Expert Advice

Online retailers that have committed to supporting consumers on their mobile phones are bracing themselves for a challenging year. Just as they thought it was a two-horse race for smartphone dominance between Apple and Google -- which enabled them to establish a neat mobile Web and app strategy -- a...

The Internet has become the world's largest shopping mall, and the market is continuing to grow. Q4 2011 U.S. retail ecommerce sales were up 14 percent compared with 2010, reaching nearly $50 billion for the quarter, ComScore recently reported. Total U.S. e-commerce sales are projected to reach $2...

Daily, we create with every keystroke 2.5 quintillion bytes of data from sensors, mobile devices, online transactions, and social networks. Monthly, we express ourselves through 1 billion tweets and 30 billion pieces of content on Facebook. Geeks call this "big data," but astute businesspeople reali...

Leave it to a comic strip, published 18 months ago, to allude to what has become a radical change in how technology is being adopted in the consumer world. Still, very few have recognized how this aspect would fundamentally transform enterprise software. When an ecosystem includes a marketplace or ...

I have a lot of fun writing about CRM -- the ideas, the tools and how they're brought together as a coherent strategy. CRM is a foundation on which to build relationships, layer on additional sales and support tools, and create a customer-centric business. But this foundation needs a foundation. Aft...

Quite a lot has been written about the importance of due-diligence in a cloud environment. Sometimes the importance of security and compliance-related vetting in the cloud is easy to justify, like when you're evaluating an off-premises public cloud hosted at a new service provider. Other times, exe...

These days, cybercriminals are successfully circumventing advanced security controls with the precision of a sniper. In the crosshairs are banks, financial institutions, governments and enterprises. In a recent Gartner survey, 76 U.S. banks indicated that malware-based attacks were a growing problem...

My childhood birthdays and Christmases had a few eternally repeated phrases associated with them: "Happy Birthday," "Merry Christmas," and "He'll grow into it." The latter one was always perplexing to me. The volume of oversized clothing I received as a kid from aunts, grandparents and family frien...

Enterprise storage is currently in the midst of a great transformation the likes of which has not been seen in well over two decades. There's been an unprecedented amount of activity in the storage space this year, with a host of promising new companies launching, and major storage vendors beginning...

Dealing with naturally risk-averse and conservative IT policies becomes increasingly less desirable to consumers when compared to the types of enablement available to the adventurous as technology rapidly evolves. IT is left to languish unappreciated, a resource of last resort, with an insurmountab...