December 2009

When HP acquired EDS in May 2008 it was clear that in the short term the company would have to manage significant integration challenges before the medium and long term benefits of the acquisition would come to bear. Now, 18 months later, HP claims that the acquisition has been completed and so it is time to take a closer look at what has been achieved so far. 

Even with year 2009's challenging economic environment, learning has not taken the drastic hit some pundits feared. In fact, in the past year I have heard more executives talk about the importance of keeping employees well-skilled and knowledgeable than ever before. Knowledgeable employees equate to greater business success. I've also seen CLOs and VPs for HR and Learning focus on making sure that learning experiences are in line with company's short and long term goals.

[Posted by Reineke Reitsma]

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In hindsight, 2009 marked a turning point for the market research industry, when technology and innovation became part of the ongoing discussion on how to move the industry forward while balancing the realities of a business world in a recession.

In the recently published report 'Predictions 2010: What Will Happen In Market Research' my team and I have identified ten trends that will shape market research in 2010. Three of these ten trends are:

Trying to avoid the obvious and the already underway, here are my predictions for 2010.

1. Cloud security standards emerge. By the end of 2010, we’ll see a framework emerge for establishing a well defined set of technology, practices, and processes, organized into different levels of trust. Ultimately, adherence to these specifications will need be certified by third parties. The effort won’t be complete, but it will be underway. Look to the government as key industry (other than the vendors) driving this effort.

COROLLARY: The use of cloud will take off as adopting organizations by and large overcome their security concerns – or at least, understand them at a specific enough level to seek out providers that satisfy these concerns.

2. Federation will start to take off by the end of 2010. Use of federation will be fueled by SaaS and cloud computing and the need for single sign-on to bridge identity from the enterprise to those external environments. Where standards reign over kludges, SAML will be the leading mechanism. OpenID will continue to be just a lab toy for the "Identerati".

3. Managed Security Services expands far beyond “Managed”. Organizations are not only turning to managed security services, they are seeking more from their providers than merely assuming operational functions. Increasingly, they seek partners to help them with security strategy, benchmarking, making the business case, and integration. MSSPs that are in fact multifaceted solution providers will start to establish market dominance. Big winners will be IBM, VZB, Wipro, among others.