- ICT innovations will come increasingly from around the globe, and the
concept of "country of origin" will become irrelevant by 2015. - Emerging megavendors will challenge the dominant vendors in many sectors of
ICT. - Aging populations in the developed world, coupled with the large "young"
populations in these areas, will strongly influence resource supply and dynamics
globally. - There is an increasing need to focus on the location and scale of ICT
investments in emerging markets. - Assess the business impact of globalization on your enterprise. This can
provide leading-edge indicators of the impact of globalization on your firm's IT
initiatives and strategies. - Focus on developing organizational skills and capabilities to increasingly
leverage a global IT resource pool and to bring innovation into the enterprise. - Avoid tactical and cost-saving-focused approaches to dealing with emerging
market capabilities, because these will not be sustainable. Instead, define a
more strategic, holistic and all-encompassing view of the value your enterprise
can derive from emerging-market engagements.
'Borderless IT' Will Affect All Companies by 2015
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Key Findings
How Cloud Computing Is Changing the World
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Peter Yared, CEO of iWidgets
a small company, who estimates he spends four times less by using Amazon Web
services vs. conventional server hosting. -
Another issue that worries CIOs is the ability to comply with regulations,
including Sarbanes-Oxley rules that govern corporate financial reporting, and
the Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act (HIPPA), which sets
rules for security and privacy of health records -
IBM's Blue Cloud software and services, which turns a corporate data center into
its own cloud
How Cloud Computing Is Changing the World
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Microsoft, has made cloud computing one of five priorities for fiscal 2009,
according to a recent memo from CEO Steve
Ballmer. -
When Amazon's S3 storage service went down, many companies had trouble doing
business. For smaller companies, the trade-off between the cost savings of using
Amazon's service and the occasional hiccup in reliability is worth it.
Adoption of Web 2.0 Is Taking Off, But Some Firms Are Still Reluctant - Bank Systems & Technology
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Regulated industries such as banking have the most to lose. Already struggling
with e-mail and instant messaging compliance, many banks are reluctant to pile
on new communication platforms to monitor and archive
What Money Can't Buy | Fast Company
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the software industry, a research project can be considered successful if it
spurs annual revenue growth of 10% to 15%. By this metric, "Microsoft has to
create the third- or fourth-largest software company in the world every year to
be considered innovative,"
Live Report! AT&T Activation Woes Continue To Dampen 3G iPhone Joy - Mobile Blog - InformationWeek
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I've been in line for a 3G iPhone for three and a half hours now. The line I am
in hasn't moved in over an hour, and we were told that the activation servers
are down. Apple and AT&T, you should have seen this coming.
Can Google Apps move up market? | InfoWorld | Analysis | 2008-07-02 | By Tom Kaneshige
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Microsoft believes the hosted services model will eventually play a major role at large corporations. "In five years, we think
closer to 50 percent of Microsoft Office users will be using Microsoft [online] services, likely in conjunction with Microsoft
software," says Alex Payne, director of product management in the Microsoft Office group. -
Gartner analyst Austin had three inquiries from companies -- "each with tens of thousands or more
users," he says -- asking about using Google Apps in the next year or two -
The three companies were not seeking full deployments, either. "They wanted to know about segmented strategies for a certain
class of employee, such as a highly mobile person who doesn't really need a laptop but has to access e-mail and corporate
information," Austin says. "They asked, 'What about cloud computing? What about Google?'" -
And herein lies the rub. Although Google Apps may carve out niches, it's unlikely that basic applications in the cloud will
play a major role in the way giants of industry conduct business. Imagine sensitive business documents being shared in the
cloud without comprehensive enterprise controls.
Can Google Apps move up market? | InfoWorld | Analysis | 2008-07-02 | By Tom Kaneshige
-
Gartner's Austin says last year he fielded a rising tide of telephone
calls from clients wanting to know more about Google Apps. -
According to TechCrunch, Google Apps earned about $400 million
in 2007. -
Google, too, saw the signs and ramped up efforts to make Google Apps more business-friendly. In summer 2007, Google bought
Postini for $625 million -- the company's third-largest acquisition. Postini brings policy, security, and compliance rules
to e-mail and the Web, a critical feature for large companies looking to leverage cloud-based computing applications. -
Earlier this year, Google's pitch hit a crescendo. It came out with a host of new products: Google Web Security for Enterprise,
which uses Postini technology, and Google Sites for people to create a "team" Web site. Most notably, in late February, Google
announced Google Apps Team Edition, which aims to give administrators visibility into Google Apps usage at their companies,
as well as the ability to exert some control -- a sure sign that Google wanted to court big companies
The McKinsey Quarterly: The Online Journal of McKinsey & Co.
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The concept is simple and attractive: rather than buying a software license for an application such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) or customer relationship management (CRM) and installing this software on individual machines, a business signs up to use the application hosted by the company that develops and sells the software, giving the buyer more flexibility to switch vendors and perhaps fewer headaches in maintaining the software.
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IDC report1 projects that 10 percent of the market for enterprise software will migrate to a pure software-as-a-service model by 2009.
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companies whose main business is delivering software as a service saw their revenues rise from $295 million in 2002 to $485 million in 2005, an 18 percent increase.
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New software design and delivery models allow many more instances of an application to run at once in a common environment, so providers can now share one application cost effectively across hundreds of companies—a vast improvement on the old client-server model. Bandwidth costs continue to drop, making it affordable for companies to purchase the level of connectivity that allows online applications to perform gracefully.
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frustrated by the traditional cycle of buying a software license, paying for a maintenance contract, and then having to go through time-consuming and expensive upgrades
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more control over the relationship if they simply paid monthly fees that could be switched to another vendor if the first failed to perform
-
he successes of early leaders, such as salesforce.com and WebEx, have demonstrated the viability and value proposition of this model.
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Although software-as-a-service vendors are less profitable than some traditional software vendors today, this gap is primarily caused by a lack of scale
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The first wave of adoption for software as a service has been under way for several years. Companies are eager to acquire the technology for human-resources applications such as CRM and payroll and for collaboration tools that aren’t mission critical, involve relatively low data security and privacy concerns, have a distributed user base, and require little integration with on-premise applications and little customization.
-
All three waves mostly aim to replicate the functionality of applications that have been sold as packaged software and hosted on the customer’s site. The next frontier—we might call it software as a service 2.0—will include new classes of applications which are actually better suited for online delivery and seamlessly integrate with on-premise applications
-
Software as a service offers several advantages to IT buyers, including more frequent (and potentially less painful) upgrades, a lower cost of ownership (up to 30 percent less for a CRM implementation, as the exhibit shows), and a higher level of service from vendors that must become more responsive to customer needs or risk losing subscription revenues. Countering these benefits are the acknowledged risks of reliability (how can IT departments ensure that the business can access its applications?) and security (how can it guarantee data privacy in line with regulations?). In addition to these broad concerns, CIOs and other IT managers must make changes in their architectural, managerial, and governance models to capture the full value of this new model.
-
Since most IT systems have been designed as closed systems with a few controlled links to the outside world, CIOs will have to shift their thinking about architecture to a hybrid model of closed and open systems
-
Second, the move to software as a service is frequently justified not only by the lower cost to own but also, and more important, by its promise to deliver better service than licensed software can with a maintenance contract.
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Third, IT managers will need to work closely with their business colleagues to refine IT governance mechanisms to capture the best business value from online delivery.
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Taken together, all of these changes signal that IT leaders will need to do more than simply plug in new hosted applications; they must revisit the foundations of the IT organization in order to ensure a smooth and fruitful transition to the new model.
Pursuing the Promise of SOA - Bank Systems & Technology
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For example, Charlotte-based Wachovia
($666 billion in assets), which turned to IBM for help designing an SOA for its
payments business, dramatically decreased the amount of time required for
testing new products, according to An. Prior to the re-architecture, the bank
faced obstacles in its testing because of rigid interfaces between its payments
channels, he relates. "Now they can test just once," An says.As a result of its SOA implementation, Wachovia has seen a 50 percent
reduction in terms of time to market, as well as cost reduction when modifying,
upgrading or adding a new payments interface, An says. This kind of speed and
savings is increasingly important in the payments space as the business becomes
more and more commoditized, he notes.
Pursuing the Promise of SOA - Bank Systems & Technology
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Conroy contends that his banking industry peers are having a hard time rolling
out SOA because they don't have a handle on exactly why they are doing it. "We
had to do a lot of prep work," he recalls. "We spent a lot of time getting the
foundational stuff in place."
Pursuing the Promise of SOA - Bank Systems & Technology
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According to McCartin, a common mistake banks often make is labeling SOA as a
technology approach; it's really about governance and rights, he asserts. "It's
a governance story," McCartin says, noting that National City turned to BEA
Systems, which is now part of Oracle (Redwood Shores, Calif.), for advice on SOA
governance and management. "Lots of people say they are doing [SOA], but it's
really a hobbyist project [for them]," he adds.
Pursuing the Promise of SOA - Bank Systems & Technology
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The business-specific content of these vendor offerings, Narter suggests, will
help financial institutions see the value of SOA -
For instance, many of the available frameworks offer a standard definition of
a customer, helping banks identify customers across their many disparate
systems, Narter adds. That normalization is the beginning of standardization
across the bank and increases the effectiveness of shared services across the
enterprise. -
There has been a lack of pervasive adoption of vertical industry protocol,"
claims Brian Jackson, Microsoft banking technology strategist for worldwide
financial services, who was recently appointed the head of architecture for
BIAN, which emerged out of SAP's Industry Value Network (IVN).
Google Data Center FAQ (Part 2): Data Center Knowledge
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How big are Google’s data centers?
-
In the Dalles, Oregon, Google's site plan includes three 68,680 square foot data center buildings, a 20,000 square foot administration building, a 16,000 square foot "transient employee dormitory" and an 18,000 square foot facility for cooling towers
-
The Google data center in Lenoir, North Carolina includes plans for two buildings, according to permits on file with Caldwell County, which describe one 139,797 square foot data center, with a 337,008 square foot structure to follow.
-
How much do Google data centers cost?
Each of the four new Google data center projects unveiled in 2007 cost an estimated $600 million. That figure includes capital investment for construction, infrastructure and computers for two data center buildings, according to Schnitt. Each project budget includes two data center facilities, with the option of adding a third, which would require additional expense beyond the $600 million. -
In its earnings reports, Google reported $1.9 billion in spending on data centers in 2006 and $2.4 billion in 2007.
-
How much energy do Google data centers use, exactly?
Google’s major data centers are supported by at least 50 megawatts of electric power, with some estimates ranging as high as 103 megawatts
Whatever happened to artificial intelligence? - Network World
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there are no silver bullets in artificial intelligence, just incremental advances
-
Eric Horvitz, manager of the Adaptive Systems group at Microsoft, says "about a quarter of all Microsoft research is focused on AI efforts." Microsoft Research includes close to 1,000 Ph.D
level researchers spread across eight campuses around the world,
Guide To Cloud Computing -- Web Services -- InformationWeek
-
IBM last year unveiled Blue Cloud, a set of offerings that, in IBM's words, will
let corporate data centers "operate more like the Internet by enabling computing
across a distributed, globally accessible fabric of resources -
IBM's first commercial cloud computing data center is going up in Wuxi, in
southern China. It will provide virtualized computing resources to the region's
chipmaking companies. -
Last October, IBM announced a partnership with Google to provide cloud computing
gateways to universities
Guide To Cloud Computing -- Web Services -- InformationWeek
-
John Gage, Sun Microsystems (NSDQ: JAVA)' co-founder, coined the phrase "the network is the
computer" nearly 20 years ago. Arguably, that was the beginning of the
cloud--but the wind changed direction -
Making cloud computing easy to use is now the focus of two initiatives at Sun:
Network.com, a collection of grid-enabled online applications available on a
pay-per-use basis, and Project Caroline, a research effort to make cloud-based
resources available to developers working on Web applications and services. -
Network.com is evolving into a "virtual on-demand data center" that customers
can use in real time as business demands change
Guide To Cloud Computing -- Web Services -- InformationWeek
-
If any technology company has had its cloud strategy questioned, it's Microsoft
(NSDQ: MSFT). Now, after a couple of years of putting the pieces into
place, Microsoft is showing progress. -
Some vendors envision a future where most, if not all, IT resources come from
the cloud, but Microsoft isn't one of them -
Its grand plan is to provide "symmetry between enterprise-based software,
partner-hosted services, and services in the cloud," chief software architect
Ray Ozzie said a few months ago. More simply, Microsoft calls it "software plus
services." -
Microsoft's first SaaS offerings for business, rolling out this year, are
Dynamics CRM Online, Exchange Online, Office Communications Online, and
SharePoint Online -
who doubts that Microsoft has entered the cloud services game should consider
this: Coca-Cola plans to subscribe to 30,000 seats of Microsoft-hosted Exchange
and SharePoint by next year. -
customers can mix and match hosted and on-premises versions of its software
-
The shift to cloud services has forced Microsoft to rethink not just the way
its products are architected, but its data center strategy, too. For years,
Microsoft leased its major data centers, but it has now begun to design,
construct, and own them, with U.S. facilities recently completed or under
construction in Illinois, Texas, and Washington, and another under way in
Dublin, Ireland.
Technology Review: Part II: A Smarter Web
-
The Los Altos, CA-based website RealTravel, created by chief
executive Ken Leeder, AdForce founder Michael Tanne, and Semantic Web researcher
Tom Gruber, offers an early example of what it will look like to mix Web 2.0
features like tagging and blogging with a semantic data-organization system. The
U.K.-based Garlik, headed by former top executives of the British online bank
Egg, uses an RDF-based database as part of a privacy service that keeps
customers apprised of how much of their personal information is appearing
online. "We think Garlik's technology gives them a really interesting technology
advantage, but this is at a very early stage," says 3i's Waterhouse, whose
venture firm helped fund Garlik. "Semantic technology is going to be a slow
burn." -
"First comes what I call the World Wide Database, making data
accessible through queries, with no AI involved," Spivack says. "Step two is the
intelligent Web, enabling software to process information more intelligently.
That's what we're working on."
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