Although it’s difficult to get a consensus growth figure, most analysts see business intelligence (BI) as a relative bright spot in the IT spending forecast, with a projected growth rate of between 2% and 10% (vs. the 9–12% projected in early 2008).
In tough economic times, businesses have three choices: ignore the situation, accept defeat, or take control. The first two options — doing nothing and riding out the storm or accepting the pounding — can be paralyzing, with devastating consequences. However, by taking control, businesses can stay ahead of competitors, grow market share, and ensure viability in all types of market conditions.
Innovation is necessary to ride the inevitable tide of change. Indeed, the success of the transformation of IBM to an On Demand Business depends on driving the right balance of productivity, collaboration, and innovation to achieve sustained, organic top line growth — and bottom line profitability.
CITYTECH assisted a client in the decision process of leveraging a cloud computing paradigm for the integration, test and production environments for a large municipality’s multi-agency web application. The application provides data collection and work flow services to internet and intranet users which will replace an existing 100% manual process.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) delivers a highly scalable cloud computing platform with high availability and dependability, and the flexibility to enable customers to build a wide range of applications. The issues of end-to-end security and end-to-end privacy within the cloud computing world are more sophisticated than within a single data center not facing the Internet.
Private and public clouds evolve the way IT services are delivered to the business. The promise of increased efficiency and agility of enterprise-class applications and services is intriguing, but enterprise customers are struggling with how cloud services can safely add realistic business value. The use of external cloud services challenge security and compliance, as well as service level management, which can involve multiple domains of control. Technology lock-in is an additional concern as various vendors deliver very different cloud computing offerings (and there are others of which you should be aware). The reality is that external cloud services are still working toward enterprise maturity.