This page lists my blogs published on www.blogger.com in 2014
Good news, bad news and wrong news on IT spending
15 December 2014 – I’ve got some good news for all you cloud service providers, security technology companies, storage suppliers, big data companies and those of you in the mobile industry: 2015 is going to be a bumper year.
All quiet on the Optus OSS front
14 November 2014 – It was, I am sure, no coincidence that NEC announced a major OSS deal with Optus on the day that Optus announced its Q2 results, as part of parent SingTel’s Q2 results announcement.
In search of the Internet of Everything
12 November 2014 – The Guardian ‘s web site this week carried a lengthy article that sought to arrive at a clear definition of the ‘Internet of Things’. While it explored the topic it did not do much to clarify the definition.
Cloud is coming, faster than you might think
28 October 2014 – IDC has been banging on about its ‘third platform’ for several years now, but maybe it takes one company’s real-world experience to bring home the importance of this shift and the rate at which it is happening.
Here comes the Quantified Selfstra
24 October 2014 – The launch of Telstra’s eHealth initiative this week was a curious affair. Most of the focus was on ReadyCare, Telstra’s joint venture with Swiss company Medgate set up to provide general practitioner services over the phone. It’s at least six months from becoming reality.
Telstra’s store revamp – in search of consistency
21 October 2014 – When Telstra CEO, David Thodey, trumpeted the innovations in customer service embedded in the company’s new $112m flagship retail outlet in the old Daryl Lea chocolate shop at 396 George Street, Sydney he talked about giving customers the ability to start an interaction in one store, review the history on their own PC, tablet etc and, eventually, when the retail refresh has been rolled out fully, pick up the conversation in another store.
Salesforce Wave and the future of data analytics
20 October 2014 – Forbes Magazine concluded a lengthy report on Dreamforce – Salesforce’s mammoth conference held in San Francisco last week – with the comment that neither of the major product announcements – data analytics tool Wave and mobile app development platform, Lightning – were “as finished, or nearly as polished, as the four-day corporate love-fest that Salesforce has become the master of hosting.”
Telcos doomed by dumb pipes? Don’t be so sure
19 August 2014 – The death of telcos, starved of revenues and relegated to being providers of dumb pipes while over the top providers cream off all the revenues, has been predicted for far longer than the likes of Google have been around.
Vodafone Australia going after M2M market
18 August 2014 – On 10 September Vodafone Australia is holding a press briefing “Machine-to-Machine – Vodafone insights on adoption, growth and future markets” at which it promises to look at “the global [M2M] landscape based on insights from Vodafone’s M2M Adoption Barometer 2014” and share “new Ovum research, commissioned by Vodafone, [that] will more closely examine expectations for the Australian market.” This could be the one area where Australia’s beleaguered number three mobile player can gain an edge on Telstra and Optus.
Digital security? No such thing, says Gartner
15 August 2014 – Good headline eh? A beat up? Don’t be so sure. Gartner has just released its 2014 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, claiming that it “maps the journey to digital business.” It puts digital security at the very start of that journey and on a slow road to the destination.
Does this space drive break the law of physics?
08 August 2014 – There’s been quite a bit of coverage on news services these last few days of a new technology that appears to violate the laws of physics and that could revolutionise space travel. I’ve read a few of these and found the explanations a bit confusing. Discussing it with people over dinner last night also suggested that just there’s a bit of confusion as to just why it is so significant. So I thought I would try and explain it in simple terms.
The soon-to-be-global smartphone player you’ve never heard of…
07 August 2014 – …And almost certainly can’t pronounce. Its name is Xiaomi. It is only four years old and has just, according to market analyst Canalys, soared to the top of China’s smartphone market, which in Q2 of 214 accounted for 37 percent of global smartphones shipments, some 108.5 million units according to Canalys.
The data centre of the future could be built from smartphones
06 August 2014 – There’s an article just published in Wired magazine, titled: “The Data Centers of Tomorrow Will Use the Same Tech Our Phones Do.” The data centre of the future, it says, “is about eliminating all vestiges of the proprietary hardware used in networking and storage in favour of commodity components available through the mobile supply chain. It’s about this commodity hardware performing the function of proprietary systems today.”
Speed bumps on the road to digital transformation
05 August 2014 – Cloudera founder and CTO Amr Awadallah, account of the challenges it and its customers face as they strive to exploit the full potential of the Cloudera Enterprise Data Hub technology is yet another example of the problems enterprises face as they embark on journey of ‘digital transformation’.
Inside Intel’s $US740m punt on Cloudera
30 July 2014 – In March this year Intel paid $US740m for an 18 percent stake in Hadoop software company Cloudera becoming its largest strategic shareholder. According to Cloudera founder and CTO, Amr Awadallah, it’s a sign that Intel believes the Cloudera approach could revolutionise the data centre and the way large organisations manage their massive data bases.
Why CMOs are getting excited about WiFi
28 July 2014 – Last week I interviewed David King, chairman and CEO of WiFi technology company, AirTight Networks. He’s in Australia for a retail trade show, which begs the question: what’s the CEO of a global WiFi company doing at such an event? The answer demonstrates yet again how digital technology is pervading every aspect of business.
CMO and CIO struggling with their new relationship
23 July 2014 – Today I received an interesting news item from Accenture Interactive that makes a timely follow-on to yesterday’sarticle where I talked about a company embracing digital marketing, quoting comments made by John Travis, Adobe’s VP brand marketing, on how his relationship with Adobe IT has changed in response to the demands of digital marketing.
Becoming digital is quite a challenge
22 July 2014 – I’ve been to a couple of briefings this week that reinforce the need for businesses to undergo a major transformation and, as research firm Forrester puts it, become ‘digital at the core’, and heard how much of a culture change is required.
In praise of APIs
18 July 2014 – I’ve come across the term API (application programming interface) a gazillion times and never thought too much about it – it’s simply how one piece of software specifies that other software should talk to it. Important, essential even, but not something to get excited about. It seems I was wrong.
Digital disconnect on Australia’s ecommerce capabilities
17 July 2014 – Two reports this week present starkly different pictures of Australia’s capabilities in the area of eCommerce.First off came the eBay sponsored Economist Intelligence Unit’s report The G20 e-Trade Readiness Index “a quantitative index ranking of countries on the degree to which they encourage—through policy, regulation and infrastructure—cross-border trade using the Internet.”
Software defined networking – it’s Intel inside
16 July 2014 – The recent rapid development of software defined networking and network functions virtualisation may owe more than you might think to the world’s leading chipmaker.
Deconstructing the Respect Network
14 July 2014 – There seems to have been a deal of confusion this week around a new concept, the Respect Network, following a global roadshow promoting the network that passed through Sydney. So I’m going to try and dispel some of that.
Mu Sigma: taking big data to the next level
11 July 2014 – Mu Sigma, a company I knew nothing of until I interviewed the company’s head of products and strategy, Deepinder Dhingra, is a Bangalore-based global enterprise employing some 3500 decision scientits that’s taken the principles of big data, or more correctly data analytics one step further to what it calls ‘decision science’.