OpinionWire

ITSM Advances Set to Empower and Engage Users in 2013Through discussions with vendors, clients and research into technology trends and disruptors, Ovum has identified what it believes will be the key IT service management (ITSM) advances of 2013. More detailed information and analysis can be found in our recently published ... read more..

IT Governance is the Key to Managing Complex Agile ProjectsOvums recent report, Managing Large-Scale Agile Projects: Case Studies, examines how leading-edge agile consultancies have dealt with the challenges of going beyond the team in a room that characterised the early gestation of agile methodologies. Today, agile software development is practised ... read more..

Enterprises Struggle to Navigate Mobile Business Intelligence LandscapeThe consumerisation of IT is prevalent in the enterprise. Consumers have become accustomed to mobile applications that allow them to swiftly and easily access relevant content regardless of place or time. These consumers are now seeking the same experience with business applications. Business ... read more..

Smart City Market Movers Stimulate ProgressSmartness is coming soon to a city near you. Truly, it is: the smart city chimera seems to have been with us forever, but there is something happening in the UK that is finally moving the market from the envisioning stage to the deployment stage ... read more..

Mobility Integration is a Major Challenge for ITOrganisations are moving beyond the traditional means of connecting with existing and potential customers. Similarly, they are exploring different avenues to fulfil the ever-increasing needs for reductions in the cost of IT, greater productivity and better employee engagement. As a result, in most ... read more..

VMware Spreads its Java Development Reach with vFabricThe crucial message to take away from the recent VMworld Europe 2012 conference in Barcelona is that VMware has software solutions for the broader management of virtualised environments that cover VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V. To use VMwares terminology for the new-generation virtualised ... read more..

Security Concerns for the Coming YearThe big security themes for 2012 were mobile device and application protection, lack of cloud-based security, data-loss prevention and the need for big data management. If advanced protection requirements and increasing compliance demands are added to the equation, most of these issues will continue to ... read more..

Market Conditions Will Drive Adoption of Sustainability Solutions in 2013Sustainability management will remain a corporate priority in 2013. Organisations around the world are being pressed to reduce their environmental impact and operate in a more sustainable manner. Difficult economic conditions, rising energy prices, resource depletion and increasingly stringent environmental regulations ... read more..

Integration Will Slowly Shift to the CloudMany organisations are still struggling with traditional application integration issues, and the increasing heterogeneity of enterprise application portfolios driven by the rapid rise of social, mobile and SaaS applications is not good news for them. Integration is often messy and complex and beyond the ... read more..

Splunk Aims to Climb the Value ChainSplunk, which specialises in delivering a data platform for machine data, is approaching a turning point. The explosion of sensory data part of the big data phenomenon is pulling the company in different directions. With a base as the data platform for ... read more..

Adopt a Balanced Approach to Private CloudsUsers are unsure of or have very different views on what constitutes a private cloud, which makes any survey about the subject rather meaningless. They approach private clouds from a variety of viewpoints including bottomup versus topdown, technology versus design, and long-term ... read more..

Meeting Business Objectives with an Enterprise-Wide Application Integration StrategyApplication integration is an enabler of many strategic initiatives and business-critical functionality, including application modernisation, B2B e-commerce, data synchronisation and reduction in the cost of IT. Given the strategic role that integration plays in the realisation of desired business results, it is ... read more..

Social Media Monitoring: Understanding Sentiment AnalysisSocial media monitoring (SMM), like most emerging software markets, is awash with terms of imprecise meaning and the unconscious and sometimes deliberate merging of terms. This can cause confusion and delay adoption, and there must at least be an attempt at removing any ambiguity. In ... read more..

The Landscape Around Open Data and Gov 2.0 Starts to Take Shapeidea of Gov 2.0 re-envisioning whats possible in government/citizen interaction and problem solving through the application of collaboration technologies has been around since 2004. Only very recently, however, has it reached the common lexicon, with local, state ... read more..

Outsourcing Needs to Respond to Climate ChangeIt is not just language issues and political volatility that outsourcers need to think about when selling delivery services to enterprises in developed locations. The issue of natural disasters and infrastructure reliability is a consideration that is certain to gain prominence among procurement officers ... read more..

Apple Bids to Acquire AuthenTec and Bring Enhanced Security to iOSApple has made a bid to acquire AuthenTec, a mobile encryption and security specialist. This acquisition is notable not just because Apple finds it notoriously difficult to spend its growing cash pile, but also because AuthenTec inked a deal in ... read more..

Being Agile About AgileSome agile (broadly defined here to include lean) software development projects succeed and some fail, and there are commentators who see agile as still having to prove itself. These failures are therefore viewed as evidence against agile, but there are a number of reasons why this thinking ... read more..

It's Time to Understand the Organisational Catalysts for Cloud AdoptionCloud services have been debated for many years, but it is now time to stop discussing theory and start discussing the actual experiences of early adopters. Why is it that some agencies embrace cloud services while others do not? Ovum recently ... read more..

COBIT 5: Helping Address Cultural ChallengesOvum believes that COBIT 5 offers valuable direction and tools on how the business and IT can better meet strategic objectives, while also addressing the cultural issues that are inherent with change initiatives and new implementations. The recently published fifth version of the COBIT framework ... read more..

APM Tools Market Revitalised by Agile, DevOps and the CloudThe application performance management (APM) tools market is undergoing a period of revitalisation as a result of the waves of agile development and its near-sibling, DevOps, as well as cloud computing, virtualisation and mobile device adoption, and technical innovation within the ... read more..

Operating IT in Harmony with How the Business WorksAs the IT environment becomes increasingly more complex, one challenge faced by many CIOs is understanding how all the different technologies relate to one another. The demand for increased velocity of business in terms of both process and development has created the ... read more..

Physical Convergence of Servers and Storage EmergesInfrastructure convergence is an established trend that so far has been driven by the increasing complexity and interdependence of virtualised servers, networks and storage. This has created a demand for pre-integrated data centre building blocks that combine all these elements. Less than three years ... read more..

For SAP's HANA, Success Depends on Innovative AppsHANA, SAP's new in-memory database technology, was ubiquitous at the vendor's recent Sapphire Now conference in Orlando, Florida. In keynotes, executive meetings and demonstrations, SAP and its partners made the case that HANA represents such an immense improvement over previous technologies that, beyond ... read more..

Google BigQuery Offers Cloud-Based Big Data for the Low TerabytesAfter six months in preview, Google has finally released BigQuery, a big data tool that enables users to query and process large datasets on Google's cloud. Unlike previous Google big data innovations such as the MapReduce framework, Google has commercial aspirations ... read more..

T-Systems on Cloud 7.0T-Systems kicked off the telco journey into cloud services in 2004, when it formed the development teams that would launch its first Dynamic Services products from 2005. T-Systems next stage in development of cloud services is to productise the applications software platforms that it has built for ... read more..

Long-Term Retention of Content Still an Issue for OrganisationsFrom attending Ovum Information Management events it is clear that the long-term preservation of information is still an issue for many organisations in both the private and public sectors. This is something that organisations must address if they are to ensure that ... read more..

Delphix Virtual Database Provides Benefits for Agile DevelopmentDelphix, a venture founded in 2008 by ex-EMC employees, launched its virtualised database to market in 2010. The Delphix Agile Data Platform is designed to appeal to the agile development community whose pace of working is faster than traditional development processes. Agile developers ... read more..

Staffing the Service Desk to Meet DemandOnce you have a service desk made up of the right people, ensuring that appropriate levels of service desk staff are in place to meet demand should be a regular and ongoing consideration for service desk managers. Relevant reporting should be in place that ... read more..

First-Mover Advantage in Big Data Awaits Asia-Pacific BanksBig data in banking continues to raise more strategy questions than there are technology answers, but it is emerging as a critical cog in the machinery that banks need to put in place in order to compete in the digital economy. First-mover competitive ... read more..

InfoSec Needs Greater Business RelevanceInfoSec must change. Vendors currently spend three days selling themselves at the show, but the needs of business organisations and their users must become the top priority. Rather than delivering a sprawl of disconnected technologies, the show needs to have more of a business and industry ... read more..