EMA Research Blog: Navigating IT and Security Horizons

Cloud is still a rapidly evolving discipline, with currently many organizations thinking about how to get started or how to take their limited cloud environment to the next level. These organizations are faced with two general challenges. They have to a) get their own house – data center – in order and b) identify a shortlist of vendors that best fit their individual requirements.

During this year’s research for the 2012 EMA Workload Automation (WLA) Radar Report, we encountered a number of very interesting core findings. These research results mostly originated from dozens of conversations with end customers, who have been using WLA software for many years and sometimes even for decades. WLA, by definition, is a mature discipline, as it started during the beginning of mainframe times, then became more complex when organizations adopted distributed computing, and today is faced with a new challenge: the cloud. Please take a look at what our research showed as the most important aspects of a modern WLA solution. The following vendors were included in the report: Arcana, ASCI, ASG, BMC, CA Technologies, Cisco, Flux, MVP Systems, Network Automation, ORSYP, Stonebranch, UC4.

I know what you’re thinking – you just read the title and thought, “Microsoft as a serious player in the mobile space … suuuuure!”  Bear with me, though – this really does make sense.

I was sitting in a plane recently, pulling out my iPad to enjoy one of my colleague’s excellent publications. After clicking the Dropbox icon, I noticed that I forgot to bookmark the actual document, so it did not replicate to the iPad. This rather annoying experience made me think about how far we have come regarding replicated and shared storage. It made me also think about where we may go from here.

Every March, IBM invites customers and analysts to its annual Pulse user conference. This year, Pulse was all about the more efficient delivery of IT services, a concept that is usually referred to as “cloud”. Since cloud has developed into a term that, due to its overuse, is often frowned upon, to say the least, it was great to see IBM try hard to demystify this elusive concept, backing it up with numerous case studies and customer testimonials. The fact that many of these case studies were not as polished as you so often see during this type of show, made the experience actually better. It became clear that these were real customers, implementing “cloud” to solve very specific corporate problems and while doing this, running into very specific IT problems. This is something that just happens when breaking new ground and it speaks for IBM’s self confidence to not present only squeaky clean projects at its show.

User Experience Management (UEM) continues to capture interest in the marketplace.  And yet it remains somewhat elusive. So, what is User Experience Management really?  It’s gone by many other names in the past, such as Quality of Experience (QoE), and has other incarnations in the present such as Real User Management (RUM).   Older, typically network-centric [...]

See Dennis’ recent article on User Experience Management (UEM), posted at APM Digest, here: http://www.apmdigest.com/the-many-dimensions-of-user-experience-management-uem

Miami Dolphins, Sun Life Stadium and IBM Intelligence Operations Center

Last September, Forbes Magazine published its 2011 ranking of the NFL’s Most Valuable Teams. Forbes gives detailed financial information on why NFL franchise values are “only” growing by 1.4%. The article notes that operating costs for NFL franchises are rising. This increase is due to:

As Big Data initiatives mature into enterprise data sources supported by NoSQL products for analytics and operational systems, a clash of cultures is on the horizon (if not here already). Traditional IT implementations teams and their top-down programs rarely see eye to eye with the grass roots culture of NoSQL platform operators. But this divide is not merely between the camps of Big Data/NoSQL and traditional IT implementation teams. This is just the tip of the iceberg…. The divide becomes much more pronounced when you take the discussion to the executive suite. CMOs and CFOs, who “own” results of analytical and operational systems, are less concerned with data center standards and development methodologies as they time to value. CIOs and CTOs, responsible for implementing the connectivity and integration between NoSQL platforms and the rest of the traditional IT environment, are facing pressures to avoid chasing the latest technology fad(s).

Informatica Goal: Maximize Return on Data

The theme of last week’s Informatica Analyst Conference was utilizing the “secular megatrends” of information technology to energize data integration across organizations at an enterprise scale.  These megatrends, described as trends we can all agree upon, are the following: