Archive | August, 2010
Steve Romero

Dipping your toes into the ocean of IT governance, Part 1

By on August 16, 2010 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

IT governance makes sense. Appoint decision-makers and create policies around the IT decision-making processes within any given business, doing so to better ensure that the projects IT undertakes best suit the business needs. But despite the simplicity behind its mission, implementing IT governance can become quite involved and often result in piecemeal approaches to bits and pieces of the overall effort, according to Steve Romero, CA Technologies’ IT governance Evangelist.

Check out Romero’s blog here: The Future of IT – What do you think?

IT and business leaders realize it would be remiss to not want to put in a safeguard of sorts to ensure that the technology investments, projects planned and enterprise architecture chosen were ideal for a company’s needs. But the hurdles with IT governance don’t emerge until the efforts are under way and stakeholders realize perhaps members of the group weren’t all on the same page, Romero says.

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Technologies that won’t be ignored

By on August 13, 2010 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

Economic experts warn of a double-dip recession, but IT industry watchers say technology trends won’t slow down in the next two years, forcing high-tech leaders to take notice.

Check out the Gartner Webinar: Technology Trends You Can’t Afford to Ignore

Gartner Managing Vice President Raymond Paquet recently hosted a Webinar to detail the 10 key trends the research firm was tracking in the coming months. Not surprisingly two of the trends are virtualization and cloud computing, and a third involves social software. This blog will explore those three areas because frankly one can’t go online without running into multiple instances and references to the technologies.

Virtualization could be an obvious pick, considering its increase in popularity over the past several years, specifically x86 server virtualization. Yet Paquet pointed out that network, storage and desktop virtualization demand attention as well. The fact that server virtualization allows IT departments to consolidate resources and eliminate power and cooling costs provides an obvious ROI, according to Paquet, who also pointed out that client virtualization needs to be approached a bit differently.

“We cannot consolidate desktops. PCs by definition have a one-to-one ratio,” Paquet explained. “The return on investment model is fundamentally different even though the technology is fundamentally the same and therefore will not have nearly as high the potential ROI.”

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Service Assurance Daily Weekly Reading List

By on August 12, 2010 in Uncategorized

The FCC’s Crusade to Keep the Internet Free
Bloomberg Businessweek this week ran a story about the potential end of ’Net Neutrality and the possibility that content online will be offered at tiers of service and not only require pre-registration but also payment. With chiefs from Google and Verizon advocating ’Net Neutrality to only a point, the Federal Communications Commission could be challenges to protect the open Web.

Global CIO: Hewlett-Packard’s New CEO: The Top 10 Challenges
HP needs a new CEO and wants one that continue on the company’s positive momentum of the past five years, in part thanks to the ousted former chief Mark Hurd. Informationweek explores just what the potential candidate will be up against in taking over one of the world’s largest technology vendors.

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Mark Hurd

HP’s dilemma: The high-tech CEO, the reality TV star and a potential PR nightmare

By on August 11, 2010 in Uncategorized

It’s not often that my professional world collides with some admittedly questionable personal interests, but last week when news broke that HP CEO Mark Hurd stepped down following a sexual harassment suit filed by a former contestant on a reality television show, I experienced a bit of whiplash.

Read Time’s take on the news — Corporate Scandals: Why HP Had to Oust Mark Hurd
View Time’s slideshow on Top 10 CEO Scandals

Because I keep up on gossip rags almost as much as high-tech mags, I realize no industry leader – or government official, athlete or actor – is safe from a sex scandal, but to learn that HP’s chief was leaving for potentially philandering with an employee and not something more related to questionable accounting practices did surprise me some. (Nothing specific to Hurd, but generally high-tech CEOs get caught and punished for being creative with accounting and not necessarily for schmoozing the assistants.)

Mark Hurd

But as the news unfolded more, inaccurate use of company funds (reportedly totaling around $20,000) was at the root of Hurd’s speedy exodus. Hurd admitted he didn’t act in line with corporate policy and will reportedly get millions to leave HP. The suit filed by Jodie Fisher, an actress who worked for HP as a marketing consultant and who is represented by the infamous Gloria Allred, was reportedly settled before the news hit and after Hurd offered to replenish the misappropriated cash.

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Is a mainframe skills shortage imminent?

By on August 9, 2010 in Uncategorized

The IT industry often debates the availability of a variety of high-tech skills, spurning arguments over which technologies are obsolete, how many H-1B visas should be distributed and if U.S. companies really need to offshore technical work if there are unemployed American IT pros.

Is your key IT talent planning to quit in 2010?
The latest discussion around lacking IT skills lies within legacy systems, according to a recent Bloomberg Businessweek online article, dubbed Big Tech Problems as Mainframes Outlast Workforce. Executives from companies such as CA Technologies and IBM explain how older IT workers dominate the mainframe positions even as they approach retirement, and that the market hasn’t made up for the potential loss by training more mainframe experts in colleges, universities and high-tech training programs.

Dayton Semerjian, a senior vice president at CA Technologies, is attributed with citing the average age of IT professionals with mainframe expertise at between 55 and 60. Second only to IBM for mainframe-related software, CA Technologies says it can see that a skills shortage will be inevitable if action is not taken now.

“The big challenge with the mainframe is that the group that has worked on it – the Baby Boomers – is retiring,” said Semerjian in the article. “The demographics are inescapable. If this isn’t addressed, it will be trouble for the platform.”

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Smartphones invade the enterprise: Will IT management need to change?

By on August 6, 2010 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

It seems inevitable that enterprise IT managers will have to devise a plan to handle a slew of smartphones in the coming years, according to recent research reports that say companies will extend business applications to the devices and most handhelds will feature Web browsers by 2015.

ABI Research this week shared data that showed more than 60% of the installed base of mobile handsets worldwide, or about 3.7 billion, will contain mobile Web browsers by 2015. And McAfee’s Digital Trust unit reported that some 75% of 150 senior IT executives intend to make internal applications available to employees on a variety of smartphones, according to a Network World article. Specifically, nearly 60% of respondents said they will mobilize more than e-mail, extending CRM, ERP and proprietary in-house applications to mobile devices.

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Service Assurance Daily Weekly Reading List

By on August 5, 2010 in Uncategorized

Quest Software acquires Surgient to Enter Private Cloud Market
The high-tech industry never fails to deliver when it comes to interesting acquisitions. If anyone doubted that cloud would drive vendors to make significant product moves, the news from eWeek around Quest buying virtualization systems management player Surgient should drive the point home. Quest will use Surgient’s self-provisioning server automation technology to help Quest offer customers an on-ramp to private cloud environments. The move is smart if not predictable, but is it too late to keep up with others who acquired technology last year and are delivering product now?

Google Wave failure may help Google Me succeed
Computerworld’s Sharon Gaudin explores how Google throwing in the towel on its Wave collaboration and communication tool doesn’t signal an end to the vendor’s plans to deliver a social networking platform. As industry speculation grows on Google creating a “Facebook-killer” application, analysts say Google is smart to end projects that aren’t delivering on expectations and savvy enough to learn from past mistakes in future product offerings.

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NetQoS buy lands CA Technologies in ‘value leader’ position

By on August 4, 2010 in CA Technologies on APM

CA Technologies can attribute its acquisition of NetQoS for its high rank on Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) recent Radar report that analyzed some 20 vendors and their Application-Aware Network Performance Management (ANPM) product capabilities.

CA Technologies certainly isn’t shy about shopping for technology — the vendor since the beginning of 2009 alone has acquired 3Tera, Cassatt, NetQoS, Nimsoft and Oblicore. And recent research shows that the company is also pretty savvy when it comes to picking companies and products that will best round out its technology portfolio.

In the case of NetQoS, CA Technologies invested $200 million in 2009 to acquire the Austin-based network performance management vendor and is already seeing the fruits of that acquisition by way of industry recognition for its technology capabilities. Combining the NetQoS portfolio with products acquired years ago with Concord Communications, namely eHealth, CA Technologies caught the attention of Jim Frey, research director at EMA, author of the recent EMA Radar report on ANPM products.

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How savvy network management optimizes application performance

By on August 3, 2010 in CA Technologies on APM

Network management is considered a mature IT discipline, yet recent research proves that even advanced practices can be updated when technology and business needs demand it.

Take application-aware network performance management, for example. Bringing together network performance data with metrics on applications and services running across the environment will help high-tech managers deliver an optimized IT end-user experience, according to Enterprise Management Associates (EMA).

“Application-aware network performance management (ANPM) in our Radar report is looking at tools that are doing performance management by monitoring the network and in doing so the tools are also revealing application details and services that are active, who’s using them and how often, what’s the responsiveness and the quality of experience,” says Jim Frey, research director at EMA.

The EMA Radar for Application-Aware Network Performance Management Q3 2010 Summary details the four key mechanisms used by vendors in tools designed to provide application awareness in a network management product. To start, tools should include packet inspection capabilities. This “technique delivers application visibility by looking into packet headers as well as deeper packet contents in order to recognize and monitor application and service use by user,” according to the report.

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Could emergency Windows patch mandate a process change?

By on August 2, 2010 in Uncategorized

Microsoft Monday released a patch outside of its normal Patch Tuesday update for a publicly disclosed vulnerability in Windows that reportedly could allow remote code execution and require extensive, time-consuming removal efforts if exploited successfully.

According to the Microsoft Malware Protection Center blog, this vulnerability can be exploited by the Sality virus, “a highly virulent strain.”

“It is known to infect other files (making full remove after infection challenging), copy itself to removable media, disable security and then download other malware,” the blog explains. “After the inclusion of the .LNK vector, the numbers of machines seeing attack attempts combining malicious .LNKs and Sality.AT soon surpassed the numbers we saw with Stuxnet.”

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