Formtek Blog

Open Source: Quality, Flexibility and Cost

dweisinger — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 15:00:45 +0000

Open Source has matured to the point where it is now used to some extent in every company. 98 percent of respondents to a survey said that their organizations make use of Open Source in some way. The people answering the survey were IT professionals in areas like network operations, server management and engineering. Many [...]

Business Intelligence: Open Source Catching Up, but Still Lags Proprietary

dweisinger — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:00:29 +0000

Open Source software pervades almost every segment of technology. In some areas Open Source even has even become the leader. For example, Linux versus UNIX, or Alfresco versus traditional ECM vendors. Open Source Business Intelligence software is one area where there is a significant amount of work being done, but for now, according to a [...]

Big Data: Bringing Growth to Rural Communities

dweisinger — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 15:00:26 +0000

Prineville, Oregon; Council Bluffs, Iowa; Quincy, Washington; The Dalles, Oregon; Mahwah, New Jersey. Are these the cities that will drive future US economic growth? These are becoming hubs of growth around cloud computing and big data research. While the industrial age in the US was driven by cities like Philadelphia, Detroit, Buffalo, Cleveland, these [...]

Private Cloud Computing: Easier Said than Done

dweisinger — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 15:00:40 +0000

The benefits of cloud computing include flexibility and cost savings. Scalability of resources is really the key to its popularity of the cloud. The traditional approach to infrastructure divvies up servers and processing power based on the applications running in the organization. Resources become dedicated to applications, and usually, to allow room for growth, [...]

SaaS: Even in the Long Term SaaS is More Competitive

dweisinger — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 15:00:43 +0000

When looking at the costs of a software solution deployed via SaaS versus one deployed via as a traditional on-site implementation, the cost benefits of SaaS are clear. There is no software license fee with SaaS. There’s no hardware costs involved with allocating servers or space needed within a datacenter. There’s also [...]

Business Intelligence: Assisted by Enterprise Search for Unified Information Access

dweisinger — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 15:00:23 +0000

Business Intelligence (BI) is increasingly being used by businesses for synthesizing data culled from many company databases to create reports and dashboards that can identify patterns and trends. BI has had its share of success, but it sometimes isn’t able to tell the whole story. That’s because BI is limited to analyzing structured data stored [...]

Cloud Computing: Cloud Services see Fast Track Growth

dweisinger — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 15:00:53 +0000

Gartner is forecasting a 16.9 percent growth of revenues generated from global cloud services this year compared to 2009 revenues. The expected 2010 global cloud service revenue is $68.3 billion. The Gartner projection is to reach $148.8 billion in 2014. IDC has a growth forecast with the same basic trend, but they predict the global [...]

Open Source: Quality now leads Affordability as Main Selection Criteria

dweisinger — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 15:00:04 +0000

During the last ten years Open Source has had a profound influence on both software companies and consumers of software, indirectly if not directly. And along the way, Open Source has changed, morphing itself in ways so as to become now widely accepted by all types of businesses. In many instances, the cream of the [...]

Records Management: Government Agencies Need Policy Around Social Media

dweisinger — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 15:00:35 +0000

Despite the challenges that government agencies face in adopting new web-based technologies like Web 2.0 and Social Media, adoption of these technologies within the government is increasing. Privacy, security, records management and freedom of information have all been big stumbling blocks for government in coming up with a strategy for using Social Media.

For example, the [...]

SaaS: Rapid Growth Continues

dweisinger — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 15:00:07 +0000

While most of the economy has been sputtering, there have been few bright spots, but SaaS is proving to be an exception. Gartner is predicting that SaaS spending will grow by 14.1 percent this year, compared to 2009. That jump compares with a more modest 3.9 percent increase that Garter is predicting for overall IT [...]