Category: White papers

The Dirty Little Secret About Online Backup

Posted on by UpsideAdmin

How do you know your business data is protected? If your server fails or a hurricane hits or some other digital disaster strikes, what would you lose? Your email? Your customer database? Your business contacts? Your business?

Perhaps you’re one of the many companies taking advantage of online backup services to protect your data. Online backup is a great way to ensure that critical digital assets, from databases to documents, can be safely restored if there’s ever a problem. But if you’re using online backup, there’s something you need to be aware of. It’s the one consideration that your online backup provider might not have mentioned to you.

It’s the dirty little secret about online backup.

The secret is that it might take a lot longer to restore that data than you expect. What most providers don’t mention is that, after a disaster or server problem, it might take days to restore critical business data. In fact, the time it takes to restore data, even with a high-speed Internet connection, can mean potential downtime that can be detrimental to your business – even to the point of causing business failure. In fact, some industry sources estimate that approximately half of computer users will experience a loss of data at some point, and businesses that experience a major loss of data may not be able to recover and could end up going out of business within two years.

Luckily, online backup solutions have been around long enough that now there are reliable options that address these issues. For example, one popular option is a hybrid online/local service that allows organizations to maintain up to date local copies of critical business data that are available to speed the recovery process in the event of a data loss. Using a hybrid model can significantly reduce recovery and restore times for small and mid-sized businesses.

In this Upside Research White Paper on The Dirty Little Secret About Online Backup, we’ll take a closer look at the dirty little secret of online backup, explore what to look for in online backup solutions, and learn how companies are solving the problem of slow recovery times through hybrid disaster recovery solutions.

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Having it Both Ways: Finding the Right BPM Tools for Workflow and Project-Based Processes

Posted on by UpsideAdmin

When it comes to business processes, change is what it’s all about. That holds true even when it comes to business process management. By now we’ve probably all learned that business process management (BPM) is a great approach for automating business processes. And over the past few years we’ve found that BPM solutions have proven they are good for automating well-defined workflows and enabling organizations to streamline a wide range of business processes.

To help organizations better define their processes and process management needs, this Upside Research white paper on BPM and workflow tools takes a closer look at the distinction between activity-based processes and traditional flow-based processes, and how organizations can optimize their processes in the most effective way.

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Nimble BPM White Paper

Posted on by UpsideAdmin

What’s needed is an approach that takes BPM back to the basics and helps organizations achieve what the technology originally promised: increased business agility and increased efficiency. Focusing on the core competency of BPM and process automation enables businesses to do more with less, streamlining their key business processes and reducing costs. What’s needed is nimble BPM.

This Upside Research white paper on Nimble BPMexplores nimble BPM and takes a closer look at BP Logix Workflow Director as an option for streamlined workflow automation and process management.

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Agile Suites

Posted on by DavidKelly

Agile software development is making inroads into organizations as a beneficial software development approach. What began as a revolution in 2001 has now become a regular part of many engineering organizations’ development projects. The benefits are attractive: increase overall throughput of the development organization by up to 40%, and work better, smarter, and faster in a world of shrinking budgets. For most companies, gaining those types of benefits and successfully implementing Agile development processes requires more than just retraining people and moving to Agile methodologies.

This Upside Research report highlights how senior developers and management can gain a higher level of control and productivity out of the entire software engineering organization by optimizing Agile software development through the use of professional Agile Suites. The report identifies several leading vendors of professional Agile software development suites, and also builds a business case for using an Agile Suite to further improve efficiency and deliver better end results for all software development.

For the full Upside Research report on Agile Suites, download the Agile Suites Report

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Insider’s Guide to BPM ROI – Learn How to Achieve High ROI for BPM Projects

Posted on by DavidKelly

As BPM continues to gain momentum and tout real-life cases of enterprise business success and return on investment, the interest in the ROI on BPM is growing dramatically.

This document is an abstract of the full Upside Research report on BPM ROI available at www.upsideresearch.com. The report is designed to explore how organizations are approaching ROI for their BPM projects. Through our extensive research, we identified some compelling elements of the ROI picture, including where organizations are finding the biggest returns, how ROI is shaping the purchase decision more than ever, and the best opportunities for making a return on your BPM investment faster. In addition, Upside Research also uncovered some important stumbling blocks that prevent organizations from seeing an ROI with their BPM projects. Finally, we provide some detailed suggestions on how to maximize the ROI of your BPM project.

Click here to download the complete Upside Research report on BPM ROI.

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Free Software Configuration Management (SCM) – Is It Worth It?

Posted on by DavidKelly

Software Configuration Management (SCM) is a critical core infrastructure tool for all software development organizations. While often taken for granted or below senior management’s radar, SCM is an extremely important component of an organization’s software infrastructure. Historically, a significant number of organizations have used open-source SCM, such as RCS, CVS and more recently Subversion, to form the backbone of their development environments. However, such solutions can have hidden costs associated with them. This paper was written to help organizations understand when such free tools make business sense and when commercial SCM solutions may be more appropriate.

In this report we provide context for answering those questions and analyze a composite scenario of an organization that has used both types of solutions, based on interviews with enterprise developers and industry research.

Click here to download the complete Upside Research report on Open Source SCM

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Best Practices for Application Service Management in Law Firms

Posted on by DavidKelly

Lawyers are known for their hard-working business ethics and their long hours put in at the office – and now, thanks to technology, outside the office. Because so much of a lawyer’s work involves technology today, it is imperative that the technology be available and working correctly when a lawyer needs it. If there’s a problem with technology—if a lawyer can’t access documents or email or get fast response from a critical application—there’s a problem with the business. That means fewer billable hours, less revenue, potentially unhappy clients and a frustrated lawyer wasting time. More so than in any other business, a legal firm’s IT infrastructure—from its applications to the network—have to work right, work fast and be available whenever the employees need them.

That, however, is easier said than done. As with most businesses, the IT staff in a law firm is typically stretched thin. Instead of being able to proactively monitor all the applications, servers, network connections and storage devices critical to daily operations, most staff are fighting technology fires or simply trying to complete important projects before deadline. For example, when an application crashes, or the network is bogged down, IT must scramble to identify the cause and then try to find the resources to fix it, all while under pressure to get the systems up and running again as quickly as possible. A downed network or server can easily cost a firm of 100 lawyers $25,000 – $75,000 per hour in lost revenues.

There is an alternative—automated systems that can proactively help IT (and even lawyers themselves) monitor everything from the new voice over IP (VOIP) telephone system to financial management applications to email performance and network bottlenecks. Leading companies in industries that have high service requirements or critical time pressures have been using these types of “application service management??? solutions successfully and profitably for years. While application service management solutions can work equally well in legal environments and can have a dramatic effect on the productivity of both IT departments and partners, most law firms are just starting to take advantage of them.

This report offers a solution for law firms feeling the crunch of their IT systems’ vulnerabilities or simply the uncertainty of inconsistent performance. By using a set of application management tools that monitor, manage and troubleshoot everything from desktops and servers to networks and applications, law firms can gain significant benefits and competitive advantages. This report also introduces Compuware Vantage as an option for law firms that are interested in leveraging the benefits of automated application service management.

Click here to download the complete Upside Research report on automated application service management in the legal market

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The Business Impact of BPM with SOA: Building a Business Case for BPM with SOA ROI

Posted on by DavidKelly

At the heart of every business is a complicated web of processes that form the foundation for all operations. These business processes are the lifeblood of the organization and typically include all of the humans and systems that exist within the enterprise. Since they play such a central role, business processes must be as efficient as possible to make the business as effective as possible. As a result, finding ways to automate and improve business processes has become a major focus for today’s organizations as they struggle to find ways to become more agile and responsive to changing business climates.

In fact, an entire market—business process management—has grown out of the desire to improve existing business processes and build new processes and services that will differentiate a business from its competitors. Business process management (BPM) solutions aim to provide enterprises with a common platform that can tap into all resources, both human and system-based, to create, manage and optimize effective business processes that span the enterprise. BPM solutions can help organizations to maximize their existing technology and human infrastructure by linking existing systems and automating tasks that can free humans up to add value elsewhere within the enterprise.

Click here to download the complete Upside Research report on BPM ROI

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State of the BPM Market

Posted on by DavidKelly

Over the past decade, BPM has evolved from a number of other technology pre-cursors, including workflow, integration and process automation. Through this evolution process, BPM has picked up a number of best practices that enable companies to use a “new” technology that has been road-tested in the past. As such, companies from all industries have started using BPM because, in short, it works. BPM can make a huge difference in how your company responds to market pressures and how it proactively tackles new business needs. Not only that, it changes the economics of managing the business through improved process performance.

To help organizations start their evaluation and understand the context for a BPM purchase, Upside Research has prepared this State of the BPM Market, as a starting point for future evaluation of this dynamic market. This report follows up on the trends and information discussed from Upside’s previous market evaluations published in June 2004 and October 2005, and provides a current snapshot of where the BPM market stands at the beginning of 2006.

By taking a look at a current snapshot of the BPM market, combined with a consideration of current hot spots, how related markets are growing, and finally what the next year holds for BPM, organizations can gain a more complete understanding of how BPM can positively impact their organization. For maximum benefit, Upside Research believes that most organizations should combine this context-setting information with an evaluation of BPM products from both a business and IT perspective to identify the most appropriate solution.

Click here to download the complete Upside Research report – State of BPM Market

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BPM Survival Guide – What You Need to Know Before Selecting a BPM Solution

Posted on by DavidKelly

It’s always easier to understand what you need to know after you know it. That’s why we’ve prepared this brief handbook for business and technology managers who want to learn more about business process management (BPM) solutions.

While trying to understand any new technology can be difficult, getting your hands around the differences in BPM solutions can be particularly troubling because so many vendors are coming into the market from very different perspectives—workflow, enterprise application integration, document management, and more.
This Upside Research Survival Guide provides business and technology managers with the overview needed to understand the benefits of BPM technologies and identify the characteristics of BPM solutions that are important for their particular needs.

Click here to download the complete Upside Research report – BPM Survival Guide

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