Features

• Today, printers. Tomorrow, 'integrated peripherals'?

  By Lamont Wood | 08 May, 2012 20:56

  Out went 42 aging black and white copiers with interface boxes that let them serve as printers. In went 42 new networked multi-function printers (MFPs) that could do color printing and copying and scan directly to e-mail, fax or files. And the owner, the Park Hill School District in Kansas City, MO, saves $19,000 yearly.

• Analysis: Why Linux is a desktop flop

  By Maria Korolov | 30 April, 2012 21:28

  It's free, easier to use than ever, IT staffers know it and love it, and it has fewer viruses and Trojans than Windows.

• The upside of shadow IT

  By Julia King | 23 April, 2012 23:55

  First, a scary statistic: Gartner predicts that in less than three years, 35 per cent of enterprise IT expenditures will happen outside of the corporate IT budget. Employees will regularly subscribe to collaboration, analytic and other Cloud services they want, all with the press of a button. Others will simply build their own applications using readily available Cloud-based tools and development platforms.

• Gartner: The top 10 strategic technology trends for 2012

  By Michael Cooney | 19 October, 2011 04:41

  ORLANDO -- The technology that makes up many of the systems in the ITworld today is at a critical juncture and in the next five years everything from mobile devices and applications to servers and social networking will impact IT in ways companies need to prepare for now, Gartner Vice President David Cearley says.

• Selling the new enterprise architecture - Part 3

  By David Braue | 22 June, 2011 07:00

  Despite its value, TOGAF can suffer from intrinsic shortcomings in the process by which EAs are selected and trained.

• Selling the new enterprise architecture - Part 2

  By David Braue | 21 June, 2011 10:09

  Despite years spent trying to encourage staff to think along business lines, many CIOs are still finding technology-focused EAs unable to think in business terms, and vice versa. Even though CIOs most certainly know better, Gartner figures suggest that just 9 per cent of enterprise architecture efforts will be built around business goals this year, with that figure growing to just 30 per cent by 2016.

• Managing relationships with vendors - Part 2

  By David Binning | 05 May, 2011 13:07

  According to Dr Tim O’Neill, co-founder and director of business intelligence specialists Avolution, probably the biggest mistake an organisation can make when dealing with suppliers is to outsource the systems architecture. “This is why there’s so many untold billions of dollars-worth of failed IT projects out there,” he says. “Outsourcing the architecture function is fraught with danger.” In order for projects to be successful organisations need to maintain a healthy degree of cynicism and effectively force vendors to earn trust.

• Managing relationships with vendors

  By David Binning | 04 May, 2011 16:03

  The IT choices a company makes can mean the difference between business success and failure. Whether it’s access to information, communications between staff, partners and customers, HR, inventory management, operation and monitoring of equipment and other and assets as well as business security, IT has managed to make itself indispensible at virtually every organisational level. Yet it would seem that for many organisations, this awareness often fails to translate into properly thought out and well-executed strategies for managing the vendors that supply the technology.

• Is the future of CRM in the Cloud? - Part 1

  By Brad Howarth | 18 April, 2011 11:22

  It is just on 10 years since Salesforce.com unveiled the first preview of its customisable online customer relationship management (CRM) software at the annual DEMO conference in California. DEMO had previously been the launch platform for ground-breaking technology such as Netscape Navigator, Sun’s Java and Adobe Acrobat, but attendees in February 2001 would have had little idea that they were witnessing something that would turn the world of customer management software — and enterprise software generally — on its head.

• Dealing with disaster

  By Tim Mendham | 06 September, 2010 10:08

  Earthquakes? Volcanoes? Pandemics? Tsunamis? Are these the stuff of business continuity? Gartner has issued several papers covering major disasters such as the Iceland volcano eruption and its impact on business travel, admitting that “few, if any, businesses plan for a volcanic ash disruption scenario”, which is probably the understatement of the year.

• Your workplace in 2020: Gartner's predictions

  By Thomas Wailgum | 05 August, 2010 02:23

  How will people work 10 years from now? Gartner thinks it has a pretty good idea, predicting 10 major changes that will occur during the next 10 years.

• 5 virtual desktop pitfalls

  By Jon Brodkin | 03 April, 2010 06:49

  Most CIOs have started considering virtual desktop infrastructure and other types of desktop virtualization, but only a minority has reached the deployment stage. (See related story, "As Windows 7 gains steam, VDI set to rise".) Virtual desktops can potentially provide more flexibility for users, make it easier to apply patches and reduce IT help desk calls, but there are still numerous problems that keep desktop pros up at night. Here are five pitfalls to watch out for.

• 2010 tech forecasts: What the accurate analysts predict

  By Bill Snyder | 06 January, 2010 07:07

  A venerable New Year's tradition in the tech world entails trotting out year-old predictions by analyst shops and laughing at their off-base prognostications. But here's a surprise: The two biggest analyst firms still standing -- Gartner and IDC -- did a pretty good job a year ago forecasting the shape of IT in 2009, as did the smaller Forrester Research and 451 Group.

• Windows 7: Don't Wait for Service Pack to Test, Gartner Says

  By Shane O'Neill | 15 October, 2009 07:37

  With any new OS deployment, IT teams traditionally take the "safe" route and wait for the first service pack. But IT groups that follow that strategy with Windows 7 rollouts will get caught in a support crunch, says research firm Gartner

• Print: the last bastion of cost cutting?

  By Tim Lohman | 19 August, 2009 10:28

  Print management services provide a major opportunity for CIOs to slash cost at their organisation according to Andrew Rowsell-Jones, research vice president at Gartner’s CIO Research Group.