By Dick Weisinger, on February 3rd, 2012
A recent report by Forrester Research concluded that, on average, customers of the Alfresco Enterprise Content Management (ECM) product are able to reclaim their costs of technology investment in just 10 months. Forrester’s Stephen Powers and Total Economic Impact (TEI) consultant Sebastian Selhorst reported their findings on the eve of yesterday’s Alfresco version 4 launch party.
ECM remains high on the radar of many companies. 71 percent of companies said that they plan to begin funding or increase their existing funding of ECM while 20 percent said that they will keep their current funding at the same level.
The reasons why ECM is so popular is because:
- Compliance
- Data Archiving
- Content Search
- Policy management of data across multiple repositories
- eDiscovery support
- Move employees away from sharing documents via file shares and email
- Social and Collaboration features
The Forrester report identifies the following elements of the ECM market that are evolving or changing:
- Many companies are experimenting with SharePoint and becoming exposed to document and data collaboration
- ECM is having more application-specific strategies
- Content-focused solutions are now preferred over one-size-fits all ECM product suites
- Cloud deployments
- Industry-specific solutions
The report then specifically delves into the benefits indentifed resulting from using the Alfresco ECM product. Benefits include
- Avoidance of software licenses
- Maintenance cost savings
- The ability to use less expensive developer resources, and
- Reduction of costs through being able to use an open source stack, like an Open Source database such as MySQL or PostgreSQL.
By Dick Weisinger, on February 2nd, 2012
In Gartner’s list of top-10 strategic technologies for 2012, it lists In-Memory Computing at number eight. Just what is that, and what’s the benefit of using it?
Quite simply it is adding large amounts of available memory to computers to speed up calculations of all types. Solving problems exclusively in memory, rather than relying on the hard drive to cache data, can dramatically improve the time to perform complex computer calculations. SAP’s HANA (High Performance Analytics Appliance) in-memory system is said to be 3600 times faster than a computer similarly configured but without the large amounts of memory. That means that calculations that may have taken hours can now be done in seconds.
SAP has jumped into in-memory computing in a big way, and SAP’s Chief Scientist Ike Nassi says that there’s nothing new about In-Memory Computing, it’s simply a rebirth of an idea dating back twenty or more years. He likens the rebirth to a sort of Ground Hog Day effect, referring to the popular movie starring Bill Murray about a weatherman who was caught up in a time-warp that doomed him to repeat his life on Ground Hogs’ Day over and over. Trends in technology repeat themselves. Nassi compares Big Data problems of today with speed issues of Lotus-123 spreadsheets back in the ’80’s. Back then, spreadsheets only managed small amounts of data, but even though data sizes were small, the data still couldn’t all fit into computer memory, and calculations were slow. Things speeded up significantly though as computers were gradually armed with more and more megabytes of fast DRAM chips.
Similar to the kick start in application development and sales that DRAM gave computers in the ’80’s, in-mmeory computing is likely to continue to push the boundaries on what is possible for application development. Expect a new category of data-based applications to emerge.
Since today is Ground Hogs’ Day, it seemed only proper to talk about in-memory computing. Today, the promise of Big Data is driving strong interest in using computers decked out with ever larger amounts of fast computer memory. Because of Big Data, another cycle of adding large amounts of memory to computers is under way.
And, it’s not just SAP that is promoting In-Memory Computing. Products using in-memory computing already today include SAS (High Performance Computing Package), Microsoft’s PowerPivot and 64-bit SQL Server database “Denali“, the Open Source Pentaho data analytics package all offer in-memory computing options. Expect more vendors and products to follow the trend.
Alan Bowling on ComputerWeekly writes that “For certain sectors where huge amounts of data are practically a requirement, such as utilities or finance, in-memory computing is already a hugely disruptive technology. Organisations in these sectors would do well to make the move to in-memory computing early, rather than being left trying to catch up with the competition.”
By Dick Weisinger, on February 1st, 2012
Just six months ago. former CIO
Vivek Kundra commented that the government can “no longer afford to be held hostage by the global
IT cartel — a powerful group of private contractors that encourage reliance on inefficient software and hardware that is expensive to acquire and to maintain.” The solution? Kundra
proposed that the government needs to streamline, shrink data centers, and as much as possible,
adopt cloud computing alternatives.
But as industry and government flee one IT cartel, they are adopting cloud services that are likely to be controlled by a new cartel, one that will likely include some new faces but will also include many of the bigger players from the previous generation of IT cartel members. At least that’s what
Phil Murphy of Forrester Research
is warning. And the prediction is that this flip from old-world computing to new-world cloud computing will happen much more quickly than many expect.
Forrester thinks that by the end of this decade there will have been massive changes in the nature of computing. Moore’s power of two law predicts that digital storage and computing capacities double every eighteen months, and if Moore’s law continues to hold, we can expect dramatic changes in the world of computers over the coming years. Forrester says, for example, that we can expect hand-held computers with
IBM-Watson-type capabilities to be commonplace by 2020.
Forrester’s Murphy
said that “The industry of 2020 is software-fuelled, cartel-enabled analytics against big data. Drawing insight from consumer and other data will become the mainstay of firms such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and a host of other social and consumer-oriented companies. Cartel partners will join forces: Big technology vendors will provide processing, analytical capabilities, and global reach, while credit-card processing, logistics, and social firms will provide transaction data, logistical supply, and consumer demand and consumption.”
Forrester identifies different categories of computing cartels that are expected to dominate the IT landscape in the future. These companies include Amazon, Cisco Systems, Google, I.B.M., Microsoft, and Oracle. The computer world in 2020 will be one driven by ease of use and low cost computing and maintenance. The Forrester report says that “Consumer and other data will become the mainstay of firms such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft. Big technology vendors will provide processing, analytical capabilities and global reach, while credit-card processing, logistics and social firms will provide transaction data, logistical supply and consumer demand and consumption.”
