Cloud has become the foundation that enables businesses to transform, differentiate and gain competitive advantage. Many organizations are now focused on cloud-first strategies as they turn their attention to advancing the use of cloud services across the business. In fact, 40% of organizations in North America alone plan to spend the majority of new or ...

The venerable mainframe computer is experiencing a surprising but well-deserved resurgence, as the organizations that depend on these systems realize how important they are for digital initiatives and for hybrid information technology strategies in general. IBM Corp. – the sole remaining purveyor of mainframe systems – continues to invest in the platform, and Big Blue’s ...

Among the many areas affected by innovation from cloud-based software, one of the most disruptive is the way companies and their employees procure goods and services. That was apparent in Las Vegas June 24-27 when Coupa Software Inc. held its annual Coupa Inspire conference focused on business spend management, where the company showcased how its business ...

We can talk about innovation in business terms of its impact on revenue and profit, or in productivity terms of agile releases and faster resolutions. But the most sustainable class of innovation comes from a cultural shift in the mindset of organizations. Though culture implies warm and fuzzy elements, don’t let me make it sound ...

Low-code platforms simplify and streamline the work of professional developers, enabling them to deliver enterprise apps in a fraction of the time of hand-coding, often with higher quality. What’s not to love? If you make your money billing development hours for enterprise clients, however, low-code may very well look like a wolf in agile sheep’s ...

The Kubernetes ecosystem was on full display at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Barcelona this past week. But many of these providers weren’t simply supporting customers’ Kubernetes efforts to implement cloud-native architectures. They were also taking advantage of cloud-native approaches themselves. Here are the highlights: State in a stateless world Take, for ...

Modernize or die. Lift-and-shift. Rip-and-replace. While enterprises are confronted by these kinds of binary imperatives at many events, it makes sense that the ChefConf 2019 conference this week in Seattle would cater to technologists seeking a third way, since conference sponsor Chef Inc. is a systems configuration management firm. To the theme, “Automating the Coded Enterprise” and accompanied ...

How is digital transformation changing the world of work? The answer will surprise you. True, technology now touches most of what people do in most jobs, both white-collar and increasingly blue-collar as well. But technology is only part of the story. The bigger picture: How people get their jobs done is undergoing a fundamental shift. ...

Are you skeptical about blockchain? I’m not surprised. For a technology that got its start as the infrastructure that underlay the bitcoin cryptocurrency and then blossomed into a Libertarian’s dream of a decentralized transaction platform that would take down the modern financial world, blockchain has had its share of hype, scams and other nonsense. However, ...

In a memorable scene from the movie “The Founder” about the origin of McDonald’s, the McDonald brothers plot the layout of their restaurant in a life-sized mockup drawn in chalk on a parking lot. This example of process optimization was certainly “lean,” but it involved no software whatsoever. Today, in contrast, optimizing business processes almost always ...