Late spring is always a busy time for conferences and events, and it sometimes feels that we are away more often than we are back in the office. Having said that, these events are the lifeblood of what we as analysts do, and it offers us an opportunity to identify the trend, issues and opportunities circulating the market and industry. Industriousness abounds here at CIC and we are eager to share a selection of the reports we have recently published with our community.
Mainframe appeal
Ian Murphy’s Commentary Article “IBM z13 – Making the mainframe attractive again” looks at the enduring qualities of the mainframe, now in its 50th year. He explores how it has withstood competition from the mini-computer, local area networks, distributed computing, blade systems and even supercomputers and how it has evolved to address new workloads that were previously seen as unsuitable for the platform.
HP’s Cloud Insights
Meanwhile, Clive Howard and Bola Rotibi have released their latest Commentary Article “HP updates Helion and Cloud28+” which examines the messaging underpinning HP’s Cloud strategy behind their updates on Cloud28+ and HP Helion. After attending both the Cloud28+ Symposium in Frankfurt and the HP Helion Roadshow in London, they reflect upon how HP has been refining its messaging around the Cloud story, and how HP’s strategy has become clearer and makes a lot of good sense for both HP and its customers and partners. Finally they have a look at what might be next for the portfolio and service.
Mobile Commerce – what makes it work
Following on from the success of our first Briefing Note “The Internet of Things: The Evolution of all Things” here at CIC we have released the second in our series of Briefing Notes “The State of Mobile Commerce: What is holding it back and why it could be better” The Briefing Note series of articles are summary pieces on a given topic and outline the CIC viewpoint on that topic. Best of all, they are free to download, so head over to our Briefing Notes page to download these insightful reports. In the meantime, we are sharing a few of the key summary points form the State of Mobile Commerce Briefing Note to pique your interest:
- Mobile Commerce is growing but numerous studies show challenges to mass market penetration. Primarily concerns about security and usability, the latter due to the difficulties of data entry on small devices.
- Mobile Wallets present opportunities to address the main customer concerns. Wallets, such as those by PayPal, Apple and Google, provide added security and make mobile transactions quick and easy.
- Customers do not trust many of the current Mobile Wallet providers as they are associated with questionable data policies or previous data loss stories. This presents an opportunity for the brands that people do trust such as banks.
- Customers are more demanding with respect to mobile commerce compared
to ecommerce and so the success of any solution will come down to implementation. The one that customers find easiest and trust the most will most likely win.
Mainframe modernisation from Serena
CIC Spotlights are reports particularly covering suppliers’ solutions, product and market strategies and the experiences of client end-user organisations. Ian Murphy and Bola Rotibi’s latest offering “Serena Mainframe Modernization Support”, assesses Serena’s support strategy for improving the change management of mainframe application assets and enabling a broader community of developers to support the mainframe platform. This report is FREE to download, so head on over now!
Storage Appeal
There is no doubt about it; we are witnessing a sea change of technological advances in the market and an explosion of vast amounts of data. In fact we have more data than we can handle – whether it is structured or unstructured – and it can be used in many different ways. Data needs to be processed so much faster, with agility being the order of the day. In the latest podcast from CIC, Podcast, “Next Gen Storage in a Data Driven Era” Bola Rotibi, Erik Vynckier of Alliance Bernstein and Ian Shave of IBM’s Storage Business Unit draw on their experiences and expertise to discuss the data and storage challenges along with the different analytical workloads facing many industry sectors but especially within the financial sector.
There are clear opportunities and potential for all industry sectors not least because of the overall affordability of an extensive range of storage strategies that can address the broadest range of needs and sophistication. A new era of storage facilities and capacity is upon us and it would be naïve not to investigate the possibilities for your organisations. The podcast is FREE to download!
We hope that you find something of interest in the above, and as always, please don’t hesitate to contact us if you would like to discuss any of the above material further with one of our analysts. Here’s to a great summer!