Expert Advice

When the pulse of the global economy slowed -- or, as some would have it, virtually flat lined -- in 2009, IT felt it. Even though IT serves as the heart of global business, the indispensable systems without which companies simply wouldn't work, layoffs and cutbacks still wracked the industry. More ...

With the explosive amounts of electronic information being generated daily, it's no wonder many companies are considering alternative storage options. None of these options has generated more interest than cloud-based systems. Companies are looking to cloud computing to ease the burden of informati...

Shopping continues to shift to the Web. With all the growth in e-commerce, retailers are focusing their efforts on better online merchandising, cross-channel integration and personalization to fine tune their sites for better conversion rates. In addition, many of the best e-commerce retailers are t...

Recent events have added further credence (if more was needed) to the growing body of evidence that -- despite the boundless hype -- cloud computing is a game-changing phenomenon that is having an impact on how people think about enterprise storage. VMWorld 2010 brought an estimated 17,000 people t...

Web 2.0 -- everyone's favorite 2007 buzz word -- heralded the age of social networks and powered a fundamental shift in the Web: filtering out excessive noise while building connections to friends, organizations and communities. Creating a Facebook profile became a way of passage to keep up with fri...

So, you're an entrepreneur with a great idea? Too bad your inspiration arrived in the worst economy since the Great Depression, complete with a meltdown of the venture capital industry. What's left on the charred landscape? The fact is that no one gets boatloads of seed capital anymore -- especially...

We all like to say our businesses are "customer-centric." It's the de rigueur thing to say these days, and it's the only smart way to describe yourself to your customer audience. But how many companies really revolve around the customer? Not many, and for realistic reasons. For instance, your busine...

When the Internet and World Wide Web finally went mainstream in the mid-1990s, new Unix-like operating systems running on PCs went mainstream too. Developers working on these systems had access to a wide range of development tools, but these platforms didn't initially offer anything like the mature,...

Mobile operators are facing a revenue dilemma these days. The numbers may vary according to which research you read, but the conclusion is the same: Data revenues are not even close to meeting escalating usage patterns. By way of example, AT&T estimates that mobile data traffic grew 50-fold betw...

Several years ago, I discovered Nirvana: the ability to point and click on a website and have pretty much anything I wanted shipped right to my door, sometimes at a cheaper price than at any store in my city. What bliss! Ah -- in the good ole days of online shopping, we were so happily ignorant. Bac...