Category: Articles

A few months ago, I wrote about some of the variations that organizations should consider when it comes to thinking about software-as-a-service (SaaS). Traditionally, many organizations have thought about software-as-a-service as something that allows organizations to simply connect to a network (or “cloud”) and access data, applications or services dynamically and remotely.

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A key poster child for such an approach has long been Salesforce.com. Since it’s summer, and there’s a bit more space for spreading out (hopefully on the porch, with lemonade, in a hammock) and considering new ideas, I thought it might be a good time to revisit the topic of my previous column and delve a little deeper into new approaches for software-as-a-service.

Endeavors Technologies is a good example of a different approach to software-as-a-service, with impressive capabilities in the application virtualization and streaming areas.

Sometimes thought control isn’t such a bad idea. And by thought control, I don’t simply mean a “big brother,” Apple computer, 1984-type situation, but a situation where people’s thoughts are influenced (yes, I guess that’s a nicer word) by certain knowledge. Influenced (perhaps educated) so that they have the information to make better decisions and take the best actions at the right time.

The goal of any good business intelligence implementation is to reflect the model of an organization’s business and enable employees to use that model to analyze, answer and decide important questions or decisions. As I noted in my last column, BI solutions can be particularly helpful for organizations during turbulent economic times because they can help companies answer questions about their business (what’s most profitable? What is the impact of making these product changes? What products or service are our customers buying?), and then help them change to adapt to the new business requirements.

When times are good, it’s easy to let things slide a bit. For example, last year was a good year for me — my family was healthy, I had steady work, and things were good financially. I didn’t have to worry too much about the day-to-day details of what I was doing — everything was working well and there weren’t any worries.

This year is a different story. Luckily, my family is still healthy and things are good in terms of business, but I’m feeling much more impacted by our nation’s economic challenges — much more so than I was last year. Gas costs a lot more. Food costs a lot more. And the prices for the rest of the services we consume and products we purchase are going up as well.

The result? Like many people, I’m looking for ways to save money. Carpooling the kids to baseball. Consolidating what would have been multiple individual errands last year into single, better planned excursions this year. Saying no to selected purchasing. Making sure we eat all the leftovers and use all the food in the freezer before purchasing new groceries. When you stop to examine things, there’s usually a fair amount of ways to save money and/or identify new ways to make some additional money (yard sale, anyone?).

There are some things that I don’t want to end – a great book, an exciting movie, a nice bottle of wine. But there are other things that I would prefer that never came up-dental emergencies, gutter cleaning and answering telemarketing calls. Neither of those lists is exhaustive, and I’m sure you have your own personal favorites.

However, I’d guess that for many business and IT managers, risk management would be something they’d want to add to that second category. Unless you enjoy ruminating on disasters, spending large amounts of time or resources planning for events which may never happen, or just have dark and pessimistic side, risk management isn’t fun.

The more some things change, the more they stay the same. Let’s take the example of IT and business challenges. Over the years, we’ve seen a wide variety of changes in both IT and business. In IT, we’ve seen organizations undergo an evolution from mainframes to minicomputers to PCs to the Internet and beyond. At the same time, organizations have undergone a wide range of business changes and challenges-from economic evolution to globalization.

Although the hype has been around for a while, we’re really still just at the start of Web 2.0—especially when it comes to enterprise applications and enterprise infrastructure components. I believe that over the next few years we’re going to see some significant changes in how both enterprise applications and enterprise infrastructure components are designed and deployed.
A key driver for these changes will continue to be the evolution of mobile platforms, the need for greater user interaction and control, and on-going changes in user interface approaches.

It’s always been hard to escape risk. Almost everything an individual (or company) does involves some level of risk–often times multiple types of risk. Of course, over the years, the types of risk that we face (both as individuals and as corporations) has changed.
That’s where risk management comes in. For large companies, IT risks have to be managed on a global scale. To do this, organizations need to ensure that there’s a common set of minimal controls that are observed across the company or globe. Then, individual departments or geographies add to extend these controls and risk management strategies by defining ones that are appropriate for their situation. It’s important to make sure that there’s flexibility built into your approach for risk management, since having a one size fits all approach is generally not a true reflection of the enterprise and is typically not realistic or achievable.

Storage area networks have been – and still – are big thing in business. Over the past few years organizations have had to find ways to add more and more storage to their IT environments as new applications come on-line and as new data sources such as Web storefronts have added massive amounts of potentially valuable data to be analyzed. As a results, organizations have invested in more and more storage capability-from larger servers to storage area networks that can connect different types of storage into a unified data network for use by a wide variety of corporate applications or users. Because of the continuing need for greater, faster, more efficient and manageable storage options, business storage solutions are going to continue to be a big area of investment for organizations over the next five years.
But it’s important to recognize that we’re not just going to see this type of focus and growth in the business sector. We’re also going to see it in our homes and personal lives. Over the next few years, the variety and types of significant storage devices we use in our personal lives will increase dramatically-from multiple, different portable storage devices, to ones for use in our cars, to ones connected to our TV and digital media centers, most households will have a variety of new storage devices with new features.
And, okay, so we may not exactly see the same thing-storage area homes-happening in the home that we’ve seen happen in business-storage area networks-but we will see a similar growth in the use of different data storage options to serve and ever-widening array of personal (and home-office) storage needs.
In fact, storage in the home and small office is a incredibly fast-growing area. Some research estimates say that there’s now as much storage in the home as there is in business. Since 2003 the growth in home storage has actually outpaced the growth in business storage. Those are two very interesting statistics that show potential of the role of home storage and digital content management as consumers dramatically increase their storage capacities. First, they indicate a massive opportunity for hardware vendors to design, build and market a variety of personal and small business storage devices for more individual or family use. Secondly, just like google and other consumer-oriented technologies that have changed business user expectations, I believe that this upcoming massive shift in consumer storage devices will also alter business user expectations on storage.
Consumers are essentially gobbling up storage faster than businesses are. When you stop to think about it, it’s not surprising, given the huge growth in digital cameras, the move to DVRs and digital videos, digital music (from MP3s to downloadable iTunes movies, TV shows and music), and more.
We can see the impact of the direction of this trend in some of the recent announcements by companies like Seagate and Maxtor, at January’s consumer electronics show in Las Vegas. For example, Seagate announced the introduction of its Maxtor® BlackArmour™ storage solution, a 2.5-inch consumer-friendly, portable AES government-grade encrypting external storage device that makes it simple for consumers (or business users) to securely and easily take their data with them. With hardware-level encryption, the device is designed to keep content locked even if it’s lost or stolen. Although these types of technologies have been around for years, what’s amazing is that you’ll get 160GB of portable, secure storage for a retail price of $149.99, all from your local Staples or electronics store.
Another interesting part of their announcement was the introduction of Maxtor Central Axis software, a software solution that enables users to remotely connect, access, upload, and share content on a Maxtor Shared Storage II drive, networked on your local home network-without breaching network firewalls. In effect, consumers and home office workers now have an easy way to share and access files remotely while maintaining a high level of security.
I believe that over the next few years we’ll see a huge change in the types and volume of storage devices that standard consumers are using in their homes. We’re going to see both a diversity of applications-from hard drives designed to move movies or music to automobile playback systems to home office storage, backup and remote access. In any case, a great many of these changes in the consumer storage technology landscape will undoubtedly filter back up to the enterprise, affecting the design, deployment and use of future business storage technologies for years to come.

These days, everywhere you look there’s more and more information bombarding us. Our email inboxes are flooding over, blogs, websites and RSS feeds provide a constant stream of updates, and new social networking sites such as twitter.com even allow your friends and family to track every movement you make – from running out to Starbucks to kicking back and watching the latest thriller on DVD. No matter how you slice it, the general public is exposed to a whole lot more information today than they were ten or twenty years ago.
Of course, it’s the same for businesses – only it’s worse. As I’ve explored in previous columns, today’s businesses are consuming, generating and repurposing huge amounts of data these days. And it’s not just coming from traditional order entry-type applications or individual users. Today, organizations have to deal with a wide range of data sources that are constantly delivering new information. The range is almost endless-it could be financial market data, network events, application data, RFID or sensor events, Web/click events or just about anything else. The effect is the same-many organizations need a proactive way to analyze, process, and act upon this ever-expanding volume of information flowing through the company from a myriad of (potentially time-critical) sources.