there's one example.) Many abbreviations and acronyms have become standard terms in tech, if not everyday language. But some terms just need to be retired.
Most people don't think of the iPad as a high-end computing device. These eight apps prove otherwise.
Big or small, data can be difficult to visualise. These examples use heat maps to put massive data sets into a context that's easy to understand.
Enterprises have been slow to adopt Windows 8 - and when they have, they've encountered migration, usability, security and hardware issues. Luckily, these challenges aren't impossible to overcome.
Call them the epic fails of technology. In 2013, a few technologies will fade into an abyss, swirling around and clinging for a last gasp of air before eventually dying. For IT executives looking to make contingency plans and approve budgets, these are the technologies to avoid.
1. Legacy Applications
Ask anyone in IT about technology trends and you might get a sideways glance. After all, what seems like a novel idea- Google Wave, anyone?-can sometime die on the vine. Few of us are ready to proclaim whether Windows 8 is a raging success or another iterative release.
At the same time, we also know that technology will change dramatically. Who could have predicted even 10 years ago that the CIO would have to deal with complications such as cloud security and virtualisation? To find out how the role will change in eight years, we tapped industry leaders, analysts and CIOs themselves to discover what the challenges of 2020 for the CIO will be like. Here's what we found out.
A help desk can be a real lifesaver for employees, not to mention a productivity boost. If a keyboard stops working or Outlook keeps crashing, a technician is just a phone call away. Even complex problems can usually be resolved internally, and relatively quickly, without the need for an outside vendor.
New ideas in IT go through a long distillation process. Someone invents the idea, vendors talk about new product concepts, analysts weigh in on the value. Eventually, a new category of hardware or software materializes, but rarely in a fully formed state. With mobile virtualization, the pedigree is sound: Most organizations use some form of server virtualization in their data centers.
What it is: Telepresence is a high-definition room-to-room video conferencing system marketed by vendors such as Cisco, Polycom and Hewlett-Packard.
Lawyers at DLA Piper used the technology to hammer out the details of a patent dispute. One legal team gathered in San Diego, another met in Palo Alto eight hours up the California coast. They spread documents out on their tables, brewed coffee and chatted for several hours as if they were in one room. The roll-out, begun in July, was so successful that most offices are now clamoring to add the technology, says Donald Jaycox, the DLA Piper CIO.