Business Technology Roundtable

In 2013, IT buyers will be looking for increased stability and better ways to prepare for the next five years in their business cycle, according the the latest market study by Ovum. "The fact that we live in very uncertain times makes investment decision-making even more difficult. With continuing instability across the global markets and even in locations with historically robust growth -- such as China and India -- the outlook for IT services in 2013 is unpredictable," said Jens Butler, principal analyst, IT Services at Ovum . Oven believes that business leaders will be looking for greater reliability in their IT usage and -- as a consequence -- seeking stability, capability and accessibility among their external service providers . Growing Trend Towards Cloud Applications Moreover, Ovum has published three "Trends to Watch" reports on cloud computing -- which reveals that 2013 will see managed cloud services continue to grow rapidly. Their Private and...

The demand for substantive customer feedback -- and engaging all constituents into the feedback process -- drives the need for businesses to innovate and also manage innovation in a new way. Results from a recent market study show that this inherent need is also creating the opportunity for social technologies to help support and add value to the commercial innovation process. The fourth annual "Social Business Survey" from International Data Corporation ( IDC ) revealed a significant departure from previous years -- in terms of focus and use cases for social business technology. With the maturing of social media tools within the enterprise -- and their adoption as an engagement channel -- use cases have grown into some broad categories, such as customer experience, sales enablement, digital commerce, enterprise social network (ESN), innovation management, and socialytics. IDC says that as users request solutions to extend outside the firewall, the 2012 survey demons...

The ongoing transformation to a comprehensive Business Technology model requires savvy leaders to see beyond the traditional IT and networking silos within their organization -- thereby offering a cohesive portfolio of application-driven services to their key stakeholders. Cisco has introduced a versatile and broad approach to network programmability -- Cisco Open Network Environment ( Cisco ONE ) -- aimed at helping customers drive the next wave of business innovation through trends such as cloud, mobility , social networking, and video. Cisco ONE enables flexible, application-driven customization of network infrastructures to help realize business objectives such as: increased service velocity, resource optimization, and faster monetization of new services. The Cisco Open Network Environment is delivered through a rich set of platform APIs, agents and controllers, and overlay network technologies. Cisco ONE complements current approaches to software-defined networking while en...

Cisco announced the results of a survey exploring the security implications of social networking and the use of personal devices in the enterprise. Perhaps the most telling finding was that employees continue to work around restrictive corporate IT security policies. Why do businesspeople, including senior corporate executives, continue to bypass their own IT organizations? Typically, the most common complaint is a lack of agility -- an inability to meet the business technology needs of internal stakeholders in a timely manner. Another significant finding: 71 percent of the survey respondents said that overly strict security policies have a negative impact on hiring and retaining talented employees under age 30. Conducted on behalf of Cisco by InsightExpress, the survey polled 500 IT security professionals across the United States, Germany, Japan, China and India. The results illustrate that the consumer influence on enterprise IT is growing and that more employees are bringing persona...

Examining the ever-changing landscape of online collaboration, and assessing the growth of social networks, Cisco announced findings from a recent market study about end-user collaboration applications and individual preferences within the workplace. Within the group of respondents using social networking for work, fifty-nine percent say that their usage of social media applications has increased over the past year. The study also found the most frequently used application for collaborating with others is email (91 percent). However, what people want from their email application is changing -- the findings highlight the potential for email service evolution. The market study, conducted by Harris Research, surveyed more than 1,000 end-users from across the United States and found that email is the preferred collaboration application at work for a variety of reasons. Navigating within the Comfort Zone Respondents like the fact that email provides an easily-accessible record of communicat...

Social media tools are entering the workplace, either by thoughtful intent or purely by accident. To date, for those organizations that actually have a plan of action, most tend to focus more on "damage containment" policies for their employees. Is a protection-centric strategy the prudent approach for concerned -- but otherwise uninformed -- business leaders, or is it shortsighted thinking that undervalues the upside opportunity ? Cisco released the results of a third-party global market study designed to assess how organizations use consumer social networking tools to collaborate externally. The use of these tools, such as Facebook and Twitter, are connecting organizations with their external stakeholders. On the upside, the tools connect people and information, establish potential new routes to market, and enhance customer intimacy and brand awareness. According to the third-party researcher , the study findings indicate that we're at the early stages of adoption and ...