Business Technology Roundtable

Across the globe, increased Internet use will fuel new growth in the Global Networked Economy . Mobile Internet users will create new demands and expectations for mobile networking infrastructure. This ongoing growth trend is highlighted by the adoption and use of mobile applications (apps). Meanwhile, enterprise C-suite leadership teams contemplate digital transformation agendas that are enabled by the significant new technology investments by telecom network service providers. That, in turn, will drive accelerated enterprise investment in business technology-based innovations.  Executive Summaries for Digital Transformation Fifth-generation (5G) wireless communications will support more than 10 percent of the world’s mobile connections by 2023, according to the latest Cisco Annual Internet Report. The average 5G speed will be 575 megabits per second or 13 times faster than the average mobile connection. With advanced performance capabilities, 5G will deliver more dynamic m...

In many organizations today, Information Technology (IT) is more than a utility, it has become an essential platform for their ongoing business development. Therefore, they crave a superior IT experience for their employees and other key stakeholders. For most, cloud computing is a fundamental ingredient of the digital transformation agenda. The common commercial use cases for public cloud services have already been exploited by many organizations. Front-office applications -- such as customer relationship management, online commerce, and numerous consumer-facing apps -- constitute the bulk of the workloads that reside on cloud service provider shared infrastructure. These initial use cases have validated the proven benefits of cloud computing architectures that are appealing to software developers -- including speed of deployment, dynamic resource acquisition, application elasticity, and service reuse across workloads. Leveraging the inherent benefits of cloud service offerings,...

Some mainstream IT buyers might think that most cloud infrastructure vendors and service providers are essentially alike. But there are key differences. Besides, given the body of market research to the contrary, there’s clearly no such thing as a "one-size-fits-all" cloud solution. Furthermore, if you believe that a hybrid cloud should support an IT agenda to transform a business, then a viable solution must consider the preexisting systems of record within the enterprise. That’s why forward-thinking CIOs often seek information and guidance on two fronts. First, they want to know how to extract costs from their legacy IT investments. Second, they desire to use that assessment exercise to free-up budget and fund innovation via a DevOps model that would streamline new cloud-native technology deployments. That’s why pragmatic CIOs understand the reality of a coexistence environment, where current on-premises IT systems must be an integral part of the total digital transf...

The world of business is changing. Disruptive shifts in power are forcing everyone to question the established status quo. In particular, savvy chief executives are tasking IT organizations to help create compelling customer experiences, support new business models and adopt agile operational processes. That's why the vast majority of IT and business leaders are joining forces on the organizations’ most pressing commercial needs and wants. They seek an open and flexible business technology foundation that's an enabler, rather than an inhibitor, to meaningful and substantive workflow progress. Forward-thinking executives believe cloud services can empower them to achieve their strategic business outcomes. Moreover, they want their whole leadership team to collaborate across the business, developing a comprehensive IT strategy that utilizes existing infrastructure investments and the elasticity of cloud services. Innovation: Opportunities vs Challenges Meanwhile, CIOs are...

More CEOs are setting bold IT innovation goals for their company. Meanwhile, CIOs are tasked to quickly build the required business technology infrastructure. What’s the primary motivation? The growing expectation that all leading organizations will achieve their key strategic business objectives via superior IT-enabled advancements. In fact, a recent study found that 55 percent of survey respondents said their environment will be changed ‘significantly’ -- 20 percent actually said it will be ‘completely transformed.’ Such major transformations can lead to significant competitive advantages, as long as the IT goals are clearly articulated, according to the findings from a Harvard Business Review (HBR) market study and associated report that was sponsored by Red Hat, Inc. The apparent benefits extend beyond the traditional commercial enterprise. For example, a $650 million innovation project at a large State Government agency is returning $4.7 billion in additional tax revenue – tha...

Here's the challenge. Your CEO won't accept anything less than a world-class IT infrastructure that meets the expectations of his most informed Line-of-Business leaders. If you're the CIO and you don't want to rely upon public cloud service providers, then are you ready to deliver the caliber of IT services that they can provision? Take a moment. Consider the implications. Ponder the impact of your actions. All the leading public cloud services providers routinely design and assemble their own data center infrastructure components, due to their extreme needs for scale and cost control. Regardless of the cloud services company, a common element among all these devices is a requirement to run an open-source operating system, such as Linux, and various other purpose-built open-source software components. Gartner, Inc. refers to this trend as the Web-scale IT phenomena. Why You Need to Adopt Web-scale IT Practices What is Web-scale IT? It's all of the things ha...

The CEOs of leading companies are already striving to create an agile business model -- one that responds quickly to competitive pressures and shifting market demands. Commercial agility often requires a corresponding accelerated business technology deployment. Meaning, the IT requirement is for applications to be provisioned in hours -- not weeks or months. That's a tall order for many corporate IT departments. Regardless, it must be done. More often than not, it's accomplished via a cloud services-based methodology. Savvy executives that proactively migrate their IT infrastructure to a cloud-centric architecture will generate new revenue that could surge by a factor of three from 2011 to 2017, according to the latest market study by IHS. Global business spending for infrastructure and services related to the cloud will reach an estimated $174.2 billion this year -- that's up by 20 percent from $145.2 billion in 2013. By 2017, enterprise spending on the cloud will r...

2014 will likely be a year of dual business goals for forward-thinking senior executives. Responding to ongoing needs for business efficiency and growth, but also adapting to exploit a fundamentally different digital commerce paradigm. Commercial digitalization, based upon the latest and most effective business technology advances has already begun, but most chief information officers (CIOs) do not feel prepared for this next era, according to a global survey of IT leaders by Gartner, Inc. Their latest market study showed that many CIOs feel overwhelmed by the prospect of building digital leadership while renovating their core of IT infrastructure. The Gartner survey found that 51 percent of CIOs are concerned that the digital transformation is coming faster than they can cope -- and 42 percent don't feel that they have the employee talent to face this future. "2014 must be a year of significant change if CIOs are to help their businesses and public sector agencies remai...

Are businesses truly prepared to adopt the most productive practices of high-performance ICT enabled work environments? In search of answers, Cisco commissioned independent research among IT decision makers in enterprise and SME organizations across the UK and Ireland -- to better understand how businesses are responding to macro trends in the marketplace. Next-generation workspaces will be a reality for 76 percent of businesses by 2016, according to the latest market study by Cisco Systems. Their study found that while IT decision makers are primarily focused on reducing IT complexity and balancing investment against cost-cutting, they still must tackle the more forward-looking core IT challenges. In particular, now they need to support investing in new technologies which enable new distributed working environments and thereby create these next-generation workspaces. CIOs face a myriad of trends which challenge and test current IT infrastructure and communication networks. Bri...

According to a new market study by Cisco, a majority (60%) of IT decision makers from North European countries believe the ability to work remotely leads to increased productivity -- and it is no longer necessary to be confined to an office to be productive. Although these IT decision makers believe technology (such as business tablets ) allows them to be more mobile and flexible, more than half (56%) of those surveyed -- led by those in Norway and The Netherlands -- work one or more extra hours per day as a result of the ability to work remotely. In Northern Europe, there is a growing need for remote access to the company network, social media access in the workplace and for the freedom to use personal devices for business purposes -- also known as "Bring Your Own Device" or BYOD. This trend can have a significant impact on the IT policies of organizations and among end users who are employed by companies with IT policies -- as the study also found that nearly half (47...

According to the findings from a global market study, the healthcare sector has a highly complex IT environment that's supporting a very diversified professional user population (i.e., clinicians) -- along with their patients in life-critical situations. The industry is currently facing growing economic and regulatory pressures that make its IT infrastructure primed for change. Therefore, all organizations will likely consider the potential benefits of migrating to cloud computing. Improvement in the quality of healthcare services is a key driver for managed cloud service adoption. Billions of dollars of federal incentives are provided for the delivery of quality healthcare services, and expanding the use of electronic health record (EHRs) systems -- as well as providing the basis for the exchange of information and data across and between the providers. These EHR systems are expected to be used extensively by 2014. Another significant opportunity is the consumer-oriented c...

The promise of cloud computing and application hosting benefits are already delivering practical solutions to very real business problems, according to the latest market study by In-Stat . In fact, many small businesses are using managed cloud services as their primary method to solve a variety of IT requirements. "Web hosting and data storage are the most obvious IT needs that can be addressed by public cloud services" says Greg Potter, Research Analyst at In-Stat. "With the advent of Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings many businesses are realizing that much of their IT needs can be fulfilled without the need for expensive networking equipment and high-end computers." Moreover, many small businesses are now re-visiting the use of thin clients for most of their employees, as the need for increased computer processing power is rendered moot by the cloud. SMB IT Applications Transition to the Cloud For the SOHO and small business market, there is consid...

Cisco commissioned a study of present-day challenges that companies face as they strive to address employee and business needs amid increasing mobility capabilities, security risks, and technologies that can deliver applications and information more ubiquitously -- from virtualized data centers and cloud computing services to traditional wired and wireless networks. The results of this international workplace study reveals that many people now believe that they no longer need to be "in the office" anymore in order to be truly productive. This and other findings provide new insight into the expectations, demands, and behavior of today's global workforce -- that's influencing the way information is accessed and how business communications are changing. "The Cisco Connected World Report gives further insight into the future of the workplace and it is clear from the research findings that the desire among employees to be more mobile and flexible in their work ...

Worldwide spending on data center technology infrastructure and services exceeds $350 billion annually, according to McKinsey and Company estimates, with half of that spent on capital expenses and half on operating expenses. Further, an estimated 70 percent or more of those costs are expended to maintain existing infrastructures, leaving 30 percent or less for new technology initiatives and applications that can provide breakthrough differentiation for businesses. It is also estimated that approximately $85 billion, or 20 percent of this total market, can be addressed with data center virtualization and private cloud technology by 2015. Cisco and EMC , together with VMware , have introduced the Virtual Computing Environment coalition, an unprecedented collaboration of three information technology (IT) industry leaders. Virtual Computing Environment Coalition Charter The coalition has been created to accelerate customers' ability to increase business agility through greater IT inf...

A West Chester, PA-based company was searching for IT help, to more effectively and securely distribute confidential and proprietary content to its customers. Enter Verizon Business, with its managed cloud service offering. Modevity, LLC will use Verizon Computing as a Service (CaaS), an on-demand, flexible solution that allows businesses to harness cloud computing to better manage IT resources and deliver performance and security that supports their growth. Better Alignment of Financial and Human Capital In addition to these benefits, Modevity expects to see a significant positive impact on the company's bottom line as a result of embracing this managed cloud service offering. "We are focused on continuing to grow Modevity in a smart way by making key resource decisions in terms of capital and staffing expenditures," said Tom J. Canova, co-founder and chief marketing officer for Modevity. "Moving to a virtual environment with Verizon Business allows us to consoli...

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...

Service providers offer a variety of options for managed services. The following describes the first of the top three most popular managed services, and the associated options, to help you determine which services would be most useful for your company. Businesses gain both tactical and strategic advantages when adopting IP Virtual Private Networks (VPN). In the short term, they benefit from cost-effective, secure network connectivity to branch offices and secure access to remote workers, teleworkers, and global partners. In the long term, they position themselves to take advantage of new value-added, IP-based applications and to support more users and applications at a lower cost. Choosing a Best-Fit IP VPN Solution Cisco commissioned the Yankee Group to describe the decision-making process that enterprises used to select one of three broad types of IP VPN managed services (click on image to enlarge). You can use the decision tree to determine which of the three options for managed I...

New studies demonstrate the pros and cons of Business Technology deployments, especially as they relate to IT investment strategies. First, the downside: in a recent study of IT management excellence, the results showed the continuing disconnect between finance and IT roles, and the value each one brings to the organization. As the report states: "The lack of alignment within organizations is exacerbated by a lack of awareness on the part of both IT and finance about their own contributions to the problem. Nearly one-quarter of the respondents report that discord between IT, business, and finance is a frequent occurrence when making IT investments." Why Clear IT Processes Matter Lack of alignment is triggering a bigger cascade of problems relating to IT investment. For instance, sometimes companies excuse their lack of IT investment due to limited budget and resources. In reality, "companies are unsure how to define or implement management processes, therefore they are u...