Expert Advice

Businesses are constantly searching for ways to reduce costs and improve revenues. Mobile technologies can provide incredible value because they offer immediate business interactions from almost anywhere. Mobile payments can expand your sales channels by helping you meet customers where they are. Pr...

Those of us who have been around the IT block a few times have witnessed remarkable changes in hardware and software capabilities. The big ones are fairly obvious in hindsight: from mainframes to minicomputers in the 1960s; from minis to PCs in the 1980s; and from dumb terminals to client-server te...

2010 was the year of social media: Mark Zuckerberg was named Time's Person of the Year, "The Social Network" seemed poised for Oscar glory, and Facebook exceeded Google's daily traffic. Certainly there were hiccups along the way -- privacy settings, ease-of-use and the Google Buzz debacle -- but no...

The proliferation of social media and the real-time Web has created a significant change in the role of today's marketer. The shift from a traditional marketing mix to a predominantly online marketing focus has placed new expectations on marketers to understand website traffic, generate leads online...

The proliferation of social media and the real-time Web has created a significant change in the role of today's marketer. The shift from a traditional marketing mix to a predominantly online marketing focus has placed new expectations on marketers to understand website traffic, generate leads online...

The proliferation of social media and the real-time Web has created a significant change in the role of today's marketer. The shift from a traditional marketing mix to a predominantly online marketing focus has placed new expectations on marketers to understand website traffic, generate leads online...

More and more, we are seeing tablets and smartphones becoming integral to user access. Coupled with the ever-increasing burden of managing or even seeking to lower storage costs, this has become a major challenge for IT departments. Public cloud storage -- also known as "Storage as a Service" -- mak...

Retailers are quickly realizing the value of adopting technologies that provide insight and analysis of their customers' behavior and experience. There's no ignoring the value of a technology that provides a new generation of intelligence and agility, but the hundreds or even thousands of transactio...

A recent study that I just read shows that the startup success rate over a period of 10 years is about 30 percent. This obviously means that about 70 percent of startups are out of business after a 10-year period! There is no doubt that the failure rate of startups is stunning and, in my opinion, wi...

Bold claim: Search-based applications are the next generation of search technology to enhance productivity and customer value for specific business processes by streamlining delivery of critical information. Skeptical response: Yeah, but don't most enterprises already have enterprise search, BI and ...

Following on the heels of the explosive growth of social media phenomena like Facebook, Wikipedia and Twitter, companies are exploring whether they can leverage the "wisdom of the crowds" to solve the problem of connecting the bits of information that can lead to innovative products and improved ser...

Every corporation has a face. Imagery, shine and style are interlayered into a skin that appears as a mask; uplift captured by a distinct name identity poises it to reach the upper stratosphere of stardom. Corporate masks are just like real people: Some are exciting and some boring; some you remembe...

A strong candidate for mCRM solutions is the retail industry -- an enormous business worldwide that includes apparel, restaurants, department stores, pharmacies, grocery, home and hardware, discount and speciality stores, hotels, malls, airports, convenience, and even telecoms. One American guide cl...

In making a case for outsourcing SaaS or PaaS, it's important to have a solid foundation on which to measure and compare and contrast your actual internal costs against the external service provider costs. It is also important to seek Finance's help in ensuring you add one more piece to your model....

As IT attempts to separate hype from reality, finding the real ROI in cloud adoption can prove elusive. Nonetheless, a demonstrable ROI must be developed as the basis and justification of a cloud transition plan. In this article, I will examine a method of valuing IT resources to build a case for ...