Bert Latamore
Latest from Bert Latamore
Switch from spreadsheets to cloud financials helps 75-year-old engineering firm navigate challenging economy
A year after Albert Cuisinot (below left) took over as CFO for Degenkolb Engineers in 2011, the 75-year-old structural engineering firm faced a business crisis. The 2008 financial collapse did not immediately impact its income. An expert in designing and refitting structures for earthquake and tsunami survival, it was involved in building several large West Coast ...
Wikibon predicts Big Data market to top $61B in 2020
Wikibon has extended its “Big Data Vendor Revenue and Market Forecast, 2011-2020” through 2020 and has estimated a 40 percent market growth in 2014, down from 60 percent in 2013. In his executive summary of the report, Wikibon Big Data analyst Jeff Kelly writes this is a product of ongoing market maturation and does not indicate ...
Wikibon urges enterprise CIOs to adopt a hybrid cloud manifesto
Enterprises are turning to hybrid cloud strategies in response to often-fragmented cloud efforts that have seen one group in the IT organization build private clouds on top of virtualized environments while others move existing applications or write new ones on public cloud infrastructure-as-a-Service platforms. The issue is that neither a private cloud nor a public ...
Wikibon: Oracle ZS4-4 storage appliance tops SP2 price/performance
Based on the latest SP2 performance benchmarks and time-adjusted pricing for competitive systems, the Oracle Corp. ZS-4-4 storage appliance displays by far the best price-performance with high overall raw performance (see chart on right). Based on this analysis, Wikibon strongly recommends that the Oracle appliance be included in any RFP for high bandwidth workloads with ...
Wikibon sees flash storage driving revolutionary business change
Moving to an all-flash data center, in conjunction with a cloud-enabled converged architecture, can cut the typical large data center’s operations budget by one-third over the next five years (see graph at right), creating resources for new development, according to a new report by Wikibon CTO David Floyer. Flash storage drives these savings mainly by ...
IBM to open customer centers for software-defined network simulation
IBM today announced Network Innovation Centers in Nice, France, and Dallas, where IBM clients can work with software-defined networking (SDN) and automation technologies from multiple providers on simulations of their network environments and typical workloads. “The network is the long pole in the tent as you virtualize hybrid data centers and need to do things ...
IBM/Softlayer announces block and file storage service with guaranteed QoS
IBM today announced a block and file storage service for its Softlayer subsidiary aimed at both traditional large vertical-stack enterprise applications and new highly transactional, customer-facing cloud applications. What differentiates this new service is that it comes with guaranteed, graduated service levels ranging from .25 input/output operations per second (IOPS) to 4 IOPS, said Softlayer ...
How cloud-based accounting revolutionized a CPA business
A client first turned CPA Jason Blumer on to Xero in 2012. That moment revolutionized his 12-year-old business. Back then, Blumer & Associates CPAs was a typical small CPA firm, mostly using spreadsheets and QuickBooks, and serving small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) in and around Greenville, SC. “Accountants are typically stick-in-the-mud about adopting new technologies,” he said. ...
Why an insurer chose IaaS over a major hardware refresh
When Noel Catrambone joined insurance holding company Kingsway Financial Services Inc. as CIO in 2012, he faced a rebuilding situation. Originally a Canadian-based company and still traded on the Toronto as well as the New York Stock Exchanges, Kingsway had brought in new senior management after the stock collapsed in 2008. Kingsway moved its center of operations ...
Wikibon view: Open Source NoSQL database vendors face a long, hard slog
Open Source NoSQL database startups like MongoDB Inc. face “a long, hard slog” to achieving success despite the strong interest in these companies in the financial community, writes Wikibon Big Data Analyst Jeff Kelly. In January, MongoDB announced a successful seventh funding round, raising $80 million, which company CEO Dev Ittycheria said was three times its ...