Download Gartner MQ for Data related technologies

 

• Operational Database Management System
• Business Intelligence and Analytics
• Data Warehouse and Database Management Solutions for Analytics
• Advanced Analytics Platforms

Download Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation

Gartner has released its 2013 MQ for Sales Force Automation. Get it complimentary from following link:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/itanalyst/default.aspx

Download Forrester Wave for Enterprise Cloud Databases

Forrester has released it ‘Forrester Wave’ report for Enterprise Cloud Databases.

Microsoft Windows Azure has come out to be the clear winner in the report and is offering the reprint of full report as free download.

Download it from here before it goes away.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2012/11/14/windows-azure-sql-database-named-an-enterprise-cloud-database-leader-by-forrester-research.aspx

Tweek : Gartner, Free eBook, Banks, Hybrid Cloud, IT Spending, Innovation

 

CIO.com ‏@CIOonline
Meeting the Challenges of Hybrid Cloud Computing Infrastructures http://trib.al/z2kVrv

StrategyArchitecture ‏@strategyarch
Banks are becoming more Innovation friendly http://bit.ly/Szbqoj

StrategyArchitecture ‏@strategyarch
Download Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management http://bit.ly/SwvffK

Gartner ‏@Gartner_inc
Gartner Says Worldwide Enterprise IT Spending is Forecast to Grow 2.5 Percent in 2013 http://gtnr.it/W9VC1k

StrategyArchitecture ‏@strategyarch
Free eBook : Agile for Dummies http://bit.ly/ZDgcWE

Forrester Research ‏@forrester
An improved, superior #CustExp can equal BILLIONS in incremental revenue. That's billions, with a B. #outsidein

Nilofer Merchant ‏@nilofer
5 of 5 stars to HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations by Nancy Duarte http://bit.ly/QGJ0xj

Banks are becoming more Innovation friendly

Highlights from the Infosys and EFMA innovation in retail banking report 2012. The study of 300 banks across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Asia-Pacific region, and the Americas found that online and mobile channels are growing rapidly, with banks focused on areas of innovation that will attract new customers and grow revenues.

Get the full report from here :

http://www.infosys.com/finacle/resources/industry-reports/Pages/index.aspx

Download Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management

Gartner recently released there Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management. Oracle being one of the vendor in leaders quadrant is offering free reprint of the full report for download.

Download the report at no cost from here before it goes away.

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1870042

Download Gartner Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals

Few days back, Gartner released its Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals. Here is a quick description of scope of this MQ.

Gartner defines a portal as "a Web software infrastructure that provides interaction with relevant information assets (for example, information/content, applications and business processes), knowledge assets and human assets by select targeted audiences, delivered in a highly personalized manner." Enterprise portals may face different audiences, including:

• Business-to-employee (B2E)
• Business-to-consumer (B2C)
• Business partners (B2B)

Of course, the public-sector corollaries to these three high-level audience types are also considered applicable. A portal product is a packaged software application that is used to create and maintain enterprise portals. These products can be used to design vertical or horizontal portals:

• Vertical portals focus on accessing specific applications or business functions.
• Horizontal portals integrate and aggregate information from multiple cross-enterprise applications, as well as specific line-of-business tools and applications.

Oracle being one of the leaders is providing the reprint of this MQ as free download. Grab it from here.

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1870043

Download Gartner MQ for Enterprise Architecture Tools 2012

Gartner has published Magic Quadrant 2012 for Enterprise Architecture Tools. EA tools are an important asset while executing the vision of Enterprise Architecture. Every EA should be proficient in atleast one the tools. The members and positions in leaders quadrant remain almost same as compared to last year.

Troux is offering free reprint of the report for download. You can download it from here:

http://resources.troux.com/gartnermq?utm_campaign=Gartner-MQ-Homepage-Banner

Microsoft Security Intelligence Report

Latest edition of Microsoft Security Intelligence Report is out.

Volume 13 of the Microsoft® Security Intelligence Report (SIRv13) provides in-depth perspectives on software vulnerabilities and exploits, malicious code threats, and potentially unwanted software in Microsoft and third-party software. Microsoft developed these perspectives based on detailed trend analyses over the past several years, with a focus on the first half of 2012.

HTML/Javascript continues to top the list when it comes to being platform for exploits.

You can download the full detailed report from here.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=34955

Starbucks Experience and Productivity

Recently came across this interesting video on how to improve customer interaction experience by influencing the productivity on customer side also. The author in this video talks about how Starbucks took a disruptive approach which may not be as customer friendly but improves overall service experience for both sides.

After watching this I realized, how much I have been practicing the same approach for many years during my career with my clients. I as a consultant mostly work with large enterprises which have many people to spend lot of time on long calls which can be done quickly. So to improve mine and their productivity, I mostly end up influencing their work style. What is your experience ?

Video : http://blogs.hbr.org/video/2012/05/how-starbucks-trains-customers.html

Obama and Technology–The wish list

Now that Mr. Obama has been elected President for another 4 years, what is our wish list for him related to Technology ?

We have in 4 areas.

Education : Encourage and Promote STEM education.

Skills : Facilitate importing of skills which are in shortage.

Government : Create policies which facilitate technology adoption and let Government agencies be the leaders in adoption.

Research : Fund and Promote research in areas where Sustainability is the core interest.

IT and CIO : Journey and Future from Gartner

As part of its ongoing symposium, Gartner today published its point of view on what future holds for IT organizations and CIO. They have identified following four futures for CIOs.

• IT as a Global Service Provider
• IT as the Engine Room
• IT ‘is’ the Business
• Everyone’s IT

While Gartner sees them as four dominant futures, I see them more as four stages of their journey. My view goes like this:

Read more about Gartner’s press release here :

http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=2229015

Why traditional journalism is still so important ?

This is the next post in the series for ‘Content Curation’ :

• Content Curation in 5 Steps

• Content Curation Tools and examples

• Content Curation Types

• Scoop.it : All in one Curation Engine

With so much digital action happening in consumer world, digital curation is becoming utmost important. From individuals to marketing professionals, everyone wants perfect digital curation tools. Amongst all this, there is a question if traditional journalism and newspaper still delivers value.

The answer to this is absolute ‘YES’.

If you apply the Theory of Need and Want to digital curation world, you know that while digital curation tools address mostly the ‘Want’ part, the traditional journalism addresses mostly ‘Need’ part.

My recommendation, enterprises apart from adopting digital curation tools should also have a traditional journalism group within to help employees know what they need to know.

The Green Grid membership now open to Individuals

The message :

We are pleased to announce a new membership opportunity for individuals to join and contribute to The Green Grid’s valuable work! The Green Grid provides a great way for you to get to know and work with industry experts on IT, facilities, and operation of efficient computing infrastructures.

Individual membership is open to individuals who are passionate about resource efficiency in business computing, saving money, and saving resources. Employees of a TGG member company are already eligible to receive membership rights through their companies so they are not eligible for Individual Memberships. You can check the Members List to see if your company is a member. To learn more, read the press release and visit the Become a Member page to watch the Executive Director’s short video about this new level of membership!

For an annual fee of $400, Individual Members of The Green Grid receive the following benefits:

v One complimentary registration pass for The Green Grid Forum 2012 (a $250 value)

v Admittance to the members-only Web site with exclusive, early access to documents before they are published to the public as well as access to members-only resources at no additional cost

v Participation in committee and work groups, as well as global expansion initiatives

v Participation in all General Meetings of The Green Grid

v Participation in members-only webcasts on technical topics such as technology, market studies, and roadmaps

v Exclusive use of The Green Grid Individual member logo

Scoop.it : All in one Curation Engine

This is NOT a sponsored post.

Recently I got a chance to use the free version of Scoop.it and I must admit, it came very close to my model of Curation Engine.

You can read more about previous posts on Curation Engine model here:

• Content Curation in 5 Steps
• Content Curation Tools and examples
• Content Curation Types

Visit www.scoop.it and try for yourself. You will love it.

Content Curation Types

This is third post in Content Curation series.

You can read the previous two posts here:

1. Content Curation in 5 Steps

2. Content Curation Tools and examples

There are basically three types of curation engines:

Individual – This is the one which we all do to get best and add our part to it. We use Twitter, facebook, Google Reader, etc to aggregate best of content for our reading. We even share our curated content with others to consume.

Crowd – Yes, the wisdom of crowd. This is what you see on digg or trending topics on twitter.

Software – This is the only automated engine and is becoming more and more popular and efficient. These are the agents which continuously scan the web for popular and highly rated content. Two of the good examples are:

News gadget on iGoogle 

www.LikeButton.com

Every type of engine has its own pros and cons. While the individuals can do a personalized curation, software based curation helps in discovering new content.

The goal is to create an engine which brings best of all three types.

Do you know of any such engine ?

Content Curation Tools and examples

Continuing to my earlier post on Content Curation in 5 Steps, here is list of some digital content curation tools. The list can be endless and so I have picked few popular ones.

Most of the tools come under one or more of the following categories

Twitter is an example of personal and aggregator content curation.

The Huffington Post is a great example of team of humans doing curation which includes lot of content creation too.

Paper.li works very well with twitter hastags and does create a page automatically.

So, what are the content curation platforms you use in your daily routines ?

Content Curation in 5 Steps

Content Curation is the antidote for Information Overload.

Here are the basic steps done during content curation.

Discover

Discover refers to activity where you decide the topic of your content curation. It can be need of yours, organization or community in general.

Research

One you have decided on the topic you start researching it. This includes collecting all the content which has already been published related to this topic. It includes exploring books, blogs, feeds, twitter, journals and even talking to people and publishing surveys.

Filter

After collection all the related content already published, now is the time to select the quality and unique ones. Rest is all discarded or archived.

Synthesize

This step refers to studying and understanding the selected material. Connecting the isolated content published and figuring out the gaps. Filling those gaps by creating the content. Creating something which is useful and unique.

Share

Share refers to publishing or teaching the new content produced in form of blog, book, presentations, podcast, etc.

I welcome comments from all content curators.

WEF Technology Pioneers 2012

The World Economic Forums’ Technology Pioneers 2012 report is out and here are few of the interesting companies featured in Information Technologies and New Media category.

Appirio enables companies to navigate today’s complex cloud computing ecosystem. Provides rapid application development platform over existing cloud platforms.”Appirio was able to build a cloud-based CRM (customer relations management programme) for Starbucks in just four weeks, based on a SalesForce.com software framework”

CloudFlare’s intelligent network accelerates Web traffic over the Internet while deftly dodging abusive bots, crawlers and denial of service attack. The virtual scaled out Web.

DoubleVerify provides tools designed to restore public confidence in business forced to operate in a global net environment increasingly exposed to swindlers, malware and cyber theft.

Dropbox connects the cloud to everyday life. We all know DropBox.

Kickstarter’s innovative crowd-funding platform lets the public in on venture capital funding for imaginative projects.

Living PlanIT develops operating systems for future cities.

Mocana’s responds to the “Internet of Things” with a deviceindependent secure platform for smart communications.

Palantir pioneers an engineering-centred approach to radically change the way data is analysed.

Download complete report from http://www.weforum.org

Design Philosophies of Apple and Microsoft

If you have a passion for User Experience and in particular Visual Design, this article is one of the best written ones.

Microsoft: Design for the time

Apple: Design for timelessness

http://www.theverge.com/2011/12/16/2640050/on-design-the-philosophies-of-apple-and-microsoft