Stories by Galen Gruman

A new set of chips promises to power everything from wearables to high-end PCs

The latest beta of Canonical's Linux smartphone system shows the outlines of a possible winner

Did you know that Angry Birds and Facebook represent the biggest mobile app concerns within IT? That's what Zenprise's analysis of its Zencloud mobile device management (MDM) users found. Ironically, companies are much less likely to block Cloud storage apps such as Dropbox and Box.net or Cloud-based note-taking apps such as Evernote that some claim pose a significant threat of sensitive corporate data being lost.

New Year's is a great occasion for taking pause to reassess priorities, needs, and wants. As we enter what looks to be a trying 2009, such a pause is even more critical. IT resources will be limited and business pressures higher. But that doesn't mean you withdraw or go into reactive mode. In tough times, being clear on your priorities is even more important, as everything you do is more critical. So InfoWorld asked its CTO Council members and its cadre of expert contributors for their top New Year's resolutions to give the tech industry a list that we hope will help you make the most of your 2009 priorities.

On Tuesday Barack Obama becomes the 44th president of the United States, during a scary economic meltdown and at a time when America questions its role in the world and its self-perception as a champion for good and progress. Among his many agenda items as president is one for technology. His incoming administration has signaled it sees technology both as an enabler of the change it seeks for the U.S. and as a worthwhile investment in its own right.

Once confined to marketing departments and media companies, the Mac is spilling over into a wider array of business environments, thanks to the confluence of a number of computing trends, not the least among them a rising tide of end-user affinity for the Apple experience.

Big-name companies from Comcast to United Airlines are jumping into SOA, changing the way organisations plan, develop, and deploy enterprise applications

Vista adoption in business has been slow (and at this writing more than 75,000 people have signed InfoWorld's petition asking Microsoft to keep Windows XP available indefinitely). Nonetheless, thousands of businesses worldwide have already adopted Vista.

For many CIOs, the budget story has not been a happy one these last several years. The economic downturn that followed the dotcom meltdown, 9/11 and the high-profile accounting scandals that led to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act negatively affected IT budgets -- a shock to IT leaders after the go-go, profligate nineties.

The nutty pace of technology change is old news, but now a whole new stream of change is aimed at the CIO: The consumer technologies that increasingly are being used by both employees and customers.
"In a few years, 100 per cent of people in the most attractive demographic-18- to 35-year-olds-will be digital natives, and their expectations are being set in that environment," says Mark McDonald, group VP for executive programs at Gartner. That means MySpace, Facebook, iPods, iPhones, Google Maps, instant messaging, blogs. And the list goes on.

“What if we created a utility for enterprise automation? Then you don’t have to create a datacentre! Then you don’t have to have a CIO!”
That was Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff in June 2003, selling the benefits of the then-new concept of software as a service (SaaS).

When Marty Garrison became CTO of ChoicePoint three years ago, the storage situation was messy. That's no small matter at a company that manages 16 billion records, such as background checks and insurance applications, eating up two petabytes of storage--that's 2,048 terabytes. And growing. Like many IT leaders, he faced lots of data in lots of silos. "Storage had grown organically by project, and it was not managed in terms of cost. So we had eight to 10 SAN [storage area network] infrastructures as islands, none of which could talk to each other. We couldn't share storage space across islands, and we couldn't tier our data," he recalls.

When global staffing firm Adecco Group began an effort one year ago to consolidate and outsource its five data centers into one, Dave Bossi came to the realisation that moving the data center would also move three separately managed Microsoft Exchange email servers of different versions and a fourth legacy email technology-with potentially huge disruption to 10,000 email users. Bossi, the North American vice president of IT, thought this might be an opportunity to rethink the company’s email strategy. “Email tends to get lost in the mix. It becomes an afterthought,” Bossi says. Unless, of course, something goes wrong.
Bossi’s case for outsourcing broke down like this: If Adecco moved the email servers to a separate outsourced provider, the email systems would be unaffected in the event of any trouble (like network overloads) at Adecco’s data center. Having a dedicated email provider also makes administering email accounts, managing servers and handling frequent software patches more efficient and less dependent on other data center resources. It shifts the responsibility for malware protection to a specialist-and eliminates the need to manage anti-malware appliances. CIO Alwin Brunner liked Bossi’s logic. Adecco is consolidating its four email platforms into one, which is hosted by USA.net (separate from Adecco’s outsourced data center that IBM manages).

ITIL is an acronym that some CIOs don't understand well. If they're aware of the IT Infrastructure Library, it's in the context of two of the library's books that provide guidance on improving help desk services (such as handling support requests) and on improving IT operations (such as managing software changes within the data center). In other words, ITIL is something that the operations staff uses. But the IT Infrastructure Library--the set of practices and service approaches outlined in a series of guides and supported by a host of toolkits, certifications, consultancies and user groups--can do more than serve as a best-practices framework for solving specific operational needs.
A growing number of CIOs are using ITIL to achieve better business alignment. For them, ITIL helps create operational consistency across multiple departments and locations, as well as with contractors and suppliers. It helps IT focus on delivering service to business units and customers, not just delivering technology. "The old model is that success is fulfilling a requirement or delivering on schedule. ITIL says success is based on whether the business value is where it needs to be," says Jo Lee Hayes, vice president of enterprise technologies at SLM, the mortgage lender known as Sallie Mae.

It can seem like a no-win situation. Business execs want more reports to glean insight on how to manage the company. So IT invests in new BI point solutions -- even as it spends more and more time cleansing data and producing reports -- only to be asked for changes again, since the reports IT delivers keep missing the mark.