Expert Advice

Though evidence abounds of cloud computing moving from the hype stage to successful adoption and deployment, many enterprises are still not clear on how to adopt cloud and make it part of their enterprise IT strategies. This is in part due to a misperception about what cloud computing is and the num...

Having an actively engaged, independent board is a must for the long-term viability of any corporation. Unfortunately, there are still many management teams that feel that their prospects for long-term employment, as well as generous salaries and perks, are dependent upon a "friendly" board of direc...

It's always fun to see the flood of articles this time of year about the holidays. "Is Your CRM Ready for Christmas?" the headlines knowingly ask. "Are You Facing a Christmas E-Commerce Customer Experience Crisis?" "The Holidays: Will You Survive? Will Your Family Survive?" OK, I stole that last one...

Social media have practical applications throughout the buyer cycle for corporate and retail customers. The first step in this direction is to get familiar with social media and then connect the channel with CRM processes. There may be challenges in seamlessly integrating the social media channel wi...

PCI DSS has evolved substantially since the five major credit card holders got together to publish a consolidated security standard in 2006. The standard has been updated regularly with the most recent version, PCI DSS 2.0, released in October 2010. PCI is here to stay, and the requirements are only...

High-performance computing applications such as numerical simulation -- whether for forecasting, mechanical and structure simulation, or computational chemistry -- require a large number of CPUs for processing. To meet these needs, customers must buy a large-scale system that enables parallel proce...

Social media is clearly becoming the next-gen customer engagement channel of choice for industry. The banking industry is likely to be the frontier in adopting next-gen technologies, including social-networking-enabled business processes. The banking industry has two important classifications based ...

There is a quiet but persistent buzz that IT budgets will grow in 2011. CIOs are hinting at this during analyst meetings, and a recent poll at Interop, the leading business trade show for IT executives, showed that more than half of IT professionals are projecting an increase in their budgets going ...

It's often useful to interview customers to understand their perspectives about their suppliers. In these discussions, open-ended questions about supplier "success stories" and "horror stories" can prompt enlightening replies. Answers in the latter category invariably connect to some supplier failur...

With more than 500 million people around the globe spending 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook, there is no question that it is the most important and pervasive social ecosystem in the world. It's no wonder that brands of all shapes, sizes and offerings are leveraging the user base to connect...