Software-vendor consolidation is a fact of corporate life for CIOs and IT managers these days. After 2009, which for high-tech M&A was more famine than feast, cash-rich enterprise vendors are devouring smaller players to expand portfolios and reel in customer bases.
For the occasional telecommuter or the 24x7 worker-from-home, many deep thoughts and vexing questions pop up during the workday.
Think innovation inside today's corporation is lacking, and that no one is tackling complex global problems, such as climate change, renewable energy, health care and financial catastrophe?
CIOs have been talking about enterprise application integration for as long as they've been talking about business-IT alignment or proving the value of the IT function. That is to say, for decades.
And, according to a new Forrester Research report, it seems that CIOs have had about as much success solving the former as they have the latter two tasks.
Steve Jobs had a serious and embarrassing Wi-Fi problem to deal with. It was plain to the thousands in attendance and the tons more people watching online: On Monday at WWDC, Jobs was struggling with wireless connectivity while attempting to demonstrate the new features of Apple's iPhone 4.
There are times in the high-tech world when it's particularly vexing to figure out just who to believe.
Similar survey data (ostensibly from the same general survey base) can provide contradictory results. Warring vendors bend facts and figures to suit their purposes and unleash FUD. And statistics can be contorted to say just about anything.
Just when you thought it was safe to jump into the SaaS waters, a new survey finds that IT and enterprise software decision-makers don't feel totally comfortable with SaaS-namely those nagging security, integration and data migration concerns.
That's the thrust of a new Forrester Research report: As Adoption Grows, Vendor Managers Can Help Business Users Succeed with SaaS Deployments, by principal analyst Liz Hebert. (The results are from Forrester's Enterprise and SMB Software Survey, North America And Europe, Q4 2009; the data was fielded to 2,165 IT executives and technology decision-makers located in Canada, France, Germany, United Kingdom and United States.)
BI remains atop business managers' wish lists and, not coincidentally, on IT's to-do list. The demand for BI and analytic tools is unlikely to abate any time soon.
For many CIOs, however, delivering new and innovative BI apps has been a bit of a Sisyphean challenge: Ballooning data volumes combined with complex IT environments have stressed legacy BI tools. Consequently, IT has been scrambling to keep up with users' desire for intuitive, easy-to-consume BI apps that incorporate all of the latest bells and whistles and corporate information sources.
This is the type of analyst report headline that cloud computing vendors don't want to read: "Empty Promises and Tough Luck: Yankee Group Exposes the Cloud's Fine Print."
That's the crux of Yankee Group's latest research effort, Cloud 99.99: The Small Print Exposed, by VP and senior research fellow Camille Mendler.
Today, most enterprises are finally facing up to the "data, data everywhere" phenomenon-an awe-inspiring and unprecedented push and pull of data and information needs. The push: Terabytes of data flooding enterprise systems and applications, a surge which Gartner predicts will grow by 650 percent during the next five years. The pull: Savvy users demanding sweeping, individualized access to analytics and business information.
First contemplating the dire ramifications of 2008's Global Economic Meltdown was a serious gut check. Slicing and dicing the IT budget in 2009 just to get through the Great Recession was strenuous. And day to day life in the New Normal hasn't been much fun either. There appears to be daylight ahead for businesses. So, now what?
According to Rudy Puryear, a partner at consultancy Bain and leader of its global IT practice, all that CEO-mandated cost-cutting in IT-"necessary for business survival," he says-is now poised to create an even bigger problem: Overspending on IT as companies rebound and respond to pent-up demand that could add more complexity to IT operations and further strain business-IT relations.
When viewers tune in to coverage of the 2010 Masters golf tournament, they will see IBM advertisements on the CBS and ESPN TV broadcasts and the IBM logo on the Masters.com website. Viewers will most likely hear about IBM's vision of a "smarter planet" campaign. (I always look forward to the guy who says "Smarter Stuttgart.")
Viewers don't have to fret about being overwhelmed with the volume of ads. This is the Masters, after all. The annual golf tournament prides itself on a "less is more" philosophy when it comes to advertisements. Commercial interruptions are the exception, not the norm: During eight hours of TV coverage on Saturday and Sunday of the 2009 Masters, Nielsen data showed just 36 minutes of commercials.
Let's call it the Wall Street Effect: Many companies now face tremendous pressure to ensure that all corporate data is "up to the second", just like those traders on The Street who bask in sub-second financial data and those consumer "day traders" who now demand equal speed.
Give me my data, and give it to me fast!
For decades, software buyers have been engaged in an "arranged marriage" type of relationship with software vendors: too much tradition, too little choice and a partnership of unequals from a deal's beginning. Typically, these deals had two key variables: the number of seat licenses (volume) a company purchased and the amount that the software publisher was willing to discount the purchase price, which was linked back to the volume.
Both sides haggled over those figures during the forced courtship that is the RFP process, but the outcome between the partners was usually predetermined. There wasn't much bliss; just some angst on the buyer side because she knew that a legacy of fixed costs and bloated shelfware lurked, and a future divorce would be unpleasant and costly.
Plenty of seismic shifts have rocked and reshaped IT in the past. Some big rumblings' epicenters had origins in an unstoppable technology shift; other fissures had nothing to do with PCs and servers. Consider the recent shocks: the Internet revolution and dotcom bust; Y2K and 9/11; the consumerisation of IT; and the unstoppable broadband and mobile explosion.
However, the latest shock - the global financial meltdown - is like the recent 8.8 earthquake that shook Chile and knocked the earth off its axis. And for IT leaders today, it's important to realize that the aftershocks are still coming.