GigaOm recently released a free report, “Enterprise mobility perceptions among IT decision makers,” that examines cloud computing, big data, and enterprise mobility. The report highlights data collected by GigaOm from 304 enterprise IT decision makers.

The findings included an observation that, while 80 percent of all enterprises support mobile phones as part of their infrastructure, the size of the business seemed to have little impact on a company’s decision to support such mobility. The report also provides a glimpse into the market share for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and Windows devices (I won’t spoil the suspense as I hope you’ll go grab your own copy of the report), as well as some insight into application support. More...

As much as I try to keep my blogs positive, I think I am entitled to a periodic rant once in a while. Today’s frustration is on the poor quality of what most online learning companies try to pass off as “computer-based training (CBT).”

I did a CCNA (Cisco-Certified Network Associate) self-study using CBT 10 years ago that was absolutely awesome. When I look at most of the CCNA self-study courses available today, they do not come close to the one I took a decade ago.  It is amazing that there are not more high-quality CBT programs for technology folks. While I understand that having an “expert” teaching in front of a whiteboard is the cheapest way to create CBT, the opportunity to massively increase the productivity of learning is totally missed by this approach.  More...

I have spent a lot of time talking about Unified Communications presence in this blog. Recently, I have been looking at the interoperability between Cisco and Microsoft deployments. At a high level, there is interoperability between the two platforms, with more to come for sure. More...

In David Hirschman’s post, “Why Do We Check In?,” he quotes the tweet of a social media professional: “I did not want to be mayor of my dentist’s office. Why did I even check in?” I have been trying to figure that out myself over the past year.

Last fall, I drafted a post about “checking in” that I never published here, as I just couldn't tie it in sufficiently.  But now I have a little better perspective on where the link is between “check-ins” and Unified Communications. Basically, a “check-in” is a piece of  presence information and is clearly part of the UC paradigm (yes, that is my smiling face on the Wikipedia page for “presence”). More...

One of the most underappreciated aspects of smartphones is the benefit of having a tool for both business and entertainment. In the early years, a dual enterprise/personal device was seen as a liability. Many companies even locked down business devices to prevent them from being used as entertainment devices. Today, however, companies have been forced by sheer momentum to integrate popular business/personal devices based on iOS and Android into their infrastructure. More...

Stacey Higginbotham penned a post at GigaOm entitled “Systems to handle big data might be this generation’s moon landing.”  Since it was posted on April 1, I asked myself if this was an April Fool’s Day joke as the comparison seemed a little farfetched; but then I realized the analogy was not about  the emotional significance of the first moon landing  but about the complexity of the problem Big Data is trying to solve. More...

One of the most expensive budget items in IT is the need to support a full-blown operating system on each and every desktop PC. Because every application installed on a given desktop can have a unique, unanticipated effect on that one device, the havoc that can be unleashed across the whole of the enterprise can sprout in an almost random, chaotic fashion. More...

It seems clear that as webpages become more interactive, with asynchronous Java enabling more and more functionality, that the line between what is a mobile web page and what is an app is starting to blur. Facebook is apparently working on an initiative to blur the line even further. More...

The explosive growth of the tablet over the past year is well documented, but until recently, I never believed that tablets could eventually replace laptops altogether. Today however, in this cloud-computing era, I am starting to see why more and more people may eventually forego a laptop and use only two devices: a smartphone and a tablet. More...

One of the biggest trends on the minds of enterprise IT executives is “Big Data,” a term coined a couple of years ago by Gartner. One of the first things to come to mind when some hear that term is “Hadoop.” Unfortunately, it is becoming increasingly apparent that many folks are still not up to speed on Hadoop. In a nutshell, Hadoop is a Linux technology that supports the trend toward virtualization, allowing data and applications to span multiple virtual servers.  More...