Every so often something comes along that changes the established order. The most oft quoted examples in the technology marketplace are the internet, HTML, the ecommerce model, open source, and distributed computing. Some of them we see coming a mile off; the shift from the use of the internet as a research collaboration tool to one of transactional commerce was fairly obvious once HTML took the geek out of the game of browse and seek. ...
08/09/2008 | Sustained Disruption.pdf | VIEW
Children's nursery rhymes. Medieval morality plays. Allegorical art. What have they all got in common? They have all been used as means of passing on information before the advent of more technical approaches, such as cheap printing that enables broad literacy. ...
07/09/2008 | The Lost Art of Storytelling.pdf | VIEW
In a recent briefing to Quocirca regarding the “greenness” of a vendor’s new hardware device the assurance was firmly made by the product manager that “We’re not trying to save the polar bears or anything.” Which was perhaps a wise thing to say as it is a stretch in anyone’s imagination how a rack mounted mass storage device might rescue an at-risk Ursus maritimus from whatever nasty fate awaits it. If Spock were an IT analyst even his eyebrows might spasm uncontrollably with cynicism were such a claim to be made. ...
04/09/2008 | This is not about polar bears.pdf | VIEW
Sunday 7 September 2008, will mark the 10th anniversary of the incorporation of Google Inc (not to be confused with the registration of the www.google.com domain 11 years ago in September 1997). In those 10 years Google has created one of the world’s most valuable brand names, become a verb and proved, during a period when many other online ventures failed, that a highly-profitable business can be created on the internet or as it is often termed, in the cloud. ...
03/09/2008 | Happy 10th Birthday Google, but have you done anything for businesses.pdf | VIEW
Thin client computing has been around for many years - predating the PC, if you include standard green screen terminals. However, the real push with thin client devices was during the late 1990s, when the likes of NCD, Wyse and IGEL pushed their devices as being the antidote to the high price, low stability and variable management costs of the standard PC. ...
02/09/2008 | Thin client computing smartens up.pdf | VIEW
According to the old cliché, content is king. For many organisations today, the content that they produce could be considered as the crown jewels of the business, including highly sensitive and valuable data such as financial records, intellectual property and databases of customer records. There are many that would like to get their hands on those gems of information and preventing this data from leaking out of an organisation is of prime concern to governments, enterprises and small businesses alike. ...
28/08/2008 | Digital DNA.pdf | VIEW
Salesforce.com is set to become a $1bn applications company, with latest quarterly revenues of just under $248m. For Mark Benioff and his team to have done this in just nine years is impressive. ...
06/08/2008 | The Rise and Rise of Infor.pdf | VIEW
Data centre energy efficiency has been getting an enormous amount of attention recently. While some companies on both the buy and sell sides are treating the issue as 'green IT', the fact is that there are a number of drivers, not least of which is the realisation a few years ago that fully loaded rack systems have the ability to boil a kettle almost as fast as they can process a transaction. ...
03/08/2008 | Measuring Datacentre Efficiency.pdf | VIEW
When the economy starts to slide, the easy option is to cut back, rather than invest. After all, every cost saved goes straight to the bottom line, every amount invested will be subject to tighter scrutiny, and even new revenues generated are subject to a decision on acceptable margins. ...
01/08/2008 | Switch from oil to silicon - digitise through the downturn.pdf | VIEW
Software Asset Management (SAM) has often been seen as a necessary evil, used to ensure that software licences are used within contractual limits, so avoiding the possibility of fines should a company be found to have a copy of an application running somewhere without a valid licence. ...
01/08/2008 | SAM - Friend or Foe.pdf | VIEW
