Business Technology Roundtable

Earlier in the year, Gartner forecast that by year-end 2016, more than 50 percent of global companies will have stored customer-sensitive data in a public cloud platform. These services can scale very quickly, which has made them very popular for applications that have a requirement for flexibility. Cloud storage offers organizations significant cost and agility benefits, but can pose some security, privacy, accessibility and performance challenges. Therefore, a big part of selecting a best-fit cloud storage provider is investing the time to perform the research to fully understand its capabilities. Furthermore, most industry analyst prior market studies have uncovered that Line of Business leaders are most likely to procure public cloud service offerings for their organizations. However, survey participants at two recent business technology events on the East Coast were divided about who in their organization is primarily driving their cloud computing strategy. So, given these...

Most forward-looking CEOs have already made their move to prepare for the future that they foresee – where business technology is a key deciding factor for them to attain ongoing commercial prosperity. This new digital-propelled environment will profoundly change business processes, along with the need for accelerated tech-savvy human capital development across all industries. Those leaders that catch the next wave of Internet-driven market development will reap the rewards of the expanding Global Networked Economy. They’ll achieve a quantum boost in performance. And they’ll reach their lofty goals by harnessing the unique competitive advantages of cloud computing services , mobile enterprise applications and other targeted business technology investments. Welcome to the Internet of Everything Worldwide IT spending is forecast to surpass $3.9 trillion in 2015 – that’s a 3.9 percent increase from 2014. Business technology spending will be driven by Digital Business practitioners, ...

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...

Senior executives at large multinational enterprises are already demanding that their CIO has a plan in place to ensure that they can effectively procure public and private cloud services for their organization. In smaller companies, some IT managers are now expected to acquire the knowledge and skills to perform a similar role. Are they prepared? To find out, let's review a current IT resource assessment. According to the findings from a recent market study by International Data Corporation (IDC), European IT departments still need to make significant improvements before they have fully embraced cloud architectures and transformed themselves into hybrid cloud service providers. When asked to evaluate their current readiness to execute on their cloud service brokering strategy -- where they become trusted internal advisers to their Line of Business leaders -- European respondents admitted to unexpectedly low levels of confidence that they're ready. As an example, 56 pe...

As the chief executive at your company, if you discovered that you had some major financial standards compliance issues within your organization, would you be concerned about the risks associated with that exposure? If your designated outside auditor had bypassed your internal finance department and chose instead to work directly with your individual Line of Business leaders, would you want to know why? Moreover, would you intervene? Yes, it's a rhetorical series of questions. And I think we all know the answers. Did you know there's a movement that's already in progress that could impact your company's provision and consumption of IT services, with a corresponding potential exposure concern that's related to compliance issues? Have you heard about the Shadow IT phenomenon? According to the assessment of several leading IT market analysts, it's a trend that's already quite pervasive across a broad cross-section of industries. It’s also been a hotly ...

So far, 2014 has turned into a banner year for CIOs that have invested the time and effort to plan for hybrid cloud services, while building strong strategic relationships with their Line of Business leadership. Their approved capital investment budget spend is on-track and operational expenses are contained, as planned. Savvy senior executives across the globe continue to make selective investments in new business technology. In fact, there could be a moderate IT infrastructure spend over the next 12-18 months, which will likely increase the demand for open source software and professional services as new cloud service projects are approved. Worldwide IT spending is now forecast to increase by 4.5 percent in 2014 at constant currency, that's according to updated projections from the latest market study by International Data Corporation (IDC). By and large, this enterprise growth is still being driven by smartphones, apps and the mobile cloud. Aside from mobility related inv...

What if you could deploy a new IT service shortly after you defined the requirements? And, just imagine the bliss, if your IT spend could directly translate into a competitive advantage. Predicting the ROI would be relatively easy. You would be the envy of your peer group. Unfortunately, as most senior executives already know, it's never that simple. Typically, you perform the technology assessment due diligence up-front, you place your bets based upon the most compelling guidance, and then you closely monitor the results. It's an iterative process, where confidence builds over time. Maybe that's why new business technology spending tends to be aligned with a past success. But this procurement model doesn't adapt very well in response to unanticipated significant market events or the rapid acceleration of unplanned technology migrations. Moreover, tight budgets and other resource constraints can severely limit an organization's ability to react quickly to chan...

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...

Accomplish much more, very rapidly, while spending less -- this is the business technology trend that savvy executives everywhere have embraced. Worldwide IT spending will reach a total $3.7 trillion in 2014, that's a 2.1 percent increase from last year, according to the latest global market study by Gartner. This forecast, however, is down from their earlier projections of 3.2 percent growth. What's driving the ongoing transition to lower business technology spending? The slower outlook for 2014 is attributed to a reduction in growth expectations for end-user devices, data center systems and IT related services. Moreover, the typical IT investment is evolving. It's transitioning from a legacy focus on technology and processes, to a focus on new business models and associated strategic outcomes that are purposefully enabled by digitalization. Transition within Enterprise Mobile Devices The IT end-user devices market -- which includes PCs, ultrabooks, smartphones, ...

Internet usage is evolving, and so are the application scenarios for business technology. In the foreseeable future, desktop personal computers will produce a much smaller share of commercial internet protocol (IP) traffic. Mobile and portable devices -- other than PCs -- will drive the majority of traffic by 2018. According to the latest findings from  Cisco Visual Networking Index , in 2013, just 33 percent of IP traffic originated with non-PC devices. However, by 2018, the non-PC share of IP traffic will grow to 57 percent. Moreover, commercial mobile location-based services will be the fastest growing application -- with a 24.9 percent CAGR -- during the forecast period. PC-originated traffic will grow at a 10 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR), while other devices or connections will have higher traffic growth rates over the forecast period -- including TVs (18 percent), tablets (74 percent), smartphones (64 percent) and M2M connections (84 percent). According to...

During the course of the last twelve months the OpenStack community has advanced as more users of the leading open-source cloud technology have been reporting their progress -- with the help of their partners -- towards making a meaningful impact on their business goals and objectives. We've also learned how these progressive technology users are pioneering changes in their own organizations -- enabling them to become more competitive in the Global Networked Economy. The OpenStack Summit 2014 opened with a keynote on the first day of the conference featuring lessons learned from industry leading organizations that have already deployed these open cloud technologies. Each case study had multiple instances of OpenStack that have been applied for a variety of commercial application scenarios. Jonathan Bryce, the Executive Director of the Foundation, introduced the growing community of  OpenStack Superusers . Glenn Ferguson, Head of Private of Cloud Enablement at Wells Fargo Ba...

It's a given, this year more CIOs will shift their focus from selective IT efficiency to overall IT effectiveness. In 2014 and beyond, enterprise IT leadership will be judged on their ability to meet the demands of tech-savvy Line of Business users. This is the type of meaningful progress that CEOs have been anticipating. But that organizational realignment won't always translate into higher budgets. Here's why. According to the latest market study by International Data Corporation (IDC), worldwide IT spending will increase by just 4.1 percent in constant currency this year -- that's down from their previous forecast of 4.6 percent and also down from 2013 growth of 4.5 percent. IDC believes that pent-up demand should eventually drive more business technology capital spending in the second half of 2014, as some organizations replace ageing infrastructure -- including servers, storage and networking equipment. So, what caused this dip in IT spending? "As smar...

Senior executives at progressive companies have been on a mission -- they're raising the bar of expectations for leaders of their significant investment in business technologies. Providing reliable access to IT resources and reporting on system up-time objectives are unlikely to gain recognition or rewards from the savvy CEO. They now require a direct impact on business-related goals and anticipated outcomes -- with no excuses. Granted, many CIOs and IT managers have made progress in their efforts to better align their IT operations with their Line of Business leader's ongoing demands. But despite this progress, according to the results of a survey announced by Red Hat, obstacles remain before the vision of true IT and business integration can be fully realized. The survey results provide insight into the progress IT leaders have made in assuming more strategic roles -- as well as into the challenges they continue to face -- but also raises fundamental questions about how C...

If you're an executive that's concerned about the high-cost of proprietary software, you're not alone. If your IT team pushes back whenever Line of Business leaders ask them for feature enhancements that goes beyond the limits of the commercial software packages they've licensed, then you already know that frustration. Are you wondering if there's an alternative to this legacy business technology scenario? Consider Open Source Software (OSS) and follow in the footsteps of the previously enlightened. North Bridge Venture Partners recently announced the results of the eighth annual investigation into OSS trends. The latest market study findings point toward the increased role that OSS solutions have in today's enterprises. "Open source is enjoying a proliferation that starts with a growing number of new developers at the grass roots. Many then go on to join enterprises who themselves are engaging in open source projects," said Michael Skok, genera...