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.

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 companys 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.

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.

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.

Cloud computing vendors and Saas (software-as-a-service) providers need to provide detailed explanations on how they will assure privacy, security and compliance.

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.

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 dont go out of their way to label it as such.

HP wants to be a software and services company. SAP wants to be an applications and business intelligence company. Isnt that what Larry Ellison and Oracle have been creating for the past 10 years?

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. Heres hoping they can get some brand recognition and sales before the startup money runs dry.

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 hasnt hit enterprise IT yet.