Vendor Forum
If you’re an enterprise not executing on your cloud plans today, you’re in trouble. It’s the way in which much business is getting done today, and the way in which it will be done tomorrow; with greater operational efficiency across the board. So what considerations should you be taking before moving to a cloud platform?
Black Friday and Cyber Monday have passed, and I've been reading (and sometimes laughing) at tips people have been giving out in the media so organizations "Bulletproof their website" to stop them crashing and slowing down during the thanksgiving and holiday season ...
To help retailers and businesses maximize the return on investments in these applications, the following are best practices retailers should implement when using an application performance monitoring solution in order to maintain these business-critical applications and ensure a good holiday season ...
Cyber Monday 2011 is on target to be the single highest online shopping day in history. There are several major performance challenges that online retailers must be prepared to meet on Cyber Monday and throughout the 2011 holiday shopping season ...
Are you finding, as an IT professional, that you feel like you're in the middle of a cutting room floor, trying to figure out what's supposed to be fitting where and not getting the answers you need in the time required? There is an alternative happier ending to this movie ...
If you were promoted from a technical position to CIO, it´s clear that leadership and communication skills will take you much further than reading technicalities about virtualization engines. And if you are in a more technical position, it could have even more> impact.
Once the business starts to offer a mobile application, how will IT manage the application? Will users have a good experience? Will they be able to download their favorite song in an acceptable time? And how do you ensure transaction success?
Does Amazon Silk have the potential to dramatically improve the mobile Web? Amazon is leveraging their cloud infrastructure and have put the majority of the work and processing power in the cloud to drastically reduce the amount of communication to and from the mobile device. They have potentially eliminated a huge chunk of the issues that makes mobile web browsing less than ideal.
Three delivery trends are changing the way enterprise IT brings applications to market: Agile development, composite applications and cloud computing. These initiatives share a single, primary purpose, and it isn’t just cost reduction. The chief objective of these trends is better, faster outcomes. All three seek to strip the latencies from traditional delivery and provide results that are more aligned with, and more responsive to, the business.
Innovation is the engine of economic growth. Organizations that innovate successfully (even to the point of rendering their own products obsolete) thrive, while those that do not lose relevancy.
Many businesses are struggling today under the weight of their IT business applications. The business cannot survive without the applications that enable the essential tasks of business—keeping accurate inventories, processing payments, handling orders, to name just a few. While the activities may be the same as they were hundreds of years ago, the volume at which these transactions occur is too vast for any mind to comprehend.
As a network manager, you are being pulled in too many directions – from troubleshooting a slow network issue, to a datacenter consolidation project, to supporting your business and maintaining mission-critical applications. I don’t want to add to your list of action items, but there is an area often overlooked by busy IT professionals - log management. If you don’t have the right log management strategy in place, you should reconsider, and here is why ...
As IT ramps up business agility with cloud computing, business users engage directly in cloud sourcing, and consumer-driven IT drives higher service expectations, IT must step up to support an agile cross-domain service model. Cloud computing puts management and security at the forefront, and managing business service is no exception. Rather than adding yet more manual labor, or continuing to focus on low-level change and configuration management, cloud drives an urgent need for a more flexible and dynamic management practice based on automated service operations management.
Cloud computing represents a compelling way for IT teams to achieve superior agility, flexibility and cost-efficiency in delivering both customer- and employee-facing enterprise applications. But just because you’re using cloud services from one of the top service providers, that’s no guarantee of superior application performance, particularly when it comes to speed. Businesses must look beyond cloud deployment benefits and evaluate how moving web applications to the cloud may impact their end users’ experiences ...
In today’s economy with sluggish job creation, there’s much talk about the change in skills required in today’s workforce. Drill down into the world of IT operations management, and there is an even greater shift happening, related not to the economy, but to cloud computing. The rapid adoption of private cloud architectures is creating ripple effects, not only on the way IT delivers services to its customers, but also on the types of skills IT requires to support these new architectures.
The other night after my football (pronounced soccer) match, we ended up in a fast food restaurant. I realized that the order taking was very slow, but in line with the actual delivery of food after you paid for your order. I remembered the novel The Goal and the Theory of Constraints, and immediately started looking for the restaurant's bottlenecks. It was clearly the kitchen. The front office, slow enough, was no slower than the back office. What does this have to do with monitoring? ...
The other day I visited a bank to introduce BSM concepts. The IT executives I talked to were very supportive of the ideas, and willing to move forward. But, they said, “How are we going to get this funded?” They had had a very bad experience in the past so they wanted to make sure they would be able to “sell” the BSM project internally. So I compiled some general tips that were useful to me in selling my products and ideas to customers, colleagues, and even to my wife (and she is tougher than all the rest, I tell you). It’s a Top 15. It’s like a Top 10, but 50% better.
I saw a survey in an interesting article the other day by ZDNet blogger Joe McKendrick. McKendrick cites a new cloud survey for The Open Group. The survey indicated that many believe cloud will bring favorable ROI to IT shops, but they lack a mechanism to track results.
For a VP of operations, the cloud, virtualization and mobile communications are making BSM harder than ever. Unfortunately your business customers don’t care. They just want your services to work when, where and how they want them. And they don’t want them to cost too much either. But here’s the issue: while effective, the tried and true approach to BSM — focusing on monitoring and measuring end-user experience—doesn’t provide the type of insight that a VP of operations needs. Today’s IT environment is just too complex. You need higher-level insights that are possible with an IT performance system.
