I was taken by a customer presentation by Stephen Rayda, CTO of Purdue Pharma, at this week's EMC Analyst Summit. Like all pharmaceutical firms, Purdue faces a lot of pressure -- and it just got a new CEO to boot. He asked which departments didn't need his attention; luckily, IT was the only one to make that list.
Company turnarounds are a big part of what I cover. There's clearly a process that seems to work far better than others. Based on what I saw at BMC Engage, the first BMC conference this decade, and have learned over the last year of executive meetings, Bob Beauchamp and his team have done an impressive job. If it weren't for the fact that BMC plans to go public again – I can hear Michael Dell in my head, screaming, "Don't do it!" – I could easily say this turnaround is complete.
As I watched the Windows 10 teaser from San Francisco this week, I thought back over the 20 years I've covered the platform and to what, for me, was the first real version of Windows. Windows 95 effectively launched me as an analyst. I doubt I'd have made it had I not been tied at the hip to that product.
It's important to understand early on when an initiative won't succeed. Sometimes that isn't easy, but often you can look under the covers at a firm's effort and see that it simply won't reach critical mass. While a company can get lucky, failure often has at its roots an unwillingness or inability to do what's required to win. In the context of the technology market, that ability to realize this applies to most any endeavor.
Intel's executive leadership stepped it up at last week's Intel Developer Forum. I used to do speaker reviews for Intel. After Andrew Grove left, though, poorly prepped speakers, sloppy presentations and missed opportunities defined IDF, with folks changing their presentations right up until they went on stage. Intel found my speaker reviews too critical, so I wasn't asked to continue.
Steve Ballmer has stepped down from Microsoft's board, and he certainly won't be forgotten. I followed Ballmer closely in his years running Microsoft and learned a lot from both his successes and failures.
We tend to approach new vendors based on the products they sell and choose vendors largely based on what we believe the products do. Unfortunately, this leads us to buy solutions that we often never fully deploy or that often fail to meet our expectations. What's more, we rarely conduct a causal analysis of the problems.
A new study ties Facebook – and, by proxy, social networks in general – to increased divorce rates. While the write-up goes to a great deal of trouble to suggest that further work will be needed to prove that Facebook causes divorce, the report presents pretty damning evidence.
The executive in charge of Comcast's support organization is having an interesting week.
Here in the U.S. we celebrate the 4th of July our day of independence signifying freedom. But we often seem happier when there is someone telling us what to do -- some person or vendor who takes away the burden of a decision and just makes it for us.
Many industry leaders over the years have developed technology to drive data center innovation. However, HP's Machine concept - which treats the datacentre as an appliance - looks to redesign the datasentre from the ground up.
It can be hard for women at the top of the corporate ladder to really drive change. (Its a challenge for men, too.) Moderating a panel at the recent Women in Technology Summit, though, CIO.com columnist Rob Enderle discovered that women outside the C-suite are driving change at many technology companies. Credit a willingness to embrace analytics.
Maintaining or rediscovering innovation is difficult and often counter-intuitive for larger companies. However, CIO.com columnist Rob Enderele offers suggestions for how businesses can get back the innovation they lack.
The thin client has been largely disappointing from the beginning, but a partnership between VMware and Nvidia may finally give the thin client the performance, scalability, security and price it needs to catch on.
Whether you're talking about your network, your company's building or your home, a perimeter approach to security is no longer adequate. As McAfee discussed at the RSA Conference, you can't provide physical or electronic security simply by trying to prevent authorized access - you have to rethink all types to security to protect data and lives.