Vendors

Tim Cook, the new CEO at Apple, is noted for his excellence at managing Apple’s supply chain, and while he has spoken about engagement with the enterprise space, this will only be a token gesture from Apple. Enterprise IT does not play to Apple’s strengths. Apple will continue to focus on being great at what it already does: designing for, and selling to, consumers. This presents a challenge for enterprise IT departments because in the absence of meaningful enterprise support from Apple, enterprise IT must aim at negating the impact of any device’s form-factor.

This month Microsoft unveiled aspects of its new Windows 8 operating system at the Build developers’ conference. A significant change in the new OS is the use of the “Metro” style user interface, which will be familiar to anyone who has used Windows Phone 7. Metro involves extensive use of multi-touch and “tiles” that represent both applications and live data, inst...

Market and technological forces are minimising the value of the Microsoft Office client, and pushing the true value proposition for productivity services to backend services. Microsoft’s evolving product, marketing and licensing strategies to support this trend. Understanding Microsoft’s strategy is important when planning future desktop deployments, as well as collaboration and mobility strategies.

Many industries: finance, media, agribusiness, and education, to name a few, are talking up their growth prospects via NBN. The logic seems to be that the faster and extensive network will leverage their opportunities and improve their terms of business. To understand which industries are more likely to prosper with NBN it is necessary to analyse three factors: timing, and with it market scalability; industry segment; and finally, productivity. Unless and until these factors are brought to analyse the economic potential it is impossible to sift the possible from the wishful hopes.

Despite its position as the second largest IT services provider in Australia, and the largest in New Zealand, Hewlett Packard (HP) does not have a consistent or mature end to end IT and business service delivery capability across its services lines in Australia and New Zealand (ANZ). Future customer confidence in the IT Outsourcing business of HP is reliant in part upon the completion of announced investment in data centres in both countries. It is the opinion of HP’s customers and prospects that its application, industry and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) based services requires a similar investment and focus to the IT outsourcing business.

Oracle’s decision to end all further development on Itanium, will force HP Integrity customers to make a strategic decision between Oracle and Itanium. Providing the latest version of Oracle software is used customers have until 2016 to implement this decision. Since Red Hat and Microsoft have also abandoned Itanium, IT Organisations must evaluate the long-term viability of this architecture based on its ability to run the applications that matter to the business. Since high-end UNIX systems typically have a 7-8 year lifespan, Organisations must have a strategy before purchasing new systems or undertaking a major upgrade. This strategy will be driven by the degree of dependence on, and satisfaction with, Oracle’s business applications.

Analysis of Microsoft’ recently announced licensing model for education suggests that up to 60% savings are possible for K-6 schools, with 30% savings for 7-12 education. Furthermore, Microsoft’s new cloud-based offerings provide similar opportunities for licensing rationalisation. Educational organisations planning desktop migration must carefully assess these new licensing and deployment options in order to gain the most advantage of Microsoft’s new licensing models. The licensing costs involved also raise questions regarding the pedagogical value of take-home netbooks.

For customers, there are many advantages, both tactical and strategic, to participating in vendor reference programs. However, IT executives should give thought to scenarios which involve their organisation being held up by a vendor as either innovative, or an early adopter. While the attention may appeal to the ego, there are risks of being out on the bleeding edge, or in being a minority adopter. Being held up as either innovative, or an early adopter, could indicate that your organisation is straying from the rest of the industry. A key concern for IT executives should be that this exclusiveness could equally herald a future shortage of skilled resources.

Organisations planning a migration from earlier versions of Office to Office 2007 or Office 2010 need to conduct an ‘Office Readiness Assessment’ prior to the migration – or risk significant business disruption. Rather than developing in-house assessments skills , a short term engagement with consultants experienced in Office file scanning tools and migration technologies is likely to be the...

Organisations dealing with larger volumes of information, and increasingly complex information requirements need solutions which can be integrated and suit users’ needs. Google’s search product is quite well understood, even if it is just as a search interface and affiliation with its Web search engine.