If you haven’t yet heard about new wireless technologies like 802.11ad, you soon will. Last week, the IEEE approved WiGig (802.11ad), a short-range wireless networking technology that works in the 60 GHz band and can perform at 7 Gbps. Compare that to the 50 Mbps of 802.11g or 100 Mbps of 802.11n and you’ll appreciate what this technology can do. It should start to appear in hardware by the middle of this year. More...

Back before the dot-com crash of 2000, I was thinking that Americans would need bigger mailboxes. The thinking back then was that brick and mortar stores would go the way of the dodo. Mailboxes would have to be huge to accommodate all those massive boxes from Amazon and eBay — or so I thought. But all these years later, my mailbox is only a little larger, and it is generally understood that online retailing is a complement — not a replacement — to brick and mortar stores. How that relationship will continue to evolve though remains to be seen. More...

GE CEO Jeff Immelt’s guest post on GigaOm this week focused on the arrival of the "Industrial Internet," which he says will surpass the magnitude of the development and adoption of the consumer Internet.

Immelt defines the Industrial Internet as an open, global network that connects people, data, and machines. The Industrial Internet leverages the cloud to connect intelligent machines that sense and report a broad array of data, helping people find meaning that would not be obvious without this level of connectivity and analytical intelligence. More...

Over the past several decades of working with IT departments, there has always been a percentage that insist, “we don’t do managed services.” I never quite understood what exactly customers meant by that, because I can’t think of a single company that runs its own coal generators for electricity, builds a new building without hiring an architect, takes their company public without hiring an underwriter, or builds their own 10,000-plus nationwide tower network rather than use a wireless carrier. All companies use managed services of some form; it’s only a question of when and where. More...

Anant Jhingran of Apigee recently opined on GigaOm that our Big Data future will require data marketplaces and data syndication models that few enterprises are currently prepared to support. If one follows the trend toward singularity, it should be clear that an enterprise’s ability to quickly acquire new data sources will require a marketplace that is somewhat akin to the NASDAQ. In other words, it would allow data set contracts to be opened or closed in a matter of minutes or seconds. More...

I’ve written so much about my HTC EVO in this blog that it now seems appropriate to share my experience with my new Samsung Galaxy S III, which I had to purchase after  accidentally damaging my EVO on a recent trip to Saint Paul. I hated to see my trusty EVO go, but the silver lining is that I get to write about a new device.

Given my focus on enterprise convergence, I am always drawn to smartphone features that blur the line between wireline and wireless. The Galaxy S III is my first device with Google Wallet, which takes advantage of Near Field Communications (NFC).More...

As the “cloud” concept arose, there was a lot of debate about whether cloud computing would really replace the client-server architectures of today’s enterprises. Now it’s clear that the answer is both “yes” and “no.”

Cloud computing isn’t an “either/or” proposition. What will happen at first is that CD and DVD-ROM drives on computers will start to disappear. “App stores” and the like are nothing more than cloud-based software management systems -- but they work really, really well. Few of the “apps” one downloads to a device or PC are actually cloud-based apps -- but as more and more applications are developed for cloud-based distribution, more and more cloud-based functionality is being written into these apps. More...

As any Star Trek fan knows, getting crew members and supplies from one place to another is as easy as using a “transporter beam.” While it still might seem like science fiction to fans and non-fans alike, most of us will start to see enterprises (the lower case kind) “beaming” physical products and replacement parts to their customers through wide area networks within our lifetime. More...

Gartner and Forbes recently completed a survey showing that more and more boards of directors are acknowledging the strategic importance of IT. This is good news, because far too often, companies assume IT decisions are tactical, rarely warranting the attention of executives who chart corporate strategy. Such a conclusion would be erroneous because it would be akin to saying the use of electricity (or coal, or steel, or labor) is merely tactical. While many aspects of how, what, why, and when in terms of specific “factors of production” might be tactical, whether to use any given factor of production per se is clearly strategic. So too it is with certain IT decisions. More...

There is little doubt that the promises of “big data” comes with risk. Steve Durbin, global vice president of the Information Security Forum (ISF), breaks down these risks into five areas: cybersecurity, data in the cloud, consumerization, interconnected supply chains, and privacy.

Cybersecurity is primary, because cybercriminals are getting more organized and are using more sophisticated techniques and tools. Even if the risk is small, a breach can wreak havoc within an organization, damaging reputations, creating substantial legal liability, and in the worst case, ruining companies financially. More...