My work at Forrester is focused on helping strategists at IT suppliers (vendors) align their development, positioning, and messaging with the big trends and disruptions in the industry. Mobility, cloud computing, globalization…trends at that high altitude. Over the last 3 years or so, that has included sustainability as it has appeared on and risen higher the strategy agenda of companies around the world.

 When I meet with strategists at tech suppliers large and small, we talk sustainability both in terms of how the companies are cleaning up their own practices and processes, and what they are doing to help their customers do the same. SAP’s “exemplar and enabler” language captures these parallel efforts nicely. But it’s still a limited perspective, one that I characterize as the IT industry playing defense. “We are improving our energy efficiency!” says the collective industry voice, as if trying to deflect public criticism of energy-hog data centers, or mountains of e-waste, or PCs left running 7 x 24. And yes, absolutely, the IT industry and its customers have more work to do to make IT infrastructure and processes less wasteful and more responsible.

Regular readers will know that I’ve been calling for Apple to up its music service game for a few years now.  If the iTunes music experience had been upgraded as frequently as the iPod range has been then we’d be looking at Apple as being the driving force in digital music that it was in the early years of the iTunes store.  Instead Tunes has trodden water, squeezing the momentum out of what should be a dynamic digital music market.

Apple has never been in the business of selling music for its own sake.  Apple sells music (apps, movies and the rest) to help sell devices.  iTunes music sales are an artifact of iPod, iPhone and iPad sales, little more than monetized CRM. 

So it was always most likely that Apple’s next step in digital music was always going to focus on enhancing the music device experience first and foremost.  And so the stage is prepared for Ping, positioned as ‘a social network for music’. It is in actual fact music discovery functionality built into iTunes.  Steve Jobs cited the 160 million iTunes accounts as a rich addressable market for the ‘social network’.  At risk of sounding over cynical this sounds very similar to Microsoft and Yahoo citing their massive installed bases of email users as a social network simply waiting to be connected.  Similarly Nokia with their handset customers.  Apple now appears to be joining the ranks of multinational companies who mistake large installed bases of engaged customers as a dormant social network.

By Boris Evelson

I get many questions from clients interested in evaluating different in-memory technologies. My first advice is not to mix apples and oranges and clearly understand the differences between in-memory indexes, in-memory OLAP, in-memory ROLAP, in-memory spreadsheets and other approaches. See more details in my recent blog entry "I forget: what's in-memory" to understand the differences. Then once you zero in on a particular segment, you can indeed do an apples to apples comparison. Let's say we pick the category of in-memory associative indexes, which would include Microsoft PowerPivot, QlikTech and TIBCO Spotfire. I recommend a 3 step approach to compare these three tools:

Every year, I get hundreds of inquiries about CRM business process project strategy and technology selection: “How many solutions should we look at? What criteria should we use to evaluate the vendors? How much do the solutions cost? Who should lead the implementation project? How long will it take to deploy the solution? How likely are we to achieve the business results we are targeting? What pitfalls do we have to watch out for?”

I just published a report based on a survey of 99 companies that provides answers to many of these questions. Here are some of the highlights:

How  Authentication-as-a-Service becomes a part of leading IAM stacks and why virtualization is no longer a viable technology without identity and access management.

CA’s acquisition of Arcot signals that partnering with an adaptive authentication vendor is no longer enough to offer a comprehensive access management strategy: you’d also have to have an adaptive authentication product to allow your customers to retire costly physical tokens. But this is not the primary reason  CA picked up Arcot. It is Arcot’s thriving hosted authentication and fraud management services that were the most lucrative assets to CA. Adaptive authentication is part of any organization’s fraud management strategy — however, CA’s inexperience here leaves a few questions to be answered. Will CA keep and grow Arcot’s fraud prevention service? If so, how will it integrate fraud management with IAM? The requirement for integration is clearly highlighted by Forrester’s conversations with its FinServ and other verticals’ customers.