Business Technology Roundtable

In the global networked economy, work is performed everywhere, at any time and any place. That said, what are the operational benefits? Cisco set out to evaluate the social, economic and environmental impacts associated with allowing and actively enabling employees to telecommute. Cisco announced the findings of its Teleworker Survey, an in-depth study of almost 2,000 company employees. The study, conducted to evaluate the social, economic and environmental impacts associated with telecommuting at Cisco, revealed that a majority of respondents experienced a significant increase in work-life flexibility, productivity and overall satisfaction as a result of their ability to work remotely. Create a Sound Telecommuting Strategy As the modern workforce continues to evolve and globalize, more companies are evaluating a telecommuting strategy to save costs and lower carbon emissions as well as to retain top talent. For these companies, Cisco's survey highlights the gains that a sound tele...

Multinational companies typically have more complex computing and networking technical support requirements, because their business technology applications can span over numerous locations with very diverse operations. Business and IT leaders are currently exploring managed cloud service options, and they're comparing all new offerings from qualified service providers with international expertise. BT, the UK-based provider of communications services, revealed that it will be launching a Virtual Data Centre (VDC) service in the coming months, supporting the needs large business and public sector organizations. VDC provides a dynamic and virtualized infrastructure platform that enables their customers to consume IT and networking Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) -- it essentially forms the base for future cloud services. BT says that VDC delivers the benefits of enterprise-class cloud computing to customers at a significant saving -- when compared with a standard hosted infrastruc...

Have you ever wondered if your company's utilization of Business Technology is in line with the creative market leaders? The Harvard Business Review recently published an interesting commentary by Susan Cramm entitled "How to Support Your IT Innovators." Ms. Cramm believes that to realize the full potential from business technology, all enterprises need IT-smart business leaders -- up, down, and across the organization. According to the results of her ongoing survey , however, business leaders apparently don't feel very smart about their IT adoption and application practices. Only 11% personally use and fully leverage the capabilities of the technology currently in place. 50% agree with the statement that "business leaders don't understand how to use their systems and technologies." And, only 25% of business leaders consider themselves "IT-smart." Liberate the Business Technology Innovators One person she interviewed said "business groups...

Some market studies continue to identify confusion regarding the true meaning of cloud-based services, and the apparent benefits derived by the early-adopters. One recent example comes from a survey of financial professionals in the UK. However, there is already growing demand from informed executive business and IT decision makers that are eager to move forward with various forms of cloud service deployments. In fact, Forrester Research has embarked on a new "Cloud and Virtualization Survey Data" series that offers key insights on where the market demand is developing, and they also debunk several stereotypes. According to Forrester's assessment, Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings, one of the three types of cloud services, is an area of cloud computing that currently receives the most market attention. It centers on two forms of capability: 1) pay-per-use hosting of virtual servers at an external cloud service provider, and 2) operating an internal cloud, whe...

Verizon Business introduced an on-demand, cloud-based Computing as a Service (CaaS) solution -- designed to meet the stringent security and performance requirements of their enterprise customers. This new offering helps businesses take advantage of cloud (IP-based) computing to more efficiently and securely manage IT computing resources -- server, network and storage -- to meet day-to-day business demands. This CaaS solution, which leverages Verizon's global IP infrastructure and data centers, enables companies to use a Web-based portal to employ computing resources in the quantities and duration dictated by their own business needs. As a result, businesses pay for the resources used and avoid having to build out for peak capacity requirements by buying new equipment and adding IT or networking staff. Designed for mid-to-large-sized businesses, CaaS is ideal for new development projects, major events and migrations so that organization can easily and quickly shift IT resources as ...