While the lazy, hazy days of late summer are usually a time to head out on that last family vacation or just whittle away the hours until Labor Day arrives, the tech world has been unusually busy. In the span of one week, Google announced it is buying Motorola Mobility to help both defend and expand its valuable Android franchise, and Hewlett-Packard detailed its plans to drop webOS, spin off its PC division and focus more on software and IT services. Cisco Systems, another bellwether of the IT industry, also announced changes and decided to ditch its Flip business. In addition to all these company moves, the business of IT is still moving along with more and more enterprises investing in cloud computing, virtualization, mobility, open-source software and business applications—especially ones that help with analytics and so-called “Big Data.” In order to put the summer of 2011 into perspective, eWEEK’s Eric Lundquist looks back at the last three months to analyze the trends that have made the IT world stand up and take notice.
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Big IT Matters
Cisco Systems bailed out of the Flip business in part to try to recover lost ground in enterprise networking. Hewlett-Packard is reassembling itself into an enterprise IT software and services organization. Why is that? Enterprise IT has money and it is willing to spend it where it can help grow sales or make a company more efficient.
The Cloud Is Not an Easy Sell
So, Microsoft 365 had a short outage. If you read all the comments on the CIO and enterprise IT forums, you will see lots of mentions regarding hesitancy to put all of a company’s computer resources on a single cloud infrastructure. Vendors that thought CIOs would toss out their old infrastructure and race to the cloud without some careful testing are in for a surprise.
Mobile Is King and Queen
Google chasing Motorola Mobility is only one part of the mobile story. Customer CEOs are enamored with the latest mobile device, but CIOs are in a rush to find developers who can build distinctive mobile applications.
Social Networks Are Not Always Your Friend
The rapid rise of Google+ is challenging the idea that Facebook will be king of business social. As companies such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ and Facebook increasingly pitch business executives, they are torn between allowing software bridges between competing services and trying to keep all the business for themselves.
Privacy, Security and Compliance Still Matter
Cloud computing vendors and Saas (software-as-a-service) providers need to provide detailed explanations on how they will assure privacy, security and compliance.
Is It the Prosumer or Just Apple?
While there is a lot of talk about the prosumer in business, where the employee decides which device to use, that device—certainly in the tablet space—usually means Apple.
Linux and Open Source Are Doing Great
It is just that those products are a bit invisible behind the big brands such as Google, Apple and many SaaS providers who use open source but don’t go out of their way to label it as such.
Is It Really All About Larry?
HP wants to be a software and services company. SAP wants to be an applications and business intelligence company. Isn’t that what Larry Ellison and Oracle have been creating for the past 10 years?
It’s Not Just the Big Tech Vendors
While there has been a lot of focus on social networking and new consumer companies, there are lots of interesting business tech startups getting off the ground, especially in the areas of mass solid state storage, cloud management and mobile app development. Here’s hoping they can get some brand recognition and sales before the startup money runs dry.
Old IT Versus GenX
For years, people said the new generation was going to overturn the habits of the old. The Old IT caveats about design and test before deployment were going to be tossed out by GenX IT experts, who advocated a deploy first and then fix the problems later philosophy. So far, the GenX wave hasn’t hit enterprise IT yet.
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While the lazy, hazy days of late summer are usually a time to head out on that last family vacation or just whittle away the hours until Labor Day arrives, the tech world has been unusually busy. In the span of one week, Google announced it is buying Motorola Mobility to help both defend and expand its valuable Android franchise, and Hewlett-Packard detailed its plans to drop webOS, spin off its PC division and focus more on software and IT services. Cisco Systems, another bellwether of the IT industry, also announced changes and decided to ditch its Flip business. In addition to all these company moves, the business of IT is still moving along with more and more enterprises investing in cloud computing, virtualization, mobility, open-source software and business applications—especially ones that help with analytics and so-called “Big Data.” In order to put the summer of 2011 into perspective, eWEEK’s Eric Lundquist looks back at the last three months to analyze the trends that have made the IT world stand up and take notice.