Peter Sondergaard from Gartner, spoke today here at Orange Business Services Orange Business Live 2010 event. He gave an over arching view of the challenges facing business and CIOs today, where – in his words – IT is shifting its focus towards towards balancing risk, cost, growth and innovation. I’ve attempted to catch what he said in this post.

Gartner lists amoungst CEO’s key business priorities that “IT-enabled changes will be a key element in post-recession strategy” – That means IT departments need to be more agile, or they will simply get outsourced. IT doesn’t control the economy, the environment, or the proliferation of technology, but it must deal with these three issues, said Peter.

The issue of business moving to Asia loomed large (as mentioned in the keynote earlier in the day). Can you accord a $25/month Salesforce.com solution if you have sales teams that are paid $100/month? We must “revisit behaviours” because the world is changing. The environment we have come into is one that is suffering from an erosion of trust as well – with $30 Billion of Lehman assets being found today, people are questioning the capabilities of businesses. [more...]

The iPad has kicked off (or is part of – depending on how you see the Apple marketing) a revolution in small form factor computing devices with touch screens. One of the most promising of these, from a business perspective, is Dell’s Streak. On sale here in the UK, before it arrives in the US, it is a 5 inch tablet that is based on Google’s Android operating system.

It has a fully featured browser, which will support Flash later in the year (meaning that businesses can develop applications in Adobe’s Flex rapid development environment – and there are a sea of applications in the Android store), making it ideal for data browsing and manipulation. It’s pretty robust too!

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WordPress continues to go from strength to strength as both a blogging platform and a CMS. The latest version – 2.9 “Carmen” – includes some useful enhancements that content creators will appreciate. For those that don’t like to go with a .0 release, WordPress 2.9.1 is now out. It fixes a few small niggles with the initial WordPress 2.9 that affected people with older versions of PHP and that used the scheduled posts feature of WordPress. [more...]

According to Dell’Oro Group figures released this month, the VoIP marketing is still a two horse race between Cisco and Avaya. The market for IP Phones grew by 10 Percent, which is a promising sign. They have also reported that the Unified Communications market grew in the third quarter of the year. The top two Unified Communications vendors, Avaya and Cisco, both posted double digit revenue gains, compared to last quarter.

“The second half of the year is typically stronger for the Enterprise Voice market, and the third quarter of this year was no exception for the Unified Communications segment,” commented Alan Weckel, Director at Dell’Oro Group. “Although we expect vendors to experience strong fiscal year-end results in the fourth quarter of 2009 and 2010, we do not expect vendors’ fiscal year-ends to be as strong as they were prior to 2008 for quite some time,”

Things are growing, but we’re still a way off the boom years of VoIP. The gradual migration continues, and the leading players remain much the same.

It is a bad week for data loss. First, Sidekick, or more specifically Danger (owned and run by Microsoft and operating the service for T-Mobile) lost a large amount of user data. People have warned about the Sidekick service for a while. Essentially, data is stored in the cloud, and not on the device. A storage network migration went (very) wrong, and Microsoft / Danger lost millions of Sidekick users’ data.

A bug has also emoerged in the latest version of Apple’s OS X, So the problem isn’t just with cloud services. This from the Guardian:

Apple has admitted that its latest operating system harbours a bug that can accidentally delete data belonging to the computer’s owner. The glitch occurs when some users who upgraded to the Snow Leopard – which was released at the end of August – log into a “guest” account on their machines. When they log back in under their own name, all of the files in their home directory – such as documents, music and videos – have been deleted. [more...]