Why does a leading online retailer invest in the most powerful general purpose mainframe in the world only to turn it into an image and video server? Yet that is exactly what JD Williams did. The company is a leading UK-based online retailer, selling products through more than 50 websites and 30 catalogs. The company
In 2000, the United States had nearly 135 million Internet users. As dramatic as that number seemed 10 years ago, the number of Internet users has grown exponentially: as of June 30, 2010, roughly two billion people are using the web. This adoption rate is even more strikinggiven the penetration of Internet use in Australia,
The What, Where and How of Application Security Why is application security such a hot issue moving into 2010 and beyond? Applications are becoming more pervasive, organizations are growing and implementing smarter software to support business process, product development and daily operations. The way businesses are dealing with their customers, their partners and their own
Software has driven corporate value like no other businesscapability for the past decade. As the planet continues tobecome more technically instrumented and interconnected,software will allow businesses of all types to derive intelligencefrom innumerable data sources in new, innovative and smarter ways.
Historically, the design of IT infrastructure did not always account forthe importance of security. System qualities such as “fast, cost-efficientor highly scalable” were prized ahead of “secure”. However, as our world has become increasingly more instrumented and interconnected,the incidence of cyber crime and data theft have only increased. Now, customer trust has intangible business value,
For several years running, Business Process Management (BPM) has become a top priority for companies. CIOs and ITexecutives continue to place business process improvement asthe top business priority for their IT organizations. Of course, there are many options for improving business processes—ranging from complete process reengineering toadopting new process management methodologies, like LeanSix Sigma, or
It’s a dynamic business world — can your organization keep up? The world is a smarter place than it was ten years ago, or even five years ago. Our systems and processes are more intelligent, instrumented and interconnected than they have ever been before. The convergence of physical and digital infrastructures is changing what’s possible
Today’s economies and commodity markets are swinging rapidly, barriers to global competition are disappearing, andempowered customers are changing preferences and expecta-tions faster than businesses can respond. In such an environ-ment businesses must be able to work smarter, increasingbusiness agility while optimizing their costs. Only too oftenwe find ourselves restrained from meeting these imperativesby siloed processes
In today’s rapidly changing environment, much is being said about the need for business agility, integration and optimiza-tion. Yet agile change at the cost of business integrity andoperational excellence is a fragile value proposition at best.While business agility is critical for excellence in managingchange, business performance and business integrity are critical for excellence in business
It is clear that service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM) are synergistic. BPM provides us the tools and techniques for understanding ourbusiness processes, the use of business resources in conductingthose processes, automation of those processes to gain more efficiency and analysis for optimizing and gaining better insight into how our business is functioning