Digital transformation fuels upside market opportunities, and related growth goals are now the CEO's top business priority, according to the latest worldwide study by Gartner. Moreover, a growing number of CEOs will focus more on financial priorities - especially profitability improvement.

The annual survey of CEO and senior business executives in the fourth quarter of 2018 examined their business issues, as well as some areas of technology agenda impact. In total, 473 business leaders of companies...

Digital transformation initiatives require a distinct technological and cultural change – and the element which binds both together is skills.

Yet getting the right skills remain a near-impossibility. The skills gap shows no sign of lessening, with two recent studies proving this point. In December OpsRamp found the vast majority of businesses

• Gartner predicts worldwide spending on information security products and services will reach $124B in 2019, growing 8.7% over the $114B invested in 2018.
• Cloud Security platform and application sales are projected to grow at a 35.3% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR)...

Before the cloud, IT projects had a definitive start and end. Choosing the right leadership team to keep all players on task was paramount to success. In the cloud era, instead of distinct start and end points, IT leads continual cycles of change and improvement. In a way, this means that projects are never done. As well, projects are continually evolving.

Project leaders must sometimes make decisions on the fly about platforms and technologies, to minimise redundancy and sprawl or in response to an urgent...

• Improving revenues using BI is now the most popular objective enterprises are pursuing in 2019
• Reporting, dashboards, data integration, advanced visualisation, and end-user self-service are the most strategic BI initiatives underway in enterprises today
• Operations, executive management, finance, and sales are primarily driving business intelligence (BI) adoption throughout enterprises today
• Tech companies’ operations and sales teams are the most effective at driving BI adoption across industries surveyed, with advertising driving BI adoption across marketing

These...

In today’s complex business ecosystem, the relationship between the CIO and the CFO has to be closely aligned, which goes beyond just an agreement on the budget. The CIO and the CFO have to be as one, working together as two strong pillars that ensure the organisation meets every demand the regulators, shareholders, customers, partners and employees place on it. The days of tension between the CIO and CFO are long gone.

Dropbox has launched a significant redesign, repositioning itself as an enterprise collaboration workspace and moving away from its file storage heritage.

The move will see Dropbox aim to be a one-stop-shop. The relaunched desktop app will enable users to create, access and share content across the Google and Microsoft portfolio, opening Google Docs and Microsoft Office files, offer synchronised search, alongside partnerships with...

Multi-cloud is one of the biggest initiatives for enterprises today; however, if you analyse the justification for this trend, so much of it is driven by fear — fear of lock-in, fear of outages, fear of cost. And while those concerns may be valid, the enterprises that are realising the value of multi-cloud have an even more compelling reason for it: choice.

A few years ago, battle lines were drawn. For the most part you either used AWS, Azure, or GCP in addition...

Bottom line: Enterprises are attaining double-digit improvements in forecast error rates, demand planning productivity, cost reductions and on-time shipments using machine learning today, revolutionising supply chain management in the process.

Machine learning algorithms and the models they’re based on excel at finding anomalies, patterns and predictive insights in large data sets. Many supply chain challenges are time, cost and resource constraint-based, making machine learning an ideal technology to...

The majority of Oracle customers are 'currently or actively planning to reduce their spend' with the software giant citing cost, maintenance, and aggressive sales tactics, according to a new report.

The study, published by enterprise software support firm Rimini Street and titled 'Why Enterprises are Rethinking Their Oracle Relationship and Cloud Strategy', explored respondents' relationships with Oracle as well as appetite for its SaaS offerings.

More than three in five (61%) of those...

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the market availability of its Amazon Managed Blockchain (AMB) service, which is designed to help companies develop and manage scalable blockchain networks.

The platform extends its support to thousands of applications and millions of transactions via open source frameworks, such as Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric. Those intending to permit multiple parties to perform transactions and maintain a cryptographically verifiable record of them without the need for a...

A recent survey from Capgemini revealed that while enterprise-scale automation is still in its infancy, IT automation projects are moving along (below). IT is starting to view automation less tactically, and more strategically.

Long read Modern enterprises that need to ship software are constantly caught in a race for optimisation, whether in terms of speed (time to ship/deploy), ease of use or, inevitably, cost. What makes this a never-ending cycle is that these goals are often at odds with each other.

The choices that organisations make usually inform what they’re optimising for. At a fundamental level, these are the factors that drive, for example,...

Over the past year, I’ve had the good fortune of sitting down with leading enterprises to speak with CIOs, enterprise architects, database engineering leaders, and more. Many of these discussions centred on the evolving world of business applications and databases and the challenges of digital transformation initiatives (customer experience, digital banking experience, data-as-a-service, real-time analytics).

• For new digital business models to succeed, customers’ privacy preferences need to be secure, and that begins by treating every identity as a new security perimeter.
• Organisations need to recognise that perimeter-based security, which focuses on securing endpoints, firewalls, and networks, provides no protection against identity and credential-based threats. Until they start implementing identity-centric security measures, account compromise attacks will continue to provide a perfect camouflage for data breaches.
• 74% of data breaches start with privileged credential...

It is always interesting to see how different industries are seizing the opportunity of cloud adoption as well as coping with its challenges. As far as the HR industry is concerned, a new report has asserted that enterprises have realised the cost savings of software as a service (SaaS) and are now focused on building the next steps.

The study, from Information Services Group (ISG), polled more than 250 companies, ranging in...

Standardisation is sometimes viewed as an assault on innovation. Being forced to abandon a polyglot buffet and adopt a more limited menu will always sound stifling. That may be because standardisation is often associated with regulatory compliance standards that have official sounding names like ISO 8076.905E and are associated with checklists, auditors and oversight committees.

Google Cloud is looking at helping enterprise organisations avoid bill shock with the launch of a storage growth plan for Google Cloud Storage.

The launch came about after Google noted the ‘astonishing and unpredictable’ rate at which data is created in its storage offerings. This is evidently not for a handful of photos and videos; companies who sign up to Storage Growth Plan are expected to hand over $10,000 per month...

MWC19 For Red Hat, it may sometimes be easier to list what the company doesn't do rather than what it does. The overall umbrella of 'making open source technologies for the enterprise' can range from containers, to cloud, to 5G. But ultimately, as the company has noted at MWC Barcelona this week, it's all developing into a hybrid universe - and it's a space where their customers and partners feel increasingly comfortable.

This is a message of which regular followers of the company - particularly

In the future, as we speed down the motorway in our self-driving vehicles, historians will mark the 2010s as the decade of the cloud. Some would argue that the tenets of cloud computing were established in the 1960s, when U.S. government scientist J.C.R. Licklider planned an “intergalactic computer network”. In 2006 the cloud...