Each month, our blog team shares a collection of articles that provide insight into the ever-evolving world of IT. Kicking off 2012, January’s top IT articles focus on the hot topics of collaboration, data storage, cloud computing and consolidation, as well as a few additional industry headlines.
Collaboration Technology
It’s a long path toward adoption of collaboration technology, as Gartner’s Craig Roth illustrates in How a Collaboration Technology Gets Adopted. Roth lists challenges of collaboration technology adoption at each stage of the process, including:
- Product selection
- End user decision to use
- Promotion
- Adoption
- Resurrection
- Value
Check out Roth’s collaboration adoption drawing; it makes his point better than this summary will, and may be something IT folk can relate to and laugh over.
Data Storage …
As we're forced to store more data, make it more useful, and ensure data access, storage takes center stage as a hot IT topic. 2012: The Year Storage Becomes a Celebrity, by Computerworld’s Lucas Mearian (@lucasmearian), shows that as the price for storage drops, organizations find better usages for data storage.
What’s driving the trend? Steve Wojtowecz, vice president of storage software development at IBM, notes the popularity of entertainment data (like our downloaded movies and music) as one driver for end users to start caring more about data storage, accessibility and speed.
Digitization of healthcare data also brings storage to center stage. Consumer-friendly, smart, analytic storage technologies, like IBM’s popular Watson, are in beta within healthcare EMR processes. For healthcare, technologies like Watson can search and analyze data, then provide consult for physicians.
See the full article for Mearian’s assessment of various data storage options, including SSD, all-flash arrays, PCIe and NAND flash.
... and Server & Cloud Consolidation
In his TechTarget article, The Value of Cloud vs. Server Consolidation, Tom Nolle (@CIMICorp) differentiates server consolidation from cloud consolidation while showing the value and business cases for each.
Says Nolle: “Cloud computing offers a similar value [to server consolidation]: replacing underused and hard-to-support local computing with a hosted service. Companies can eliminate many application-specific servers using either consolidation or cloudsourcing, so it’s essential to pick the best strategy.”
The article goes into further detail on when to cloudsource your servers, how to determine whether the cloud option is a good alternative to server consolidation, and if so, how to choose a cloud service model (SaaS, PaaS or IaaS).
IT Industry Trends & Investments
Gartner and IDC’s 2012 IT spending forecasts differ: Gartner says global IT spending will be essentially flat, while IDC estimates 6.9% growth. Both agree, however, that mobility, the cloud, and analytics (or big data) will shape IT trends for 2012.
As organizations adopt these technologies, InfoWorld’s Ted Samson (@tsamson_IW) reports that mobile, cloud and big data pros are in high demand. Samson’s findings come from two industry reports that look at Global 1000 companies’ 2012 business priorities, and IT salaries and hiring trends:
- Hacket Group’s 2012 IT Key Issues: Coming to Terms with the 'New Normal'
- Bluewolf’s 2012 IT Salary Guide
In the News
January’s IT industry headlines …
- Apple reported its first quarter results—the company’s highest quarterly revenue and earnings ever, with all-time record iPhone, iPad and Mac sales.
- VMware reported strong fourth quarter results, and the virtualization company filled reports with much talk of the cloud.
What articles did you enjoy last month? Please share your thoughts and additional resources in the comments below.
This post is an MCPc blogging team collaboration.
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