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If customers are going to search the web for product information from their phones no matter what, shouldn’t retailers enable the experience by providing robust in-store connectivity? Retailers who engage customers in all channels have a better chance of winning their dollars in the end but engaging customers at as many touchpoints as possible without becoming annoying. This report looks at three major benefits of in-store Wi-Fi:

• Mobile app/site users are more likely to buy on the day they are in the store
• In-store Wi-Fi networks produce valuable business intelligence
• The ability to create a new revenue stream from mobile ads delivered to smartphones and tablets over the store’s wireless network

And then examines some best practices

• Easing network sign-on to spur adoption
• Driving purchases through in-store mode
• Empowering shoppers and associates
• Driving app value with deep integration across channels

A lot of big data that needs to be analyzed doesn’t need to be updated, so it can be stored as an archive in a deeply compressed format while still online for query and analysis. This report looks at:

• The challenge of keeping data accessible when volumes are growing more than 50 percent per annum
• The two most common usage scenarios employed in online analytic archives
• The business impacts of big data deployment
• Disk as the new tape for an online archive

Communications service providers (CSPs) can deliver highly reliable, low-latency, secure networks between highly distributed user populations and applications running at remote cloud data centers. So, they offer tremendous advantages for enterprises looking to adopt public and private cloud computing. However, the advantages of public and private data centers are diminished if performance is slow, unreliable, and unpredictable. Erratic performance and high latency will impact user adoption, satisfaction, and productivity. This reports discusses the need for IT managers to consider CSP cloud offerings as part of any enterprise-class cloud architecture that combines the performance, reliability, and security advantages of cloud providers with their own networks.

• End users are increasingly mobile and need to access corporate applications 24/7/365 from multiple devices as well as multiple locations.
• Applications require the network to handle real-time exchanges of information (e.g., video and collaboration tools).
• Applications and data are stored on a combination of public cloud assets and remote (internal) data centers. IT will be asked to manage these application, computing, and storage resources seamlessly and securely.

In the digital age, media companies involved in news, music, broadcasting, film, games, and events, must develop a coherent social media strategy, but partnering with the likes of Facebook can have its pitfalls. This report will demonstrate how online media companies enter into these bargains, and how they evaluate the strategic dimensions of social media.

• What are the benefits of partnering with Facebook, Twitter, Google or Pinterest?
• What are the “pain points” that characterize these partnerships?
• What downsides are media companies willing to accept in exchange for the upsides?

Establishing a startup’s business infrastructure early — that is, establishing support in the areas of legal, accounting, tax, insurance, and human resources (HR) — provides a number of critical benefits. This paper examines eleven benefits and provides suggestions for management teams that will facilitate establishment of an appropriate infrastructure.

• Minimizing risk
• Increasing efficiency
• Standardizing contracts
• Quickly processing one-off contracts and special circumstances
• Safe harbors
• Advice on new business practices and new jurisdictions
• Providing a sounding board
• Facilitating tax benefits and avoiding tax problems
• Building wealth (e.g., founders’ ownership and intellectual property rights)
• Smoother financings
• Effective employee management (i.e., avoiding employment-law issues

As companies in all sectors rush to embrace the promise of big data, managers attempt to track tracking ever more data so that they can understand both their businesses and the ways customers interact with them. But effective data-based decisions are not made in response to simplistic data reporting; they are made in response to considered and ongoing data analysis. This paper explores the potential of data-driven decision can play in delivering insight and business value.

• What is data-driven decision making?
• What are the five-steps comprising the “data to decisions framework”?
• Does data-driven decision making require data volumes equal to those typically associated with big data?
• What is the difference between structured and unstructured data?
• How can big data drive smarter decision making?
• What are the big questions to ask?

Optimizing content, whether that content is an entertainment product or brand messaging, is crucial as customers migrate from being passive recipients to becoming active contributors and message amplifiers. This report examines challenges and opportunities such as changing customer expectations about content, the rise of the online influencer, some of the important tools that enable social engagement, and the future of social engagement. Key findings related to optimizing content for social engagement discussed in this report include:

• Customers and potential customers discovering new content
• Enterprises finding new audiences
• An increased depth in the relationship between enterprise and customer
• Greater understanding of customer sentiment, including specific sources of dissatisfaction
• Metrics measuring “applause not the attendance”
• Enterprises facilitating users so that they can share content

Charged with delivering a positive web experience that has become exceedingly more complex, website owners must now consider the customer experience across desktop and mobile devices and their browsers. Mobilizing web design is a catch-22; adjusting to design challenges is costly, but not adjusting leaves a poor mobile web experience that usually results in a loss of revenue. This report examines:

• How the multi-device environment has increased the complexity of delivering web content
• How website owners, while struggling to assimilate multiple devices and browsers, are trying to maintain a consistent user experience
• How browser fragmentation, a result of the current multitude of browsers, creates an opportunity for optimization
• The necessary balance between delivering the best experience for a given device and managing overhead costs
• Multiple mobile experiences that incorporate both the mobile web and native apps
• The company’s desired relationship with its customers as an important consideration in determining its mobile strategy
• How an innovative multi-device strategy will be disruptive to the status quo
• How a quality mobile experience can advance customer relationships and how a poor experience can terminate relationships

Startups adopting cloud computing often deal with disproportionate infrastructure costs or cloud solutions that require completely revamped infrastructure. Established enterprises have been slow to embrace cloud computing for their own reasons, including security, speed of access to cloud resources, and runaway network costs. The key challenges (with solutions listed below each challenge) are:

• Network: Improved latency and better uptime
• Cost: Predictable bills
• Security: Isolation and controlled access

Increases in cloud service create a parallel increase in the number of internet users, but increased performance cannot be sustained if the corresponding cost to the service provider (SP) for delivering this performance also increases. What service providers need is a way of delivering low latency, fast response, and increasing performance while minimizing the cost of the network. This research paper will examine the stress points in a cloud infrastructure and the available network options.

• How can networks realize the performance that can be gained from clustering and parallelism demanded from a server farm today?
• What brings about performance improvement in both bandwidth and IOPS?
• Why is storage acceleration critical?
• What is causing the rise of the convergent data center?

This paper explores how next-generation WAN strategies, specifically WAN optimization and virtualization, address emerging enterprise WAN requirements while improving on the cost and performance of traditional solutions.

• A few of the leading factors driving enterprise WAN quality and performance requirements are applications, cloud computing, consolidation of data centers and server infrastructure, and desktop virtualization.
• The cost and performance issues associated with traditional WAN solutions have spurred the development of next-generation enterprise WAN capabilities.
• Some vendors have developed WAN-optimization strategies that leverage existing WAN connectivity but strive to improve the performance of networks and increase the speed of access to critical applications and information.
• The principal variance between WAN optimization and WAN virtualization is bandwidth utilization; WAN optimization seeks to make the best possible use of a limited resource, while WAN virtualization seeks to add additional resources.
• WAN optimization and WAN virtualization will prove to be essential components in the secure and cost-efficient adoption of cloud services.

Over-the-top (OTT) messaging applications have upended the mobile operators’ highly profitable short messaging services (SMS) business. The ability of text-messaging services to send messages quickly and reliably has added significant utility to the mobile phone, spawning a multitude of communication modes for both it and the internet.

• A As the mobile-messaging market evolves, messaging will become more technology and protocol agnostic, so messages will be able to travel among SMS systems and IP-based messaging systems.
• Messaging is growing, especially in the web space with the integration of SMS, IP messaging, or both, due to the advent of OTT, social networking, and web applications in general.
• The person-to-person applications are also seeing a surge of new use cases powered by the various services and technologies available to consumers.
• The mobile-messaging market is converging, and the flexibility of IP allows vendors to extend their value propositions throughout the value chain. In order to keep up, carriers will need to launch their own IP-based messaging services.

Nowhere is the major trend towards open source more apparent than in the cloud, but at present, there is no true open standard that all providers obey. In this report, we examine some of the issues surrounding open source.

• Video programmers must produce multiple internet-streaming formats that use different types of security and different ways of inserting ads.
• Broadcasters and programmers must understand the technical details of the various format and delivery types needed for OTT delivery.
• Broadcasters and programmers must also maintain high video quality despite external factors and multiple architectural approaches.
• Content is still king; programming represents the primary value to consumers, so broadcasters should view OTT delivery as an additional channel of distribution as well as an added revenue opportunity for video-programming producers.

Historically Hadoop has been a favorite among organizations who needed a cost-effective way to store, process, and analyze massive volumes of multistructured data. With the introduction of real-time query, Hadoop has taken a major step toward unifying the majority of big data analytic applications onto one platform.

GigaOM Pro’s discussion of how Hadoop democratizes access to big data analytics includes:

• What’s driving the need for real-time analysis?
• What’s driving the need for a more unified platform for big data analytics?
• What will customers be able to do when they fully implement real-time query?
• What are four key benefits of real-time query across customer use cases?
• How can we move toward a converged big data analytics platform?

Nowhere is the major trend towards open source more apparent than in the cloud, but at present, there is no true open standard that all providers obey. In this report, we examine some of the issues surrounding open source.

• Although AWS won the API battle for the cloud, if it rests for a moment, the tide could quickly turn.
• Anyone looking for a longer-term alternative now has two exciting prospects: OpenStack and Red Hat’s OpenShift.
• The dream of the open hybrid cloud, where anyone can easily deploy code, data stores, and services across multiple providers, is close at hand.
• Viewed from any direction, the coming months and years are going to give end users more variety, portability, and compatibility.
• Keeping an eye on emerging PaaS solutions like OpenShift and coding new apps into these solutions could keep today’s greenfield cloud deployment from becoming tomorrow’s migration nightmare.

What are the characteristics of a “utility,” and can we see them in today’s computing models? This report explores the difficulties in establishing one set of metrics to compare the numerous offerings available today.

Examples include:

• Compare and contrast the costs and capabilities of different computing infrastructures.
• A common set of metrics would enable a comparison of competing cloud offerings.
• Once cloud offerings can be compared, customers will be able to select the best service for specific tasks.
• As a market for generic compute resources emerges, opportunities arise for excess capacity to be bought and sold as a commodity.

This report examines the world of continuous delivery and its underlying philosophy, devops.

Among the key points it addresses are:

• What is continuous delivery?
• What are the trends driving continuous delivery?
• What is devops?
• How does a company construct a continuous-delivery pipeline?

The organizations and companies that can bring tools, resources, and a collective voice to highly under-represented app developers will be an important factor in the evolution of mobile-app development. App developers supply the talent behind the creation of the millions of apps on the market today – a multibillion-dollar market.

• The app developer’s primary focus is developing tools and utility apps, with a secondary focus on gaming and social utilities
• The app developer community is composed mainly of individuals or very small companies; it remains largely unknown and often underrepresented
• Many developers view apps as projects rather than products, making monetization difficult

At least 80 percent of business-relevant data exists in unstructured form.

Examples include:

• Logs produced by web servers, manufacturing processes’ e-commerce systems, etc.
• Mentions, comments and conversations on social networks.
• Streams of data from sensors embedded in domestic appliances, traffic-management systems, smart power grids and other systems.
• Aggregations of data from multiple sources, e.g. purchase histories, etc.

Read this report to learn how companies like Facebook, Yahoo, and Procter & Gamble are using tools like Hadoop to meet their data analysis needs, scaling in parallel across hundreds or thousands of computers grouped together into clusters.

At least 80 percent of business-relevant data exists in unstructured form.

Examples include:

• Logs produced by web servers, manufacturing processes’ e-commerce systems, etc..
• Mentions, comments and conversations on social networks.
• Streams of data from sensors embedded in domestic appliances, traffic-management systems, smart power grids and other systems.
• Aggregations of data from multiple sources, e.g. purchase histories, etc.

Read this report to learn how companies like Facebook, Yahoo, and Procter & Gamble are using tools like Hadoop to meet their data analysis needs, scaling in parallel across hundreds or thousands of computers grouped together into clusters.

BI and data analytics projects often fail. To examine the reasons why, this report analyzes the results of a 2012 survey of 304 IT decision makers at small, medium, and large enterprises across North America.

Highlights from surveyed companies include:

• 45 percent said the main reason BI projects fail is due to a lack of expert staff who are able to draw conclusions and apply findings from data.
• 61 percent are investigating using a third-party service provider for their big data needs.
• 70 percent of those considering a service provider for their big data needs would choose a cloud service provider (i.e., Amazon, Rackspace, Logicworks) over an IT vendor (i.e., Microsoft, IBM).

This report examines the new recruiting ecosystem and the technology-driven trends that are changing the workplace including:

• Social networking and gamification as recruiting tactics
• Mobile recruiting technologies
• Applicant tracking systems
• Technology and onboarding

This paper explains how business executives working with their CTOs or CIOs and other tech management can use big data within their organizations. It explains:

• What big data is and how it differs from traditional business intelligence;
• The different considerations executives should take into account as they plan their big data strategies are discussed;
• Examples of how some companies are putting their operational data to creative use.

This report examines the hyperlocal-mobile (HyLoMo) advertising opportunity for publishers and developers, discussing:

• Factors fueling the growth of HyLoMo advertising
• Projected growth of HyLoMo and results publishers are achieving
• Local ad networks: key capabilities and characteristics for publishers and developers to consider
• Ways to make location an integral part of mobile websites and apps

The New IT Manager is a three-part report meant to educate and advise IT managers on the latest developments within IT management for business.

• Part 1 describes and quantifies each of these trends, demonstrating that they are real now, growing rapidly and perilous to ignore.
• Part 2 investigates the actual and potential impacts of these trends on IT departments and their managers.
• Part 3 presents actionable strategic options with which IT managers may respond to the new reality of corporate computing that they face.

This report covers strategies with which IT leaders can combat the growing threat to their department including:

• Redesigning the IT organization to deal with the loss of control that comes with the emergence of cloud computing, mobile devices and the consumerization of IT
• Accelerating the IT department’s shift to a service provider model
• becoming more aware of external and internal current realities and emerging trends
• Becoming a proactive leader in developing and implementing IT and corporate strategy

The New IT Manager is a three-part report meant to educate and advise IT managers on the latest developments within IT management for business.

• Part 1 describes and quantifies each of these trends, demonstrating that they are real now, growing rapidly and perilous to ignore.
• Part 2 investigates the actual and potential impacts of these trends on IT departments and their managers.
• Part 3 presents actionable strategic options with which IT managers may respond to the new reality of corporate computing that they face.

This report covers the different types of complexity in the business IT environment including:

• Complexity of devices and applications as well as physical and virtual computing environments
• Challenges for IT staff of managing, monitoring and supporting computing assets in an increasingly complex environment
• The growing use of shadow IT in businesses and how that is making IT workers’ jobs seem impossible

The New IT Manager is a three-part report meant to educate and advise IT managers on the latest developments within IT management for business.

• Part 1 describes and quantifies each of these trends, demonstrating that they are real now, growing rapidly and perilous to ignore.
• Part 2 investigates the actual and potential impacts of these trends on IT departments and their managers.
• Part 3 presents actionable strategic options with which IT managers may respond to the new reality of corporate computing that they face.

This Report Covers:

• The old model: When IT selected and controlled all tools and programs employees used to do their jobs
• Why cloud computing, mobile computing, and the consumerization of IT are three real, rapidly growing trends that cannot be ignored
• Research data that shows currently high and growing future levels of adoption for the aforementioned three trends
• The perspectives of businesspeople and IT staff about why each trend is important
• The benefits gained by businesses that have already embraced the cloud, mobile and consumerization trends that are fueling their rapid adoption.

This Report Covers:

• Business content collaboration challenges and their implications, based on a survey of 306 business managers
• Managers’ business objectives, pain points and feature wish lists for collaboration applications and services
• Areas of collaboration solutions where managers can appreciate the most benefit in terms of productivity, project speed and customer satisfaction

This Report Covers:

• The atypical ascent of Wi-Fi within the enterprise and its expanding role in both public and private organizations
• Expansion in Wi-Fi standards, a new generation of Wi-Fi equipment and devices, and the viability of threat from competing wireless technologies
• Drivers and requirements for the next stage of growth of Wi-Fi in the enterprise
• How enterprises can improve performance by leveraging the evolution of Wi-Fi and deploying future-proof networks

This Report Covers:

• An overview of the factors to be considered in a public-to-private cloud-migration strategy and a description of private cloud technologies
• Why many startups that met their early growth needs with a public cloud are increasingly turning to the private and hybrid clouds as they mature, and the benefits they are realizing
• A case study of Zynga and its deployment of a hybrid solution leveraging both the private and public clouds

This Report Covers:

• How independent software vendors (ISVs) are partnering with hosting providers to enter the cloud computing market
• Responsibilities ISVs still retain when partnering with hosting providers
• Cloud computing basics, including the types of clouds and service delivery models
• How the cloud is changing enterprise expectations as the purchase decision maker shifts from the IT department to the executive level
• Common considerations that should be evaluated when selection a hosting provider to delivered the desired quality of service and meet operating expectations
• Basic metrics for measuring performance in hosting and supporting cloud services

This Report Covers:

• The disruption of publishers’ traditional revenue streams as a result of digital technology and the resulting economic challenges to the industry
• Why the strategy of making information content freely available on the web in order to drive advertising revenue has largely failed and what publishers need to do to survive
• What publishers can learn from research on purchase behavior around other types of digital content where paid-content models are better established, such as music, video and especially online gaming
• Ways publishers can begin to rebuild the revenue side of their business on a more sustainable foundation, including all-you-can-eat subscriptions, metered paywalls, tiered pricing and complementary revenue streams

Part II covers:

• The results of an online study of 200 U.S.-based IT departments with internal support staffs at mostly midsize to large companies (76 percent supported 1,000-plus devices).
• A look into IT managers’ ability to support Millennials while incorporating data from the survey of Millennials that powered the first part of the series
• IT departments’ readiness to handle Millennials’ tech-support expectations, communications channel preferences, problem-solving approaches and awareness of and adherence to IT policies
• How Millennials’ attitudes and behavior around technology shape the way they work with IT and what CIOs and tech-support managers need to know to determine whether they’re prepared to handle this generation by comparing their own standards and practices to those of Millennials.
• A self-test that enables IT managers and tech-support personnel to benchmark themselves in comparison with their peers and understand their own level of preparedness for the Millennial generation

Part I covers:

• The results of an online survey of 400 Millennials in the U.S., ages 20 through 29 as well as 20 in-depth interviews of Millennials and IT managers at large corporations
• Millennials’ use of technology at work, especially how they communicate and learn and their expectations of technology support in the workplace
• Millennials’ attitudes and behavior regarding communication means and preferences
• Millennials’ approaches to solving problems and their mobile and after-hours work habits
• How Millennials’ attitudes and behavior around technology plays out in the digital workplace, the potential pitfalls and opportunities that result, and what IT organizations can do to optimize support for this new generation
• An IT self-assessment to assist IT managers and tech support personnel in understanding their own level of preparedness for this new generation
• Strategies to handle Millennial communications expectations and problem- solving preferences

• The survey responses of 1,000 technology-empowered workers in the U.S. including end users and communications technology decision makers
• The future of work and the workplace including the shifting nature of actual workspaces from the four walls of the traditional office space, the emergence of new flexible hours, the role of consumer-grade technologies such as iPads, smartphones and notebooks, and the role of cloud-based services
• The rise of the “consumerization of IT” in the workplace and what that means for how we work today
• The changing nature of relationships between employees and managers
• How emerging technologies are fuelling new ways of working and a fundamental re-engineering of business processes