KEY ON IT blog

The problem with most surveys outlining IT priorities is that they cast too big a net. While generally speaking, corporate CIOs may rank business intelligence high on the priority list, for example, the overall number masks the fact that priorities are different for different sized organizations in different industries.

The divergence in priorities according to company size and industry sector was made very clear in a new survey by IBM, which studied mid-market (100 to 1000...

Key Information Systems - Can work out of Woodland Hills Corporate Office as well (Orange County, California Area)

Job Description
In this role, the Architect is expected to have subject matter expert knowledge in NetApp and IBM N Series storage solutions. The architect will serve as the resident go-to resource for storage projects. 

This is a technical pre-sales position with an element of post-sales support.

A typical engagement is the architect will partner with a sales account manager to...

Decision support systems and their progeny business intelligence have long been thought to be the domain of large companies, often very large companies. Even the term “data warehouse” conjures up images of vast amounts of data that has to be pulled and assembled to serve up a report.

Historically, projects geared to building business intelligence infrastructures have cost millions of dollars, taken months if not years to complete and have involved scores of people from both the IT organization...

Webinar Series -

Date: Wednesday - November 9, 2011
Time: 11:00am PT

IBM's Netezza is enabling organizations to gain an entirely new level of business analytics performance. Netezza improves your data warehouse performance by 10-100 times, at half the cost of traditional solutions. Netezza is scalable and easy to use.

Netezza is a purpose-built, optimized analytics engine. It has placed the processing power at the disk level, so analysis occurs at the source at streaming speeds - analysis that took...

Big Data is increasingly becoming a part of the enterprise IT vernacular and we are seeing it rapidly move through the hype cycle as a viable value creation opportunity for enterprises. In a recent report, McKinsey estimated this value to be in the order of billions of dollars and deemed it the "next frontier for innovation, competition and productivity".

The unprecedented growth and availability...

New business information technology seems to follow a well-defined hype cycle. When a new technology is introduced all the IT pundits proclaim it as the greatest thing since sliced bread and that it will replace everything which preceded it.

Then bleeding-edge type IT professionals start to use it (often investing millions of dollars in the process) and guess what? It doesn’t work as advertised and unanticipated problems emerge! At this point, the pundits decide that it must be used by few, but...

An old axiom often used and sometimes attributed to Nelson Mandela says that what you see depends on where you sit.  Like Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, the idea is that what people see is determined by their position in the universe, regardless if that universe is corporate, political or any other.

So despite all the pressure on CIOs to align IT with business objectives, sometimes a CIO has a different set of priorities than the CEO. The divergence of views can be found in a study by...

The death of Steve Jobs marks the end of a generation of visionaries and entrepreneurs responsible for the emergence of computer technology into nearly every aspect of our lives. The Apple II was the first step on that path and the iPhone 4S the latest step.

Over the past several days, hundreds of commentaries and remembrances have reflected on many of the most obvious of Jobs’ achievements, starting from the very beginning.  He was the first to understand that if computer technology was...

Key Info Concierge Service

To help foster the exchange of ideas between participants at our 2011 CIO Retreat, we’ve established an on-going Concierge Service whereby we’ll arrange conference calls between yourself and any of the speakers or other participants of the Retreat. The list of participants is attached and you can download the agenda containing the speakers here. Please let me know if you would like us to facilitate a discussion with anyone on the lists now or any time in the future. In...

There has been a pretty steady drumbeat of reports over the past couple of years that CIOs are transforming themselves into champions of business transformation and business strategists. For at least a decade, CIOs were supposed to have been the leaders in the effort to more closely align IT with business goals.

With that mandate, you would think that over time CIOs would be gaining status within their organizations. But some interesting findings in a survey sponsored by the MIT Sloan CIO...

Some numbers just never get better. For at least the past 20 years, virtually everybody associated with IT in some fashion has bemoaned the rate of data growth. Over and over we have heard cautionary tales about the data explosion and big data.

Apparently, data growth is just like the weather. Everybody talks about it but nobody can do anything to change it. Last year the Gartner Group  predicted that the amount of data will grow 650 percent from 2010 to 2015. Market research group IDCestimates...

The ceremonies surrounding the 10^th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks brought into sharp relief the changes sparked by that event. Although there had been ample evidence before, that this would be the case, the attack signaled the start of a new war with a new enemy for many, if not most, Americans. Indeed, the destruction of the Twin Towers holds a place in modern American history analogous to the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the assassination of President Kennedy. These events...

Pete manages Key Info marketing campaigns and events, corporate image, Web presence and industry outreach programs. Pete has been with Key Info since its inception over a decade ago. Over his career, Pete has worked with top management at IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun and Intel, and he currently serves on the IBM Business Partner Marketing Advisory Board. Prior to joining Key Info, Pete spent twenty years building and managing sales channels, selling teams and marketing programs with companies...

The Key Info professional staff has long-term experience with IBM and other leading IT technologies by its business partners including Brocade, Cisco, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NetApp, UNIT4, and VMware.

Our professionals have earned over 100 professional IT certifications, and contribute regularly to the discussions, reports, newsletters and blogs that are published by the company.

Profiles for all professional staff members can be found on the Key Information Systems website. Key Info has one of...