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Public Council Teleconference: Application Rationalization — Hidden Costs and Smart Decisions
November 17 at 11:00 am US/Eastern (GMT-5)
Join Honorio Padrón, of The Hackett Group, who will share the drivers for companies to tackle application rationalization and the results of research that define the hidden cost of complexity. Additionally, we will discuss key decision milestones—to start or not, holding the course steady and fulfilling expectations.
Virtual Desktop Cost-Benefit Analysis — Michael Jacobs, Catlin Group
The analysis contained in this presentation measures the cost of everything from the machines and licenses to the infrastructure for virtual vs. traditional desktop environments.
Honor your best senior team members - Apply for the CIO Ones to Watch Award
Get well-earned public recognition for your top up-and-coming team members, your IT organization and your enterprise. Award winners will be announced, publicized and feted in May 2010, great timing to help attract new IT recruits to your company.
Learn more about the CIO Executive Council »April 03, 2008 — CIO —
IBM and Microsoft are poised to dominate the collaboration technology market for providing applications to the future workplace, says a new report by Forrester Research. But that doesn't mean small vendors in the Web 2.0 space, or a little company called Google, won't have a prominent role as well.
Forrester's vision for the future office is the "information workplace," a 21st century platform that manages content, messaging, team collaboration, real-time collaboration and communication among employees using a common platform.
This would be a departure from many current businesses. Today users toggle among multiple applications that often don't talk well with each other and aren't integrated with back-end data.
The amount of enterprises who are actually ready to embrace this information workplace is still relatively small, however. When asked if implementing such a converged strategy was in the works for the coming year, only 24 percent of the 1,017 enterprise IT decision makers surveyed said it was a priority and 8 percent said it was a critical priority. Nearly 34 percent said it was not a priority, and 32 percent said it was not on their agenda altogether.
The report is bullish on Microsoft and IBM to be at the center of the information workplace. With Microsoft's SharePoint gathering nearly 85 million licenses, and IBM's Sametime collaboration platform having 18 million, CIOs looking to create the information workplace will likely try to leverage existing investments with those vendors.
As the report notes, both of these incumbents have offerings in collaboration, content, portals, office productivity and business intelligence — all the technologies Forrester views as critical for achieving the information workplace.
While IBM or Microsoft might provide the baseline, however, that doesn't mean smaller vendors won't play a part, so long as they design their software to connect with the big boys' mammoth platforms.
"Enterprises do want to work with a smaller number of vendors, but that doesn't mean [IBM and Microsoft] can do it alone,"says Erica Driver, the primary author of the report.
For instance, some Web 2.0 vendors might provide an enterprise wiki and blog with better functionality than the one provided by SharePoint. If that Web 2.0 vendor designed the software properly so that it integrated with SharePoint, however, an enterprise customer would be more likely to buy it.
"That's exactly the approach the point product ones need to take,"Driver says. "They need to keep their functionality ahead of what [IBM and Microsoft] are delivering. There's a chance they can stay ahead by releasing products more quickly."