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SAP Unifies Compliance and BI Tools

March 25, 2011 No Comments

The release, announced on Wednesday, integrates elements of its business intelligence toolkit with the newest version of its governance, risk and compliance (GRC) tools into a single platform that can plug into other business intelligence software, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications.

Microsoft readies its first Server application-virtualization beta

March 24, 2011 No Comments

Tweet While Microsoft is rolling out a number of test builds of various private-cloud building blocks this week, the company also is poised to deliver a beta of Server App-V, one of its public-cloud foundation technologies. Microsoft posted for download on March 22 the documentation for its coming Microsoft Server Application Virtualization (Server App-V) beta […]

Much Ado About Android Licensing and Headers

March 24, 2011 No Comments

Tweet Google and the many-tentacled beast that is open source licensing took the Linux spotlight this week as bloggers pondered whether Android has a bit of a copyright conundrum. “There has been a lot of hearsay about what Google may or may not have done to Android,” consultant and Slashdot blogger Gerhard Mack told LinuxInsider. […]

Skewering Social CRM?

March 23, 2011 No Comments

Tweet Earlier in the week I attended an event in Madrid where fellow ZDNet’er Paul Greenberg and independent analyst Esteban Kolsky discussed business responses to the notion of the social customer. My motivation was to hear first hand from subject matter experts I respect even though I have problems with the term ’social anything.’ As […]

WORK-LIFE-INTEGRATION

March 23, 2011 No Comments

Tweet Posted by Michele Walsh – ITBriefcase.net Today’s cartoon by Dilbert- Scott Adams made me chuckle.. so so true!

Multi-tenancy: Emulation Or The Real Thing?

March 22, 2011 No Comments

It’s a mark of how much progress SaaS has made towards mainstream acceptance that vendors entering the space now proudly wear multi-tenancy as a badge of honor, rather than espousing the argument that it’s a side-issue that’s irrelevant to customers.

Oracle Hopes to Bring More Sales Focus to Social CRM

March 21, 2011 No Comments

Tweet One of my favorite points made by Bertrand Duperrin in a blog post on social CRM (SCRM) I cited in my own post titled Social CRM Moves Focus from “Management” to “Relationship” was that SCRM occurs not just on Facebook or other social channels but also over the phone or in person, in any […]

Introducing Your Honey to Linux

March 21, 2011 No Comments

Tweet “A couple years ago, I bought my wife a new Thinkpad,” Slashdot blogger Chris Travers recalled. “She made a specific request: ‘I don’t want to use something weird, like Linux.’” Though the laptop came with Vista, it “never worked right. It had video card issues, power management issues and networking issues.” After a few […]

The HP cloud offering: Neither Innovative Nor Compelling

March 18, 2011 No Comments

By now most of us have seen the coverage of Hewlett-Packard’s CEO, Léo Apotheker, as he unveiled the company’s plans to offer IaaS (infrastructure as a service) and other goodies in the cloud. (Also, be sure to check out an exclusive interview with Apotheker by IDG Enterprise Chief Content Officer John Gallant and InfoWorld Editor in Chief Eric Knorr.)

Does FOSS Need a Charismatic Leader?

March 18, 2011 No Comments

Tweet “I don’t think FOSS needs a figurehead, and that’s good considering we would be screwed otherwise,” said Slashdot blogger Gerhard Mack. “Linus Torvalds just doesn’t seem to have the time or interest … . Richard Stallman is a poor public speaker and wastes time arguing over semantics. Eric Raymond can’t keep to just arguing […]

Hey, Who Interrupted My Supply Chain?

March 14, 2011 No Comments

Tweet Who stocks warehouse nowadays?  The real question is, “Who owns warehouses…or sub-assembly plants…or even manufactures products?”  Cisco, Intel, Micron and others lead a trend where rapid fluctuations in markets and technologies have led to supply chains that rely on external organizations to create just-in-time supplies of parts and even whole products.  What does this […]

Can Cloud Computing Save The American Economy?

March 13, 2011 No Comments

Tweet The American dream is in peril from the confluence of sky rocketing deficits, high unemployment, and the ticking time bomb of an aging baby boomer generation, with its coincident increase in the burden of entitlements as a percentage of GDP. For the first time, the next generation of Americans, our grandchildren, risk having a […]

Did SOA Deliver on Integration Promises?

March 13, 2011 No Comments

Tweet Oracle recently released an update to its Application Integration Architecture, which is largely a set of pre-built integration packets. All this focus on integration prompted an interesting question from Managing Automation’s Stephanie Neil: Why isn’t SOA enough to solve integration? You may think that’s a darn good question. After all, a few years ago, […]

Cloud Computing Savings From Shutting Down

March 11, 2011 No Comments

James Staten, the cloud analyst at Forrester Research, was the leadoff speaker list at Cloud Connect 2011, a UBM Techweb event, Wednesday morning. His message at first seemed to be a defensive and negative one: “The power of the cloud comes from ‘down’ and ‘off.'”

Standard Processes, Custom Decisions

March 10, 2011 No Comments

Tweet I gave a webinar on Smarter ERP with Decision Management and one of the tweets during the presentation – “Standard processes, custom decisions” prompted a few requests for more details. So, here goes. When I talk to companies about their ERP implementations we often end up discussing the balance between standardization/globalization and flexibility/localization. These […]

Data Management Weaknesses ‘Need to be Identified’

March 10, 2011 No Comments

Tweet Businesses should identify their data management weaknesses in order to improve their operations in this area. According to Richards Roberts, president of RecMan Inc, the pace of technological change is posing challenges for data management processes. But finding out where problems reside can make things easier, he suggested in an article published on the […]

Red Hat Challenges Open Source Moochers

March 10, 2011 No Comments

Tweet Red Hat Red (NYSE: RHT) has gotten fed up with what it sees as companies like Oracle and Novell sidling up to its Linux server operating system customers in a shifty manner and whispering “Wanna buy cheap support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux?” Red Hat finds this galling because it effectively gives away RHEL […]

Salesforce’s Service Cloud 3 Blurs Line Between CRM, BPM

March 9, 2011 No Comments

Tweet Plenty of smart people have tried to come up with a definition for adaptive case management. (The methodology is also sometimes called dynamic case management.) One thing that seems clear is that it will never fit neatly into any single enterprise software category. While it’s most often mentioned in the same breath with business […]

Forrester: Business Intelligence Careers Offer Hope for IT Workers

March 7, 2011 No Comments

Tweet As we’ve said, time’s are still tough for IT workers despite the relatively large demand for employees with technical skills. At the core of the problem seems to be a mismatch between the skill that unemployed workers have and the skills companies desire. Earlier today we explored some ideas about how IT workers can […]

Hybrid Enterprise Content Management and Cloud Computing

March 7, 2011 No Comments

Tweet In my previous article on data warehouse workload as a candidate for cloud, I elaborated on How the hybrid delivery model Supports Data Warehouse migration into cloud. Most of the major  IT companies predict a hybrid delivery in the future, where by the future enterprises need to look for a delivery model that comprises […]

Why the Microsoft-Google Cloud Sniping Won’t Stop Soon

March 4, 2011 No Comments

Tweet The interminable sniping between Microsoft and Google over their respective cloud-based office productivity services may never end. The latest Microsoft shot at Google came around the final release of Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office last week. Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office adds cloud and collaboration to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in Microsoft […]

Amazon to Provide ‘Formation’ Cloud Computing

March 1, 2011 No Comments

Tweet Amazon.com just announced a new product called CloudFormation that allows those who use the AWS (Amazon Web Services) cloud to configure and manage resources as a single system by creating a template that describes the applications and resources that make up their system or architecture. CloudFormation then takes care of provisioning, while taking into […]

Do enterprise architects work for IT or the business or what?

March 1, 2011 No Comments

Tweet Who’s the boss? At a recent confab, Forrester Research VP Gene Leganza provided some interesting speculation about the evolution of enterprise architecture. InformationWeek’s Charles Babcock reports on Leganza’s statements: “Currently only 4% of enterprise architects report to a business executive, a chief operating officer, or chief executive officer, for example, as opposed to 43% […]

The State of Play in Automating Insurance Claims

February 23, 2011 No Comments

Tweet SOURCE:  James Taylor Talking about claims and using Decision Management to improve claims I recently caught up with Donald Light of Celent. Donald recently wrote a new report for Celent – Claims Systems Vendors, North American P/C Insurance 2011. This is the most recent update of the Celent study that evaluates vendors in the […]

Integrated Social Business & the Future of Social Media Metrics

February 23, 2011 No Comments

Tweet This week as part of our executive series, I talked with CEO and one of the original founders of Collective Intellect, Don Springer. He provided his insight on the primary drivers in social media and text analytics for 2011, the biggest challenges enterprises are facing as they rollout integrated social business processes and the […]

Gartner: Social CRM Spending Soon to Top $1 Billion Worldwide

February 22, 2011 No Comments

Tweet I’m often skeptical of the multi-billion-dollar market predictions made by analyst firms. But social customer relationship management (CRM) is definitely an emerging portion of the enterprise 2.0 space, and it’s helpful to see what kind of growth it may generate. Gartner, for one, just issued a prediction that the CRM market will enter a […]

Automating Business Process Discovery

February 21, 2011 No Comments

I can remember the many hours of heartache trying to work out what actually happened when I was trying to document a business process for a customer. Invariably, Joe tells you one thing, Sarah tells you something completely different and “Old Bob” tells you that for “X” we do it that way. Trying to untangle these conflicting issues to understand the business rules and the process paths is hard work but vital.

An Open Source Approach to Veterans Affairs Medical Info

February 21, 2011 No Comments

Tweet For years, the VA has run the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA), which is their Electronic Health Record (EHR) system. Turns out it was written by clinicians themselves, and has served well over years. However, the VA believes it might be time to use open source methods in a kind of […]

Aqua Connect and HELIOS help enterprises abandoned by Apple

February 21, 2011 No Comments

Tweet Earlier this month, Apple Computer surprised enterprise IT decision-makers by announcing the demise of its Xserve with the suggestion that they move to the company’s power powerful workstation, the Mac Pro. While this system offers the ability to expand up to 12 cores, it is no enterprise server. My colleague David Morgenstern, posted Apple […]

Is the Shade Coming Down on the Windows Era?

February 17, 2011 No Comments

Tweet If the human brain can be compared to a search engine, it seems fair to say that most of us tend to scan the news each day for search terms and phrases that support our existing point of view. That, indeed, could explain why a recent post over at the Linux Foundation has drawn […]

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