It's scary out there in the cloud. Data thieves, hackers, criminals, they're all out there scouring the Internet around the clock for ways to get into your corporate networks so they can steal data from poorly protected businesses.
If your enterprise has customized your mission-critical ERP systems over the years, your future upgrades will likely be more troublesome and terrifying because the changes can conflict with the patches. On the other hand, if you are running out-of-the-box ERP with little customization, maybe you're not getting all the important features your business needs.
Companies of every kind are beginning to focus more on consumers and engaging with them on Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms. But the successful businesses, the ones that want to really make their social media efforts sing, are going beyond just gaining that simple visibility.
In the past, CRM served a simple purpose inside your enterprise: It kept track of your customers, their addresses and their orders. Now, though, there's far more that comes under the CRM umbrella, from connecting with your customers through social media to being able to instantly transmit customer data to a call center agent when customers call in for help.
When you're on an airliner and fly through layers of clouds, you see first-hand that they come in many forms - sometimes hazy, sometimes translucent and sometimes so dense that you can't see through them. In many ways, Cloud computing is similar - there are lots of grey areas, and it's hard to know exactly what you might get from each Cloud offering.
To help businesses get smarter and stronger, business intelligence (BI) systems analyse and synthesise huge pools of corporate data to create terabytes of performance-enhancing information for enterprises of all sizes.
The good news is right there on the balance sheets of some of the nation's largest and most influential IT companies: Their income and revenue are higher and growing again, and the effects are starting to be very noticeable across the U.S. tech industry.
We take the Internet for granted now, but a lot of developments helped to make it the gargantuan shopping, socializing, commerce-helping, video-sharing behemoth it is today.
Today we all use our smartphones and our broadband-equipped home and work PCs to instantly access information and data on just about any topic via the Internet.
Most people -- even IT pros who spend their lives maintaining corporate computing infrastructure -- are so busy with life, families, work and the rest that they tend to leave periodic home PC maintenance tasks at the bottom of a long list of things that never get done.
During the 2010 Winter Olympics, the three U.S. bobsled teams will be competing in the bobsleigh event with their fastest-ever four-man bobsled.
Still pondering social media marketing? Time to get smart with these 5 essential books.
When the Internet arrived for mass public consumption in the mid-'90s, a whole new world of advertising to and communicating with customers and potential customers cracked open its gates. Companies of all sizes began creating Web sites and putting their products online; some companies, such as Amazon.com and Overstock.com, existed only on the Web.
For just a moment, forget Google Chrome OS, the new Windows 7 and all the online hoopla about the shocking death of Michael Jackson. Those happenings aren't the reasons I love the Internet. Instead, to me, the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing this weekend is Exhibit A in the evidence files that show the real beauty of the Web and its amazing technology that brings the world to each of us on our computers.
Microsoft is launching Windows 7, Google has fired back with Chrome OS, and today Microsoft is turning up the volume on Office 2010. That's a lot to juggle, and soon you'll be asking yourself: Can I afford to upgrade or can I afford not to upgrade?