Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.

Yes, Joe Tucci is a great salesman and Michael Dell is the ultimate entrepreneur, but it is Google that is really behind the $67 billion merger. Tucci: “The waves of change we now see in our industry are unprecedented and, to navigate this change, we must create a new company for a new era.” In other words, we must survive in the digital natives era, ushered in by Google, and magnified by the likes of Amazon and Facebook.

To understand what Tucci calls “the new world order,” let’s take a quick tour of the old one, to better understand how the digital natives forced Dell and EMC into the largest tech acquisition in history. Dell and EMC were the two most successful U.S. stocks in the 1990s, appreciating more than any other stock over that booming decade. They rode on a new tidal wave of digital data, unleashed by the advent of the PC and the networking of PCs in 1980s.

As a result, between 1990 and 2000, the structure of the IT industry has changed for the first—and so far, the last—time, expanding to include large vendors focused on one layer of the IT stack: Intel in semi-conductors, EMC in storage, Cisco in networking, Microsoft in operating systems, Oracle in databases. IBM—the dominant player in the previous era of vertically-integrated, “one-stop-shopping” IT vendors—saved itself from the fate of DEC, Wang, and Prime (all, like EMC, based in Massachusetts) by focusing on services.

More of the Forbes.com post from Gil Press

Enterprise Business Analysts (EBAs) are rising to the occasion to foster creativity and produce innovative products and services.

The Business Analysis discipline is transforming itself in response to the 21st century realities: the Internet of everything is everywhere; change is the only constant, digital, social and mobile spheres have converged; every company needs to be a technology company; competitive advantage is always at risk; software is embedded in virtually every product and service; technology advances are fast and furious and unrelenting. In the midst of these challenges, we strive to reduce costs, do more with less, provide customer value, improve decision making, produce innovations, and advance internal capabilities.

In response to these challenges and to remain competitive, companies are continuously innovating to transform themselves and remain on the leading edge. EBAs are rising to the occasion to foster creativity and produce innovative products and services. Project-related requirements management skills are still needed.

More of the BATimes.com post from Kathleen B Hass

I find this totally fascinating, though not completely unexpected. When a random sample of American adults were asked the question “Just a rough guess, what percent profit on each dollar of sales do you think the average company makes after taxes?” for the Reason-Rupe poll in May 2013, the average response was 36%! That response was very close to historical results from the polling organization ORC’s polls for a slightly different, but related question: What percent profit on each dollar of sales do you think the average manufacturer makes after taxes? Responses to that question in 9 different polls between 1971 and 1987 ranged from 28% to 37% and averaged 31.6%.

How do the public’s estimates of corporate profit margins compare to reality? Not surprisingly they are off by a huge margin. According to this Yahoo!Finance database for 212 different industries, the average profit margin for the most recent quarter was 7.5% and the median profit margin was 6.5% (see chart above). Interestingly, there wasn’t a single industry out of 212 that had a profit margin as high as 36% in the most recent quarter. The industry “REIT-Diversified” had the highest profit margin at 33.5% followed by just one other industry – Wireless Communications at 30.9% – with a profit margin higher than 30%.

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Traditional enterprise data centers had significantly more outages that had an impact on business than did colocation data centers over a recent span of 12 months.

That is another conclusion from the latest survey of data center industry professionals conducted by the Uptime Institute. We covered data center budget trends from the survey on Thursday, and today we are looking at outage-related data.

Seven percent of enterprise data center operators (other than financial services companies) that were surveyed, said they had five or more “business-impacting” data center outages over 12 months. Only three percent of the colocation data center operators that were surveyed could say the same for their recent outage record.

The split between enterprises and third-party data center service providers that participated in the survey was fairly even.

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Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates used this phrase in his memoir, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War. In his case, he was mainly referring to his dealings with Congress and the press, but it’s excellent advice for anyone interested in preserving their credibility, relationships and personal effectiveness.

I’ve had the taste of my foot in my mouth often enough to know that it’s hard to do when the lips are pressed tightly together. While it may be obvious, it’s easy miss chances to shut up when we’re fired by passion for our position or our product, or even when we’re trying to help someone else. Common opportunities to shut up include:

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The challenge facing nearly every IT organization today is not whether to make use of cloud computing services, but the degree to which they want to manage it. Despite the popular perception that internal IT organizations are threatened by cloud services, a new survey suggests that most of them aspire to manage only about half the cloud services being used by their organization by 2016. Internal IT organizations are clearly being asked to deliver more cloud computing services, and IT organizations are getting fairly comfortable with the idea that they don’t need to directly control every service. In fact, a new survey of 131 senior IT executives conducted by 2nd Watch, a provider cloud services and tools for managing Amazon Web Services, found that more than 40 percent of them are already brokering cloud services. Most surprisingly, the biggest consumer of cloud services is not sales and marketing, but rather operations across the rest of the business.

More of the CIO Insight article and slideshow

http://customerthink.com/eight-common-myths-about-business-risk/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=eight-common-myths-about-business-risk&utm_reader=feedly

Evolution is supposed to be slow-moving and steady, giving those affected plenty of time to react. Revolution, on the other hand, is rapid and disruptive and usually leaves casualties in its wake. Nevertheless, revolution is still a process, which means it unfolds in stages, and it isn’t always easy (in fact, it rarely is) to see how one stage will affect another or how it will all come out in the end.

In that regard, the cloud is a typical revolution. What’s surprising, though, is that each stage so far has been a mini-revolution in itself, and it doesn’t look like we’re even close to finishing.

NASA CTO Chris Kemp spelled all this out plainly enough at the recent OpenStack Enterprise Forum, where he noted that demand for the cloud is quickly propelling the demand for hyperscale infrastructure, both within the traditional enterprise and in the hosted service provider market.

More of the IT Business Edge post

The nature of neural networks is perhaps better understood by more people nowadays than used to the be the case. Forms of neural network are used for a range of computational purposes, where they have proved useful as a way to economically discover solutions to difficult problems in pattern recognition, optimization, and other fields. How a particular solution works isn’t always clear, especially when using larger networks, but if it can be proven to work well then why worry?

We ourselves are neural networks: the complex adaptive phenomena that we choose to call the self arises from comparatively simple exchanges between many, many neurons. The machine is the connections and the state of its neurons, constantly altering itself in response to circumstances and its own operation.

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