Eric Lundquist

Enterprise applications used to be a code word for one big yawn. You had an ERP app that was first developed in about 1963 and incrementally updated ever since. You put a Web front end on your inventory control system, called it 2.0 and off you went to happy hour. You sank so much money […]

No Pollyannas allowed in the following ten good business tech possibilities from what looks like a very grim 2009. Instead, I’ll try a dose of reality. For a fuller, more research driven look at the upside of IT see our research article. We also have a slideshow on top CIO priorities. 1. Business will recognize […]

While there are few good outcomes from a strained economy, one outcome worth considering is the reconsidering of outsourcing. Outsourcing in reality has meant offshoring or in the words of those outsourced, “Hey, I’m outta work because they shipped my job to India (or China, or Russia, take your pick). But something has changed and […]

Look, 2009 is shaping up to be a very tough economic year. Here is my list of business books that are enduring, well written and may just help you get through the current economic crunch. While some of these titles are classics, a few are new, and some are different and I have little doubt […]

Do the Big Three auto companies really need $34 Billion? What happened to all those billions poured into the banking industry? Why do those banks with all that money still feel compelled to try to throw new charges onto my account at every opportunity? Are those big car companies and big banks really too big […]

You’ve got a little over a month before the start of 2009. If you are like a lot of CIOs, you still don’t know what you have for a budget for next year. The uncertain economy is certain to mean continuing budget reviews, scrutinizing of all capital expenditures including IT costs and just a lot […]

I spent a couple days down South this week including stops in Atlanta where I moderated a series of presentations on enterprise technology and had coffee and dinner with a range of end users, systems integrators and analysts. So what did I learn while trying to avoid watching the televised spectacle of the heads of […]

What makes a vendor valuable to a CIO? This year, as in years past, we have been presenting our most valuable vendor rankings. I’d guess in 2009, the criteria whereby customers keep a valued vendor in the budget or decide to look elsewhere will be crucial to not just the vendor, but the customer’s success […]

The New York Times was first (I think) with a story about Google’s upcoming voice search service. The first product will work with Apple’s iPhone. Sometimes consumer tech products are not that big a deal for businesses, but this one matters. In the last several years all the major vendors have jumped into unified communications […]

Remember the SWOT analysis? Before business intelligence, the hype curve and the BCG matrix, there was SWOT. Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats were four boxes on a grid where you could work through a company strategy and see if you had a chance of success. SWOT seems to have been born full grown sometime in […]

Okay, life is getting hairy out there in techland. Sun Microsystems is cutting nearly twenty percent (6,000) employees, venture capitalists who couldn’t shovel money fast enough into lame web 2.0 startups are starting to preach cost control and the – sort of but not quite – closing of the Valleywag gossip site means that the […]

Here in Boston there are lots of discount furniture stores advertising on television. There is Bob’s Discount Furniture — home of the Bob-o-pedic mattress and Jordan’s megastore furniture stores which include movie theaters and all sorts of entertaining diversions to occupy you while the salesfolk endeavor to separate you from your money. One common advertising […]