Overcoming IT Budget Planning Obstacles for Risk-minded CIOs
While having access to benchmarks plays a key role in helping CISOs keep the budget in line with peer organizations, leadership will understandably want a clear picture of how the business is investing. This is why it’s crucial that CISOs build an easy to understand investment strategy that outlines exactly where the organization intends to spend its allotment and what the return on that spend will be. The goal here is to first gain an understanding of where the organization falls short today, as well as document and communicate strengths. CISOs need to be able to address how current security investments are performing, not just what the gaps are. This is where having something as simple as a security report card can effectively demonstrate security progress in language and terms that the organization’s leaders can understand. It also helps in building an incremental plan to clearly outline how the organization can improve security.
Want Early Payment Discounts? It All Starts At The Back
More troublesome still, above all of the influencing factors outside of the buyer’s control, is the need for vigour in the technologies supporting supplier payments. There’s obviously little point negotiating early payment discounts if the purchase-to-pay (P2P) system, whirring away in the back-end is too complex, outmoded or reliant on the rubber stamp – or, in the case of a great many banks, all three, and not so much whirring away as spluttering along – to facilitate such a thing.
Amazon Launches Amazon Business Marketplace, Will Close AmazonSupply
“For years I’ve been going to procurement software events hosted by vendors,” she said. “Amazon is always the reference point for usability. ‘Why can’t buying for my business be as easy as shopping on Amazon?’ ‘Why doesn’t this procurement system work more like Amazon?’ Now Amazon has a specific marketplace for businesses to buy from Amazon and third parties, just as consumers use Amazon.com to buy from Amazon and used book sellers.”
Why Millennials’ Amazon Experience Is Shaping Vendor Selection
Bottom line, the future of procurement, is in the hands of people who are used to total buyer control. Depending on how you look at it, platforms like Amazon’s have either spoiled or enlightened them as to what’s possible for purchasing. They’re used to finding complicated commodities (organic, top-rated, fair trade, non-GMO, free shipping, crunchy peanut butter) in 2 minutes online.
Also, we spend much time talking about the “right time to send an email,” but the Adobe data shows we are consuming data at all times of the day. If you knew when your customer was in bed or in his “second office,” you could better target delivery when they are reading email.
IBM is ensuring they are the major player for internet of things by helping create a standardized ecosystem. HP is looking to sell off a company and move some of their employees to staffing firms. VMWare continues to be presented as the future of EMC. Meanwhile, Oracle is trying to avoid having their executives sued.
IBM
IBM and ARM Collaborate to Accelerate Delivery of Internet of Things
IBM today announced an expansion of its Internet of Things (IoT) platform called IBM IoT Foundation – through an integration with ARM, providing out of the box connectivity with ARM® mbed”-enabled devices to analytics services. This fusion will allow huge quantities of data from devices such as industrial appliances, weather sensors and wearable monitoring devices to be gathered, analyzed and acted upon.
There are plenty of clouds that want to store your connected data, but IBM is making the case that it has everything developers need in one reputable cloud. IoT Foundations has the IBM brand, new capabilities announced Thursday to handle data analytics (it uses a variation of the Spark real-time data processing standard) and device management capabilities. The link with ARM should help the engineers at a big name company or startup so they don’t have to worry about the mechanics of connecting their device to the Internet and offloading the data. Instead, they can just make it happen with a few clicks on a cloud dashboard.
IBM partners PH firm Ionics Inc to create Internet-of-Things platform
The Philippine listed firm disclosed that one of its units Ionics EMS Inc, a local electronics manufacturing services provider, is working with IBM as “a key design partner” to launch the IBM IoT Platform. The latter is meant to enable organizations across industries to improve engagement with clients, accelerate technology innovation and enhance business operations.
Half a Century Later Mainframes, Together with Linux, Still Run Much of Today’s Infrastructure
These platform innovations have enabled mainframes to incorporate major advances in technology and keep evolving over the years. This was the case with the transition to microprocessors and the parallel sysplex architecture, without which IBM would not have survived its near-death experience in the early 1990s. A few years later, mainframes embraced TCP/IP and just about all Internet standards, integrating seamlessly with the Internet and World Wide Web, and enabling its customers to leverage their existing transaction and data base applications in all kinds of new e-business solutions. Then came zLinux, which made it possible to easily port just about any Linux application to mainframes.
Sources close to the matter tell us that Ogilvy’s creative team has been hard at work on a larger effort set to debut later this fall. Specifics are scarce at the moment, but we hear that the new campaign will be more “corporate” than the work in this post and that its ultimate goal is a complete refresh/rebranding of the IBM name.
In the presentation–which Kulach says is aimed at helping users to secure an IBM i system from the perspective of an external and internal intruder–purports to show a series of techniques for compromising the system, including “privilege escalation by nested user switching, getting full system access via JDBC, bypassing the ‘green screen’ (5250) limitations,” and how to get direct access to password hashes through an undocumented API.
But to pull off Kulach’s approach to hacking an IBM i server would require such a poorly configured IBM i server that it just strains the credulity of the premise.
Oracle asks Oregon Supreme Court to drop execs from lawsuit
Oregon sued Oracle and the five executives, including co-CEO Safra Catz, in their personal capacities last year. The state alleges they conspired to enrich themselves and made false claims at the expense of taxpayers. Oracle says people can’t be sued solely for their actions on behalf of their employer. The company says Oregon has exceeded its authority in order to gain leverage in its litigation with Oracle.
Private equity firms have expressed interest in TippingPoint, the people said this week. The unit could be valued at between $200 million and $300 million, the people added.
Unnamed sources told Business Insider that HP contacted some hourly employees and asked them to become contract workers for a company called Adecco. Those who accepted lost all accrued vacation time, paid time off, benefits and seniority. Those who refused were terminated without severance.
A number of the newly laid off HP Enterprise Services employees will be offered jobs at Ciber and have 48 hours to accept or decline. HP confirmed the agreement with this statement provided to Business Insider
HP pulls sponsorship of hacking contest over Wassenaar Arrangement
“Due to the complexity of obtaining real-time import/export licenses in countries that participate in the Wassenaar Arrangement, the ZDI has notified conference organizer, Dragos Ruiu, that it will not be holding the Pwn2Own contest at PacSecWest in November,” HP said in a statement to Ars Technica.
The Wassenaar Arrangement aims to control the export of various goods, software and information. Of particular concern to the tech industry, however, is the limitation on technologies related to “intrusion software.” The arrangement functions as, more or less, a suggested export guideline with each of the 41 participating countries enforcing it to its liking.
Hewlett-Packard Brings New Products for VMware vSphere
Hewlett-Packard will combine its Virtual Application Networks SDN Controller with the VMware NSX network virtualization platform that provides a private cloud-based service. This would make the cloud-computing environment more secure, simple, flexible and efficient. The move will enable Hewlett-Packard to offer an efficient and improved hybrid IT environment to drive performance.
We asked VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger if he was going to be the next CEO of EMC … and he didn’t say no
With VMware under his belt, Gelsinger now has experience running a public company in which EMC has a controlling stake. EMC poached Gelsinger from Intel in 2009, after a 30-year career there, mentored by star Intel CEO Andy Grove and rising to general manager. At EMC, Gelsinger quickly rose to COO and was widely considered to be Tucci’s heir.
VMware’s Three Data Points For 2016 From CFO Jon Chadwick
VMware CFO Jonathan Chadwick announced that the company’s operating margins for 2016 are expected to expand 50bp year-over-year, while the FCF for the year will have a 12 percent tailwind over 2015.
EMC announces SAP partnership expansion, hybrid cloud offerings and partner credential program
Virtustream has been deployed in production environments of “more than 200 SAP solutions and one of the first implementations of the SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA in the cloud,” EMC said. “[It] forms the foundation of the EMC Federation’s new managed cloud services business, led by chief executive officer Rodney Rogers.”
TCS veteran Ankur Prakash, who was previously the COO of the company’s Latin America business, has now been mandated to lead Wipro’s emerging markets business, a role in which he will report directly to Neemuchwala, according to two people directly familiar with the development. Both of them requested anonymity.
Windows 10 Is Great, but Microsoft Can’t Save the PC
But for device makers, the situation could be quite different. Later this year, Hewlett-Packard will cleave itself in two, creating two separate companies focused on different businesses. One of those firms — HP — will derive around half of its revenue from sales of traditional PCs. If PC shipments continue to decline, that company could be devastated. Earlier this month, when Hewlett-Packard turned in third quarter earnings, its PC-related revenue contracted more than 13%.
Businesses are buying analytics software even if investors aren’t
There are some wrinkles to iron out as the world adjusts to a trend toward open source and freemium business models, and to business software that individuals can buy. But there’s a huge opportunity for companies to cash in on business demand for better data analysis, and the young companies that live and breathe data seem the best positioned to cash in.
Salesforce jumps into health care with a tailored cloud platform
Aiming to help healthcare organizations manage their relationships with patients, the company’s new Salesforce Health Cloud promises providers a complete view of each patient as well as the ability to engage them better across caregiver networks. Overall, the goal is to help providers make smarter patient-care decisions, the company said.
The real reason why women are cold in the workplace
Heating and cooling systems are based on a complex metric encompassing subjective feelings of comfort and an averaged metabolic rate—that of a 40 year-old man weighing 154 lbs. “When you turn it over to operations, that’s when it all goes downhill,” Brookshire explains.
The “flash” measure of sentiment among manufacturing purchasing managers fell to 47.1 in August, the worst figure in 77 months and a decline from the index’s final reading of 47.8 in July, according to Caixin Insight and Markit Economics. Any number below 50 indicates a deceleration in the manufacturing sector.
Choosinginternal shared services over outsourcing can improve risk management, performance management and collaboration―which can often be lost in a sourcing arrangement. Technology companies may be hesitant to migrate fragmented processes―which rely heavily on the skill and experience of the current staff to operate smoothly―to an SSC, but it may be worthwhile in the long run to cut that dependency. Outside of the substantial upfront costs involved with establishing an outsourced or offshore service center, recent concerns show that labor costs are rising in emerging economies such as India, China and the Philippines―which may result in the erosion of offshore benefits. Despite the appeal of a quick-fix, outsourcing should be considered a shift of service, not a solution. Consider resolving the issue internally before involving a third party. You may even find that automation improvements play a large role in partially or fully eliminating the drivers for outsourcing.
84 Percent of Procurement Executives Unsatisfied with Insight from Company Data
A majority of procurement officers (53 percent) named spend visibility as the data metric proven most effective in supporting their operations. However, 69 percent of procurement executives reported that they believe metrics used to evaluate their function drive the wrong behavior within their organizations.
But while the study shows that businesses have a healthy respect for agility, their capacity for it is another story. Fifty-two percent of global respondents (and an equal percentage of U.S. respondents) say their business does not have an IT infrastructure capable of meeting competitive threats. In addition, 49 percent of respondents say they either cannot or do not know if they can shift workloads between public, private and hybrid clouds, or migrate on-premises applications to the cloud. Only 50 percent of respondents say they can develop, test and deploy new business applications for use on mobile devices within six months, with the percentage falling to just 30 percent that can do the same in a one-month timeframe.
This time, I knew I needed someone different. I hired the best coach I know who specializes in “Intuitive Action.” Of course I’m partial to the field of coaching, but in this case I knew I needed it more. While sometimes it makes sense to consult with friends, colleagues, mentors and others, working with a coach is different. Coaches are impartial and are there to challenge you and push you out of your comfort zone. There’s not a better place to find new ideas than in the unknown.
