eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
eWEEK has always covered innovation in the IT business; we’ve just never named it and put it all into one section. Starting March 12, we are adding a new horizontal look—that is, across all sectors of IT—at this topic.
In this section, you’ll find stories about new ways software and hardware are helping us get work done. We’re going to talk about new ideas in IT management, security, cloud deployments, mobile devices, storage, social networks, virtualized everything—you name it—all in one place. You’ll hear about what we will be using in the future. You’ll read about new trends and new ideas from thought leaders—and not only analysts, CEOs, authors and entrepreneurs.
In other words, you never know what you’ll be reading about in eWEEK “Innovation.” You’ll just know that it will be newsy, relevant and often surprising.
“Innovation” also will include real-world use cases that show innovation. We’ll be talking often to line-of-business people who know their companies and markets and who are actually using new-generation IT to get work done and solve problems on a daily basis.
Stories From the Front Lines
These are the folks who work on the front lines every day; they are also the ones who are now requisitioning and acquiring new IT and have to make it all work every day. It’s true: More and more IT decisions are being made outside the IT department, much to the consternation of many people. But disruption is a way of life in the IT world, so this should be nothing new to those in the know.
In many cases, these decision makers are limited by budgets, regulations and/or closely watching boards of directors and thus forced to come up with new ways to use standard software and hardware to solve the inevitable new issues that constantly crop up. For example, we’ll bring you a story about how an IT manager invested in one point product specifically to monitor server performance and then later found out how it also worked for other purposes—such as keeping tabs on storage arrays and networking boxes—to save him a surprising amount of his budget.
In another example, you’ll learn about a new company named Huddle, which provides a smart cloud-based calendaring app that sets up your schedule for the day and also brings you the documents you need—automatically—right to your iPhone or iPad. Or laptop.
New and Young Companies Spotlighted
You’ll also learn about a young company called Gravitant, a cloud-service broker that helps enterprises find exactly the right online subscription functionalities in short order. Another is The Neat Company, which makes cloud-connected desktop office machines that are making dreaded accounting functions a lot easier for everybody.
Well-established companies that might not get the innovation credit they deserve didn’t get to be mainstream for nothing. For example, we’ll check out Hewlett-Packard’s new initiatives in tablets and hybrid laptop PCs. Will the venerable company get the tablet right this time? We’ll check them out here.
We’ll be looking at how new sensor IT is changing business, and we’ll examine how social networks inside businesses are enabling projects to be completed faster and more efficiently.
We’ll be covering conferences that focus on startups, excellent events such as Under the Radar, DEMO, AlwaysOn, Launch and Disrupt. We’ve been covering these on eWEEK all along, but they’ve been spread out all over the site. For your convenience, we’re now channeling some of those older but still very relevant stories to this new section.
We also will offer a new calendar of startup events. We will be visiting research and development labs of companies large and small and doing reports. We will be checking in regularly with venture capitalists, whose job it is to spot promising new IT talent.
An Industry Grab Bag
This will be a completely horizontal section. No, we don’t mean you have to be reclining in order to read it; we mean that the content in this section will cut horizontally across all our other more focused sections. After all, when you click on eWEEK’s “Mobile,” “Storage,” “New-Era Networks,” “Cloud” or any other current tab section, you know that you can expect the latest news, analysis and features on each of those topics.
“Innovation” will be different; this will be an IT industry grab bag. All that will connect the stories to each other is that eWEEK believes they involve some level of innovation, and that you should know about it.
Check out “Innovation” as often as you can; there are plenty of good stories to tell, and we’re glad to be able to tell them.