Apps Tech News

Few topics have lately drawn more hype and scrutiny than Big Data. Having originated with Internet firms, Big Data has captured enterprise attention with examples that show how organizations, from public sector to financial services firms, telcos, and media derived insights that improved customer retention, operational efficiency, and risk mitigation.

Ovum recently attended a SAP-sponsored event hosted by the Churchill Club, a Silicon Valley business and technology forum, on forward-thinking in technology innovation. The two panelists were Alan Kay, founder of Viewpoints Research Institute and who famously said “the best way to predict the future is to invent it”, and Vishal Sikka, head of technology and innovation at SAP. They discussed advances in digital technology that have been profoundly transforming business for the last couple of decades.

IBM now develops a gamut of innovative software and hardware technologies that can help companies ingest and make sense of Big Data. This was the key message Ovum came away with from a recent analyst conference at IBM’s historic Almaden Labs in San Jose, California, an apt location given the lab’s reputation for ground-breaking innovation in IT, notably the hard disk drive and the SQL database.

In 2011, most employees started using smart mobile devices. In 2012, several businesses allowed users to bring their own devices to work; IT security personnel battled the security problems that this trend gave birth to. This years, corporate corridors are reverberating with sounds of IT-related words: BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), Mobile Osmosis, Mobile Device Management, Mobility Apps and Mobile Security.

When you walked into the new venue for the GSMA Mobile World Congress (MWC2013), everything was unfamiliar. Indeed it only became properly clear that this was the MWC when a big screen reassuringly started to show four middle-aged white men in smart suits talking earnestly about how it was vital that the European mobile operators should be regulated less.

This is Part 1 of a two-part blog series recapping Mobile World Congress 2013 by guest blogger, Stuart Newstead. What did Barcelona was tell us about different parts of the mobile ecosystem?

The digital revolution and, latterly, the consumerization of IT have brought about massive change in verticals such as retail and banking. This has widened the already considerable gulf between ICT adoption in these sectors and in the healthcare sector.

Are businesses truly prepared to adopt the most productive practices of high-performance ICT enabled work environments? In search of answers, Cisco commissioned independent research among IT decision makers in enterprise and SME organisations across the UK and Ireland -- to better understand how businesses are responding to macro trends in the marketplace.