KEY ON IT blog

A New Approach to Security

The day before the COMMON conference—IBM’s premier event for its midrange systems users--opened in Anaheim this month, IBM released a study reporting on the new role of security in many organizations and the new pressures on security officers.  According to the study, in most far-sighted companies, security is now seen as a business imperative rather than just a technological challenge.  As a result, security is now a regular topic of ongoing business discussions.

The...

Less is More with Virtualization

If you think that the virtualization market is starting to mature, you may want to think again.  In fact, even though perhaps as many as 85 percent of large companies (and 67 percent of middle-sized companies) have implemented virtualization solutions to one degree or another, the market and the technology is developing rapidly and the potential ways to implement virtualization are growing. The key to understanding those trends is to think both bigger and...

Smarter Planet? Think Local

In the information technology arena, sometimes a marketing campaign can make a difference.  Intel’s Intel Inside program led consumers to actually realize that what was inside their devices counted.  Perhaps even more impressively, Apple’s Think Different fanned the embers of extreme loyalty among Macintosh users and we know where that ultimately led.

After four years, IBM’s Smarter Planet campaign has risen to the same level. When the IBM chairperson Sam Palmisano kicke...

IBM’s Next Step

As anticipated, IBM has unveiled a major new architecture that some analysts say is on the scale of the historic IBM System/360 and the System/38 from days of yore.  Called PureSystems, IBM is touting the two packages unveiled as the first in a new category called “expert integrated systems.” 

There can be no doubt that IBM considers PureSystems a major step forward.  Over the past four years, Big Blue has acquired multiple companies and invested more than $2 billion in...

As former President Bill Clinton might have said if he had campaigned to be president of IBM, “It’s the applications, stupid.” Since the beginning of the modern age of computing, the real value has not come from the technology itself, but what people can do with it.

And that is how you know that we are still at the very beginning of what promises to be a very significant revolution sparked by the application of Big Data. Over time, Big Data will be used to solve big problems; both ones we...

People with their eyes peeled to the blogosphere have picked up word that IBM is ready to unveil a major new server platform at a Webcast on April 11.  It’s dubbed internally as the Next Generation Platform and externally as an “expert integrated system”.  According to the invitation to the Webcast floating around the Internet,  the system will “integrate built-in expertise, integration by design and a simplified overall experience,” that will, once again, “change the economics of computing”.

Th...

For most of us, Big Data is pretty daunting. Everybody throws all those humongous numbers around - the amount of data will grow 800 percent in the next five years; 80 percent of the world’s data was created in the last two years; 80 percent of all data is unstructured; 30 billion pieces of information are shared on Facebook every month and so on - but in the trenches in many companies it is hard to see exactly how to capitalize on that data. 

So while in theory there is a lot more data out there,...

Contributor: Pete Elliot

By now, there can be no doubt that the Big Data phenomenon is real. A new report, from the market research company IDC, projects that the demand for Big Data technology and services will climb to $16.9 billion by 2015. That’s a major increase from $3.2 billion spent in 2010. During that period, spending on Big Data will grow seven times faster than the overall growth rate in IT.

And for those of you who were wondering what exactly Big Data is, the IDC report includes a...

Last year, Linux turned 20. When Linux was created in 1991 as a sort of a hobby/social experiment/geek project by Linus Torvalds, it was little more than a curiosity. The whole concept of open source software was in its infancy as was the Internet itself, which became the key enabling technology for the whole open source movement.

When IBM decided to invest $1 billion in the platform in 2001, not only did Linux move to center stage of corporate computing, but all of it sudden it was seen as a...

Computer and information security is a top priority in virtually every organization and venue. Reports of data and privacy breaches, identity and intellectual property theft and even espionage seem to be an almost daily occurrence.

But in healthcare, the security stakes are even higher than they are in many other industries. First, healthcare providers operate under strict federal regulations. The 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) mandate standards was designed...

You know that the concept of Big Data has gone mainstream when there is an article about it in The New York Times. Of course, going mainstream is a two-edged sword. The hype about what can be done now will grow and many people will ultimately be disappointed when the results don’t match the promise. The well-known Gartner Technology Hype Cycle is now officially in effect. On the other hand, with more people focused on the potential benefits of Big Data, more companies should be willing to...

Electronic Healthcare Records (EHR) are one of the essential lynchpins in Healthcare IT. In the long run, EHR will be the comprehensive record for patient care. Even a basic EHR will contain a listing of all of a patient’s diagnoses and help prevent harmful drug interactions. And if we’re lucky, EHRs will also eliminate the need to fill in all that nasty paperwork with complete health histories, every time we go to a specialist.

The good news is that the use of electronic health records grew more...

In so many areas, the impact of computerization is now taken for granted. Foreign travelers expect that they can shove their ATM card into a machine anywhere in the world and money will pop out in seconds. Nobody thinks about all the processing that takes place to get that done. Ask an online search engine just about any question and it will produce an answer—though not always a correct answer—in a flash. And if you want to sort through terabytes of corporate data to identify trends or other...

Based on more than 3,000 interviews with CIOs around the world, in companies large and small, IBM’s 2011 research report The Essential CIO, is part of its C-Suite Studies series. This study is one of the more insightful and credible of its kind. The report provides an in-depth look at the changing role of the CIO within the enterprise and shifting demands on the IT organization.

From a 20,000 foot perspective, the report contends CIOs are faced with four different types of mandates—to leverage...

While many folks in the IT world are entranced by the Big Bang Theory and the Large Hadron Collider of technology innovation—some “killer app” will appear that revolutionizes everything—change in IT is usually incremental. Sure Time magazine may have named the personal computer the “machine of the year” in 1983. However, before PCs penetrated the corporate world, price points dropped dramatically, processing power went into overdrive and the graphical user interface became ubiquitous. Along the same...

In almost stealth fashion, the last five years have been a period of incredible innovation in corporate IT. The emergence of Cloud Computing, Software As A Service, the demand for mobility, the drive towards virtualization and the recognition of the importance of Big Data are leading to profound changes in the way organizations generate, communicate, apply and store data. And while the changes may not be as flashy and in-your-face as the previous IT revolutions launched by the personal computer...

With the New Year upon us, it is time to turn once again to one of our favorite past times—predictions. Where will you, your competitors (or your clients) be investing IT budgets next year?

The CIO Insight’s 2012 IT Investment Patterns Study forecasts that large enterprises will be increasing their budgets most significantly in mobile applications development, wireless equipment and network attached storage.  Mid-range companies, on the other hand, are stepping up their spending on ERP, sales...

In 2007, Malcolm Gladwell, perhaps the best-selling author on the planet today, now that J.K. Rowling is taking a breather, published the intriguing book Blink. The beguiling thesis of the book was that snap judgments made by the right person can be good - very, very good actually. Many people walked away from the book with perhaps the oversimplified or even wrong message that they should just go with their gut since it is usually as good as other methods of decision-making.

Well, don’t believe...