Category: Profit Magazine

Increasing Productivity and Profitability by David A. Kelly
August, 2008 : Profit Magazine

Over the past few years, IT services giant Unisys has embarked on one of the most extensive makeovers in the industry, refocusing itself from a hardware-oriented company to one focused on services and solutions.
At the same time, Unisys has also transformed its IT infrastructure. The company has reduced the total number of applications in its portfolio by 35 percent, decreased its server footprint by 50 percent through virtualization, increased its use of off-the-shelf applications to 60 percent, and achieved costs per end user that are 30 percent lower than comparable organizations.

But one area that had eluded Unisys’ transformation was critical to its future profitability—the area of resource management and professional service automation (PSA), including project setup, budget and funding, online resource requests, résumé searches, assigning resources to projects, and more. With about 22,000 employees in billable jobs, Unisys had to make sure its consultants focused and executed efficiently.

Putting Oracle Database 11g to Work by David A. Kelly
May 2008 : Profit Magazine

Your IT staff may get excited about the nuts and bolts of a new software release, but the ultimate success of an upgrade is based on the benefit it delivers to the business. Profit took a look at Oracle’s new database—Oracle Database 11g—to get an executive’s take on it. Here are five ways it will benefit your enterprise:
Protect and manage unstructured data. Unstructured data—the volumes of information stored outside the database—is the fastest-growing type of enterprise data. From XML datatypes to geospatial objects, organizations are storing and managing more large data files—without the added protection, security, and management capabilities associated with traditional database solutions.

Oracle SecureFiles, a new feature in Oracle Database 11g, allows you to deliver this information from the database with the same speed and performance of a file system. But SecureFiles allows you to compress (for reduced storage requirements), encrypt, (for greater security) and deduplicate (for greater information accuracy) this data. By moving unstructured data into databases, you can better track and secure important data that is currently spread around your enterprise.
“We think this is the last remaining piece to really help nudge customers to move more and more of their high-value business documents out of file systems into databases, and get all the benefits of a database—the reliability, availability, security,” says Andy Mendelsohn, Oracle’s senior vice president of database server technologies. “It makes it easier for them to deal with their auditors who are always auditing them against compliance requirements.”

India – Sophisticated and Savvy by David A. Kelly
November 2006 : Profit Magazine

India is handling red-hot growth with real business intelligence.

India was everywhere at the Davos World Economic Forum earlier this year, as Indian executives and government officials used the event to promote India’s position as the fastest-growing democratic economy in the world. Beyond its borders, the country is sometimes seen as an immense and exotic land. For many consumers, it’s also the voice on the other end of the phone when they call technical support for their computers, telephones, or television sets.

But call centers are far from the only area that Indian businesses are focused on. Businesspeople who are paying attention know that India’s best years are still ahead, and opportunities are there for the taking.

Next Generation UI–Clear Skies Ahead by David A. Kelly
May 2006 : Profit Magazine

Next-generation usability makes users happier and more productive.

Sue Shaw knows the importance of usability. As the enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications architect at Shell Canada, she’s tasked with serving the IT demands of Shell Canada’s 4,200 applications users. She knows that the success or failure of an IT project comes down to one thing—value to the employee. “It’s really our employees who determine how effective a piece of software is,” says Shaw. “For them, it’s always about being able to get their jobs done quickly and accurately.”