If you look at most businesses today, IT organizations are expected to have very managed processes for their supply-chain systems and for their human resources systems, but when it comes to software delivery or software development, as you mentioned, there is this sense that software is some sort of an art.
What’s driven Microsoft from day one, and continues to do so, is that Microsoft is the software company for Joe the Plumber. That’s their constituency, not necessarily Joe the Developer. They cater to Joe the Developer, Joe the CIO, and Joe the Analyst certainly likes to check in on what they are doing. It's this whole idea of disruptive technology. They have always targeted the under-served and un-served parts of the marketplace and move up from there.
BI has become a killer application over the past few years, and we're now extending that beyond enterprise-class computing into cloud-class computing. The amount of data and content -- and the need for innovative analytics from across the Internet -- is still growing rapidly, even though we have harsh economic times.
In essence, the service, Amazon Elastic MapReduce, if it works as advertised, abstracts the complexity and cost of massive parallel and symmetrical programming and processing so non-computer scientists -- you know, business types -- can examine and query huge data sets.
Now Roger has a new job, and has begun what I belief is his first blog, though he's a been a columnist and a prolific penner of analyst missives for years. He's now at IAG Research as senior vice president of the Communications Sector coverage. The firm has its pulse on the advertising shifts now afoot, and Roger will no doubt have the definitive pulse of how advertising, video and mobile work together.
IT trends are pushing those tasked with supporting their businesses, as never before, to meet and collaborate with their peers and colleagues, and really re-evaluate how IT and business come together.
The so-called app store model, pioneered by Apple, is rapidly gaining admiring adopters thanks to its promise of reducing cost of distribution and of updates -- and also of creating whole new revenue streams and even deeper user relationships.
The primary driver here that we're hearing from members and customers is that they need to get more out of the investments that they're making -- their payroll for their IT staff. They need to get more productivity. And that has a number of consequences.
UShareSoft expects customers to see advantages such as independence of image format. The company also expects its products to give organizations the ability to control its own software and governance processes.
I was just having breakfast yesterday with two systems architects from Seattle, who said they were exploring virtualization, including both VMWare and Xen hypervisors. The liked the potential benefits but were put off by the complexity of setting the stuff up and maintaining it. Their choices, they said, pretty much boiled down to consulting help or more automation in the software.