In this era of unprecedented change, organizations need agility to adapt rapidly. Part of what separates winners from losers is the ability to respond quickly and intelligently to market opportunities, competitive threats and regulatory constraints — in short, to innovate and create value.
Although it’s difficult to get a consensus growth figure, most analysts see business intelligence (BI) as a relative bright spot in the IT spending forecast, with a projected growth rate of between 2% and 10% (vs. the 9–12% projected in early 2008).
he widespread emergence of the Internet in the mid 1990s as a platform for electronic data distribution and the advent of structured information have revolutionized our ability to deliver information to any corner of the world. While the introduction of Extensible Markup Language (XML)i as a structured format was a major enabling factor, the promise offered by SOAP based webservices triggered the discovery of architectural patterns that are now known as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).
As telecommunications service providers (SPs) attempt to offset declines in legacy revenues by moving into adjacent segments such as enterprise IT services, they may be overlooking an attractive and underserved market: the small- and medium-sized business (SMB) sector. To date, SPs have focused their efforts in the highly competitive market for enterprise IT services to build critical mass for service offerings.
The Problem – Replace the paper driven dispatch and delivery system
A large fuel logistics and delivery company with over 77 fixed based terminals, 2500 trucks, and 3500 truck drivers in 36 states was using a paper and phone based system to deliver over 2 million loads of petroleum per year.
Private and public clouds evolve the way IT services are delivered to the business. The promise of increased efficiency and agility of enterprise-class applications and services is intriguing, but enterprise customers are struggling with how cloud services can safely add realistic business value. The use of external cloud services challenge security and compliance, as well as service level management, which can involve multiple domains of control. Technology lock-in is an additional concern as various vendors deliver very different cloud computing offerings (and there are others of which you should be aware). The reality is that external cloud services are still working toward enterprise maturity.