Keeping a business on course and profitable requires a corporate leader to make judicious decisions at every step. It’s no surprise, then, that decision support systems (DSS), long used at the operational levels of enterprises, have matured enough to become part of executives’ everyday tools. “Although some people think the
Something scary is happening in the world of computing. Even though everything is getting smaller and more powerful, we’re faced with increasing demand for power to run systems, keep them cool and house them. Although disk drive capacity requirements double every year, if companies require more drives, the issues become
Managing data effectively has always been a major challenge for businesses. How do you capture it? Store it? Process it? Access it? What do you do with it once its immediate usefulness to your organization is gone? And, naturally, how do you accomplish all this at the lowest possible cost?
It’s virtually a no-brainer. Your data is backed up the instant you make a change to it — any change, no matter how small. You can retrieve it immediately. That’s right; no need to hassle with locating and accessing the right backup tape. And the expense is easily justified by
Ramiro Perez doesn’t like to wait around. As purchasing manager for Copart Inc., a $500 million automotive services firm based in Fairfield, Calif. helping insurance companies process and sell “total loss” vehicles, his job is all about efficiency — and that’s as much about making sure his organization doesn’t waste
A strange thing happened when St. Louis, Mo.-based Sisters of Mercy Health System began populating its data center with new servers. “We ran out of power capacity,” says Bill Hodges, director of the data center at Mercy, the ninth largest Catholic healthcare system in the country. Mercy found that the
After being sidelined for years by low-cost PCs and servers, the virtues of virtualization are re-emerging. Its adoption is accelerating among companies of all sizes. “The world will be virtualized in several years,” says Sal Capizzi, senior analyst at the Boston, Mass. based Yankee Group. “In five years, they’ll be
Rapid change in technology is nothing new. But some things remain a constant: CIOs will always be under pressure to prove IT spending improves business growth and, at the same time, find ways to deliver more with less. These days, that means figuring out which parts of IT to keep
Is the Microsoft monolith beginning to crumble? Alternative applications for everyday office tasks like word processing, e-mail, spreadsheets and presentations have been available for years, but their small size and limited resources relegated them to the sidelines. Now, however, the software giant is facing challenges from champions of similar size.
It’s an unpleasant and unavoidable fact of life: IT organizations are almost always in problem-solving mode. And the best way to address unusual, urgent or one-time issues is to create temporary IT “solution teams.” The experts on these SWAT teams – the apt acronym for Special Weapons and Tactics –