Infrastructure & operations

BMC Software goes private - what it means for users

Forrester Analysts — Thu, 09 May 2013 10:52:26 GMT

BMC Software has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by a private investor group led by Bain Capital and Golden Gate Capital together with GIC Special Investments Pte Ltd (“GIC”) and Insight Venture Partners (collectively, the “Investor Group”). Under...

So Capita gets ITIL but will people finally 'get' ITIL?

Forrester Analysts — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 15:07:04 GMT

It’s not often that I get to write about breaking news in the IT service management (ITSM) world but this definitely is it (I think the last time was this). Well I say “breaking news,” many of us were talking...

OpenStack Summit Report

Forrester Analysts — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 11:13:05 GMT

At the OpenStack Summit in Portland last week, the open-source cloud platform got real, to echo Forrester's cloud team predictions for 2013. At the busy gathering attended by over 2,400, suits mingled effortlessly with hoodies and deep-tech design committee meetings...

IT Service Management benchmarks - for you, by you

Forrester Analysts — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 16:32:14 GMT

In a previous blog post, SysAid - a provider of IT management solutions - was kind enough to share some metrics/performance snapshots collected from its customers. As a quick recap, SysAid captures service desk benchmarking information through its customers’ use...

Collected insights on Microsoft's Q3 performance

Forrester Analysts — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 13:48:09 GMT

There is plenty of speculation in the industry this quarter about the future of Microsoft given the challenges facing Windows 8. Microsoft reported flat revenues in the Windows Division today, citing the transition in the PC industry overall. The good...

OpenStack goes Grizzly, Azure IaaS goes live

Forrester Analysts — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 16:22:46 GMT

The OpenStack Foundation and Microsoft have released major updates to their cloud platforms and frankly there’s nothing really new or exciting here - which is a good thing. Sure, there were over 250 new features added in the Grizzly release...

Bring back the start button, Microsoft...

Forrester Analysts — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 14:08:38 GMT

ZDNet’s legendary Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley reported on an intriguing possibility for the rumored forthcoming Windows Blue update to Windows 8: That Microsoft could bring back the Start Button for desktop mode and/or allow users to boot directly to...

IBM makes major commitment to flash

Forrester Analysts — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 10:42:59 GMT

In his 1956 dystopian sci-fi novel "The City and the Stars", Arthur C. Clarke puts forth the fundamental design tenet for making eternal machines, "A machine shall have no moving parts". To someone from the 1950s current computers would appear...

Hyper-portability of tablets drives worker productivity

Forrester Analysts — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 13:25:18 GMT

Technology’s value to a business derives at least in part from its ability to increase productivity. The 1987 Nobel Prize winning economist Robert Solow demonstrated that technology increases the productivity of both capital and labour to create economic growth. Some...

The importance of customer 'choice' in ITSM tool selection

Forrester Analysts — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 12:10:20 GMT

The recent Forrester SaaS for IT Service Management (ITSM) Market Overview has proved popular but I thought it wise to step back from its focus on SaaS for a moment to talk about “choice.” That is choice of delivery model...

Storage quality of service is a must-have

Forrester Analysts — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 11:08:05 GMT

Later this year, many of the established storage players will finally be adding Storage QoS (Quality of Service) functionality to their systems. Though start-ups such as SolidFire and NexGen Storage (and some platforms such as IBM's XIV) have been touting...

VMware takes the cover off its public cloud

Forrester Analysts — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 13:51:19 GMT

Sometimes you can only coax a reluctant partner and I&O customer community for so long before you feel you have to take matters into your own hands. That is exactly what VMware has decided to do, to become relevant in...

The VMware community has the innovator's dilemma

Forrester Analysts — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 10:07:20 GMT

VMware Partner Exchange, CEO Pat Gelsinger and his executive staff decided to demonise Amazon Web Services and their public cloud brethren in a very short sighted defensive move that frankly betrays the fact that they don’t understand the disruption they...

Home working: Marissa Mayer's Yahoo! move isn't unusual

Forrester Analysts — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 12:39:07 GMT

Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer made a splash in the news by changing the company's policy on working from home. In a memo leaked to All Things D, Yahoo! told its employees: "To become the absolute best place to work, communication...

IBM embraces Emerson for DCIM

Forrester Analysts — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 17:35:51 GMT

- Emerson Network Power is entering into a significant partnership with IBM to both integrate Emerson’s new Trellis DCIM suite into IBM’s ITSM products as well as to jointly sell Trellis to IBM customers. This partnership has the potential...

MWC: More global and more disruptive than ever before

Forrester Analysts — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 11:13:34 GMT

It’s that time of the year: the pilgrimage to the Mobile Mecca, Mobile World Congress (MWC), in Barcelona. This is my 10th pilgrimage in a row and, needless to say, the event has changed tremendously over the past few years...

Datacentre networking: The awkward teenage years

Forrester Analysts — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 11:38:01 GMT

Forrester has just completed a comprehensive analysis of datacentre networking solutions from Alcatel-Lucent, Arista Networks, Avaya, Brocade Communication Systems, Cisco Systems, Extreme Networks, Hewlett-Packard, and Juniper Networks. Instead of comparing just the vendors’ features and functions and positioning them accordingly, we...

Automation: The only way to really 'do more with less'?

Forrester Analysts — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 12:38:51 GMT

The changing business and IT landscapes bring increased demand for IT (or IT services) AND increasing complexity. The slide below (a tweaked version of a genuine Glenn O’Donnell original) paints a picture of increasing complexity and an impending capability gulf;...

We do a great job. Our dashboard is a sea of green... Really?

Forrester Analysts — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 15:29:10 GMT

A Forrester-client inquiry call and the creation of some slides for a webinar with Axios really got me thinking about how we measure our success in IT. It just seemed so easy to take the IT version of success (and...

Server virtualisation: Driving value above and beyond the hypervisor

Forrester Analysts — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 16:36:49 GMT

Now that we’ve been back from the holidays for a month, I’d like to round out the 2013 predictions season with a look at the year ahead in server virtualisation. If you’re like me (or this New York Times columnist),...

Dell: Going private offers less risk to customers than the current path

Forrester Analysts — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 16:33:40 GMT

To publish this post, I must first discredit myself. I'm 42, and while I love what I do for a living, Michael Dell is 47 and his company was already doing $1 million a day in business by the time...

Is your IT service desk customer experience up to scratch?

Forrester Analysts — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 12:00:38 GMT

My most popular blog of 2012 wasn't written by me but I guess you might have expected this if you've already read a few. That blog's author, an end-user (or is that a customer of an internal IT organisation),...

The coming PC management crisis: A hypothesis

Forrester Analysts — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 16:30:00 GMT

I was at an industry conference recently, standing in the booth of a large PC maker while being indoctrinated with the latest word: "You can manage it with existing tools!" - a marketing director beamed, as he waved a new...

Are you like Oracle when it comes to the Cloud?

Forrester Analysts — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 11:53:42 GMT

Oracle makes itself an easy target for the ire of the cloud community when it makes dumb, cloudwashed announcements like last week's supposed IaaS offering. But then again, Oracle is just doing what it thinks it takes to be in...

On the road with DCIM - Affirmation & embellishment of our underlying thesis

Forrester Analysts — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 16:32:00 GMT

I was part of a Forrester Team that recently completed a multi-country rollout tour with Emerson Network Power as they formally released their Trellis DCIM product, a comprehensive DCIM environment many years in the building. One of the key takeaways was...