I just finished presenting at the TDWI “Cool BI” Forum in Chicago this week.  I had an interesting conversation after my presentation about identifying where to look for big data opportunities within one’s organization.  I’m a big advocate of starting with the annual report, and I’ll use this blog to discuss 1) where to look in the

InFocus Weekly Roundup May 11, 2012 “Stump the Bloggers” with your questions on Capitalizing on Cloud Services and Transitioning to ITaaS.  Post your questions for InFocus bloggers here – and they will be answered live from EMC World May 21 (simulcast on the EMC Community Network). This week, Wayne Pauley, Choong Keng Leung, and JP Morgenthal

Traditional views on IaaS and PaaS are already outmoded. They present a view of the universe that delineates based on a particular software element called a hypervisor. However, these terms do nothing more than continue to promote a stratified IT organization. As I discussed in my previous blog, stratification of IT has become a primary

Too many years ago, when I was at Verizon, a key problem was lack of consistent customer data – including the basics such as name, address and other customer information. Today’s blog explores some of the key customer data issues that persist in today’s IT systems… a sort of “Back to the Future.” The same

Financial Planning is a growing need, especially for today’s retiring or retired baby boomers that require planning to sustain their lifestyle and for the Gen X/Y generations who are facing high education costs and less certain retirement prospects.  Planning tools are playing an increasing role in attracting and retaining these clients.  The right tools convey

Yesterday I had the privilege of accepting the TSIA STAR Award for Best Use of Metrics and Business Intelligence on behalf of EMC. This is the third year in a row that EMC has won this award. EMC’s commitment to improving our customers’ experience is what this is all about. Our core metrics are designed

Referring to the IT Transformation Puzzle which we discussed in my previous blog post IT Transformation – Where to Start?, most IT organizations will start their transformation journey with the Infrastructure Layer as shown in Figure 1. Figure 1: Infrastructure Transformation This is because Infrastructure is the foundation that everything else ‘rides’ on top of.

One of the leading problems plaguing IT organizations is the high costs of operations and maintenance.  The industry average is roughly 70% with some organizations going as high as 90%. Picking apart these costs one often finds a stratified organization focused on narrow bands of computing with little crossover between the bands. Moreover, the weighting

In my last post, I discussed why cloud architects need to be business savvy when transforming IT to ITaaS.  Part of that discussion was how to get the information needed to assess the organization and the technology.  In this post I will dig a little deeper into that assessment process, starting with the working definition

In my discussions about the assault of big data technologies on the traditional Business Intelligence (BI) and data warehouse (DW) markets, sometimes it is hard to identify specific use cases where a big data technology – like Hadoop – can help your BI environment.  Many of these big data use cases are really still being