International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) After the Enron debacle, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) assumed a leadership role in the rush toward an international set of accounting standards (IFRS). The long and proud independent standard setting process in the United States of America is being phased out in favor of an international standard setting process with an international governing body, the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB). So what’s the big deal? Confusing Standards? So will we have a single, simple, principles-based global set of accounting standards? Not so fast, my friend! Initially, public companies will be required to convert to IFRS while private US companies could choose to adopt IFRS for small- and mid-sized entities or could, along with not-for-profit organizations, continue to report under g... (more)

[Flashback to 2008] Is Google the Elephant in the Cloud?

While cloud computing reporting has recently been focused on Microsoft's Azure announcement and Amazon's upgrade to EC2, there's an elephant in the cloud: Google. According to a well-researched article in Cloud Computing Journal, Google filed as long ago as February 2006 a provisional patent application with 91 different numbered claims that arguably makes it clear that Google has a multi-year lead in cloud computing. The article, written by Stephen T. Arnold, concludes that: "Google can, with the deployment of software, deliver global services that other companies cannot match in terms of speed of deployment, operation, and enhancement....[T]his patent document is an indication that Google can put its foot on the gas pedal at any time and operate in a dimension that other companies cannot." Stephen E. Arnold, who blogs at arnoldit.com, monitors search, content p... (more)

10th International Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo New York – Photo Album

10th International Cloud Expo, held on June 11-14, 2012 at the Javits Center in New York City, featured four content-packed days with a rich array of sessions about the business and technical value of cloud computing led by exceptional speakers from every sector of the cloud computing ecosystem. The Cloud Expo series is the fastest-growing Enterprise IT event in the past 10 years, devoted to every aspect of delivering massively scalable enterprise IT as a service. We invite you to enjoy our photo album of the show - we'll be adding new images all week. ... (more)

Who Are The All-Time Heroes of i-Technology?

I wonder how many people, as I did, found themselves thrown into confusion by the death last week of Jean Ichbiah (pictured), inventor of Ada.  Learning that the inventor of a computer programming language is already old enough to have lived 66 years (Ichbiah was 66 when he succumbed to brain cancer) is a little like learning that your 11-year-old daughter has grown up and left home or that the first car you ever bought no longer is legal because it runs on gasoline in an age where all automobiles must run on water. How can something as novel, as new, as a computing language possibly already be so old-fangled that an early practitioner like Ichbiah can already no longer be with us? The thought was so disquieting that it took me immediately back to the last time I wrote about Ichbiah, and indeed about Ada Lovelace for whom his language was named. It was in the context ... (more)

Enterprise Mashups without Governance = 10 to Life

Darryl Taft at eWeek just published a good recap of the opening panel discussion from this week’s Webservices/SOA on Wallstreet Conference, ‘Enterprise Mashups For Wall Street – Leveraging SOA and Web 2.0’. I was also at the show and had a chance to listen to the panel discussion live. The best part of the discussion was when the conversation went down the path of Innovation versus Governance. During this thread, an interesting statement was made by Rene Bonvanie, SVP of Marketing at Serena. Darryl wrote that Rene said; 'governance should take a back seat to innovation’. Boy, was this the wrong thing to say to a financial audience where governance is #1 on IT’s priority list! We all know if you don’t enforce governance in the financial services sector, you and your office mates may spend some some time in prison. Just ask the folks at Societe Generale about their US... (more)

When to Automate the Order Management Process

To read part 2, click here. To read part 1, click here. Order entry and management is a particularly tricky automation challenge because it intersects and connects many different departments and cultures. Properly done, an order is generated directly from a quote, which was created with a tie to inventory. The order is then passed to a staging area or a work ticket is automatically generated. At any point, when a customer wants to know the status of his or her order, a customer-service representative needs to be able to access this information directly. It is common for smaller businesses not to have the process automated. An order is typically filled out by hand in the sales department, then typed in by an order entry person and ultimately walked down to the manufacturing floor or fulfillment environment. That creates a significant disconnect when a customer asks a... (more)

Planning, Budgeting and Forecasting as a Service

SaaS / BpaaS Adoption This is a continuation of my series of articles on Industry SaaS. This term ‘Industry SaaS' can be interchangeably used with BpaaS (Business Process as a Service). However, the term ‘Industry SaaS' meaning a Software as a Service meant for a specific industry is stressed for wider attention, as the term BpaaS has yet to mature with a clear definition. Planning, Budgeting & Forecasting Business Planning and Forecasting refers to the set of activities where business is planned against the strategy and what forecast activities or results of the organization may occur from operational execution during a particular time period. The following are the functions of this business process. Planning: To ensure that organization is able to align its activities towards the vision. Budgeting: To ensure that proper resources are allocated to the planned activ... (more)

Is SSD dead? No, however some vendors might be

Is SSD dead? No, however some vendors might be By Greg Schulz In a recent conversation with Dave Raffo about the nand flash solid state disk (SSD) market, we talked about industry trends, perspectives and where the market is now as well as headed. One of my comments is, has been and will remain that the industry has still not reached anywhere near full potential for deployment of SSD for enterprise, SMB and other data storage needs. Granted, there is broad adoption in terms of discussion or conversation and plenty of early adopters. SSD and in particular nand flash is anything but dead, in fact in the big broad picture of things, it is still very early in the game. Sure, for those who cover and crave the newest, latest and greatest technology to talk about, nand flash SSD might seem old, yesterday news, long in the tooth and time for something else. However, for th... (more)

Shelly Palmer Radio Report

Click to play ... As if having your stock tank wasn’t bad enough, Facebook and its banks are now facing lawsuits from disgruntled shareholders.  The suit claims that Facebook hid weakened revenue growth forecasts from the general public while alerting a select group of investors ahead of its IPO. Andrew Noyes, a Facebook spokesman, said: “We believe the lawsuit is without merit and will defend ourselves vigorously.”  Morgan Stanley had no comment about the lawsuit, but previously said that Facebook IPO procedures complied with all applicable regulations and were the same as in any initial offering.  No matter how you look at it, this is not great news for Facebook or any other tech company looking to go public in the near future.  NASDAQ already apologized for a series of technical glitches that had a negative impact on Facebook’s IPO, this lawsuit – one of many t... (more)

Right-Size IT Budgets with Windows Server 2012 "Storage Spaces"

What is the Largest Single Cost Category in Your IT Hardware Budget? If you're like most of the enterprise customer organizations that were surveyed when we were designing Windows Server 2012, your answer is probably the same as theirs: STORAGE! For the organizations we surveyed, we found that as much as 60% of their annual hardware budgets were allocated to expensive hardware SAN solutions due to ever-increasing storage requirements. Wouldn't it be nice to have some of that budget back for other IT projects? YES! We agree too ... that's why the server team included "Storage Spaces" in Windows Server 2012! Get Ready for "Storage Spaces"! "Storage Spaces" is a new storage virtualization technology that's included in Windows Server 2012 and our FREE Hyper-V Server 2012 to provide SAN-like storage capabilities and performance using commodity hardware components, such as ... (more)

Don’t blame Generation Y for applications on the network

New European research shows that contrary to widespread opinion junior staff are not always responsible for bringing applications into the workplace, and for the risks associated with this 25th October 2012, London - Today, Easynet, the network, hosting and cloud integration business, released the results of its 'Applications in the Cloud' pan-European study, which revealed that rather than Gen Y employees bringing the majority of applications into the workplace, it is senior management and the C suite that are responsible. The introduction of unmanaged applications in the workplace, and the associated security risks, brings with it major headaches for the CIO, who must somehow find a way to control all the potential points of entry and data leakage across the corporate network. Applications have traditionally been perceived by the Board and senior managers as bein... (more)