Summary Bullets:
• IBM’s Connect 2016 conference highlights industrial design and user experience (UX) excellence as differentiators in its Collaboration portfolio
• UX is important across all types of IT products and services, but is especially relevant to achieving success in enterprise collaboration initiatives
“’Easy to Use’ is easy to say,” as generations of programmers have heard and then learned – often the hard way. Continue reading “Why Design Thinking is Important to Collaboration”
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Last week’s IBM Connect 2016 (IBM’s annual collaboration conference) was somewhat of a revelation for me. What stood out for me was how IBM has changed itself from a company that was more product-focused to one which is more asset-led. Asset-led companies tend to make decisions based on the needs of the user and the assets of the solution. The perfect situation is, of course, for a business to relate customer needs to the business’s own strengths. This, then, is where IBM’s design thinking approach to solution development is key to success. Continue reading “Why Is IBM So Averse to Screaming About Verse and Other Innovations?”
Summary Bullets:
• IBM’s three design acquisitions in one week strengthen its marketing cloud clout
• IBM will glean knowledge through partnership with Adobe Marketing Cloud
Do you know how many calorie-counting apps are out there? A lot. But I’ve never cared for most of them until I came across MyFitnessPal, which is a quick set-up, helps me track daily calories, and includes slick graphics like pie charts to make sure I’m taking in the correct ratio of calories between carbs, fats, and proteins. Continue reading “IBM’s UX Handholding Drives Business to Digital Marketing Cloud Portfolio”
Summary Bullets:
This week saw IBM’s annual collaboration conference (IBM Connect 2016) break from a longstanding tradition and move to a new venue. On the surface, this may not seem like much. Companies always shop around for the best venue. But, this is a big deal for IBM, which had heretofore held its collaboration conference (which you may recognize by its former name, Lotusphere) at the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin hotel for more than 20 consecutive years. That’s an awful lot of stability. Maybe too much stability. Continue reading “Whither Cognitive Collaboration? IBM’s Embarrassment of Riches”
Summary Bullets:
• Cellular wireless services continue to find traction for flexible, value-priced temporary and failover connectivity, as long as the enterprise is comfortable using best-effort broadband.
• Fixed wireless specialists offer a flexible range of microwave access connectivity when wireline options are inadequate or not available, but buyers still frequently lean toward wired.
In the U.S., fixed wireless services have gone through several boom-and-bust publicity cycles. But behind the publicity, wireless technologies are sound and in most cases, delivering on promises. AT&T, Verizon and Sprint don’t disclose the numbers of businesses that have purchased CPE with their respective managed 4G/3G fixed wireless failover services. But the widespread resale of cellular failover services by other providers shows the service option has solid traction. Cost and availability have something to do with that. When a wireless failover service can cost as little as $10-$20 per month as long as it’s idle, that’s a cheap insurance policy. It also helps that 4G networks are now nationwide, and offer better throughput and performance than 3G wireless. But cellular wireless is still best-effort broadband, and not an option for failing over traffic that must have sustained throughput or guaranteed performance.
Continue reading “Fixed Wireless Access Finds Success, but Perception Challenges Remain”
Summary Bullets:
• The sharing economy plus IoT is changing the balance of power between telcos and their suppliers
• CSPs may be powerless to stop themselves from being marginalized.
There are two big questions hanging over Mobile World Congress 2016, which opens in Barcelona in a couple of weeks. The first is about who will win the scramble for account control in the Internet of Things. The second is about the industry’s balance of power as firms test the limits of the rented/shared asset ownership model.
Continue reading “MWC16 May Reveal that IoT Will Upset the Industry’s Balance of Power”
Summary Bullets:
Robust connectivity to the Internet worldwide remains elusive despite the aggressive efforts of pioneers such as Google and investment partner Fidelity. There are vast expanses of land and sea where the choice is between high-latency (up to one second per hop) GEO satellites, or lower-latency but very narrowband LEO or MEO constellations such as Orbcomm, Globalstar or Iridium. Continue reading “Is It a Bird? Is It a Plane? No, It’s a Google/SpaceX Satellite!”
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Little-known Axway has purchased one of the leading MADP pure plays, Appcelerator, to enhance Axway’s API service offering with mobile technology and improve its competitive threat as it goes after enterprises launching mobile projects. Continue reading “Axway’s Acquisition of Appcelerator Increases Its Mobile Value Proposition”
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Shadow IT just got real. Or, at least, it’s well on its way to legitimacy now that IT leaders have begun to realize it’s impossible to completely lock down the use of external, unmanaged cloud services like file sharing and synchronization. Already vendors are seeking to capitalize upon the opportunity inherent within that realization. Consider Cisco’s recently introduced Cisco Cloud Consumption Service, which quite literally discovers and continuously monitors unmanaged cloud services. The idea is that by closely watching the use of such services, an organization can at a minimum identify security vulnerabilities and better manage (read: control) costs. Continue reading “Simple Observation May Be the Best Means of Controlling the Democratization of Data”
Summary Bullets:
• Another flurry of security vendor acquisitions is likely in 2016, thanks largely to slowing venture capital investing.
• Best-of-breed product integration and automation capabilities will be top industry storylines this year.
Many of you surely agree that end-of-year predictions articles are a tired trope, rolled out by publishers as click-bait while their staffs enjoy a holiday vacation. Here at Current Analysis, the Enterprise Security team (yes, it’s a team of one!) decided not to stare into the crystal ball last year, but with the first month of 2016 coming to a close, we wanted to highlight three trends that are guiding our research efforts this year.
Continue reading “Enterprise Security: Three Themes We’re Watching in 2016”
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