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IBM Watson Takes Cognitive Computing to the Head of the Class

Laura's Insights ITIC Blog, News / By

Pardon the pun, but there’s nothing elementary about IBM’s newly formed, New York City-based Watson Business Unit (BU).

IBM is committing $1 billion and 2,000 employees, as well as its considerable research and development (R&D) talents and marketing muscle to Watson, thus putting the full weight of its global technology and services brand behind the newly formed BU and initiative.

IBM CEO Virginia Rometty said that Michael Rhodin, most recently SVP of IBM’s Software Solutions Group, will take charge of the Watson Group. According to Rometty, the company established Watson as a separate BU based on the strong demand for cognitive computing. The IBM Watson Group will develop cloud-based technologies that can power services for businesses, industries and consumers.

Rometty also said the new IBM Watson Group notably integrates design, services, core functions, technologies, and a fully formed ecosystem which includes a design lab as well as hundreds of outside external partner applicants, foundations and advisors. All of these elements are crucial if Watson is to succeed. …

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IBM Watson Takes Cognitive Computing to the Head of the Class Read More »

IBM Platform Resource Scheduler Automates, Accelerates Cloud Deployments

Laura's Insights ITIC Blog / By

One of the most daunting and off-putting challenges for any enterprise IT department is how to efficiently plan and effectively manage cloud deployments or upgrades while still maintaining the reliability and availability of the existing infrastructure during the rollout.

IBM solves this issue with its newly released Platform Resource Scheduler which is part of the company’s Platform Computing portfolio and an offering within the IBM Software Defined Environment (SDE) vision for next generation cloud automation. The Platform Resource Scheduler is a prescriptive set of services designed to ensure that enterprise IT departments get a trouble-free transition to a private, public or private cloud environment by automating the most common placement and policy procedures of their virtual machines (VMs). It also helps guarantee quality of service while greatly reducing the most typical human errors that occur when IT administrators manually perform tasks like load balancing and memory balancing. The Platform Resource Scheduler is sold with IBM’s SmartCloud Orchestrator and PowerVC and is available as an add-on with IBM SmartCloud Open Stack Entry products. It also features full compatibility with Nova APIs and fits into all IBM OpenStack environments. It is built on open APIs, tools and technologies to maximize client value, skills availability and easy reuse across hybrid cloud environments. It supports heterogeneous (both IBM and non-IBM) infrastructures and runs on Linux, UNIX and Windows as well as IBM’s zOS operating systems. …

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IBM Platform Resource Scheduler Automates, Accelerates Cloud Deployments Read More »

Does Infrastructure Really Matter When it Comes to IT Security?

Laura's Insights ITIC Blog, News / By

Yes, infrastructure absolutely does matter and has a profound and immediate impact on enterprise security.

Server hardware (and the server operating systems and applications that run on them) form the bedrock upon which the performance, reliability and functionality of the entire infrastructure rests. Just as you wouldn’t want to build a house on quicksand, you don’t want your infrastructure to be shaky or suspect: it will undermine security, network operations, negatively impact revenue, raise the risk of litigation and potentially cause your firm to lose business.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. These days, many if not most corporate enterprises have extranets to facilitate commerce and communications amongst their customers, business partners and suppliers. Any weak link in infrastructure security has the potential to become a gaping hole, allowing a security breach to extend beyond the confines of the corporate network and extranet. Security breaches can infect and invade other networks with astounding rapidity.

Increasingly, aging and inadequate infrastructure adversely impacts enterprise security. …

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Does Infrastructure Really Matter When it Comes to IT Security? Read More »

Two-Thirds of Corporations Now Require 99.99% Database Uptime, Reliability

ITIC Reports & Surveys / By

A 64% majority of organizations now require that their databases deliver a minimum of four, “nines” of uptime 99.99% or better for their most mission critical applications . That is the equivalent of 52 minutes of unplanned downtime per database/per annum or just over one minute of downtime per week as a result of an unplanned outage.

Those are the results of ITIC’s 2013 – 2014 Database Reliability and Deployment Trends Survey, an independent Web-based survey which polled 600 organizations worldwide during May/June 2013. The nearly two-thirds of respondents who indicated they need 99.99% or greater availability is a 10% increase over the 54% who said they required a minimum of four nines reliability in ITIC’s 2011-2012 Database Reliability survey.

This trend will almost certainly continue unabated owing in large part to an increase in mainstream user deployments of databases running Big Data Analytics, Business Intelligence (BI), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications. These applications are data intensive and closely align with organizations’ main-line-of-business and recurring revenue stream. Hence, any downtime on a physical, virtual or cloud-based DB will likely cause immediate disruptions that will quickly impact the corporation’s bottom line. …

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Two-Thirds of Corporations Now Require 99.99% Database Uptime, Reliability Read More »

Microsoft: Bullish or Bottoming Out? Part 2

Laura's Insights ITIC Blog / By

According to some press and industry, you’d think that Microsoft was all but dead. Microsoft’s tactical and strategic technology and business missteps are well publicized and dissected ad infinitum. Less well documented are Microsoft’s strengths from both a consumer and enterprise perspective and there are plenty of those.

Microsoft Strengths

One of the most notable company wins in the past five years is the Xbox 360 and Kinect.

Xbox 360 and Kinect: Simply put, this is an unqualified success. The latest statistics released earlier this month by the NPD Group show that Microsoft has a 47% market share and sold 257,000 Xbox 360 units in the U.S. in June, besting its rivals the Sony PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii for the 18th consecutive month. But Microsoft and indeed all the hardware games vendors find their sales shrinking due to the sharp increase in the numbers of users playing games on their smart phones. In Microsoft’s 2012 third fiscal quarter ending in March, Xbox 360 sales dropped 33% to $584 million. The consumer space is notoriously fickle and games users are always looking for the next big thing. Microsoft’s ace in the hole is the Kinect motion-controller, which still has a lot of appeal. The company is banking on that as well as slew of new applications and functions like the Kinect PlayFit Dashboard which lets users track the number of calories they burn when they play Kinect games. …

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Microsoft: Bullish or Bottoming Out? Part 2 Read More »

Facebook IPO Flops; Can it be Fixed?

Laura's Insights ITIC Blog / By

The honeymoon is over for Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. In fact, it ended before it began.

Facebook’s long-awaited and much hyped IPO is less than a week old and the blame game is on as the company has lost nearly 20% of its value since the initial offering.

After three days of trading Wall Street’s take on Facebook has gone from jubilant to jaundiced.

The stock ended its first full day of trading at $38.23 – essentially flat from its $38 opening price though it did manage to set an IPO record for the sheer volume of trades — 567 million shares on opening day last Friday. Investors hoped for a turnaround. That never materialized. On Monday, a selloff prompted the shares to fall by nearly 11%, ending at $34.03. The news worsened Tuesday. The stock sank another eight percent down trading in the $31 – $32 range. …

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Facebook IPO Flops; Can it be Fixed? Read More »

Spring 2011: Hackers Had a Bonanza

Laura's Insights ITIC Blog, News / By

Hackers have had a bonanza in April, May and June (so far). Nary has a day gone by without news of yet another major attack. Here’s a partial list of some of the most publicized hacks of the last 10 weeks:

RSA Security: On April 1, in a move akin to raiding Fort Knox, RSA’s Secure ID technology (one of the industry’s gold standards in security software) was hacked. RSA executives described the hack as “very sophisticated.” They characterized it as an advanced persistent threat (APT)-type targeted attack. It used a routine tactic – a phishing Email that contained an infected attachment that was triggered when opened.

Epsilon:  This Irving, TX –based company handles customer email messaging for over 150 firms, including large banks and retailers like Best Buy, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and L.L.Bean. In April, millions of consumers learned that Epsilon’s networks were breached when they received Emails from their banks and credit card companies informing them that the hack might have exposed their names and Email addresses to the hackers. Epsilon released a statement assuring consumers that only Email addresses and names were compromised and that no sensitive data was disclosed. …

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Spring 2011: Hackers Had a Bonanza Read More »

Security Wars: Time to Use Continuous Monitoring Tools to Thwart Hackers

Laura's Insights ITIC Blog, News / By

It’s time for corporations to wise up and use the latest, most effective weapons to safeguard and secure their data.

High tech devices, software applications, Emails, user accounts, social media and networks – even those presumed safe — are being hacked with alarming alacrity and ease.

Security tools, encryption and updating your networks with the latest patches are certainly necessary, but they are not enough. Corporations must arm themselves with the latest security tools and devices in order to effectively combat the new breed of malware, malicious code and ever more proficient hackers. I’m referring to the new breed of continuous monitoring tools that identify, detect and shut down vulnerabilities before hackers can find and exploit them. …

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Security Wars: Time to Use Continuous Monitoring Tools to Thwart Hackers Read More »

2011 in High Tech YTD Part 3: Cisco Pulls Plug on Flip, Focuses on Core Competencies

Laura's Insights ITIC Blog / By

Cisco Pulls the Plug on Flip

Following two consecutive fiscal quarters, Cisco Systems shocked the industry three weeks ago with the news that it will cease to manufacture its popular Flip video camera and will lay off the division’s 550 workers, substantially reducing its consumer businesses.

Also within the past two weeks, Cisco unveiled a voluntary retirement program aimed at workers 50 years old whose age plus tenure at the company equals 60; these workers have from May 10 through June 24 to opt in. This is the first time in two years that Cisco instituted such a cost cutting policy.

Cisco recently hired Gary Moore as Chief Operating Officer to fine tune its re-focused initiatives. …

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2011 in High Tech YTD Part 3: Cisco Pulls Plug on Flip, Focuses on Core Competencies Read More »

2011 in High Tech YTD Part 2: Management Shakeups at Google, HP, Microsoft etc.

Laura's Insights ITIC Blog / By

Revolving Door

In contrast to Apple’s stunning success, the first calendar quarter of 2011 was a revolving door for other Silicon Valley companies and executives. There were management shifts, shakeups and ousters at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Google, Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Microsoft. They were variously aimed at jumpstarting product momentum (AMD, Microsoft), polishing a tarnished image and placating stockholders (HP) and providing an orderly transition of power (Google).

You need a scorecard to keep up with all the comings and goings.

AMD’s board ousted chief executive Dirk Meyer in mid-January after only 18 months on the job. It then appointed Senior Vice President and CFO Thomas Seifert, as interim CEO while the search goes on for a permanent chief executive. Siefert continues as chief financial officer and says he does not want to be considered for the permanent CEO position. This is probably a smart move. AMD’s flamboyant co-founder Jerry Sanders spent 33 years as CEO (1969 to 2002), but everyone who’s followed has had a short tenure. …

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2011 in High Tech YTD Part 2: Management Shakeups at Google, HP, Microsoft etc. Read More »

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