Apple Starts Unleashing Mountain Lion
17 Feb 2012 5:26pm GMT Sooner than expected, Apple Thursday started previewing a developer-directed beta of Mountain Lion, its next-generation Mac OS X 10.8, due out late this summer. It’s borrowed some more features from iOS like the popular and unlimited iChat-replacing iMessages IM as well as Notes, Games Center and Reminders and changed the names of Mac’s Address Book to Contacts and iCalc to Calendar, making the two operating systems more alike – you can see where this is going, right?...
IT Strategy Guide 2012
17 Feb 2012 3:45pm GMT In Aug 2011, around 72 million people accessed social networking sites from mobile, increase of 37% from previous year (study by ComScore) and nearly 50% (of 72 million) access networking sites almost every day. Devising a cohesive strategy for addressing both mobility and social media should be at or near the top of any IT executive's to-do list for 2012. Devising a mobile strategy first: IT leaders are recognizing that in order to have truly useful mobile apps, it can't just be limited...
Architecture and Change: The Proper End Is Fitness for Purpose
16 Feb 2012 2:00pm GMT We have to be careful that we don’t make change an end in itself. We have to remember that change is a means to the end of getting something we want that is different from what we have. In the enterprise context, that something has been labeled in different ways. One is “alignment,” specifically “business/IT alignment.” Some have concluded that alignment isn’t quite the right idea, and it’s really “integration” we are pursuing. Others have...
Hadoop and Business Intelligence
16 Feb 2012 1:49pm GMT Like my colleague Alex Olesker, I too attended Cloudera Day 2012. While there were many panels of interest, perhaps one of the most important was Amr Awadallah‘s talk about big data applications to business intelligence. Many CTOVision readers with backgrounds in the intelligence community may think of corporate espionage when the phrase “business intelligence” is uttered, but I assure you that this is definitely not the case. Business intelligence is different from...
Cisco Challenges EC’s OK of Microsoft’s Skype Acquisition
16 Feb 2012 1:45pm GMT Cisco Wednesday filed suit in the European Union’s second-highest court, the General Court in Luxembourg, challenging the European Commission’s rubber stamp last October of Microsoft’s $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype. Cisco says it isn’t opposed to the merger, but figures the EC should have put strings on its unconditional approval to ensure Skype’s standards-based interoperability with other systems like its own videoconferencing widgetry “to avoid any...