EMA Blog: Business Intelligence and IT Management

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:

See Torsten's guest blog at Parallels.

See Torsten’s guest blog at Parallels.

If you look at the history of Big Data requirements (volume, velocity and variety), and the NoSQL platforms supporting those requirements, you see a history of organizations and development teams breaking the mold of traditional information technology (IT) programs. Instead of following the traditional IT methodologies to solve the Big Data issues, these teams pushed the envelope and invented new technologies to solve those “volume, velocity and variety” problems. More often than not, these efforts were accomplished using collaborative, bottom-up methodologies, such as Open Source, rather than rigid, top-down approaches found in traditional product development methodologies. Specifically, if you look at the history of the Hadoop development at Yahoo, you see an approach that sought the input and wide spread resources of the Open Source movement rather than a more rigid proprietary approach.

On the one hand, many in the industry have begun todismiss the CMDB as well past its prime, at least in terms of industry hype and attention. For this rather significant population, the CMDB has evolved into a complex and demanding data store with tangible but difficult-to-justify benefits, with questionable relationships to cloud computing and [...]