Systems Integrator

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 client-provider metaphor has long characterized the relationship between the IT organization and the rest of the “business” in their enterprises. IT organizations must develop service-level agreements that they are expected to meet. Many companies have long used chargeback processes to calculate the way IT resources are consumed.

But what does the “business” really expect from the CIO and IT? IBM’s 2011 global chief information officers study The Essential CIO sheds some interesting light...

This may be hard to believe, but before you know it, hurricane season will be upon us again. And while we can all hope that we won’t face another catastrophe like Katrina, the sad fact of the matter is that weather is getting more extreme. This year alone there has been widespread flooding in many parts of the country, hugely destructive tornados and punishing snow storms. Katrina may have been the worst ever for the US but weather disasters have become routine. And let’s not even think about...

Cloud computing is certainly the darling of Wall Street these days.  Anybody who still follows the market can’t help but notice that any company associated with the “cloud” is hot.  As is often the case, when Wall Street anoints an emerging technology as hot, it means it probably still poses a lot of problems for the people on the ground who are responsible for evaluating and implementing it.   Yet how many times will some senior executive read something somewhere and buttonhole an IT manager...

A new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that children between the ages of eight and 18 spend seven and a half hours a day using electronic devices such as smart phones, computers, televisions, iPods, iPads, PDAs etc. That is a lot of time online. The typical college student has 500 to 1000 or more “friends” on Facebook and sends and receives more than 100 text messages daily. Kids are communicating so much these days that if you ask me how they have time to do anything else I would...