Business Technology Roundtable

Recovery from the financial crisis in Europe continues across the whole region. Granted, there are structural reasons for the eurozone economy's slow recovery. Regardless, savvy senior executives in leading nations are actively seeks ways to grow their business. For some that means a shift to cloud computing services -- thereby lowering operational costs and boosting productivity. As an example, forward-looking UK businesses are becoming more competitive as a direct result of their adoption of cloud services, that's according to the latest market study findings from the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF). Quest for a Competitive Advantage The CIF research -- conducted in May 2014, polling 250 senior IT managers and other business decision-makers -- found that 55 percent of managers report having experienced a competitive advantage from using cloud services. A further 23 percent of surveyed managers anticipate seeing a meaningful commercial advantage from their cloud service depl...

Some people are never satisfied. These fearless agents of change are everywhere. They're informed, confident and willing to experiment. They seek out the best business technology solution for the job at hand. They act on instinct. Yes, you could say that they're driven. However, they're also at risk of being labeled as "rogue employees" because they ordered a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering and perhaps expensed it without prior approval. Sometimes they're the champion of progressive projects that are referred to as Shadow IT -- intentionally bypassing their company's formal evaluation and procurement process. How can this happen? Is it just because their activities are tolerated, or are they being encouraged? If so, by whom? Why would any business leader applaud a team member that breaks the rules? Maybe, the simple answer is that staying within the confines of the status-quo won't enable a top-performer to fully apply their talent, achieving...

Public cloud service adoption is already a mainstream phenomenon in most organizations. Meanwhile, many large enterprises see a private cloud in their future. But choosing whether to invest in building an internal cloud infrastructure or buy from a cloud service provider will become more challenging – in anticipation, savvy IT leaders are becoming brokers of dynamic business technology solutions. Hybrid cloud resource management and progressive operational process adoption are the key focal points in preparation for this transition. Moreover, Line of Business demand for emerging use cases and just-in-time IT workload creation requires speedy access to a managed self-serve DevOps deployment model . That’s why comprehensive management and provisioning tools -- such as Red Hat CloudForms -- have become essential platforms. Besides, given the pervasive trends in the marketplace, every business will eventually need an actionable hybrid cloud adoption plan. It’s a requirement of the for...