With the latest versions of Intel vPro technology, KACE Appliances offer remote management capabilities for systems that are better than ever—even when the KACE agents are not running, or the system is blue-screened, or has hardware or startup issues. This paper details how Dell KACE Appliances can be integrated with the Intel vPro technology to offer effective remote system management and recovery.
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Given the complexity of today’s dynamic IT infrastructures and the broad range of management disciplines necessary to support them, choosing a lifecycle management solution can be a difficult and bewildering project. Simplify your project by downloading this side-by-side functional and financial comparison of solution suites from four of the leading vendors in this market space: Dell KACE, LANDesk, Microsoft, and Symantec.
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This white paper will discuss traditional and contemporary practices, reflect on the changing dynamics of the customer/supplier relationship, and identifying priorities for evolving the role of procurement in IT outsourcing.
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Most organisations are sitting on IT equipment that is not supporting the business optimally, yet the received wisdom is to sweat the assets to gain as much perceived lifetime value from them as possible. However, IT assets have inherent value which can change significantly through each asset’s lifecycle—whether this is through its hard resale value or just through its scrap value. By applying a full IT lifecycle management (ITLM) approach to the complete IT platform, a business-optimised platform can be created—one where business value overrides the embedded concept of sweating assets.
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The "model and execute" approach to app development means that IT efforts are focused on meeting business needs instead of infrastructure issues. IT can work directly with users on designing the data structure, customizing the interface, and defining process tasks, ultimately ensuring rapid implementation, alignment with business needs, lower maintenance costs, increased adoption, and scalability. Download this white paper to learn how.
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The wide variety of Android devices in the marketplace makes it extremely difficult to write apps that scale smoothly on many screen sizes. This white paper examines the tools provided by the Android software development kit (SDK), and presents a simple solution to allow a single layout to automatically scale to any screen size without distortion.
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In the coming years, a new Internet protocol, IPv6, will gradually succeed IPv4. The two Internet protocols aren’t interchangeable or compatible, so organizations will have to run them both in parallel on their networks for some time. This checklist offers five steps as a phased, cost-effective approach to move to the next-generation Internet protocol.
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When it’s time to expand your business network, you must consider the current and future needs of your organization and assess the technologies that will provide the best performance for mission-critical applications. This checklist offers 10 rules for building a network that will reliably support your business as it grows.
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If your organization is like many others, it’s got a good handle on how to manage mobile devices throughout the environment. With that foundation firmly in place, it’s now time to devise a viable strategy for managing the applications that your employees will use on those devices. This white paper outlines the driving forces behind businesses establishing corporate application stores, the benefits of such an approach, and what to seek in a solution that supports this strategy.
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Organizations today face fierce competition. One strategy for gaining a competitive edge is to look to advanced technological options focused on the core business. With the rapid adoption of cloud computing, organizations can take help from technology partners to cope with their technology requirements. Know the key points and get guidance for selecting a technology partner for Windows Azure cloud computing platform.
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The widespread adoption of smartphones and tablets, the growth of cloud computing, and the increased need for convenience printing means that organizations must provide employees with a secure and simple managed approach to mobile printing. Read this report and learn about the market drivers for mobile printing in the business environment and some of the best practices for building a mobile print strategy.
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Social networks offer many opportunities for businesses to gain a closer engagement with their customers. This appears to be an unstoppable bandwagon that all organizations must leap on before they are left behind, but is it that simple? The social network landscape is packed with choices and pitfalls for the unwary, so a careful and appropriately nuanced response is required. Read more on how to best use social media.
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A properly conducted code review can do more for the security of your application than nearly any other step. A large numbers of bugs can be found and fixed before the code makes it into an official build or into the hands of the test team. Additionally, the code review process lends itself very well to sharing security best practices amongst a development team and it produces "lessons learned" toward preventing future bugs. This guide focuses on identifying the types of issues that you should look for in the code being reviewed, and then on finding these bugs as quickly and effectively as possible. It also describes how you can use threat models, architecture diagrams, and other inputs to help guide your review.
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An ERP system is a major investment for any business, particularly a smaller one. A well-planned and implemented ERP system can change the way you do business and significantly improve profitability. But there are pitfalls if you have not prepared properly. In this white paper, Pronto Software outlines critical questions you need to consider in the search, evaluation, and implementation of an ERP solution for your business.
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This white paper describes the need for IPv6, the benefits it can provide, and how important it is to take a holistic view of IPv6 migration from a business perspective.
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As the marketplace moves towards a less opaque and more defined cloud computing model, UK-based businesses will increasingly expect reliable, secure and cost-effective on-demand services that free employees to be more productive and more profitable, wherever they are located. These organizations have heard about the benefits but remain unsure about the “types of cloud” available to them, and about the precise timing and extent to which they should embrace opportunities presented by the cloud. Beyond convergence, the situation has become even more complicated with trends such as consumerization and the proliferation of handheld devices, plus the security threats (and remarkable new business opportunities) posed by an increasingly mobile world. Learn more.
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Mobile device interfaces can enhance customer engagement by providing services such as pricing information and user review facilities. The upward trend in the sale of smartphones further validates the importance of creating retail mobile solutions. By leveraging the potential of mobile commerce, retailers can unify the customer experience across channels and better understand customer behavior through analytics. In this context, retailers have started to develop sophisticated mobile platforms that capture shopping preferences and customer location, create shopping wish lists, provide rich product information, integrate social media, and so on. Download this white paper to learn more.
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The emerging class of digitally savvy bank customers, including small and midsized businesses, increasingly wants to use bank branches for sophisticated financial advice, support, and products--as opposed to conventional transactions such as cashing pay checks. This white paper, produced jointly by Knowledge@Wharton and Wipro Technologies, captures the emerging business models for bank branches. It is based on comprehensive, globally conducted customer surveys, as well as interviews with Wharton faculty and Wipro executives.
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In the current regulatory environment, banks are facing two levels of challenges. While they are under pressure to expand beyond home territories, they also face stifling regulatory constraints. These restrictions are forcing banks to maximize on every capital expenditure they make. Such financial and regulatory reforms, in the face of the economic slowdown, have positive effects on quality assurance, governance and data management. But it also forces banks to hold capital that they would otherwise invest. This environment has made it vital for banks to sharpen their analytical and forecasting capabilities. Find out how the burden of regulation, expansion, cost optimization, and business transformation can be shared by an expert partner to foster an environment for growth.
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The oil and gas industry is faced with not only the challenges of volatile prices but also the various risks from owning and operating critical infrastructures and assets. In order to overcome these issues without compromising cost efficiency, IT services within the process control domain (PCD) need to be transformed. This encompasses the outsourcing of IT services within the business-critical PCD so that the organization benefits from the best practices of wider enterprise IT. Transforming IT services within the PCD not only helps reduce costs but also helps meet the common business challenges faced by the oil and gas industry. Download this white paper to learn more now.
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New technologies and changing economic conditions have triggered a number of changes in the pharmaceuticals, life sciences, and biotech sectors. Increased global sales of life sciences products and growing demand for drugs present drug industry companies with a host of opportunities. However, the mandate for clinical trials has led to considerable inflation in their research and development (R&D) expenditure. The resolution lies in using emerging markets as an alternative to conduct these trials. Thanks to new technologies, the cloud, and social media/online portals, the pharmaceuticals, life sciences and biotech sectors can make the most of the emerging opportunities. Learn how.
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For more than a decade, offshoring and outsourcing enjoyed an unchallenged monopoly in terms of adding value to global organizations. Since the economic downturn of 2008, however, there has been a shift in the perspective of IT expenditure. An increased demand for direct linking of IT to business outcomes and variablization of IT cost has made IT services in the cloud an attractive business idea. Find out why.
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As a company in the financial sector, you place extremely high demands on your call center. The complicated and sensitive nature of the calls requires an agent who is highly trained and experienced. This leads to a high cost per call. At the same time, sacrificing caller satisfaction is not an option. This creates a tough challenge: How do you decrease the cost per call, while improving the customer experience? Download this white paper to find out.
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Power over ethernet (PoE) allows network administrators to deploy VoIP phones, WLAN access points, IP security cameras, and other powered devices without having to install AC outlets, pull cables, or modify building plans. By eliminating the need for separate electrical wiring and power outlets, PoE technology can deliver savings of up to 50 percent compared to traditional network powering infrastructures. Learn more now.
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Test language is a dictionary of keywords that helps testers communicate with one another and with other subject-matter experts. The keywords replace common English as the testing basis and create an approach called keyword-driven testing (KDT). KDT can be used to improve communication between testers, avoid inconsistency in test documents, and serve as the infrastructure for test automation. Download this white paper to learn more.
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This IDC Buyer Case Study examines BT's successful project to reduce costs and raise efficiency and quality in its release-service introduction, testing, and deployment activities, using offshore-based partner Wipro. It looks at the challenges, risks, and outcomes of the project, and draws some lessons for organizations considering similar challenges.
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This white paper reveals the results of a survey that examined how companies can intelligently manage devices to create value, and to look at implications for improving energy efficiency. While recognizing there are challenges facing smart management of devices, one third of those who responded to a related survey also acknowledged that such efforts could help cut costs or increase profits significantly across many areas of the business. Learn more. Download this white paper now.
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Cloud and virtualization both help deliver optimal resources, on-demand utilization, flexibility, and scalability. However, business owners often have to address issues that are common with computer networks such as unauthorized use, outside intrusion, data loss and technical support. A managed services solution that is well-planned, efficient, and cost-effective is crucial to maintaining a functioning network. By outsourcing service management, organizations can devote time and resources to more important aspects of the business, while critical systems and data are hosted in a secure environment. Learn more. Download now.
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Security Information and Event Manager (SIEM) users face the pressure of high costs related to the selection of a SIEM product, its deployment, integration and day-to-day use. Such cost pressure stems from substantial initial cost of the product, additional expenses for specific hardware and third-party product licenses, etc. In the end, what was initially considered as an affordable price for the chosen SIEM solution may turn out to be a large hole in the budget with an enormous total cost of ownership. Download this white paper to learn different approaches for resolving them successfully.
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The SaaS delivery model promises the consumer a pay-per-use model for consuming software without any up-front capital expenditure in terms of buying the license and infrastructure, and without the overhead of maintaining the infrastructure necessary to run the software. That said, there are three levels of SaaS maturity among ISVs. Download this white paper to learn about the shortcomings and merits of each SaaS maturity level.
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While technology has improved quality of life, it has also contributed to global environmental imbalance, particularly in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. However, technology, combined with smart policy, can significantly reduce the emissions responsible for climate change. Learn where IT has high-impact potential to reduce carbon emissions while boosting profitability—and how you can use IT to “green” your practices for larger-scale benefits.
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Security breaches are perpetrated by a wide variety of external and internal sources, including hacktivists, targeted attackers, and profit-motivated
cybercriminals, as well as through mundane everyday occurrences, such as missing laptops and thumb drives. To address these compliance and privacy issues, organizations have responded by adding layers of controls and integrating them with varied results. Now, those organizations realize that making security simpler is the ultimate strategy for ensuring end user adoption of new security measures and meeting multiple, overlapping regulatory requirements. This paper is a review of DigitalPersona Pro, its integrated approach, and its features and efficiencies in these areas.
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The growing adoption of laptops and other portable devices is changing the foundation of traveling and telecommuting. Laptops have overtaken desktops as the computer of choice for business users. While endpoint protection has been traditionally associated with solutions like antivirus and firewalls, these technologies don’t adequately protect data against theft, loss or unauthorized access. Learn more. Download this white paper now.
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Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is notoriously complex. Horror stories abound about failed installations, unresponsive vendors, and wasted investments. But as daunting as ERP can be, many organizations can’t operate without it. Working closely with your vendor to configure a solution, choosing the right delivery model, and following this list of 10 tips can help you optimize your ERP initiative. Find out more.
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This report discusses the policy and business drivers of "clean tech," and the development of the clean tech sector in terms of business models, globalization, technological diffusion, and growth. The emphasis on clean tech has increased in recent years due to international concerns about the economic impact of climate change caused by GHG (largely CO2) emissions from energy production and consumption. This report examines government policies in different economies, and focuses on clean tech opportunities for software services such as measurement and monitoring, platform efficiency software, mitigation software, system integration, and managed services consulting.
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There is an increasing trend among employees toward using their personal mobile device for fulfilment of their work commitments. While this appears to bring many benefits for the employee while, on the face of it, reducing upfront costs for employers, it does introduce significant on-going costs and risks for the organisation. However, with many appealing mobile consumer devices being offered, the trend is likely to increase. Organizations need to work out suitable strategies and policies to manage this complex and hybrid situation in the best interests of both themselves and their employees.
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Today's organizations, faced with stricter internal security policies and multiple regulatory compliance requirements, continue to struggle in their efforts to make Active Directory auditing simpler and more adept at fulfilling their needs. Native Windows auditing mechanisms don't meet the demands of modern businesses, and administrators are often left in the dark about significant and potentially harmful Active Directory changes. Learn how to easily improve native Active Directory auditing without making dramatic changes to your IT infrastructure in this eye-opening white paper written by renowned industry expert Don Jones.
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Businesses need to be highly flexible, scalable, and able to adapt quickly to market conditions and customer demands. However, this is easier said than done; building and maintaining such capabilities the traditional way is laborious and challenging. Download this white paper to learn about the various capability acquisition and IT solution deployment options—and how to evaluate them.
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These days, the IT department can’t just focus on keeping servers up and running, getting users the access they need, and bringing new services online to benefit the business. IT is, unfortunately, also the last line of defense in the organization’s security and compliance efforts. Microsoft MVP Don Jones recounts the top 5 horror stories associated with poor auditing. Read this white paper and prevent these nightmares from happening to you.
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Before adopting any applications for key business functions, executives should perform a thorough total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis. Unfortunately, apples-to-apples comparisons can prove challenging. While it may be tempting to compare the initial license price of on-premises software to the annual subscription fees for cloud computing, this methodology fails to account for the ongoing internal operating costs for the on-premises software. Beyond direct software and hardware purchase and implementation costs, it’s also important for organizations to consider additional business drivers, including infrastructure and resource overhead, maintenance costs, ongoing operations, flexibility, and risk. Download this paper to learn more about how you can estimate the true TCO of cloud applications versus traditional on-premise software.
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The world is out of IPv4 addresses and the time of IPv6 is at hand. This paper explores existing file transfer technology used for bulk data exchange under the lens of IPv6 and highlights issues to consider during strategic or tactical planning. Summary results from a series of IPv6 interoperability tests involving 5 clients, 3 browsers, and 6 servers illuminate the findings and recommendations.
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File-level recovery on its own is an incomplete strategy when it comes to meeting stringent recovery time objectives (RTOs) for complete system recovery. This paper investigates what’s at risk, where system-level recovery fits relative to current data protection approaches, the impact of system-level recovery on your IT department’s ability to meet RTOs, and the potential of system-level recovery to reduce costs.
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The explosive growth of enterprise data poses new storage and data management challenges for enterprises. This white paper details how organizations can leverage cloud-based storage offerings as part of their data protection plans. The paper also takes a closer look at solutions offered by Riverbed that allow organizations to integrate cloud-based storage within solutions that address a growing set of data protection demands.
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Freight costs can represent a significant component of your supply chain—often around 5-7 percent of sales for manufacturing, retail, and wholesale/distribution companies. For many firms, this responsibility is not managed as well as it could be. This white paper shares 10 best practices in transportation management, with valuable insights from industry professionals.
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This white paper examines the use cases of database migration and challenges that accompany it. The main attention is devoted to solutions used to remove the complexity and bottlenecks of database migration. This white paper introduces Devart's Schema and Data Compare tools tailored to facilitate any database migration tasks and reduce time and effort.
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Businesses today demand that their information technology (IT) functions deliver certainty, confidence, and agility while improving efficiency. This white paper explains how Attenda provides a way for businesses to achieve their IT goals while avoiding the pitfalls of wholesale outsourcing or uncontrolled consumption of public cloud services.
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This white paper describes some of the common challenges associated with protecting data on laptops and at home and remote offices and portrays proven solutions to the challenges of protecting distributed business data by establishing a private cloud/enterprise cloud. Learn which best practices can ensure business continuity throughout an organization with a distributed information technology (IT) infrastructure.
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This whitepaper delves into the common problem of shifting from one mobile platform to another, in particular, Apple’s iOS to Google’s Android or vice versa. Each platform’s background and features are discussed, along with development considerations, monetization, and deployment. Other aspects included are the differences in hardware and programming languages, multi-platform options, and testing applications.
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Software as a service (SaaS) is becoming an increasingly attractive choice for manufacturers that would rather not continue to divert resources into purchases of sophisticated software systems that do not represent their core business, while adding costly IT resources. SaaS provider’s IT experts handle it, while your company gets back to doing what it does best. See the infrastructure needed to sustain SaaS in manufacturing.
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In a well integrated identity environment, SiteMinder handles web access management, authentication, single sign-on (SSO), secure session management, and flexible policy definition. SiteMinder functions well when data exists in a relatively homogeneous state; this blueprint shows users how to extend an existing SiteMinder infrastructure across additional heterogeneous applications, identity sources, and constituents.
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Enterprises are looking for incremental change to their infrastructure. The value of your portal lies in delivering a rich and secure experience across multiple applications. The more information you provide, the more valuable your portal is to stakeholders across your organization. Developed by the inventors of the virtual directory, identity and context virtualization is the next generation integration solution.
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No portal is an island—or at least, it shouldn’t be. While SharePoint is great for sharing documents, it doesn’t integrate easily with the rest of your enterprise. To be truly useful, your portal needs to bring together all your users and connect to all your applications. Read about identity and context virtualization—a next-generation integration solution.
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Overlooking how an application fits into your overall IT landscape can lead to costly implementations. But addressing data management with middleware solutions that work seamlessly with existing applications in your company’s IT environment can lead to significant benefits. Explore the value of technology decisions that support and maintain infrastructure-wide interoperability with regard to your data management solutions.
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For web single sign-on (SSO), and consistent enforcement of authorization across all applications, many web access management (WAM) packages offer an excellent and proven approach. However, they assume a relatively homogeneous identity environment. This white paper describes how virtualization solves the issue of directory integration with an approach that is cost effective, nonintrusive, and easy to deploy.
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If you are a multi-company enterprise, then this Two-tier ERP Strategy Kit will show you how to grow your satellite divisions while cutting costs. Including analyst research, whitepapers, and real-world case studies, this Kit shows how you can equip your subsidiaries with a more agile, flexible cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) system while maintaining your headquarters on-premise ERP instance of SAP or Oracle.
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Various scenarios can impact the resources for a rollout delivery team when utilized for large technology infrastructure rollouts at multiple locations. Shifting processes, methodologies, and resources can streamline the technology rollout at each site. This paper explains how alterations to the rollout delivery team configuration, as determined by project variables, can impact site delivery and your business. Read more.
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The administration and management of printing can be time-consuming, often relying on manual processes. Many businesses are rethinking their approach to managing the print environment, by either adopting a managed service or implementing centralized print management tools. This can ensure the high availability, reliability and manageability of printing resources, while leaving IT staff free to focus on core activities.
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Computing infrastructure today though versatile must be used wisely. Intelligent workload management (IWM) allows for efficient consumption of computing resources while ensuring business tasks are supported by all needed resources—and that this is all done securely. IWM tools support the building, management, monitoring, and securing of workloads. See how to run your cloud computing system with leading-edge technology.
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Universities and other higher education establishments have to address the need for savings across the board. One area is expenses from faculty members and other associated with faculty. The complex mix of expense types needs a flexible yet solid means of managing spend as close as possible to the point of expense that encourages the individual to participate in the process without it being seen as an imposition. Know how.
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Balancing employee requests for keeping mobile channels open, while getting the right level of work and commitment from them, should not be left to chance. All organizations need to fully understand their employees’ mobile usage and behaviors to be able to put appropriate policies in place to ensure business requirements are met while acceptable personal use is still enabled. Read this white paper to know how to do this.
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Managing mobile costs is a challenge for all organizations and becomes more complex and problematic for those organizations spanning across countries or using multiple suppliers within one country. Getting to grips with these costs in a way that does not undermine the value of mobile flexibility is paramount, and organizations need to gather sufficient detail to effectively manage and analyze their mobile costs. See how.
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Electronically stored information is a key asset to any organization, but it is often insufficiently cared for. Failure to protect data can result not only in steep fines, but also in loss of competitive advantage of the company. To ensure the safety and integrity of information, read this report on data governance examining how well European businesses understand the risks and what steps they have taken to address them.
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Old-style, one application per physical server data centers are not only nearing the end of their useful lives, but are also becoming barriers to a business’ future success. Virtualization has come to the foreground, yet it also creates headaches for data center and facilities managers. Read about aspects of creating a strategy for a flexible and effective data center aimed to carry your business forward.
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This white paper analyzes the return on investment (ROI) that customers can expect from their enterprise network solution, based on interviews with customers. Additionally, you will read about the business case for proactively managing network and application performance. Get the visibility you need to achieve your IT objectives. Download this white paper today.
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The case company is rolling out new professional service concepts, addressing the customer need for services fitting the information technology infrastructure library (ITIL) framework. A centrally located team needed ITIL service knowledge and certification before training service development, consulting, and sales. Implement applied the Foundation Fasttrack concept—fast-paced, flexible learning in a familiar environment.
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To establish optimal service and support conditions, the case company, Naviair, chose to adapt and implement information technology infrastructure library (ITIL) service support processes. During the process, Implement Consulting Group assisted with facilitation, ITIL input, and lean competences and tools. The existing procedures and instructions were combined with ITIL’s different service support areas.
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The case company decided to carry out an information technology infrastructure library (ITIL) implementation, and in so doing hoped to make production in IT more visible, increase customer satisfaction, and maintain or increase employee satisfaction in IT. Implement Consulting Group facilitated the process selection and design and managed the requirement collection, selection, and implementation phases of the project.
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The case company implemented an information technology services management (ITSM) system to support information technology infrastructure library (ITIL)–inspired processes. Implement Consulting Group had the project management responsibility during the entire process—from the preliminary requirement collection to selection and implementation to testing and go-live.
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This article focuses on the development of strategic agility as a capability that is built into the design of an architecture. The capabilities, the article argues, are matured through six stages that offer different levels of strategic agility. Strategic agility, once capitalized through modular architectures, enables a company to achieve greater speed and flexibility in information technology (IT) deliveries.
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Companies must meet GRC criteria defined by internal and external policies, as failing to do so can have business and legal consequences. Although management of travel and entertainment (T&E) expenses is often seen as being of low importance for overall GRC, poorly managed T&E can lead to unforeseen issues with long-term business impact. See why using an external T&E management provider is the best way to adhere to GRC.
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The managed print services (MPS) market continues to evolve as vendors expand their service offerings beyond the office print environment. Today the business agenda is broader, and MPS must provide a route to business transformation as well as cost efficiency. Businesses thus must place their transformational goals on the agenda at the start of an MPS engagement. See what major MPS providers have to offer to your business.
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Comprehensive management and protection of information can be achieved only when both data centers and end points are controlled by managed service providers (MSPs). MSPs must change their thinking and embrace end point management, ensuring IT availability, data security, and business continuity. See how MSPs with the right tools and services are well positioned to strengthen customer relationships and grow market share.
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This whitepaper provides an overview of challenges associated with monitoring and management of heterogeneous database environments. Relational database systems (RDBMS) are at the very heart of virtually every enterprise: they power CRM, ERP, e-commerce, billing and other systems. Efficient monitoring, troubleshooting and database performance analysis are essential for the business to stay up 24/7. On the other hand, automated DB diagnostics and management tasks can keep the IT costs under control.
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Spurred on by the increased availability of high-speed data services and wide array of smartphones, many organizations see mobile applications as a way to improve organizational efficiency, increase collaboration, and raise the speed at which business gets done. To get the most out of mobility, organizations need to rethink the technologies, the people, and the processes involved in creating a truly mobile enterprise.
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IT is feeling the pressure to allow users to access sensitive corporate data via their personal mobile phones. Employees want the flexibility to use applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), e-mail and instant messaging not only from within the workplace, but at any time from any device. Yet, with network security and customer privacy at stake, IT has been slow to bow.
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According to The Nielsen Company, some 150 million people in the US will be using smartphones by mid-2011 to view twitter feeds, conduct searches, consult maps and more. People are increasingly using smartphones to get work done too. As long as it’s governed appropriately, workplace use of consumer-oriented smartphones can lower spending, heighten morale and help employees get more done.
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Not too long ago, business support of mobile workers centered on managing the use of a limited number of Windows-based laptops and BlackBerry smartphones. Today mobile phones are ubiquitous for most employees, and IT departments are being asked to provide broad access to networks, databases and critical enterprise applications while they manage, support and figure out how to protect data from theft and security breaches.
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Technology is at a point where organizations must make decisions about where the IT platform future lies. Will existing architectures be sufficient to see a business through the next few years, or will cloud computing—built on the proven approaches of Web services and service-oriented architecture—be a better way forward? By modeling and predicting future states, organizations can make the right decisions. Find out how.
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Low margins, a boom in the managed services sector, and a decreasing reliance on client–server-based infrastructures are drastically changing the business landscape for many traditional IT channel players. This paper assesses the challenges facing the IT channel and describes how IT resellers can transform the growing demand for managed services from a threat into a key opportunity for future business success.
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One area of cloud computing that presents significant opportunity is data protection as a service. However, not every business model for data protection services has an equal potential for success. This paper is intended for managed service providers (MSPs), value-added resellers (VARs), IT solution providers, and system integrators who are offering, or are interested in offering backup and recovery as a service.
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This paper presents a more holistic approach to software quality management. It advocates systematic monitoring and ongoing analysis with an efficient business intelligence (BI) tool instead of occasional audits, which are time-consuming and selective by nature.
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Rich internet application (RIA) technologies in general and Adobe Flex in particular promise richness, usability and productivity exceeding those of today’s Web applications. However, little public information is available on measured results and savings achieved. This paper fills this much needed gap by providing results achieved by Verax Systems in real-life projects and is intended to provide real data.
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Ultimate Software is in a very competitive market. Its continued success is fueled by relentlessly delivering new products and incremental innovation. A few years ago, the company’s strategic initiatives were to evolve of their software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery model and launch new features targeted to medium sized enterprises. Learn how a new product portfolio management (PPM) solution helped Ultimate Software reach its goals.
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If product ideas in the past emerged from the mind of a single inventor, they are now harvested everywhere—from customers, prospects, engineers, support staff, business analysts, bloggers, executives and marketing professionals. Succeeding with good ideas in that environment, and abandoning unworkable ones early on, requires a complete end-to-end product innovation management platform. Find out more.
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Product managers have seen their workloads rise exponentially. Their core assignment—setting out clear specifications for product revisions and innovations—has grown chaotic. What’s missing is a comprehensive repository of requirements, assignments, analyses, and project status that enables coordinated execution by all of the players involved. Find out how to bring that kind of transparency to your development processes.
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Agile software development is swiftly gaining acceptance. But, for the process to succeed, it must be driven by business value at the core. If not, the speed and fluidity agile introduces can actually increase the risk of creating products that miss customer needs and threaten revenue goals. Discover the five high-impact failure areas that emerge as companies implement agile in complex, distributed team environments.
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As you evaluate conferencing solutions for your organization, an important selection consideration should be the overall cost of the solution; both initial and on-going. It is necessary to evaluate the cost of your current conferencing solution as well as whether an on-premise alternative will pay for itself in a reasonable amount of time. Find out how.
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This white paper discusses explanation of benefits (EOB) and electronic remittance advice (ERA – ANSI 835). It also highlights iTech’s automated ERA processing solutions.
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Real-time IT infrastructure promises to deliver services to businesses with the same availability as utilities. Cost reductions will be achieved through virtualization and consolidation. This white paper looks at the business drivers and technology advances that will provide the foundation for manageability of infrastructures across enterprise applications.
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IT managers have to protect the business against malware, keep Internet bandwidth available for legitimate business needs, and enforce acceptable use policies for the human resource department. Managers must also find a balance between allowing reasonable personal Internet use at work and maintaining productivity and concentration in the office. Learn how to deal with the top 10 threats facing these managers.
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IT managers need to establish policies for Web use in the workplace. This paper discusses how Internet bandwidth is a finite and expensive resource that needs protection from spammers, criminals, hackers, time-wasters, and employee misuse. Not only is it expensive and limited but it is a vital business tool. Discover the true cost of Web use and misuse, and learn the steps you can take to reclaim your company’s Internet.
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Business intelligence (BI) is no longer just for back-office analysts. More people are using BI in their daily tasks than ever before. This white paper explains how job scheduling makes data warehousing—the key component in modern BI—more efficient, relevant, and accurate. It also outlines how one company used job scheduling to unify its data warehousing chores, free up IT resources, and increase its BI effectiveness.
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Application delivery has become a priority for virtually all IT organizations. Unfortunately, the majority still struggle with this highly complex task. This handbook can help you to help become better at application delivery by creating and analyzing a framework that you can customize for use in your environment. It also identifies key criteria that IT organizations can use to evaluate alternative solutions.
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Technology has enabled businesses to become highly distributed—whether across a region or around the globe. This paper explores the business imperatives that are driving enterprise IT design today, and presents five key principles chief information officers (CIOs) are using to redesign business infrastructures. It also explains how wide-area network (WAN) solutions can help hold distributed organizations together.
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The amount of data and IT assets stored outside corporate data centers has risen significantly, and IT managers are now looking to consolidate their IT infrastructure. This paper examines the trends toward server consolidation and virtualization, and how wide area network (WAN) optimization can help IT organizations address the challenges of application performance and information availability within these environments.
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In the ever-changing economy, organizations looking to cut costs and drive innovation are turning to co-sourcing as a cost-effective and less risky alternative to outsourcing or offshoring. This white paper explores the primary business benefits of the co-sourcing model and provides key information for evaluation.
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The Linux operating system is free and stable, delivers solid performance, and often has good vendor support. These advantages have allowed it to garner 60 percent of the Web server market, making it popular among Web hosts as well. Yet despite the obvious advantages, Linux is not fully optimized for Web hosts because it was never designed specifically to address the unique requirements for this market. Find out more.
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This guide explores what a whitelist is, the distinction between sender source whitelists and sender address whitelists, the characteristics of a good whitelist, the role of the user in managing a whitelist, and finally the role of the IT administrator in the whitelist management process.
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On January 5, 2009, the American Design Communities presented a document to the US Congress called “Redesigning America’s Future: 10 Design Policy Proposals for the United States of America’s Economic Competitiveness & Democratic Governance.” Indeed, design is gaining importance in every area. This discussion with technologist Elif Tutuk explores how design thinking could be applied to business intelligence (BI).
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Virtualization is a key element of the IT strategy for businesses of all sizes, with a variety of benefits for small and midsized businesses. It helps them to build an IT infrastructure with enterprise-class capabilities and it does so with a form factor—and a return on investment (ROI)—that fits any business. Discover how your business can use virtualization to reduce costs, improve services, and simplify management.
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Virtualization is central to twenty-first-century IT systems, yet many chief information officers fail to understand the benefits it can deliver to the data center. Storage controllers have always offered the ability to carve out pieces of real storage from a large pool and deliver them to a number of hosts, but it is storage virtualization itself that offers improvements that drive operational efficiency. Find out more.
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This white paper explains the importance of an independent, enterprise-wide job scheduling solution for your IT infrastructure. It discusses why you need a single job scheduling tool, the market drivers leading IT professionals to an independent job scheduling solution, the benefits of an independent job scheduling solution, and how it can save your business valuable time, money, and resources while avoiding risk.
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Many companies have invested a lot in their job scheduling environments, but are bogged down by inefficient processes, incompatible systems, and a lack of visibility. Through technology reuse and consolidation, you can reduce the time, money, and resources expended, while scaling to support enterprise-wide capacity. This white paper focuses on job scheduling challenges and presents a solution to upgrade your environment.
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Today’s customers want to enjoy a consistent user experience as they switch between different devices. Given the proliferation of smartphones, tablets, netbooks, social networks, and Web sites, it is not surprising that many companies are extending their business beyond the corporate Web site. Learn the top 10 considerations that companies should be aware of when planning to implement an extended channel strategy.
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Demarc extensions have been a recurring gray area in the telecommunications industry for years. There is often misconception when it comes to who actually performs the Demarc extension. This confusion can lead to finger pointing and eventually a bad reputation for those involved. Understand the issues surrounding the Demarc extension and how they can be resolved from the very beginning.
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Your company needs an approach to server-side application distribution and provisioning that is architected for the cloud and designed for IT, if it’s going to deliver on the business promise of virtualization. Learn about one solution for solution for provisioning and deploying server-side applications in the cloud—or anywhere else.
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Data centers have grown rapidly in size and complexity. At the same time, competitive and economic pressures have made cost control critical. To cut costs and meet service level objectives, organizations of all sizes are initiating projects to simplify IT, consolidate resources, and increase energy efficiency. Discover why companies are turning to virtualization to master these and other data management challenges.
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One of the greatest challenges facing organizations is protecting corporate data. The issues that complicate data protection are compounded by increasing demand for data capacity, and higher service levels. Often these demands are coupled with regulatory requirements and a shifting business environment, which impact infrastructure. IT organizations must meet these demands while maintaining flat budgets. Find out how.
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Unifying development and operations is a critical aspect of enabling a dynamic infrastructure—one that improves service, reduces cost, and manages risk to better meet the evolving challenges of today’s technology, application, and business environments. This white paper introduces a process and product framework to help organizations enable a more dynamic infrastructure for delivery of smarter products and services.
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As companies expand operations into new markets, the percentage of total corporate data in remote offices is increasing. Remote offices have unique backup and recovery requirements in order to support a wide range of applications, and to protect against a wide range of risk factors. Discover solutions that help organizations protect remote data and offer extensive data protection and recovery solutions for remote offices.
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Organizations seeking to align the software delivery process with business strategy and goals are beginning to adopt a collaborative software delivery life cycle. While not always an easy change to make, moving to a collaborative approach has clear benefits for companies and their customers. Learn how three companies improved software quality by following a collaborative approach throughout the software delivery lifecycle.
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Business users have become more technically adept, and they expect more accessibility and flexibility in their business applications. Many have become accustomed to the high standards of customization they encounter on the Web. And they’re demanding a similar experience from the organizations for which they work. Discover tools that enable your employees to contribute substantial strategic value to your organization.
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The demand for business intelligence is increasing at a rapid pace across all industries—more so during tough economic conditions as seen in 2009. Many senior executives are looking to optimize existing business processes that can lead to bottom-line and top-line benefits. This paper presents the different levels of analytical solutions that are required for organizations, with a specific focus on predictive analytics.
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With the boom in sales of smart mobile handsets, the opportunity for developing and selling mobile applications is ever more appealing. But the market is changing and evolving rapidly, with new concepts and technologies vying for attention. Discover why, in order to gain momentum, mobile applications need to have both appealing value for customers and the most appropriate, rapid, and wide-reaching routes to market.
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In February 2009, Quocirca interviewed 800 individuals across eight geographies about their views on, and usage of, enterprise performance management (EPM) tools and processes. The research was repeated in December 2009 and there was a clear improvement in understanding of EPM basics. However, much remains to be done. The overall increase in the EPM sub-indices does not mean there is room for complacency. Find out why.
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As networks, devices, and media converge, telecom companies have increasingly complex catalogs of products and services on offer to customers who are, in turn, becoming more aware that they can switch to other providers. These companies need to find ways to effectively and consistently engage with customers to optimize the entire sales experience and capitalize on competing influences rather than losing out to them.
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Whether it’s for an in-house delivery model or an on-demand model, a business case needs to justify the total value of a solution. This ensures that the selected delivery model will help reduce operational costs and drive continuous value from IT investments. Learn how to properly prepare a business case that includes a total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis to assess both cost impacts and line-of-business impacts.
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The most important consideration for product engineering outsourcing (PEO) is vendor skills. Choosing the right set of skills can help companies achieve business objectives such as reducing time to market or lowering costs. Choosing the wrong set of skills can lead to subpar outcomes and mire companies in regret. Ensuring that your projects are in good hands makes the difference between failure and success. Find out why.
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Digital Britain is the UK government’s strategic plan for the UK’s digital economy. While social inclusion and rights protection are major themes, the plan will also have a significant impact on businesses—encouraging the distribution and virtualization of business functions, and interconnectivity between companies, customers, suppliers, and employees. Learn how to minimize any harmful impact on your business.
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KAMCO Industries, Inc. is an injection molder that serves tier-one and -two suppliers to Honda. After years of using stand-alone solutions and spreadsheets to manage business and production operations, the company was finding it challenging to maintain and support its IT infrastructure. Learn how KAMCO chose a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that helped it increase efficiency and standardize operations.
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CAMACO, a leading seating systems solutions provider, needed to replace its outdated, unmanageable batch-process manufacturing resource planning (MRP) system with a completely integrated MRP/enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution. Learn how the company’s new solution addressed its network issues while reducing its existing burden of high maintenance costs and expensive hardware and software upgrades.
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The electrical power generation, transmission, and distribution system has survived for decades with limited intelligence. But today, independent power producers, green power sources, and new regulations require a smarter grid. Learn how the electric utility landscape has changed, and how Ethernet-based supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems can be used to control power flowing into and out of the grid.
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This paper focuses on identifying the similarities and differences between Oracle Financial Analyzer (OFA) and Hyperion Planning (HP). For users who are migrating, or thinking of migrating, to Hyperion Planning, strategies will be discussed to ensure their existing functionality can be replicated in HP. The paper is aimed at users who are familiar with OFA or similar multidimensional database applications.
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For finance executives, the financial advantages of cloud computing are undeniable. Shifting the costs of hardware and software from a capital investment to an operating expense makes software-as-a-service (SaaS) more affordable, and far more accessible. Learn how SaaS financials tools can free finance executives from the constraints of on-premise solutions, allowing them to concentrate on growth, regulation, and risk.
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The service industry consumes millions of gallons of fuel and expends trillions of pounds of carbon monoxide each year as trucks roll to installation and service locations. Eliminating unnecessary travel is one way service companies can help protect the environment, and meet environmental compliance requirements. Discover a methodology that can help you reduce your fleet’s fuel consumption and carbon monoxide emissions.
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Critical business processes in biotech and pharmaceutical companies involve highly confidential documents that need to be safely accessed by external partners and potential licensees. Poor security measures, based on a traditional view of data security, have led to high-profile security breaches. Discover new ways for life sciences companies to conduct important business securely without being impeded by IT complexity.
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When cyber-criminals stage attacks on businesses with covert malware, spam, and scams that drain employee productivity, users aren’t aware they’ve been victimized. Rich media, open-source platforms, and social-networking sites are vulnerable to these threats. Learn how a hosted Web security and content filtering service intercepts all types of Web-borne attacks.
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Technology rollouts on a nationwide and global scale require technicians to perform onsite work. Though you may have hired a technology rollout Company to manage and deploy these technicians, they ultimately serve as direct representatives of your company. If they are ill-mannered, inexperienced, or unprofessional, it is a direct reflection of your company to your customer and you are faced with the consequences. Thus, understanding the relationship your technology rollout company has with its field technicians is very important. Find out how to intelligently evaluate a technology rollout company to ensure that your deployment is as efficient and cost-effective as possible.
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For managed services providers (MSPs) aiming to serve small and medium-sized businesses, the ability to capture and retain lasting customer relationships is a determining factor for long-term profitability. Only by clearly and consistently communicating your value to your customer can you hope to attain the role of trusted advisor—a position that will help protect you from losing business to lower-priced competitors. Learn how an integrated, offline reporting solution can help ensure that your customers perceive your value in the ways that matter most to all managers within the customer organization.
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A business' success delivering managed services depends on its ability to improve the delivery of effective and efficient services to its customer base. Learn about ways that managed services providers (MSPs) can develop a higher-value business by improving their ability to attract and retain high-quality customers and provide IT services in an effective manner.
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Service companies that want to thrive need to find a better way to deliver services and run their business. Automating IT services is the answer, and it should be the immediate goal of any company that aims to stay in business as market pressures increase. Looking beyond basic automation, becoming a managed services provider (MSP) should be the long-term goal. Discover ways to ensure your service company's survival in today’s competitive IT services market.
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Margins on profitable products and services erode as they become commoditized. And now, the same process is starting to happen to the IT services market. To avoid the commoditization trap and distinguish their services from their competitors, managed services providers (MSPs) need to develop a two-pronged strategy that involves delivering higher-value services that yield greater profit margins, and driving down service delivery costs so they can effectively deliver responsive, tools-based services to compete efficiently in a commoditized market. Find out how.
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Most IT service providers have always and continue to operate in a break/fix service environment. When a customer calls with an issue, the service provider drops everything to fix it. Under these circumstances, service providers have a difficult time forecasting monthly revenues and staffing needs, which has a huge impact on profitability. Add to this the intense competition, excessive customer turnover, low technician utilization rates, and shrinking margins that characterize today‟s market, and the result is IT service providers anxious to find a new way of delivering their services. Learn about innovative IT-as-a-Service initiatives that are defining the new IT value chain of the future.
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With the success of software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based vendors, more applications are being accessed over the Web. Applications once considered too proprietary or mission-critical for SaaS, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), are now being delivered as services. After seeing the increasing rates of SaaS adoption, Nucleus Research decided to examine the user base of SaaS vendor NetSuite. Find out what they learned.
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Nationwide and global multi-site technology rollouts require internal resources beyond just a single point of contact. By understanding the dynamics and configurations of a deployment company’s internal resources, you can be sure that you are getting the most efficient and cost-effective system of methodologies for your project. Get the critical information you need to evaluate a technology rollout company effectively and ensure that you are getting the most efficient and cost-effective implementation system for your technology deployment projects.
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As new products are developed and introduced in the market, it becomes important for manufacturers to know the saleability of these products to further explore the marketing possibilities in the niche user segment. Learn about the Demo/Eval programs that are commonly used by manufacturers to test the usability of their product and also understand some of the basic user requirements that should be offered to enhance saleability.
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When companies have technology rollouts to deploy on a nationwide or global scale, service efficiency is critical. By understanding the details of the Rollout Services Model, they can avoid the potential nightmares of project implementation and increase the chances that projects are completed on time and within budget. Learn how to evaluate a technology rollout company effectively and ensure that you are getting the most efficient and cost-effective implementation system for your technology deployment projects.
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The rapid deployment of nationwide technology rollouts requires well-defined processes, robust management skills, and a unique understanding of how to get the job done. Without a proven technology rollout system, businesses run a high risk of project complications that can result in increased costs, missed deadlines, and an overwhelming burden on internal resources. Learn what a technology rollout system is, how it can lower costs and save time without compromising quality, and what questions to ask a technology rollout company.
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For IT departments drowning in complex and expensive software maintenance chores, the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model can ease the burden. SaaS reduces complexity by outsourcing most of the infrastructure needed to run software applications, and reduces costs by charging only for what is consumed. But you can also adopt a hybrid SaaS model, in which some systems are outsourced and others are kept in-house. Learn more.
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The global economic recession has put immense pressure on companies to cut costs—particularly IT-related expenditure. Companies were often forced to run only a few projects with regulatory impact and immovable deadlines, proceeding against very lean budgets. Recently, key economies such as the US and China have started to show signs of recovery. Learn more about how the recession has had an impact on IT investment.
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Many manufacturers are incorporating embedded systems into their products to meet the growing demand. While this approach offers exciting opportunities for innovation, it also adds a level of complexity to products that have zero tolerance for bugs and must beat the competition to market. But companies that successfully address these challenges are seeing higher profitability—in spite of the current economy. Find out why.
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Yes—process manufacturers do face extraordinary business challenges. You need to effectively respond to market imbalances, supplier failure, and increased regulation and quality requirements. You also need an IT backbone specifically designed for process manufacturing—integrating supply chain planning, product lifecycle management (PLM), and enterprise asset management (EAM). Find out how to adapt to the “new normal.”
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For many consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies, the environment is too complex to implement a new business process without upgrading the IT systems that support that process. Taking a consumer approach to upgrading can help. You need to seek out solutions that fit your CPG environment, can keep up with continual innovation, and more. But you always need to be thinking ahead. Learn more about developing an IT roadmap.
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Calculating the total cost of ownership (TCO) of an Internet protocol (IP) telephony system is complicated. And you need to know the return on investment (ROI). But knowing the TCO doesn’t make it easy to figure out the ROI—because the benefits of IP private branch exchange (PBX) aren’t easy to quantify. You can, however, get an idea of your ROI by knowing 10 ways a new IP phone system can repay the money you spend on it.
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Formally defining, effectively retaining, and successfully archiving e-mail and other electronic business records is one of the most important tasks facing many organizations today. Learn how to quickly and cost-effectively preserve, protect, and produce legally compliant e-mail and other electronically stored information (ESI) in anticipation of litigation and regulatory audits, with an e-discovery compliance program.
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Online spam campaigns have become more sophisticated and precisely targeted. Spammers routinely disseminate millions of fraudulent e-mail messages to control legions of employee computers and connect them into botnets which sap bandwidth and productivity. Learn how implementing a hosted anti-spam service in your company can provide multi-layered protection against spam, improve employee productivity, and lower costs.
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Today’s mobile software companies face a daunting challenge: How can they achieve quality while getting to market swiftly? After all, speed is king in the mobile market. The trade-off between speed and quality in mobile software development is an illusion—or should be. Get a closer look at the situation with a framework that presents a way to use quality assurance (QA) processes to accelerate development.
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The crucial interoperability of wireless network devices built around the 802.11 standard is threatened by the advent of faster technologies. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is trying to cope by developing the 802.11n standard—but it’s still in draft form. Meanwhile, how can manufacturers cope with the confusion surrounding the future of 802.11? Get an outline of the situation.
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Efforts to improve the efficiency and maturity of a quality assurance (QA) or test organization have largely been academic exercises, and difficult to apply to real-world software development environments. Today, with newer methods such as the Testing Maturity Model (TMM), it’s easier to assess, implement, and improve test processes. Learn about fresh techniques for assessing the effectiveness of QA organizations.
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Stand-alone learning management systems (LMS) often lack scalability, reliability, and secure access—and the interfaces to offer these features. But new development strategies, standards, and tools can move LMS into the “next generation.” If you’re an independent software vendor (ISV), an engineer of educational software products, or the chief learning officer of a corporate university, this info will interest you.
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Consultant Paul Mitnick chose the Training Partner learning management system (LMS) to help a real estate firm consolidate its learning management program. In addition to a breakdown of the steps involved in his LMS software selection process, you’ll also discover how the LMS implementation went—including the testing and timing involved in ensuring that all data was in the new LMS before it was accessed by users.
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Standards can play an important part in enterprise learning, from the development of learning content to how it interacts with database management applications—specifically learning management systems (LMSs) and learning content management systems (LCMs). This document provides an overview of the standards that affect learning technologies and advice on how to work with vendors of standards-affected technologies.
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Companies dealing with industry or government regulations are often required to meet specific standards for system security, audit trails, and verification of electronic documents. With electronic data increasingly replacing printed documentation, new strategies are needed for dealing with regulatory compliance. Discover how these regulations can affect the use of learning management systems (LMSs) for employee training.
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Is a total ban on workplace social networking a good idea? Companies should take more calculating points of view and look at how to turn the negative effects of social networking into positive effects. Employers can manage employee social networking to maximize the positives. The strategy combines employee education, well-thought-out acceptable use policies (AUPs), and—critically—effective Web filtering technology.
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Hosted services can offer a sound solution for small and medium businesses requiring safe and reasonably priced platforms. Applying the same concept at a higher level could result in hosting and services providers leasing or renting virtual real estate for the services they provide in order to lower their initial investments or subsequent upgrade costs. Learn more about “hosted hosting,” the new breed of hosting services.
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You know your organization’s need for stronger IT security can’t wait any longer. Regulatory compliance and the risk of a data breach are forcing you to implement more stringent security procedures. But password problems still consume time and money. Though the benefits of single sign-on (SSO) and strong authentication are significant, deploying an IT security solution can be daunting. Get tips on how to go about it.
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For many projects, the transition from initiative to production is chaotic and lacks a pragmatic framework for ongoing support. Inheritance Engineering offers a means for carrying out change in a reliable fashion and retaining as much value as possible throughout the life of the software. Unfortunately, this does not occur for a variety of reasons. Find out what those reasons are, and how to address software maintenance.
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For midsize firms seeking more value in a shorter period of time, a rapid enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation may be the way to go. If you’re unsure this is the right choice, you need to consider some important factors. The best candidates tend to be ERP solution first-timers. Learn more about how to work closely with ERP partner vendors for a rapid—and successful—ERP implementation.
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The small to midsize market for enterprise applications is already growing. Small to midsize businesses (SMBs) are looking for practical solutions that offer full capabilities at a quick return on investment (ROI). Vendors responding to SMB requirements now offer solutions with rapid implementation, Microsoft Office integration, and mobile support. Find out more about what enterprise application vendors are offering—and what you should be looking for.
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To compete in today’s economy, you need enterprise-size IT infrastructure and reach—but at a midsize cost. To do this, you need to find an IT community that understands your business processes and objectives. The Oracle Accelerate program offers a way to find a software vendor and local partner organizations that can provide you with the IT infrastructure, the features and functions, and the expertise. Learn more.
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Why would a company choose to migrate its development tools? And if the migration is decided upon, how can this be done easily and effectively? Get answers to these questions, and explore the concerns and issues surrounding migration of your development environment, using IBM’s Rational Application Developer (RAD) as an example of a current tool and MyEclipse Blue Edition from Genuitec as an example of a new tool.
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Most document security companies concern themselves solely with the prevention of unauthorized access to content. Online publishers, on the other hand, struggle to find a balance between document security and a satisfactory reader experience. A new approach to document security can give online content publishers the ability to protect their content without adding unnecessary complexity to document access. Learn more.
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The pervasiveness of malware on the Internet creates more opportunities for mixing and matching dangerous content than previously possible. A converged threat is a combination of viruses, spyware, phishing, spam, and other attempts to exploit vulnerabilities. But you can’t sever all ties with the Internet—you need better protection methods to head off potential threats before they reach their targets. Learn more.
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The increasing use of virtualization allowed managed hosting providers to reduce costs by sharing infrastructure between customers, creating the earliest versions of what is now known as cloud computing. Platforms managed by specialists provide higher service levels, greater ease of secure access, and more manageable costs than many companies can achieve internally. Discover more about Europe’s managed hosting market.
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IT departments rarely have the luxury of spare capacity or sufficient knowledge of all the products and technologies that the rest of the organization expects. However, IT is an integral part of most companies, and supporting diverse or specialized technologies and understanding their impact on the business is necessary. Organizations not only need third parties—they need them to be focused and cost-effective. Learn more.
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Unencrypted communication between users’ workstations and the backend SAP servers is a significant vulnerability to your SAP environment. This can put the confidential data inside your SAP systems and your entire business activity at risk—and have a negative impact on your customers. Find out how to reduce business risks and improve audit results through encrypted communication and two-factor user authentication for SAP.
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Product activation is a popular approach for securing software licenses. However, software developers need to understand all the requirements for a capable activation system, from the license models they’ll need to support, to how to deal with the corner-case customer environments. Learn about the obvious, and not-so-obvious, issues software developers need to consider as they select a product activation system.
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Software vendors have used license management for many years. Older approaches, such as key-file-based licensing or dongles, do have a number of drawbacks for both the vendor and the user. Product activation solves many of these problems, so is gaining broad acceptance. Learn more about product activation and licensing management, and why modern product activation systems are superior to other techniques.
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Aligning IT with business objectives has long been a mantra of corporate directives. But organizations often fall short of publishing quality documents and assembling plans that meet business needs—never mind providing the necessary details to ensure thorough infrastructure planning. Don’t focus too much on technology—find out how to better manage the IT planning process and how to overcome its challenges.
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Tape drives and tape drive backups are expensive, time-consuming, and unreliable. Tape drives can cost from $350 to thousands of dollars (and the tapes aren’t free either). Plus, tapes are notoriously failure-prone and vulnerable to environmental degradation—and tape drive installation is expensive. Find out the other reasons why your tape backup system might not be an effective data storage and security strategy.
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SysTrust is an assurance service developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) and the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants (CICA). SysTrust Certification is critical for any CPA, bank, lender, or financial institution subject to a data security system audit. Failure to meet industry standards can result in fines of up to $1,000 (USD) per infraction. Learn how you can protect yourself.
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The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) regulates the storage and management of corporate financial data for all Registered Public Accounting Firms and many publicly held companies. Which SOX regulations affect data backup in your company—and how can a remote data backup solution help you comply? Find out, with an explanation of various sections of the SOX act, matched with key remote data backup functionality.
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A remote data backup solution can be compliant with almost any international, federal, or state data protection regulation—and can be compliant with the common caveats of most data security laws by providing functionality like data encryption and secure media control. And, as some regulations require files to be archived for several years, you can create a routine that archives files you select for backup and storage.
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Backing up critical data on an external drive provides only minimal protection against one type of data loss: hard drive failure and nothing else. External drives are easily damaged, lost, or stolen. Portable drive backups are rarely taken off-site and are insecure, time-consuming, and limited. And when an external drive holding key data no longer works, what will you do? There’s a better way to back up data. Learn more.
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Sadly, a division exists between business analysts and IT—they often perform separate data-related duties. There are benefits for companies that unite business analytics with business intelligence. But the adaptive information cycle—a model linking the center-out approach of traditional data warehousing to the emergent prototyping typifying today’s analytic environment—is not as complex as it may sound. Learn more.
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Backing up your critical data on compact disc (CD) or digital versatile disc (DVD) is risky business. Disks can be easily damaged by routine use or natural disaster, lost, or stolen. CD and DVD backups are rarely taken offsite, and are not secure, automated, or full featured. Discover 10 reasons why you need to find a better data backup solution for your business, and avoid the endless expense of backing up on CD and DVD.
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A number of bargain-basement data backup services are entering the market with a barrage of advertising. Some people may make business decisions based on price alone, but when it comes to vital needs like secure data, cheaper is not better. Would you buy the cheapest parachute? Then why settle for the cheapest data backup solution? Learn more about data backup technologies and why you should avoid cheap alternatives.
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Discover a framework for crafting a software-as-a-service (SaaS) strategy in your company. Examine key concerns such as data integrity, maintaining compliance, and ensuring proper process management, as well as approaches to help maximize your return on investment (ROI). A SaaS solution for your enterprise resource planning (ERP) or accounting system might be your ticket to improved business and application performance.
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Specialty Products needed to address several warehouse and manufacturing management issues, including real-time inventory tracking. As it looked for a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, the company also wanted one-step order processing. Learn how the new ERP system, featuring a virtual shop front and electronic data interchange (EDI) capabilities, meets the company’s business and warehouse operating needs.
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Dorcy, a global distributor of flashlights and batteries, manufactures its product line in Taiwan, China, and Korea, and repackages products in two US warehouses to ship to major retailers. With 2,500 items in its inventory—approaching $12 million (USD) at any given time—Dorcy needs a warehouse management system (WMS) that automates reports and provides real-time inventory data. Learn about the solution it uses.
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With traditional paper-based invoicing, the cash conversion process is lengthy and very inefficient. Today’s pressures to be accountable mean that you must improve your financial systems to provide timely and accurate financial information. Electronic data interchange (EDI) can minimize the delays on payment and address the lack of access to process information. Learn more about improving your invoice and payment cycle.
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IT has long been seen as one of the best ways to address the challenges of the business environment. Yet the complexity and rigidity of IT infrastructure keep IT from fully serving the business. IT could better help serve your customers and reduce business costs if it were provided as a service. Find out more about IT service management standards and best practices, with a focus on SAP’s approach to IT optimization.
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IT managers realize that service-oriented architecture (SOA) projects are no longer an “if”—they’re a “when.” SOA can help achieve your number-one goal: aligning IT with business. If you’re in the consideration and planning stage, you’ll need some practical strategies for a business-driven SOA deployment. Find out how packaged solutions can accelerate SOA deployments, ease the burden of SOA management, and more.
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To many managers, the words “business process management” (BPM) conjure up images of complexity—months of planning, meetings, and more meetings. While BPM can be complex, it needn’t be. You can move quickly to implement process automation for your company. Learn what to consider and act on as you contemplate how to automate your business processes and increase competitive advantage and customer loyalty.
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In 2008, botnets were responsible for 90 percent of spam. The ever-changing nature of botnets makes them hard to detect and even harder to defend against—and these compromised “robot” computer networks don’t seem to be going away in the near future. Learn about new and sophisticated botnets, how they can affect your business network, and the steps you can take to protect your company from a botnet attack.
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American Refrigeration Supplies (ARS) is a wholesaler of refrigeration and heating equipment, parts, and supplies. In a difficult economy, there is little margin for error with respect to how ARS manages its clients and vendors. Because a growing number of product vendors are using electronic data interchange (EDI), ARS was pushed to upgrade its distribution processes. Learn about the EDI solution the company chose.
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IT has long been one of the best ways to address business challenges. Yet significant obstacles at the level of IT infrastructure stand in the way. Siloed IT operations and rigid IT management processes can impede business agility. When IT partners with the business to act less as a technology provider and more as a service provider, business objectives can be achieved more efficiently and cost-effectively. Find out how.
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Information management software from Business Objects, an SAP company, can be used for SAP data migration projects—either for upgrades from one version of SAP to a newer one, or from other environments to SAP. In practice, many considerations that apply to SAP migrations are the same as those pertaining to non-SAP environments. But a few requirements are particular to an SAP implementation. Find out what they are.
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Nowadays, it’s easy to spend nearly as much time trying to make the pieces of your supply chain work together as you actually spend working. Managing disparate systems and solving communication issues create challenges that keep your business-to-business (B2B) solutions from working in sync. Find out how integrating the technology, business processes, and communication of your entire business community can help.
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Leading companies are increasing the percentage of perfect orders and reducing costs by exchanging documents with trading partners via electronic data interchange (EDI). Diverse trading partner capabilities and high-cost value-added network (VAN) fees, however, can pose barriers to even greater success. Learn about a solution that can help remove those barriers and let you exchange data regardless of format.
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While an electronic data interchange (EDI) initiative improves supply chain communication and speeds up the exchange of goods and services, it is a complicated undertaking. To get started, learn how Inovis Professional Services array of consulting and training offerings, including assessments and technology planning, can help you implement mission-critical integrated solutions efficiently and cost-effectively.
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Early in 2004, software service provider Vermont Information Processing (VIP) saw an opportunity to help beverage producers drive down costs, improve productivity, and increase the accuracy of their business processes through automated supply chain communication solutions—or electronic data interchange (EDI) solutions. Find out why VIP chose Inovis’ suite of EDI solutions, and how it and its clients are benefiting.
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Achieving perfection in all of its transactions is important for shipping companies like Yantian—perfection that can only come with automation. While Yantian uses industry-standard electronic data interchange (EDI) to exchange transaction documents, it must accommodate the wide variety of media, formats, and protocols shippers use. Find out how Yantian used a server solution to simplify its trading partner management.
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Tandy Brands designs, manufactures, and markets fashion accessories for the whole family. With five years of success using the Inovis TrustedLink solution to trade via electronic data interchange (EDI) with 80 retailers, Tandy was mandated by Wal-Mart to use the Internet to do business. Find out how the company integrated its existing solution with another one from Inovis to satisfy Wal-Mart’s demands—and save money.
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Electronic connections with corporate customers determine much of a bank’s competitive differentiation and cost structure. But many banks are held back by outdated file transfer systems, which make it difficult to reliably connect to clients and rapidly deliver new services. Learn how using a managed file transfer platform can help banks simplify data transfers, lower costs, and deliver compelling services to customers.
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The need to transmit documents securely to business partners or within your own company is increasing rapidly. Critical, time-sensitive documents need to be secure and auditable, and delivery must be guaranteed. Learn how the Inovis BizManager business-to-business (B2B) gateway solution can help your company achieve a standardized, synchronized, and streamlined exchange of information, both internally and externally.
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The ability to securely exchange information with trading partners is vital to your success. And while the type of information varies by industry, the goal is the same: standardized, synchronized, streamlined exchange of information across the trading community. Learn how Inovis BizManager provides direct, secure data exchange, and can reduce the time, cost, and effort of fulfilling electronic communication requirements.
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Designed for the IBM System i and iSeries platforms, Inovis’ BizManager400 provides secure managed file transfer of critical business documents like purchase orders, advance ship notices, and invoices. BizManager400can also serve as a single business-to-business (B2B) gateway for trading partner connectivity, community management, integrated mapping, and integration. Find out about the key capabilities of BizManager400.
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Part of the BizManager product suite, BizLink is an enterprise-level electronic data interchange (EDI) solution and business-to-business (B2B) gateway. It’s designed for secure managed file transfer, regardless of disparate data types, transports, and connectivity methods. Find out how Bizlink can protect private data, and simplify the management of a complex community of external partners and internal organizations.
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Big Lots, the largest closeout retailer in the United States (US), needed a way to manage vendors, and get its products to stores as quickly as possible. The company chose Inovis Partner Performance Management—an on-demand, service-oriented architecture (SOA)-based solution—as its supplier management system. Learn how this solution helped Big Lots share data with vendors, reduce errors, and improve its supply chain.
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Fashion retailer Anchor Blue was looking for a way to increase supply chain visibility, reduce costs, and shorten the time required to get products onto store shelves. The company implemented the Inovis AS2 software solution to consolidate data from multiple partners into a single view. Learn how the new electronic data interchange (EDI) system helped reduce transaction costs and get merchandise into stores faster.
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Oxford University Press (OUP), the largest university press in the world, publishes over 4,500 books per year. OUP has long used electronic data interchange (EDI) for inbound orders, invoices, and credit and delivery notes. Learn why incorporating a value-added network (VAN) to its existing EDI software helped OUP improve its warehouse efficiency, boost trading partner adoption, and reduce annual VAN costs by 60 percent.
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Mission Rubber’s customers—the manufacturer’s representatives and distributors it sells through—began insisting on the use of electronic data interchange (EDI) for all transactions. The company wanted a reliable supplier that could provide cost-effective EDI translation and document exchange functionality. Find out why Mission Rubber finds its EDI solution is simple to set up, manage, and use—and how the company benefits.
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As EXEX Jewelry began to grow, the company’s founder realized her existing system of tracking transactions couldn’t keep pace. And increasingly, large retailers demanded that all transactions be completed via electronic data interchange (EDI) and that product information be uploaded to a centralized, third-party repository. Find out how EXEX has improved efficiency and increased product data accuracy with an EDI solution.
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Milwaukee Electric Tool, in business for 85 years, was using an electronic data interchange (EDI) solution that had been outsourced at very high cost. When the company chose a new EDI solution, the focus of the conversion was on reducing costs while improving accuracy and increasing trading partner adoption. Learn more about how the company put EDI order processing back in-house and reduced cost per order by 86 percent.
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Deluxe Media Services supplies the world’s best-known film, music, and games companies with solutions for manufacturing and distributing packaged media. But in each country where Deluxe has operations, it was using a different electronic data interchange (EDI) provider and value-added network to exchange critical business documents. Learn about the problems this caused, and the EDI solution Deluxe chose to solve them.
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Dole manages a diverse network of global shipping, manufacturing, and sales operations. It needed a system that would enable connectivity with all its global operations and support internal systems. Dole looked for a provider to take on its external and internal connectivity needs. Find out about the data exchange solution that provides Dole with connectivity along with transaction tracking, auditing, and management.
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Web-borne malware is now more common than malware entering a company through e-mail. The number of Web sites carrying malware increased by 400 percent in 2008. This can cause serious issues for your business. You need to proactively protect your networks both by instituting acceptable usage policies for employee Web usage and by implementing a solution that can effectively combat these malware intrusions. Find out how.
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Unplanned e-mail outages or even routine maintenance can cause huge disruption, not only to your business, but also to your customers and partners. What issues do organizations face regarding e-mail outages? Learn about the different e-mail continuity solutions available and how a hosted e-mail continuity service can provide a cost-effective, high-availability e-mail solution with minimal deployment efforts required.
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With limited IT budgets and resources, how can small to midsized companies effectively and affordably manage and secure their digital assets? Creative companies, with assets that are almost entirely digital, are especially concerned with effective data management. Explore options that can save time and money—and provide your creative companies with creative solutions for solving your digital file management problems.
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Although students at the University of Nevada’s Reno campus were generally respectful of the campus’s computers and IT policies, entertainment or malicious software often appeared on computer hard drives. This made machines less stable or even disabled them entirely. To combat the problem of computer network security, UNR found a solution that enables automatic shutdown time and safer shared computer workstations.
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Schools often need to deploy computers that offer a limited feature set, as limiting a computer’s functions is important to protecting its purpose and keeping students focused. To lock down student workstation functionality, Newburgh Enlarged City School District finally implemented a solution to control system settings and application functionality. Learn more about the features and functionality of this workstation access solution.
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Oklahoma City University spent a significant amount of money putting the latest computer technology and software in its classrooms. But teachers noticed students weren’t always using these learning tools appropriately. After installing teacher management software, instructors have total control of classroom computers and no longer have to deal with classroom distractions, such as games and instant messaging. Learn more.
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Student workstations at the University of Kentucky were constantly going down due to user activity—both innocent and malicious. IT couldn’t repair all the workstations immediately, so many students had to wait to use a computer. To reduce computer downtime and eliminate workstation damage, the system administrator installed a solution that prevented workstation drift and helped ensure desktop security. Find out how.
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Lewis and Clark Community College in Illinois (US) was having a number of technology problems in its classrooms, leading to student attention issues. After installing a new software solution, teachers can now share their screens with students, provide remote assistance to students from a central console, and monitor classroom screens to ensure students are on task. Find out more about this workstation management solution.
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More and more students in classes at a senior high school were using USB drives to bring applications into the classroom. Because allowing unauthorized programs to run on workstations presents a number of serious challenges to teachers, the school needed to find a way to stop this behavior. Learn about the solution the school used to block distractive software and ensure its computers were used for their intended purpose.
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The IT landscape has grown into a complex system of servers, networks, locations, products, and processes. Making all these systems work efficiently and securely has become an enormous task. This four-chapter e-book can help you identify the issues surrounding the design, control, and management of jobs, and give you insight into best practices for an efficient, maintainable job scheduling and workload automation system.
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In December 2008, Advanced Systems Concepts commissioned Forrester Consulting to examine the potential return on investment (ROI) that companies may realize by deploying ActiveBatch, an IT job scheduling and management solution. Learn about the financial impact in a midsized financial services company with global operations, in which ActiveBatch is used to manage its mission-critical job scheduling environment.
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The Internet allows us to access information from anywhere in the world. However, access to documents is a barrier to many remote workers and travelers who rely on people in the office to retrieve files from cabinets and fax or e-mail those documents. Learn how document management systems (DMSs) can help create, manage, audit, and retain documents in a company-wide, controlled, and remotely accessible filing structure.
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Is it is possible for small and medium businesses (SMBs) to achieve levels of application integration historically reserved for large enterprises with deep IT pockets? Duplication of data can be eliminated with the right electronic document management system (EDMS). Discover how an EDMS can be integrated with other core business applications to replace paper files and documents, driving efficiency and managing IT costs.
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Limited resources dictate that most midsize companies must support business continuity at the lowest cost and without putting additional pressure on scarce IT resources. But business continuity is more of a critical success factor than ever before. Customers won’t tolerate a lack of service availability. Midsize companies must find a way to ensure maximum business continuity, and reduce downtime—and costs. Learn more.
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A strong identity management platform plays dual roles: gatekeeper and guardian of business intelligence (BI) and data. Midsize businesses can’t operate effectively without the ability to control access to their networks and business systems. And, many midsize companies must report on this information for compliance purposes. Learn about the factors driving midsize companies toward stronger identity management systems.
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For years, SEM Products Inc.—manufacturer of interior and exterior auto body repair and refinishing products—was managing its business with two software systems and various manual processes. As the business grew, it became clear that these systems were lacking in data accessibility and overall functionality. Learn about the enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution SEM now uses for improved order entry functionality.
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While companies have long seen their stores of data as valuable corporate assets, how they manage those stores varies enormously. Today, however, new government regulations require that companies retain and control information for long periods of time. Find out what IT managers are doing to meet these new regulatory requirements, and learn about solutions for storing vast quantities of data for the lowest possible cost.
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A highly available IT infrastructure is a critical success factor for businesses in today’s fast moving and “always on” economy. But the traditional approach to building high availability infrastructure is expensive to implement and rarely meets user’s service level expectations. Learn how technologies available in the Oracle Database 11g can help you avoid costly downtime and recover quickly from unavoidable failures.
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Bollé, a midsized distributor of sunglasses and other products to the Australian and New Zealand markets, sources both locally and from overseas. Inefficiencies resulting from a lack of integration between finance and inventory—and non-existent system security—forced Bollé to review its systems. After implementing PRONTO-Xi, the company achieves better than 99.5 percent order dispatch accuracy. Discover more benefits.
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IT spending is often an issue for companies, but in difficult economic times it’s even more important to see what benefit IT can bring to the business. But IT investments are most effective when they improve business performance. Find out the degree to which organizations in the United Kingdom (UK) understand what IT is doing for their businesses, and in particular how some companies measure this and benefit from it.
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Monitoring, measuring, and reporting on the financial health of a company is a basic need that requires effective tools and processes to optimize the end result. Underpinning this is the requirement for planning capabilities, using scenario and what-if analysis with simulations and other forward-looking capabilities. The new primary research presented in this report shows that most organizations still have much to do.
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As you implement a virtualized environment, knowing how to monitor and maintain them becomes yet another challenge. Monitoring network and application traffic in an environment containing one-to-many relationships between physical hardware devices and virtual application servers presents a number of concerns. Learn about the traffic flow in virtual environments, and the various visibility options and their ramifications.
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Integrative software as a service (SaaS) business systems are a way of transforming your finance operations. SaaS can position finance as the nexus of standardized, real-time information. Finance executives should investigate SaaS solutions and providers, so that finance and IT can work together to enable a cost-effective transformation of finance to a stronger leadership role and improve finance’s value to your company.
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With an uncertain future, if you want to continue growing you must step away from “business as usual” and focus on keeping operations lean and efficient. Top-level executives have directed managers to restructure and cut costs. For chief information officers (CIOs), restructuring often means consolidating IT resources to eliminate redundancy. But today, managers must look past the numbers and evaluate long-term benefits.
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The Internet creates new opportunities for mischief—and new challenges for managers. How do you balance individual access with the overall good of the business? What’s the right balance between monitoring and blocking? Learn about a Web security solution that can allow you to monitor and enforce your Internet usage policies, bringing site monitoring and filtering together with anti-virus and anti-spyware protection.
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Server-based computing has been seen at best as a way to provide those within highly task-based environments with a controlled desktop environment. However, changes in software, hardware, security, and management systems are driving the shift toward server-based computing being suitable for a larger proportion of a company’s user base. Learn how client-side computing can be more tightly controlled yet provide flexibility.
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Network-centric operations (NCO) provide the ability to leverage information networks to generate a more dynamic and agile decision-making space. A fundamental enabler is service-orientated architecture (SOA). The use of industry-standard IT architectures helps ensure that systems can be provisioned rapidly, shared as appropriate, and give the flexibility and response times needed within such challenging environments.
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Networked printers and multifunction peripherals often require a high level of support and manual intervention. Secure remote monitoring platforms reduce device downtime by automating service alerts and meter reading, and providing proactive toner replenishment. Users benefit from improved device uptime, and manufacturers and their service partners can build proactive service relationships that can drive customer loyalty.
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Given today’s economic climate, companies are looking to create more value by reducing risk and saving costs. As companies increasingly rely on data networks encompassing an ever-growing range and number of internet protocol (IP)-enabled devices and applications, they need to more effectively administer and manage these assets—they can no longer take the management of their IP networks for granted.
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As energy resources become scarcer and more expensive, electrical efficiency is a more important performance factor in the specification and selection of large uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems. There are three subtle but crucial factors that can affect the cost of operating a UPS system. Sadly, these factors are often unrecognized. Find out what they are, as well as common errors in evaluating UPS efficiency.
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Common methods for monitoring the data center environment date from the days of centralized mainframes, and include such practices as walking around with thermometers. But as data centers continue to evolve with distributed processing and server technologies that drive up power and cooling demands, you must examine the environment more closely. Monitoring equipment isn’t enough—learn how to better manage your data center.
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Blade servers have a major advantage over traditional ones—improving processing ability while using less power per server. But, with their smaller footprint, blades can be much more densely packed, resulting in racks that use up to 20 times the electrical power and generate up to 20 times the heat. This can stress power and cooling system capability. Learn how to create a power and cooling strategy with these guidelines.
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In some circumstances, the air surrounding IT equipment can be harmful to internal electronic components and lead to failure and downtime. Reliance on precision cooling solutions to maintain the proper humidity level in a computer room or data center doesn’t always assure proper humidity levels at the IT equipment air intake. Learn more about humidity, its effects, and its management in computer rooms and data centers.
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Avoidable mistakes made when installing cooling systems and racks in data centers or network rooms compromise availability and increase costs. These flaws create hot spots, decrease efficiency, and reduce cooling capacity. Although facilities operators are often held accountable for cooling problems, many problems are caused by improper deployment of IT equipment. Learn more about these mistakes and about simple remedies.
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Data center electrical efficiency is rarely planned or managed. The unfortunate result is that most data centers waste substantial amounts of electricity. Today, it is both possible and prudent to plan and measure data center efficiency. In addition to reducing electrical consumption, efficiency improvements can bring higher IT power densities. Learn how to describe, measure, and evaluate data center efficiency.
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Perimeter computer-room air handlers and central air-handling units have been used to cool data centers since the launch of the mainframe. But as rack power grew, air delivery and heat removal challenges appeared. Row-based designs address issues of proper heat removal and cold air supply—and bring energy-efficiency advantages. Learn more about row-based solutions and the benefits they can deliver to your data center.
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The new web-borne threats attacking business networks are more intense and sophisticated than ever. Methods using rich media, web 2.0 collaboration tools, and a host of other technologies expose networks to a new breed of web security threats. Find out what the latest web security threats are, including the risks and business impact these threats represent, and understand the advantages of hosted security solutions.
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How much time do you waste juggling multiple applications or searching for documents instead of focusing on your customers and prospects? Salesforce.com and Google, two software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers, have teamed up to bring together Web-based business applications that can streamline communication and collaboration. Find out how to take advantage of the benefits of SaaS to meet more of your business needs.
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Guardian Management had a clear vision for its business: shift emphasis from real-estate management to real-estate investment, and expand throughout the western United States. But Guardian’s technology infrastructure didn’t support these goals, so the company embarked on comprehensive infrastructure optimization. Discover why the new infrastructure is more available and reliable—and how it’s fueling business productivity.
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Coordinating all shipping processes—from inbound to outbound freight—can be a logistics headache in a global economy—especially if you don’t make the most of all a transportation management system (TMS) has to offer. One director of logistics found that a web-based TMS solution resulted in a 10 percent decrease in the number of carriers, with a 15 percent increase in carrier load factors. Learn more about the benefits.
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Today’s executives have more challenges and concerns than ever, from compliance to use of technology. To thrive and ultimately excel within a competitive landscape, an organization must have a technology framework capable of meeting today’s marketplace requirements while positioning the company for future growth and challenges. Find out how to better leverage technology investments and become a best-run business.
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Want to know more about distributed agile best practices for software development projects? Find out about the challenges and lessons learned from this implementation of distributed agile for teams distributed across US, Europe, and India. Discover how this large, globally distributed project for a large telecom vendor realized such benefits as better collaboration, higher quality product, and on-time delivery.
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Euclid Insurance needed to allow clients and carriers to securely transfer sensitive data without straining the company’s IT resources or forcing use of cumbersome encryption keys. Euclid standardized its data security with an online data storage solution. Find out about the benefits, including secure online file sharing and collaboration; auditable document access for regulatory compliance; and lower cost of operations.
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In a global survey of senior managers in various functions from 17 industries, 61 percent say IT’s primary mission today is that of reducing costs and boosting productivity. But the IT mission is changing: nearly 70 percent of the same executives say that within three years IT’s main role will be to enable revenue growth. Learn more about how this shift is expected to happen, and how to manage it in your organization.
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Virtualization of system resources aboard x86 servers has become a de facto component of modern computing. So hardware and software vendors have begun to consider its impact on the architectural design of their products and the go-to-market models they use. Find out how virtualization can offer companies cost-savings for existing infrastructure, and new deployments that can be architected to leverage virtualization.
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The Delphi technique—drawing wise counsel from senior and experienced software developers—can help you prepare estimates for software development projects. With this method of software estimation, project specifications are given to a few experts, depending on their availability. Learn about the essential steps involved in this software estimation methodology for more accurate estimates of software development effort.
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The conventional unit of measurement for software size is the point. Unfortunately, the point-based measurement system fails to account for many of the complexities of software development. This paper proposes software size units (SSUs) as an alternative to points, defines their component elements, and explains how to use SSUs for more accurate software estimations and easier productivity assessments.
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While many software professionals know one or more software sizing techniques—most have a reasonable understanding of function point analysis (FPA) or use case point techniques—they’re often stymied when it comes to making a real-life estimate. Learn a methodology that can help you make realistic estimates, including best- and worst-case scenarios that you can use to make pricing and delivery commitments to clients.
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Project management tools for software development should include a broad range of functionality. Project teams must be able to estimate the scope and duration of each project, divide work into components and tasks; provide quality assurance; and generate detailed performance metrics. Find out how many project management solutions are missing the mark, and learn what to look for when choosing a solution of your own.
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Virtualization software reduces total cost of ownership (TCO) in server environments and provides almost immediate return on investment (ROI). TCO analysis should take a holistic view of all software and hardware costs, giving a better view of technology purchases and where new efficiencies can be made. Learn how to apply a TCO model to virtualization projects, and reduce the costs of operating a server environment.
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Organizations that want a sustainable competitive advantage need to reduce infrastructure costs, respond faster to business needs, and increase the consistency and predictability of operations. Adopting virtualization infrastructure—the combination of server, storage, and networking virtualization technologies—is essential to achieving these goals. Find out how virtualization can help you decrease costs and more.
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If you’re not up to speed on the key benefits of software asset management (SAM) solutions, this overview can help. Additionally, you’ll learn about the areas where an SAM solution can deliver the most tangible, quantifiable cost savings to your company. You’ll also learn how to calculate the potential return on investment (ROI) on an SAM solution in order to present senior management with a compelling business case.
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Many organizations do a poor job of measuring the business value of their IT investments. Simple financial metrics are not good enough. But there are a number of consistent, repeatable, and credible measurement methodologies that hold both business users and IT departments accountable. Compare four methodologies, and learn how adding one of them to your overall governance framework can improve your IT investment returns.
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System planning is the Achilles’ heel of a data center physical infrastructure project. Planning mistakes can propagate through later deployment phases, resulting in delays, cost overruns, wasted time, and a compromised system. These troubles can be eliminated by viewing system planning as a data flow model, with sequenced tasks that progressively transform and refine data from initial concept to final design. Learn more.
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The average power consumed by an enclosure in a data center is about 1.7 kilowatts (kWs), but the maximum power that can be obtained by filling a rack with available high density servers, such as blade servers, is over 20 kW. Find out about the power density values of current and new data centers, and learn practical approaches to creating strategies for deploying high-density computing, with limitations and benefits.
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IT management is faced with the daunting task of turning complex data into actionable information that supports an organization’s business strategy. IT management is also responsible for ensuring the availability and performance of mission-critical applications. Discover how to manage the IT environment from a dashboard that can deliver valuable and easy-to-use information from both physical and virtual environments.
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As virtualized servers move to production environments, the threat of process and infrastructure breakdown is mounting, exposing IT departments to a number of virtualization risks. IT managers are looking for solutions that provide better control and a more comprehensive view of their virtual and physical IT environments. Follow these simple guidelines to choose the best-fit vendor for your virtualization solution.
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Many large, sophisticated enterprise IT environments still suffer from preventable critical failures. To keep the infrastructure up and running, IT departments must constantly monitor servers, applications, and services—task that have become essential over the past 10 years. Learn about the most common infrastructure problems, and discover simple and proactive measures you can take to cut downtime by over 50 percent.
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Virtualization is a leap forward in data center evolution. It saves energy, increases computing throughput, frees up floor space, and facilitates load migration and disaster recovery. Optimizing your power and cooling infrastructure is an essential step in realizing the full potential of virtualization. Find out why optimized infrastructure is so important, and how you can reap the full rewards of virtualization.
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Network-critical physical infrastructure includes power, cooling, racks and physical structure, security and fire protection, cabling, management systems, and service. To manage these key pieces of your network’s physical structure, you need to be able to manage devices individually. Find out how an element management solution can help you assimilate and manage the large volume of data necessary for network availability.
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Conventional methods for specifying data center density don’t provide the guidance to assure predictable power and cooling performance for the latest IT equipment. Discover an improved method that can help assure compatibility with anticipated high-density loads, provide unambiguous instruction for design and installation of power and cooling equipment, prevent oversizing, and maximize electrical efficiency.
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Conventional models for estimating the electrical efficiency of data centers are grossly inaccurate for real-world installations. Electrical loss estimates are typically made by summing inefficiencies of electrical devices, such as power and cooling equipment. Discover a more accurate efficiency model that can help you identify and quantify waste in power and cooling equipment, and reduce total cost of ownership (TCO).
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The traditional room-oriented approach to data center cooling has limitations in next-generation data centers. Next-generation data centers must adapt to changing requirements, support high and variable power density, and reduce power consumption and other operating costs. Find out how row- and rack-oriented cooling architectures reduce total cost of ownership (TCO), and address the needs of next-generations data centers.
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Electricity costs are an increasing portion of the total cost of ownership (TCO) for data centers. But you can dramatically reduce the electrical consumption of typical data centers through appropriate design of both the network-critical physical infrastructure and IT architecture. Discover how to quantify electricity savings and learn about methods that can greatly reduce your data center electrical power consumption.
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Data center commissioning requires tight coordination between vendors, facilities, IT departments, engineers, the commissioning agent, and others. Managed properly, commissioning can deliver an unbiased evaluation of whether a new data center will succeed or not. Managed poorly, it can lead to problematic data center performance issues. Learn 10 common data center commissioning mistakes, and find out how to avoid them.
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Despite advances in technology, power outages continue to be a major cause of PC and server downtime. Protecting computers with uninterruptible power supply (UPS) hardware is part of a total solution, but power management software is also needed to prevent data corruption after extended power outages. Learn about the various software configurations you can implement and the best practices that can help you ensure uptime.
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The need to share information is greater than ever, with increasingly complex company-wide processes. The movement of digital data, both within a company and across its porous boundaries, carries more and more risk as regulations for data protection and personal privacy are tightened. Discover how to stay ahead of the competition by putting the technology in place that allows you to share content widely, but safely.
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InMotion, with more than 50 stores in 33 airports, delivers portable entertainment to the travelers’ market. InMotion faced inventory control issues due to limited store space, and plans to merge with another airport retailer added to the problem. The merger required InMotion to find a solution that could handle multiple sales channels while providing real-time inventory updates to prevent overstock in stores. Learn more.
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Today’s economy favors agility—companies must respond instantly to fluctuations in the marketplace to keep a competitive edge and save costs. A flexible communications infrastructure is a key part of achieving organizational agility. Voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), the technology behind the converged voice-data network, allows companies to scale phone solutions to their needs—saving money even as those needs change.
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Choosing a business phone system is a three-phase process. First, evaluate your requirements, then evaluate potential vendors, and finally evaluate the technology. Shopping for a new phone system is as much about planning, implementation, and support as it is about installing new state-of-the-art equipment. Before making your decision, learn the dos and don’ts of the evaluation and selection process.
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Plasti Dip International has been a leader in rubberized and specialty coatings since 1972, selling its products to manufacturers, retailers, and distributors worldwide. To compete in a crowded retail marketplace, dominated by large retailers, Plasti Dip required integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) and electronic data interchange (EDI) functionality. Discover how the company found the right solution.
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IT infrastructure software has a well-established track record for experiencing frequent cost overruns and missed deadlines. Expensive software and extensive customization are the key contributors to increasing identity management costs to four or five times more than the price of the initial identity software license. Learn how software as a service (SaaS) can reduce the cost and complexity of IT infrastructure.
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An unprecedented wave of security breaches has led to the establishment of technical standards, IT governance frameworks and laws designed to improve and enforce IT security. Companies are under increasing pressure to control their IT infrastructures more effectively. Learn how ongoing automated vulnerability assessments, together with well-defined network security policies, can simplify the compliance process.
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Unsurprisingly, research shows that the majority of companies see their future predicated on how well they can innovate. However, just throwing IT technology at issues in the hope that innovation will happen is not viable. Ideas are ephemeral and easily crushed within the wrong environment. Creating a suitable culture, allied with a well implemented idea management approach combined with strong leadership, is required.
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Crowley Maritime, offering a range of services such as shipping and barge towing, needs rapid customer billing and invoicing. The company’s electronic data interchange (EDI) volume increased by 500 percent over five years, and management wanted to sustain this growth without harming service delivery. Find out how an integration solution enabled Crowley to support new growth without adding new staff, while reducing costs.
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Companies should consider managed file transfer (MFT) suite vendors that meet their tactical and strategic needs. It's all too easy to be reactive and deploy technology that supports only one file transfer protocol and one standard for secure file transfers. It's more prudent to deploy a product that can be easily expanded and upgraded to handle multiple protocols and multiple standards in a well-managed, auditable way.
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Business-to-business (B2B) gateway solutions have matured to the point where they can support a wide range of projects. However, there are still functional differences—including product maturity, service-oriented architecture (SOA) enablement, architectural coherence, and community management—among competing solutions. Find out who the leaders, challengers, visionaries, and niche players are in the B2B gateway market.
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Today’s data transmission departments are battling for budget and relevance. Moving files and ensuring delivery is getting tougher every day. To successfully deliver data to an increasing number of target platforms and meet rising customer expectations, leading companies are adopting service-oriented architectures (SOAs) and upgrading their file transfer departments into data transmission services. Find out more.
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The biggest threat to data security doesn’t come from hackers, misconfigured firewalls, missing patches, or negligent employees. Nor is it in the application layer of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) Basic Model. Instead, there are three undocumented layers of the OSI Model that exert a huge influence on security decisions and the integrity of security programs. Learn about those layers and how to manage the threat.
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Outsourcing is increasingly used to reduce costs and increase value—but it has its risks. As companies look to push more of their custom software application development needs to outsourcing partners, you need to plan carefully to build stringent security requirements into contracts and create metrics to ensure those requirements are met. Find out how to increase the value and reduce the risk of outsourcing.
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With the frenetic pace of global mergers and acquisitions (M&A) showing no sign of abating, nearly every chief information officer (CIO) today must at some point grapple with the enormous challenges of integrating acquired companies. But too often success eludes the merged companies—with IT getting part of the blame. Find out how to avoid common M&A pitfalls and achieve rapid, highly effective post-merger integration.
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Companies implement unified communications (UC) to boost employee productivity. An approach for successful UC implementation includes an often overlooked component: the need for visibility and control of network flows due to the increased demands of UC. Learn about a network appliance that can provide visibility of network traffic, so you can prioritize and control that traffic to realize the benefits of UC.
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The differences between on-demand applications (also known as software as a service, or SaaS) and on-premise solutions mean that stronger benefits can be achieved with a SaaS-based system. On-demand solutions are far more cost-effective than their on-premise counterparts—statistics show that the total cost of ownership (TCO) for an on-premise solution over the first three years is 60 to 200 percent higher. Find out more.
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In today’s economy, competitive advantage can be short-lived. Companies recognize that continued investments in IT infrastructure are required to stay ahead. Executives in all industries must understand how IT drives value and competitive advantage. Explore the relationship between IT investment and gains in performance and productivity, and find out how leading companies are maximizing their returns on IT investments.
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Has your organization truly embraced the message of the incident management process, as part of the practices recommended in the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)? If your efforts have centered on the service desk, then you may be missing out on a lot of what incident management in particular and ITIL in general can offer. Learn more about the core principles of ITIL, and how you can use them to improve service management.
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Long-term cost savings and extensive feature sets make voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) phone systems an attractive option for many businesses. But with prices for a single VoIP phone ranging from $150 to $700 (USD) or more, switching to VoIP can be an expensive proposition. Find out what to look for in a VoIP phone system, how to buy, what you can expect to pay, and how to get the most out of your investment.
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The payment card industry (PCI) Data Security Standard establishes common processes and precautions for handling credit card data. Although achieving PCI compliance can seem daunting, the requirements represent security best practices that should be observed by any organization with IT systems and data to protect. Learn about network scanning and security assessment solutions that can help you manage PCI compliance.
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For businesses of all sizes, especially those lacking the IT resources and budget for an in-house e-mail archiving solution, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution may offer a feasible and effective alternative. SaaS e-mail archiving can be implemented in days rather than months, eliminate upfront hardware and software costs, and get transparent, continuous upgrades. Discover the other benefits of SaaS e-mail solutions.
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The network of devices used for information, security, and daily transactions is now ubiquitous, and everyone now relies on it even if they don’t acknowledge it. But network failure can cause widespread disruption, unhappy customers, unproductive employees, and lost business. Ensuring network availability, security, and efficiency is a job for experts who need powerful tools to carry out these tasks. Learn more.
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You may already know what disk defragmentation software does and what the benefits are. Take a closer look at the benefits in performance, cost, time-to-complete, wattage consumed for each test, and overall kilowatt hours (KWHs) consumed with Diskeeper defragmentation software. All tests, including methodology, format, and protocols, were performed with a focus of determining power and cost savings. Learn more.
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Most operating systems use logical file systems optimized for traditional magnetic hard disk drives (HDD). As a result, users adopting newer solid state drive (SSD) technology often see poor write-speed performance caused by free space fragmentation. Learn how new automatic disk maintenance technologies can improve SSD performance and extend the life of SSD devices by minimizing free space fragmentation.
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Midsize businesses face the same security threats as larger companies, and likewise they must comply with the same regulations. But, their security budgets are smaller. The good news is that IT security systems don’t have to be expensive. Learn about the top three security problems, how to develop security policies using integrated security solutions, and how to do vulnerability assessment with low-cost security tools.
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Lundburg Family Farms, a grower of organic and sustainably farmed rice products, aims for top efficiency in all areas, and so it looks for new IT management solutions that offer long-term cost savings and efficiencies. The company’s old operating system didn’t provide adequate network security, and it wanted to find a flexible security solution that would enhance security while improving network user access. Learn more.
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Ensynch, a provider of IT security management solutions, was satisfied with its operating system. However, Ensynch often looks to make upgrades that will improve its competitive edge, especially those that strengthen IT security, better promote mobility, and improve employee productivity. Discover how Windows Vista helped Ensynch achieve stronger IT security, faster mobile connectivity, and more efficient use of IT staff.
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Consolidating various data center devices running on multiple platforms provides network administrators with a more efficient information infrastructure. After all, fewer moving parts results in better overall efficiency and reliability. Use a centralized console to manage infrastructure, and combine reliability and remote connectivity while reducing costs—without compromising application and technology service levels.
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New standards, protocols, and platforms to support the data center continually appear: TCP/IP, Telnet, SSL, PPP, USB, MacOS, Linux, and Windows 2003 servers—the list goes on. All offer flexibility, standardization, and compatibility. But they also pose challenges, such as silos of information and limited access from applications on other platforms. But data center infrastructure needs to be centrally managed—discover how.
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For data center administrators responsible for monitoring the screens of hundreds—and potentially thousands—of servers and PCs, video resolution is paramount for efficiency. A keyboard/video/mouse (KVM) switch can help by enabling IT staff to manage servers and other network devices, within the data center or remotely. Get a technical glimpse into the “whys” behind the “V” in KVM and the importance of video resolution.
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In the past 12 years, the universal serial bus (USB) has grown from pipe dream into the de facto standard for devices such as portable memory devices, video game consoles, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and more. Learn how a USB keyboard/video/mouse (KVM) can correctly emulate the constant presence of a keyboard and mouse to each connected computer, offering much more flexibility in the data centers of tomorrow.
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E-discovery is the extension of the discovery process to include identifying, preserving, collecting, reviewing, and analyzing electronically stored information. Today, it represents 35 percent of the total cost of litigation. Companies that fail to produce e-mail in a timely manner face paying fines and other risks. Learn how you can develop an e-discovery plan to better manage your electronic data discovery processes.
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The Internet is now an important business tool—but it also puts companies at risk of exposure to Web-based threats that can cause major damages, such as financial losses, identity theft, and loss of intellectual property, to name a few. To protect your business data and reputation, learn about a multilayered solution that can offer stronger protection while reducing your reliance on time-consuming signature downloads.
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Most companies have already invested in e-mail security. However, yesterday’s defenses may not be up to the challenge of tomorrow’s threats. Why? Because Internet security risks are increasingly malicious: Web threats are growing more than 100 percent every six months, and targeted attacks are up 351 percent from two years ago. Re-examine your approach to mail server security and protect yourself from malware attacks.
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Ping Identity provides software for the computer security and identity management industry. Ping wanted to facilitate rapid, high-end development and accelerate time to market for its leading Web security product. When its first outsourcing choice didn’t offer enough Agile development expertise, Ping found another solution that helped reduce costs by 46 percent and doubled in-house performance in key areas. Learn more.
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Analysts estimate that 80 percent of a company’s intellectual property is in its e-mail. Finding this information when it’s needed can be a major source of frustration for employees—one that can consume hours per week and megabytes of storage. But clearly these documents must be retained, not deleted. Learn about a searchable archiving solution that protects companies from liabilities as well as increasing storage costs.
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Today’s mobile devices improve productivity and efficiency, but they also bring new risks to companies: confidential corporate and personal data can be lost or subject to other threats. Mobile device security management should consider a combination of people, processes, and technology. Learn about current security issues and actionable mobile security best practices so you can mitigate the risks your company is facing.
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Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software can facilitate business improvements. But it can also create new challenges, including obsolete technology, lack of flexibility, and high support costs, to name a few. There’s a way to keep your current ERP system while extending its capabilities to remote manufacturing sites, service centers, and supply chain partners: a service-oriented architecture (SOA) approach. Learn more.
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Many consumers don’t trust Web site safety enough to complete an e-commerce transaction—and consequently, billions of dollars in sales are lost. How can you combat this trend and ensure your customers trust you enough to share their sensitive data in online transactions? Learn how an extended validation SSL certificate increases the visibility of authentication status—to help assure your visitors find your site is safe.
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Software manufacturers and original equipment manufacturers (OEM) needing to embed business intelligence (BI) modules into their solutions are familiar with the “build versus buy” question. Learn about the factors you should take into consideration when making this decision, including cost, time to market, and the module’s quality and ability to be embedded—as well as the best practices.
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IT administrators must maintain application availability while controlling costs. One key area where operational efficiency can be achieved is in the storage infrastructure. But traditional storage systems are inherently inefficient. Learn why thin provisioning can help simplify storage management while improving capacity use, and how distributed redundant array of independent disks (RAID) technology can help.
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Loss of data due to system failure can cost a company thousands of dollars per hour of downtime. Business continuity is critical, with data protection plans that provide rapid, seamless, and non-disruptive backup and recovery. Learn how Oracle databases, when used with Pillar’s replication solutions, deliver a backup and recovery plan that can protect against errors and provide more efficient storage management.
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Growing demands on storage management system requirements can run counter to your need to lower costs. With Database 10g, Oracle introduced new features that can simplify database storage management to offer significant savings in both deployment cost and ongoing management overhead. Find out about best practices for deploying Oracle with Pillar’s Axiom storage system, with benefits to performance and management.
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Worldwide, scores of enterprises have realized that they must protect their investments in legacy systems—without getting locked into outdated technologies. They face this challenge especially when making efforts to advance to superior information systems that allow them better efficiencies and more distributed computing strengths. Find out how to manage the challenge—without cost overruns and unprofitable delays.
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Today, almost everything has gone online, from banking to pet food. And every day, new companies are starting up with a purely Web-based business model. This means that established companies have to adopt new tactics to make their online presence felt. All this has fueled the need for a robust Web-centric application infrastructure. Find out about the 10 benefits the J2EE platform can bring to your organization.
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This white paper describes how interdomain federation happens with the Jabber Extensible Communications Platform (Jabber XCP). If you’re a service operator, line-of-business manager, security professional, or application developer, we’ll help you understand the benefits and challenges involved in building communication "clouds" using real-time technologies such as extensible messaging and presence protocol (XMPP).
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At Jabber, Inc., security is a core priority in every phase of design, implementation, and deployment. We aggressively apply lessons learned from other Internet-scale technologies and from our work with customers in the financial, government, and telecommunications sectors to achieve continuous improvement in the security profile of our products. In this whitepaper, we delve into the core security features of Jabber XCP.
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Speed and agility are increasingly important elements to success in a wide variety of domains. As a result, the Internet is becoming a more dynamic, user-centric, real-time environment. In this white paper, we explore characteristic technologies of the real-time Internet and how enterprises, governments, service providers, and other organizations can leverage those technologies to build competitive advantage.
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This white paper discusses how session initiation protocol (SIP), real-time transport protocol (RTP), and extensible messaging and presence protocol (XMPP) can work together to harness the unique strengths of each protocol within and across applications. Each protocol has a role in powering the real-time Internet, and this paper highlights how they complement each other to create a whole solution.
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Presence is a key technology powering the real-time Internet. Forward-thinking businesses, service providers, and government agencies are already reaping the benefits of presence-enabled information exchange. This paper explores the nature of presence data, its value to the organization, and methods for leveraging presence to create strategic value and competitive advantage.
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The rise of electronic records is having a profound effect on business litigation. Electronic records are now so important that the litigation rules in US federal courts have been officially amended to give judges and litigants more guidance on coping with records. IT managers tasked with setting policies for e-mail retention should understand the amended rules before any lawsuit is started or anticipated. Learn more.
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The results of a recent industry survey shed light on the latest trends, challenges, and solutions in software product development for 2008. If you are involved in the planning and development of products, software applications, or systems, this report can help you gain insight into the biggest challenges in innovation, the top barriers to success, which metrics matter most when measuring success, and more.
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A software migration can cause pain over many months in at least three crucial areas, though it will provide long-term benefit. But with a migration assurance program, you can completely avoid major pain. Find out how a rollover to Office 2007 and Vista can impact the productivity of your users, your IT staff, and your business. And learn about the steps you can take to minimize or avoid a decrease in productivity.
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In the competitive auto industry, Nissen Chemitec America knows the need for lean manufacturing. Its legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) system was preventing the company from adopting lean principles, and so in 2003 it looked for an ERP tailored for contract manufacturers serving the auto industry. Learn how the new system helps the company stay lean within the confines of compliance and changing customer demands.
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IT organizations struggle with the challenges of shrinking budgets, ever-changing technology, compliance pressures, and more. For greater efficiency, many IT organizations are turning to information technology service management (ITSM) to help improve processes. But there’s still too much focus on technology and not enough on business outcomes. Learn key strategies for changing your approach to delivering IT services.
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Customers and users see the value of IT services only after they’re in operation. Unfortunately, preparation and due diligence doesn’t always mean that you end up providing the IT services those users are expecting. With the automotive industry used as an analogy, get key tips on how to better define and document IT operations design and transition—so ultimately, your customers and users get the services they demand.
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North American server installations are uniquely inefficient because of multiple circuits, use of floor space and weight, and more. A new approach to power distribution for high-density server installations saves floor space, simplifies power cabling, saves capital cost, reduces weight, and increases electrical efficiency. Learn more about how this distribution architecture can provide you with numerous benefits.
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New power and cooling technology allows for a simple and rapid deployment of self-contained high-density zones within an existing or new low-density data center. The independence of these high-density zones allows for reliable high-density equipment operation without a negative impact on existing power and cooling infrastructure—and with more electrical efficiency than conventional designs. Learn more now.
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Many of the mysteries of equipment failure, downtime, software, and data corruption are the result of a problematic power supply. Compounding the problem is that there is no standardized way to describe power problems. Learn more about common power disturbances, what can cause them, and how to safeguard your critical equipment—all described in Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) standard terms.
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High-density servers offer a significant performance per-watt benefit. However, they can present a significant cooling challenge. Most data centers are designed to cool an average of no more than 2 kilowatts per rack, but many new servers demand over 40. Thus, innovative strategies must be used to properly cool high-density equipment. Read about 10 approaches that can help increase cooling efficiency in your data center.
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Globally, data center power and cooling infrastructure wastes more than 60 million megawatt-hours per year that do not contribute usefully to powering IT equipment. This is an enormous financial burden on industry, and is a significant public policy environmental issue. Find out about the principles of a new data center architecture that can be implemented today to dramatically improve the electrical efficiency of your data center.
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The majority of IT organizations are under great pressure to evolve to a next-generation network operations center (NOC). A survey of 176 IT professionals has revealed that over a quarter of NOCs don’t meet their organization’s current needs for application performance management. Learn how to migrate away from the current stove-piped NOC to an integrated operations center that effectively supports all components of IT.
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For disaster recovery, remote replication is a simpler alternative to traditional servers. However, simple replication in a virtual server can affect the consistency of files or applications and create longer recovery cycles. Find out how two virtual machine (VM) solutions can overcome these limitations to deliver consistent replication and fast recovery of stored data for uninterrupted processes and business continuity.
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The recently standardized NETCONF configuration management protocol, with the NETCONF-oriented data modeling language called YANG, can simplify network configuration management. Learn how the two technologies work, and how they can be used to support transactional capabilities and rollback management—so next-generation configuration management systems are simpler and more understandable than current systems.
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The loss of your computer facilities, even a temporary one, can seriously affect your operations, resulting in significant monetary consequences. And the risk of catastrophe has greatly increased. For this reason, you should invest in an effective and reliable backup system. Learn about procedures for server backup management, and the various tools available on the market that can help you protect your vital data.
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Many companies have already invested heavily in solutions that provide remote access solutions to their employees, and are now looking to leverage those solutions for their remote vendors. But what works for your employees might not work for your vendors—and the wrong solution can introduce security risks, from viruses to unauthorized access and noncompliance. Learn about the different access requirements for vendors.
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With the compliance demands of Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), the Payment Card Industry (PCI), and others, it’s crucial that companies emphasize separation of duties (SoD) and internal access controls to help maximize network security. But many still struggle with the real-time need of granting temporary access to resources. Learn about a solution that can offer secure, controlled, and audited resource access in a timely fashion.
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Data Protection Manager is designed to provide continuous data protection for servers. A virtual tape library solution with de-duplication complements Microsoft DPM 2007, and together they can meet the data protection and recovery challenges of both Windows and non-Windows environments. Find out how these technologies work together to provide continuous data protection and recovery for enterprises of all sizes.
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A data de-duplication application can be an integral part of your data protection and data replication software. De-duplication technology can dramatically reduce the cost of protecting your data. Find out how data de-duplication software can work in conjunction with storage software to minimize duplicate data for more efficient disaster recovery—and how this can save bandwidth, storage resources, and overhead.
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Data de-duplication can be considered the next evolutionary step in backup technology, as it can reduce data volumes, slash storage needs, and minimize data protection costs and risks. But to separate the hype from reality, you must consider a number of key factors so you can select a data de-duplication solution that actually delivers cost-effective, high-performance, and scalable long-term data storage. Learn more.
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Successful business operations hinge on a company’s ability to maintain a high level of data availability. Database applications, such as Oracle, demand advanced data storage management to optimize application and data availability, as well as storage management capabilities. Discover a solution that can help deliver an enhanced backup, restore, and recovery regime that protects your vital data from soft and hard errors.
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IT managers face explosive data growth, which drives up costs for primary storage and storage for backup and disaster recovery. To help reduce costs and footprint while maximizing return on investment (ROI), a single-instance repository de-duplication tool, when integrated with a virtual tape library, could be the answer. Learn about how using this green, flexible, and scalable solution can help with your backup needs.
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Genius Project4Domino and Microsoft Project are both project management tools, and though their range of features is different, they are also complementary. Using the solutions together can bring a well-rounded project management solution to companies of all sizes. Learn how they can be used to ensure consistency and eliminate downtime, so your long-term strategic project plans are a success.
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Competitive testing analysis is a vital part of designing, evaluating, and marketing hardware and software products. National Technical Systems (NTS) tested two change management systems, measuring how quickly each compares selected datasets. Find out which solution proved to be twice as fast as the other in a local area network (LAN), and almost 24 times faster in a wide area network (WAN) environment. Learn more.
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Your data models are brilliant ... but only if database administrators (DBAs) and developers are on the same page. A mismatch of expectations can slow down a project and lead to weak products. But this situation can be avoided if you develop a strategy that builds a little more teamwork. Follow seven cost-effective steps to better collaboration, and get a lot more value from your software development team’s data modeling.
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The combination of cross-platform environments, added database complexity, more data, and less headcount is a challenge for database administrators (DBAs) trying to maintain high database availability and performance. Discover techniques DBAs can use to streamline and automate storage, performance, and capacity management to deliver high database performance and availability—helping to ensure overall database success.
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One of the most formidable IT challenges that companies must solve is the extreme cost of the development process. Don’t let your data warehouse development project become part of the 50 percent that’s abandoned—and don’t lose time and money. Learn how to optimize your development process and improve the performance of your database management systems through a complete examination and debugging of your database schema.
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When choosing a change management tool for your business environment, you need to consider several important factors. First is the number of database platforms in your data center, and whether to get a solution that supports multiple platforms. Find out the other factors, and how the right tool can reduce training and software costs, increase productivity, and ensure database availability, security, and performance.
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Your business has a better chance of withstanding the challenges of difficult economic times if it can respond quickly to change, provide accurate data, and fulfill demand in a timely way. Electronic data interchange (EDI) can help give you this competitive edge. But to make EDI work, you need to know the five worst mistakes to avoid making when you embark on an EDI integration project in your small to medium business.
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Although IT outsourcing can result in cost savings of up to 60 percent, you’re not as likely to see that return if you don’t have an offshore development center (ODC). This team of programmers and developers, hand picked to complement your skill-set and culture, works on your behalf at the service provider’s site, and can be a seamless extension of your IT department. Learn more about the benefits of setting up an ODC.
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Software developers need a powerful tool to control and plan the quality of their software applications. With a solution that offers project analysis, testing, and bug administration, you have options that can help increase the quality of your software products. Read about a software test tool that has administrative functions to help you more effectively plan, control, and evaluate your software as it’s developed.
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Electronic health records can provide many benefits for patients and health care providers and insurers. Health care technology managers should have a strategic technical background to make informed decisions about integrating, partnering, or supporting personal health care record (PHR) solutions. Learn best practices on implementation, and how to leverage your existing health care technologies with new PHR platforms.
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Remote control software allows you to work on a remote computer—located across the hall or around the world—in real time, as if you were using its own keyboard and mouse. And remote solutions can dramatically reduce your cost of supporting client desktops. But before implementing remote software in your company, learn about the various remote capabilities and features you need to consider, including automated scripting.
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The best encryption and security policies will not protect your laptops against careless employee use. Learn about the latest innovations in tracking IT assets off the local area network (LAN), remotely deleting sensitive data, and physically recovering stolen computers.
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The number of mid-market manufacturers and other businesses using electronic data interchange (EDI) is expanding—and with it, the need to integrate EDI data with in-house enterprise resource planning (ERP) and accounting systems. Unfortunately, over 80 percent of data integration projects fail. Don’t let your company join that statistic. Learn about five key steps to buying and implementing EDI to ERP integration software.
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IT administrators need to simplify both complex and routine tasks to deliver increasing value with limited resources. Data center automation can help minimize the duties associated with maintaining the existing infrastructure. Learn about a solution that can enable automated batch processing for more efficient operations, and integrate the diverse application and platform environments often found in today’s data centers.
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Maybe you’re considering software test tools for the first time. Or maybe you have experience but think your existing software test automation process needs retooling. Whatever your perspective, there are tips and tricks you may not know about test design and development. These 10 steps to building software test automation can help you shorten your time to market, improve the quality of your products, and save you money.
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Web 2.0 applications, perceived by many software users as better looking and easier to use than traditional apps, can provide many benefits to your company. However, building Web 2.0 apps adds development burdens of security, transaction management, and a variety of user interface features. To conquer these issues, you might consider an application generator to eliminate hand-coding infrastructure programming. Learn more.
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To meet high user expectation for applications, your IT department must find ways to improve productivity and complete projects according to the latest standards—often with a reduced head count. In this environment, wasting time on code writing and other repetitive tasks is agonizing. But application generators can automate and manage your development processes. Learn about the functionality that can benefit your company.
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All government projects must be run as efficiently as possible. Modeling and simulation tools can help maximize efficiency and predict the costs and risks associated with many government projects. Model-building templates, plus features that allow users to share and re-use models and create custom models, can help government successfully design and complete major environmental and infrastructural projects. Find out more.
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Day-to-day IT requirements are often managed at the expense of strategic goals. But if you can consistently control change in your IT environment, you’ll be that much closer to resource efficiency and risk mitigation. Learn about a four-phase change management methodology that, when used with enterprise software, can help you detect, track, and analyze change—for continuous improvements and more budget for new projects.
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The prevalence of Web 2.0 demonstrates that integrating the technology used to manage Web sites is becoming easier. A similar mashup of methods for Web site marketing tools can help you measure how you communicate with customers and help deliver sales opportunities. But before you start cooking, find out how to pick the right ingredients for two simple but effective mashups for Web site subscription and content feedback.
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In today’s competitive market, creating and maintaining successful customer relationships is vital. That’s why everyone involved with the customer must work together as a team. In most companies, sales, engineering, and marketing often use separate systems—causing communication gaps in customer support. Discover how sharing information through integrated customer relationship management (CRM) can help bridge those gaps.
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Most businesses recognize the strategic importance of customer relationship management (CRM), but some small to medium businesses (SMBs) continue to use basic contact managers or simple spreadsheets to track customers, manage leads, and collaborate on sales. Achieving great results requires more than just installing CRM software. Learn how assessing your business’s CRM maturity level can help build your road map to success.
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Your web site can be your best marketing and sales tool in a global market. Stale content, however, isn't useful to visitors—so you have to make sure your site is constantly updated. How can you reduce the time and financial expense of using multiple systems and multiple forms of content to revise your site? A software-as-a-service (SaaS) content management system (CMS) might be the solution you're looking for. Read more.
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Companies looking to expand their facilities and strategize their way into the marketplace often focus most of their efforts on bottom line results. During the process, they factor in infrastructure costs but often pay little attention on how to control them. Find out how a Web-enabled solution that puts infrastructure management sharply in focus can help you easily access distributed information while helping curb costs.
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Role management is becoming recognized as an essential aspect of an organization's identity management and security. But role management goes well beyond simply assigning passwords or user IDs. You must also manage and govern the roles related to the core business activities of your organization. Start by looking at key considerations for choosing a role management solution, and benefit from suggested best practices.
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As the growth of electronic records continues, two major trends in the world of document and content management have now become intertwined. In view of these trends, companies are beginning to assess their current record management practices, and what has resulted is the clear need for electronic records management (ERM). Discover how ERM can provide a cost-effective solution for your growing business.
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Collaborative tools are becoming essential to sharing data in today’s office environment. You need a solution that can grow to accommodate new projects and uses—and a storage system that is flexible enough to meet initial demands and adapt to changes. Find out how a multiple-node storage area network (SAN) can maximize the scalability and functionality of your collaboration tools, and ease storage administration.
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Every enterprise must be prepared to confront an incident that threatens the security, privacy, or general operations of the company or its customers. But how is it possible to respond to an incident quickly, without interrupting corporate operations? By building an incident response team (IRT) with the right skills, authority, and knowledge to properly deal with a range of known—and unknown incidents. Find out how.
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Just when malware design seemed to have reached a plateau, new and more complex attack techniques have now emerged. For a while, security controls designed to manage spam, viruses, and malware were working, but as a result of this success, the threats they protected against were forced to change. Learn about today’s key security trends and how you can fight against the sophisticated new generation of Internet threats.
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Service excellence alone is not enough to ensure future growth and profitability in today’s challenging market. Streamlining IT processes is essential to your business workflow. Whatever your professional services software needs—from customer relationship management (CRM) to human capital management—it’s time to learn your lessons: find out key strategies and best practices that can help your company grow profitably.
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How can you leverage your current IT infrastructure without increasing complexity—and cost? Creating the next generation of enterprise resource planning (ERP) via enterprise services architecture (ESA) outsourcing can make your IT system leaner, less expensive, and more adaptive. Read more for a clear picture of how to avoid difficulties when adopting an enterprise services approach for your back-office processes.
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Changing business practices, especially those that consolidate business and IT functions, requires careful research and decision making. For companies needing to move beyond traditional enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, enterprise service applications (ESA) can help reduce the complexity of having disparate IT systems. Find out about the benefits of ESA and how it can help you achieve operational excellence.
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Professional service providers are starting to apply supply chain management concepts to their strategies for hiring and retaining talent. Adapting to market demands such as globalization and a more sophisticated client base means human resources departments need a complete and integrated process of talent management. But hiring and keeping top talent can also help you increase revenues and increase client loyalty. Find out how.
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Managing growth is a monumental undertaking—and one that Valero Energy Corporation has mastered. But as one of the largest oil refinery companies in North America, with revenues exceeding $90 billion (USD), the company needed to find a way to fit new applications into its existing infrastructure in a quick and cost-effective manner. By switching to SAP’s NetWeaver platform, Valero saved $480,000 (USD) in the first month.
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Today’s midsized distributors can benefit from their software systems in ways that were impossible a few years ago. By layering advanced, affordable supply chain management (SCM) and electronic data interchange (EDI) functionality on top of their existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, they can profit from improved productivity and lower labor costs. Find out how.
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Sant Joan de Déu Hospital is one of the most important hospitals in Spain, and specializes in pediatrics and women’s medicine. Because of its status, it needed to find a way to automate its internal processes and develop a corporate portal for patients and health professionals. Since deploying a business process management (BPM) solution, Sant Joan has increased accessibility and created autonomy within its departments.
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As the Microsoft Exchange environment continues to grow, building and managing the underlying IT infrastructure becomes increasingly difficult for Exchange administrators. Adding more and more storage can lead to frequent system downtime and slower response times. Discover seven ways your administrators can spend less time on day-to-day Microsoft Exchange management—while planning for future growth in the process.
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The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) was created by credit card companies to protect cardholder data, ensuring that merchants and service providers maintain the highest degree of information security. However, many retailers are still questioning its effectiveness and necessity in light of the high cost of compliance. Read this white paper to find out what this cost really means for your organization.
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The blade server market is one of many fast growing in the IT industry, helping large businesses resolve issues with power, cooling, and space constraints in their datacenters. But what about the mid-market customer whose needs are very different? Hewlett Packard (HP) addresses these needs with the launch of its new HP BladeSystem c3000—a complete blade server and storage solution designed with the mid-market in mind.
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Today’s configuration management tools focus on collecting and reporting statistics, logs, and failures, but fail to address the need for analyzing this data to determine best practices for improving efficiencies. That’s why Configuresoft has developed software that enables you to link core systems configuration and change management disciplines into actionable analytics. Find out how it can work for you.
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Data deduplication is one of the hottest technologies in storage today. However, with many different deduplication approaches from various vendors—each hyping its own unique benefits—it’s easy to get caught up in determining which factors are most important for you. Discover the different methodologies used in design deduplication solutions so you can make the right decision the first time.
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The teachers at Bangor Township Schools in Michigan (US) wanted a way to monitor students’ computer screens to make sure computers were being used for classroom projects and not games or messaging. Insight, Faronics’ classroom management solution, allows teachers to monitor every screen and to send warnings to students who visit inappropriate web sites. Read about the other benefits these teachers gained with Insight.
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The competitive nature of the financial services industry today and the changing landscape of the customer approach to investing puts an onus on suppliers to consider how well they are dealing with customers’ business transactions. In order to provide better customer service—while at the same time improving operations—these organizations must invest in a system that allows real-time visibility of the entire process.
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Why choose on-demand when there are so many integrated software solutions on the market? Because on-demand packages provide a number of benefits that can help IT focus on innovation and creating true business value, rather than dealing with network headaches. But along with the benefits there are a number of challenges. Read more about these challenges and how you can manage your on-demand implementation project.
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To solve your data-intensive problems and deal with data storage tasks, you might consider a two-tier method. How? By using service-oriented architecture (SOA) to make distributed systems interoperable. Why? SOA can optimize data storage architecture, transparently and securely, to maximize and optimize access to large quantities of data. Learn about other benefits, and the steps that are best for your IT infrastructure.
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As businesses become increasingly dependent on the effective delivery of IT services over global networks, technologies that optimize application performance over wide area networks (WANs) become more competitive. But how do you know which WAN to choose when there are so many solutions on the market? By learning about WAN best practices and principles, and by making comparative evaluations of competing vendors’ offerings.
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When you connect to the Internet, you do so through the Windows Socket (Winsock) layer. While this layer is an integral part of the Windows operating system and acts as an interface between your computer and the Net, it cannot distinguish the difference between good traffic and bad. MicroWorld Winsock Layer (MWL) technology helps by sitting on the Winsock layer and analyzing the traffic—before it gets to your computer.
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Today’s business processes place high demands on IT infrastructure, and the answer often is integration of software and hardware resources. Now you can integrate by separating: divide logical processing and storage resources from the physical hardware on which they run, and help make virtualization a powerful tool for improving your data center’s flexibility, reliability, and use—while reducing cost of management.
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Virtual data centers must enable increased physical server use and central management of virtual machine infrastructure. A clustered file system, with a virtual machine manager (VMM), can add critical new management and migration capability to current virtual servers. Before installing and configuring VMM, find out the hardware and software required for migration and integration, and helpful “how-to” pointers.
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Software implementation can be complex. Even when it seems all your business processes and systems are “go” after the implementation of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, there might still be room for improvement. Find out how a post-implementation system assessment of technical and functional systems can improve data capture accuracy, increase user buy-in, and boost your return on investment (ROI).
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Computerized numerical control (CNC) is crucial to the successful operation of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) application, but the road to success is sometimes rocky. To surmount the challenges of meeting your CNC needs, learn how an on-demand (or CNC managed services) model can improve your return on investment, and streamline and standardize your business processes.
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The most common challenge companies face when it comes to achieving scalability isn’t the cost, but the difficulty of predicting that cost once applications grow beyond a certain threshold. Don’t scale up—scale out, with coherent clustered caching. Learn about caching methods that can help improve and predict scalability, as well as maintain accurate and up-to-date data, even in the face of peak user load.
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Businesses today are increasingly committed to Web-enabled applications as a cost-effective way of delivering critical business solutions. But as more and more businesses follow suit, it becomes increasingly apparent that better performance and availability across the Internet must be realized by the early movers in order to maintain their lead. With the deployment of advanced products and services, this can be achieved.
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Blade computing is a new computing architecture that provides a highly dense, scalable, and powerful flexible platform to support businesses’ software needs. Blade architecture was once used for simple server consolidation, but it has now become a way of managing IT assets, which provides significant business benefits. Find out how a blade system can benefit your company while optimizing your existing infrastructure.
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According to Symantec, 40 percent of malicious attacks target your browser. With Web content threats quickly on the rise, there’s an opportunity for businesses to enhance their Web filtering strategies. Enforcing appropriate use policy and providing robust Web content security, however, requires a dynamic filtering solution that can mitigate a variety of content security threats—not only today but in the future as well.
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Although secure sockets layer (SSL) is a ubiquitous enabler of e-commerce and outsourcing, it creates a special challenge for network administrators and security professionals because its encryption is known to decelerate data. In order to regain control over application delivery—when everything business-related is encrypted—organizations need to look toward SSL-aware solutions that can help decipher and accelerate data.
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A secure and accurate flow of information in your supply chain operations has never been more critical—and complex. Digital transfer of unstructured information is a security risk, for both confidentiality and compliance, and traditional file transfer methods are now falling short. A managed file transfer solution combining hardware, software, and networks can meet your demands for visibility, security, and compliance.
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To ensure end-to-end visibility while still meeting multiple trading partner requirements in your supply chain operations, one solution is to consolidate with a single value-added network (VAN). Looking for a migration partner? Want to know more about the latest in VAN solutions? Learn the drill without tripping any alarms: use a best-practices checklist to help make your VAN migration simple and seamless.
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As the solution of choice for many companies, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems have helped many manufacturers operate more efficiently and effectively. By streamlining business operations, ERP systems can solve many of the problems faced by today’s manufacturing companies—and help them become leaner and more competitive. Find out how an ERP solution can work for your company.
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A call center can be so much more to your enterprise than a costly necessity. By carefully selecting an on-premise contact center solution, your company can boost revenues, retain customers, and discover customer service strengths and weaknesses in the long term. But before making a purchase, do you have the information you need about your current situation? Find out what to ask before you buy.
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E-mail archiving systems are no longer simply tools that focus on regulatory compliance, but instead are multifaceted systems that can help companies satisfy legal discovery requirements, improve messaging-related storage management, and assist in disaster recovery efforts. While there are several solutions available, a hosted solution can offer a number of important benefits you should consider.
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Even when business revenues decline, the demand for IT services often continues to increase. To meet those challenges, both businesses and IT partners must come to terms with the demand and delivery needs of each group. Strong communication between the user and the IT provider is essential. Strategize your initiatives and transform your business: find out key recommendations to manage IT supply and demand relationships.
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Wi-Fi has become the access method of choice for users at the office, at home, and on the road. According to research, nearly 200 million Wi-Fi chipsets were sold in 2006 alone. But can Wi-Fi work effectively in a wireless local area network (WLAN) environment? Yes it can. To deliver Wi-Fi more reliably to increasingly diverse devices requires a self-configuring platform that covers larger areas and higher user densities.
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There are key systems in every infrastructure where unapproved change can pose significant business risk. These guidelines show you how to properly categorize these systems in order to identify those that have risk characteristics. By learning how to identify critical change control failure points in your infrastructure, you reduce the threat of costly downtime, potential security breaches, and compliance weaknesses.
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Deploying and migrating JaveEE applications is hard work, the kind that is error-prone, repetitive, and time-consuming, resulting in lost man-hours, soaring costs, and potential configuration issues that are bound to pop up later. In response to this complex environment, Phurnace Software has created a software application that accelerates the deployment of JavaEE applications and helps to minimize errors.
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Before an organization can truly realize the cost and agility benefits of enterprise service-oriented architecture (SOA), there are a few concepts it should know about. By understanding the various stages of SOA adoption and by knowing what technologies are available, an organization will stand a better chance of succeeding in its SOA initiatives. With these seven steps, effective SOA can be realized.
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Corporate governance encompasses the processes and systems by which organizations operate—and it affects every business. To effectively participate in governance processes, businesses should consider closed-loop service oriented architecture (SOA). Although stand-alone applications for governance, management, and security exist, find out why they do not enable the demand and value management that closed-loop SOA offers.
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Corporate IT organizations are struggling to satisfy the demands of a constantly evolving business environment. Lowering costs and responding to changing markets are a few of the challenges they face. Another is understanding how to leverage mission-critical applications as they develop new composite applications. Find out how deploying a service-oriented legacy architecture (SOLA) can help—and save you time and money.
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Corporate IT departments and independent software vendors (ISV) alike are faced with a number of similar business challenges. One such challenge is the problem of how to derive additional value from their existing Windows and UNIX software applications and create advantage with Web-enabled solutions. Discover the pros and cons of Web-based and Web-enabled applications—and learn about the solutions that lead the pack.
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Linux operating systems are taking the world by storm, and have seen double-digit growth rates for seven consecutive quarters. With its promise of higher performance and better stability and security, Linux has become the alternative to traditional Windows-based servers. By deploying Linux in key strategic areas and taking advantage of application publishing solutions, you can lower your costs and speed time-to-market.
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Nearly half of all US companies have serious data quality issues. The problem is that most are not thinking about their business data as being valuable. But in reality data has become—in some cases—just as valuable as inventory. The solution to most organizational data challenges today is to combine a strong data quality program with a master data management (MDM) program, helping businesses leverage data as an asset.
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“It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack!” That saying and Internet site searches go together like ham and eggs. To help maximize search effectiveness, many online retailers are now establishing competitive advantages through site search analytics. By manufacturing and analyzing search content, they’re improving the relevancy of search results, thus closing the gap between searching and finding—and buying.
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Despite the defensive efforts of firewalls, intrusion detection, antivirus solutions, and the like, criminals, careless employees, and contractors have exposed more than 158 million digital records of consumers personally identifiable information since 2005. With this critical need for stronger network security, Qualys has developed an on-demand solution that effectively manages these vulnerabilities.
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As with all things, there’s a good side and a bad side—the Internet is no different. Although it improves communication between businesses and customers, it can also overwhelm customers that are bombarded with marketing e-mails on a daily basis. Customers want more convenient contact channels. Smart companies understand this and are responding by adopting a multichannel approach to customer relationship management (CRM).
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As a provider of employee benefits, CIGNA must observe a bevy of regulatory compliance mandates. Because much of its efforts are compliance-focused, it continually embraces technology, searching for new products to better manage its benefit offerings and track its security risks. With QualysGuard’s vulnerability management solution, CIGNA has mitigated vulnerabilities and remained up-to-date with compliance regulations.
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With a vast global network that supports over 60,000 employees, vulnerability and risk management programs are crucial for Oracle GIT. To further enhance its IT system risk management capabilities, Oracle deployed QualysGuard’s on-demand software vulnerability and compliance management solution. Since its deployment, Oracle has optimized its scanning capabilities and automated its demand security auditing processes.
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As one of the largest Internet marketplaces, eBay proclaims that the trust it enables between buyers and sellers has been the key to its success. To ensure continued success, eBay wanted to standardize its network security auditing and remediation processes, and turned to QualysGuard’s vulnerability management solution. With Qualys’ automated solution, eBay can now quickly and easily remediate any network vulnerabilities.
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To keep your growing business competitive, your data center must be secure, protected against disaster, and available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. But if managing IT is not your core competence, what are your options? A managed service provider (MSP) can help. Learn about the benefits of outsourcing data center management, and make sure your crucial business applications are always available when you need them.
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Corporate concern for the environment is no longer just an issue of compliancy. Businesses are becoming increasingly concerned about how much energy is required by their IT operations, especially by their data centers. Greening IT starts in the data center: find out how data center consolidation—and other solutions—can help you reduce energy consumption, and even increase productivity and efficiency.
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When it comes to data and storage management, midsize organizations often face similar issues to those of their larger counterparts. Rapid data growth, business continuity, and data archiving are just a few of the problems they must deal with. By coupling IP-based storage area network (SAN) technology with Ethernet-based SAN connectivity, however, organizations can gain higher levels of efficiency and effectiveness.
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With the increasing complexity of the data center and its dependent systems, data center automation (DCA) is becoming a necessity. To replace the costly and inefficient human aspect of managing the data center, IT departments must adopt DCA solutions. Combined with utility-based computing architectures, these solutions can provide greater dynamics in the environment and facilitate speed of response to market demands.
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Remote access to source code is a requirement for today’s development teams. Popular source control packages are ideal for sharing code across a local area network (LAN), but when used remotely over the Internet, they cause problems in performance, security, and flexibility. Find out how remote-access middleware does more than increase your network speed. It can protect your code base and provide multiplatform support.
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For small businesses with limited budgets and IT support, customer relationship management (CRM) has been out of reach. Until now, these small companies have missed out on the benefits provided by CRM because most applications were built for larger companies. New technology, however, has now emerged that levels the playing field for these smaller businesses by providing a fully customizable and affordable CRM system.
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What can user-driven applications like Morello and Microsoft’s Office SharePoint (MOSS) 2007 do to help your web content management strategy? By combining the two, users can develop web applications and collaborative workspaces themselves rather than acquiring IT development input. In doing so, they unlock the silos of working practices and content stores, and add significant value to the web content management strategy.
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When testing firm Promissor’s system kept crashing, it knew it was time to make a change. With over 800 employees made up of part-timers, temporary workers, and employees on various pay cycles, its payroll team was constantly reconstructing lost time sheets and wasting valuable time. Since implementing an automated Web-based solution, it has benefited from improved data collection accuracy and reduced manual processing.
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Non-profit organization The March of Dimes realized that to continue its success, it would need to find more efficient and effective ways to work. Its human resources (HR) department was doing most of its HR and payroll processes manually—for over 1400 employees in various locations. To automate these processes, it turned to a Web-based application and has since significantly cut down on processing time and expense.
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TESTCo was accustomed to managing its issue tracking for software testing using Microsoft Excel or one of its customers’ homegrown solutions. But as operations expanded, the company realized it needed a better system to manage this process—one that could monitor issues and ensure they were resolved and documented. Using ProjectLockers Issue Manager, TESTCo has benefited by saving on maintenance hours and costs.
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For many years, S&C Electric, a global provider of electric power system equipment, used internally built tracking and Subversion data to manage source code and documents and to track viruses. But as it grew, its needs became more complex, and more maintenance time was required. A managed source control solution now manages and protects S&C Electric’s intellectual property, and saves the company a lot in man-hours.
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Software company Terra Technology’s development team often worked remotely, without a centralized development system. Managing documents manually was quickly becoming an unproductive use of the team s time—and increased its chances of making errors. Since using ProjectLocker’s document management system, Terra Technology has saved valuable time and money, and can now focus on its core competency—supply chain software.
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Any geographically distributed business with three or more remote sites has likely dealt with tape-based backup systems. If this sounds like your business, then you certainly understand the complexities involved with managing growing data—not to mention the risks. The good new is that an agentless, multisite backup and recovery software solution is available that can offer a high-speed alternative to tape-based systems.
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Would spending millions of dollars and countless hours securing your data center be enough for it to pass a compliance audit? While many businesses work hard at securing their data centers, they often forget to secure remote office data. With the consequences of non-compliance ranging from financial penalties to job loss and worse, it could mean the end of your business. Don’t let compliance become your Achilles heel.
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IT managers today face plenty of problems when it comes to protecting remote office data—problems that agentless architecture could eliminate. Many organizations outsource their data protection, which can be costly. But an agentless architecture disk-to-disk (D2D) software solution can offer your business bottom-line benefits that range from lower administrative costs to pay-as-you-grow scalability and increased security.
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Online advertising has grown so fast that it has surpassed billboards, magazines, and cable in spending. Local advertising is growing even faster, and the need to provide competitive services to advertisers is becoming imperative. As demand for local listings increases, a tool enabling advertisers to manage their own web site listings will not only save them significant operating dollars, it’ll provide a competitive edge.
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Today’s IT professionals are often challenged by unrelenting changes in the enterprise, increased data growth and compliance regulations, and geographic distribution of assets, to name a few. Keyboard/video/mouse (KVM) over Internet protocol (IP) can help by providing an effective tool that can remotely manage servers—regardless of their physical location. When looking for a KVM over IP solution, you should consider some basic requirements first.
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An estimated 55 percent of users of business critical applications work in remote locations. With so many users working remotely, networks become congested and user productivity suffers. Until now, wide area network (WAN) monitoring and shaping has required special appliances, but there’s a new alternative software-based solution available that leverages the power of the user’s PC—providing unprecedented traffic control.
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What’s all this hype about wikis anyway? According to Gartner’s Hype Cycle, wikis are descending from the crest of a hype wave and coasting into areas where real business value can be recognized. Why? Because their ability to allow corporate users to collaborate on any number of internal projects in an online environment where everyone is given an equal voice is not only empowering, but speeds the process of innovation.
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What can a managed Subversion solution do to help .NET businesses solve their integration problems? Subversion meets the challenge of software development by allowing teams to use branching and tagging methods that help them work better with their QA organizations. It also saves .NET businesses a lot of money over setting up and maintaining a development infrastructure in house, which keeps the cost of ownership manageable.
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Software development best practices can save you money and make your team more productive. When software development teams don’t invest in a solid development platform, it makes their work harder and often ends up costing them more money over time. A hosted platform, however, provides a level of convenience and savings that makes it the obvious choice for today’s IT development, management, and consulting organizations.
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What does Visibility’s .NET enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution have that others don’t? .NET technology. And because it contains no legacy code, it provides a system that’s accessible using a web-browser and has a user interface equal in functionality to a client-server application. In fact, any client PC with Internet Explorer 5.5 or later can operate it—without compromising the quality of the user experience.
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In their efforts to accelerate time to market and improve business process efficiency, many marketing organizations adopt customer relationship management (CRM). But CRM often falls short in exploiting the exponential growth of content associated with product and brand marketing. By using a digital asset management (DAM) solution, however, you can increase productivity and achieve a favorable return on investment (ROI).
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In today’s business world, heightened privacy concerns and tightened regulations such as the US Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act have forced organizations to improve their workflow and archival and records management processes. That's why many results-oriented organizations are now using workflow software—bringing together people, processes, and documents to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and meet compliance requirements.
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The future of customer service management (CRM) is changing—and SAP’s CRM 5.2 is a big part of the reason. SAP is known for constantly enhancing its products—whether it’s changing its tier architecture or introducing new dimensional components. But its latest in CRM technology provides many new features and functionalities, and introduces some of the latest trends. If you want to know more about SAP CRM 5.2, here it is.
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Today’s complex enterprise networks present unique challenges to those whose task it is to manage and secure them. Existing security measures that worked yesterday may not be sufficient tomorrow. But by combining Configuresoft’s Enterprise Configuration Manager (ECM) with Microsoft’s System Center 2007, businesses can secure their data, protect their bottom lines from costly downtime, and meet regulatory standards.
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IT is often characterized as distinct groups pursuing individual agendas and launching disconnected initiatives to increase operational efficiencies. To overcome this, organizations need a set of capabilities that can help improve coordination between IT and the rest of the business while facilitating effective service management. Adopting foundational technologies and a best-practice benchmark is a good place to start.
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Most businesses today depend on their own IT departments to satisfy corporate governance objectives and meet increasing customer demand. Unfortunately, many have failed to clearly demonstrate to themselves—and to their customers—that they are truly managing their business. Only when the IT department understands what the business wants can it benchmark itself and build continual improvement plans that can meet these demands.
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Manufacturers’ business needs have changed significantly over the past few years, evolving the roles that technology plays within the manufacturing process. Two key technologies—enterprise resource planning (ERP) and product lifecycle management (PLM)—have developed into key success factors for manufacturers and when combined, provide a collaborative environment that adds value and helps in maintaining a competitive edge.
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Is scrambling to consolidate and virtualize your information systems department frazzling you and your hardware? Are management and infrastructure costs not as low as you’d like them to be? Separate your business applications from your physical server hardware—and make your virtual infrastructure more dynamic and flexible, while reducing costs. The trick is doing it without losing space or key data. Find out how.
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Enterprises of all sizes are building flexible storage infrastructures by using iSCSI and virtualization technologies that let them allocate and shift storage area network (SAN) resources dynamically in response to the demands of their virtualized server environments. Find out how a virtualized infrastructure with virtualization technologies can help you achieve an IT infrastructure that is simple to manage and scale.
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iSCSI storage area networks (SANs) offer an alternative for building SANs. Consolidating storage in a SAN offers storage management and scaling benefits for data centers, and iSCSI support in Windows Server 2003 makes connecting servers to an iSCSI SAN easier and more affordable. Read this technical briefing to understand best practices and the benefits of using an iSCSI SAN with SQL Server 2005.
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SQL Server deployments can be large and complex. However, Auto-Snapshot Manager simplifies data management tasks and offers a comprehensive approach to SQL Server protection by providing both local and remote database protection, allowing for quick data recovery in case of data loss or site failure. Find out more about how Auto-Snapshot Manager can provide you with the safety net you need for effective disaster recovery.
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Organizations of all sizes face similar challenges when managing storage—not enough capacity or protection. Help has arrived with Internet small computer system interface storage area networks (iSCSI SANs)—and they're steadily gaining momentum. With iSCSI SANs, businesses can effectively manage their storage needs, while lowering costs and increasing security. Find out why many industry leaders are choosing iSCSI today.
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With your Internet and e-mail gateways largely secured against external hackers, most security breaches are now occurring within your network. But why should this issue be placed above the many other IT and governance concerns vying for your attention? Well, where would you be if your closest competitors suddenly had your latest technical blueprints—or if your customers all cancelled their accounts thanks to a data leak?
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Today’s extensive use of data collection tools coupled with the easy access to communication networks has woven more devices and systems into the fabric of our daily lives. As the scale of integration and complexity grows, so does the need for the appropriate paradigm to address it. In order to scale, system software architecture must be organized around a common-shared information model that can span multiple systems.
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Information lifecycle management (ILM) is rapidly gaining acceptance as a process crucial to the success of many IT initiatives. The reason for this is the importance of managing data. With the growing demand for ILM comes a variety of solutions that follow a disjointed, point product approach. By choosing an ILM software designed to scale to its needs, a business can benefit from software built on a unified platform.
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Every day, sensitive business information finds its way into the wrong hands—through external breaches or internal theft. Such data is highly regulated, and any risks of exposure can result in stiff penalties and legal liabilities. Many of these security risks lie in the test/dev environments, and as such require a solution that protects data application clones from unauthorized access without jeopardizing its integrity.
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The growth of application data has placed an enormous burden on IT organizations to maintain acceptable application performance and availability. The weight of managing and navigating through vast amounts of inactive data has caused outages and raised budgets, among other problems. Active archiving software, however, addresses complex data management issues and delivers lasting benefits to organizations and its users.
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Data breach is a very real problem in business today. Every day, organizations store massive amounts of data inside database tables—data ranging from credit card transactions to product inventories. This valuable information is what runs the business. In order to protect this data and stay on top of compliance, an enterprise data management solution that respects information privacy regulations should be considered.
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Fax hardware plays a crucial role in the sending and receiving of business documents. With high-volume use over time, instabilities in performance can occur. Therefore, how well fax boards and fax software applications perform together becomes an important consideration. With IQ Express intelligent fax board series, fax servers send and receive corporate documents electronically—reducing costs and improving productivity.
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For automotive manufacturers and their suppliers, consumer demands are high and global competition is fierce. To compete successfully, manufacturers must meet expectations and still generate an acceptable profit margin. By using QAD’s Just-in-time (JIT) Sequencing process together with its Manufacturing Execution Workbench (MEW) tools, automotive manufacturers will have the foundation needed to meet these challenges.
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Three strikes—your out; that’s what lockout management does. But employees often forget the many passwords needed to access information. What ensues is a flood of calls to the help desk that, over time, can become a huge administrative burden. Adopting a strong password policy is critical. By implementing a lockout management strategy via automated management solutions, businesses enhance security and improve workflow.
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When Naghi Group’s annual revenue began to soar, it realized that running core business operations on multiple systems was no longer feasible; its current solution lacked the integration capabilities necessary to communicate with its distribution and manufacturing departments. After only a few months since integrating VAI’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, Naghi has already realized its many benefits.
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Are virtual appliances really more advantageous than physical appliances? For businesses looking to decrease server complexity, increase load balance, and optimize scalability and mobility, the answer is yes. Virtualization has brought distributed computing to a new level and provides many key benefits. This white paper looks at four of those benefits and uncovers why more organizations need to consider making a change.
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Technology products always seem to come out strong, and then wither under intense scrutiny. This was the case with single sign-on (SSO). However, any product driven by strong need will reinvent itself to address the problems it contains. With SSO, a number of myths have now been exploded. Find out why it may be time for you to evaluate SSO for your company. Myth #1: You can’t get true SSO.
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While virtualization technology can simplify server management and reduce operating costs, in production environments it presents a disaster-recovery challenge. The problem: simply backing up a host server doesn’t always ensure that data within virtual machines is recoverable. With Acronis’s True Image, IT managers can rest assured their data, settings, applications, and operating systems are protected against disaster.
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To boot or pre-boot, that is the question. There’s no doubt that operating systems (OSs) are complicated given the sheer amount of code that must be flawlessly interfaced and the potential vulnerabilities that can ensue. While full disk encryption (FDE) is one step closer to a more secure OS, encryption without strong authentication isn’t enough. For security-conscious users, pre-boot authentication is the only way to go.
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The Mobile County Public School System was frustrated with frequent attacks by viruses and malware on its student and staff workstations. The school district’s IT department searched for ways to gain more control over the multi-user computer environment. With Faronics’ Deep Freeze servers, IT now has centralized control of workstations, and increased protection against the effects of spyware, malware, and viruses.
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Newport Independent school district’s implementation of a formal energy-conservation policy created problems for the district-wide computer system. Rather than having to manually shut down up to 900 computers at the end of every day, the district’s head IT technician opted to centralize control with Faronic’s Power Save technology. The final result: a solution that is both environmentally and fiscally responsible.
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Many manufacturers want to increase production efficiency and improve quality—but how can they ensure their efforts are successful? A process-oriented enterprise resource planning (ERP) system may be the answer. This white paper includes case studies on a variety of process manufacturing industries and provides valuable insights into the ERP capabilities required to successfully manage a process-oriented implementation.
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On top of the many challenges faced by IT managers today comes yet another challenge: ensuring efficient and secure user access to SAP. Because of the unencrypted communication between users’ workstations and the backend servers, the SAP environment—and the confidential data it stores—become vulnerable. With a secure single sign-on solution to SAP, however, you can significantly improve the security of this environment.
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Today’s business environment is more mobile than ever. With more employees traveling—using laptops, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and home computers to conduct business—vulnerabilities increase. Companies are now protecting their digital assets with full disk encryption (FDE). Recent advances in FDE allow businesses to protect data stored on users’ mobile devices, without jeopardizing intellectual property.
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Protecting your company’s data is not only wise, but often legally necessary. In order to beef up their data security programs, more companies are implementing full disk encryption (FDE). In the past, FDE was software based, which left it open to greater security risks. With the advent of new technology, however, it is now possible to migrate from software- to hardware-based FDE while still protecting your existing systems.
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Fax servers are essential for the financial services industry. Their reliability and security help transmit financial information quickly and safely. Financial institutions, however, also have workflow and document needs due to lots of back-office paperwork. Luckily, there are fax servers on the market that help financial institutions optimize workflow and business processes—organizing and reducing paperwork backlog.
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When you decide to implement a new fax software solution, you should review how the solution will be implemented and managed, as well as its ability to grow with your network. Within a Windows network, critical architectural, administrative, and usage concerns should be thoroughly considered. Review your options with this fax server overview outlining the benefits of different fax servers and e-mail integration.
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Secure transmission of health care information is critical to your medical organization and your clients. Volumes of critical medical data are sent to you every day, making it imperative that the information be sent quickly and safely. Fax servers are easy-to-use point-to-point systems that provide secure transmission of confidential information—saving you time and money while protecting all your sensitive data.
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Whether field service is your primary business or a service offering, incorporating mobile technologies into your existing system can give you a competitive edge. Electronic information capture not only increases reporting accuracy, but it also provides real-time data for your planning, billing, and purchasing needs—bridging the gap between your front-office operations and back-office processes.
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Keeping up-to-date on security features is challenging for any size business. Making your computer system secure without sacrificing usability isn’t easy. In fact, careful planning is absolutely necessary to ensure a secure system that works for you. Whether you’re worried about hackers, phishing, or internal breaches, there is a security solution to help you protect your critical data.
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What would you do if a critical error occurred during production—all because the wrong data was input into your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system? You’d probably be asking “how could this happen?” The ability to communicate information between teams can mean the difference between production success and failure. Avoid these snafus with a system that can integrate the data of both the design and ERP systems.
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Why is Vyatta’s open source networking approach so successful? Because it is in touch with today’s users needs. By eliminating the reliance on specialized hardware, Vyatta’s open source, Linux-based approach to networking is changing the way networks are being purchased and deployed. With its strong community of users, Vyatta is challenging even proprietary networking vendors like Cisco. We challenge you to find out more.
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How can you get the most out of your virtualization project and avoid the common mistakes made by many businesses? By adopting a strategy that’ll allow you to be free of risk and save on your pocketbook. Don’t let your virtualization project become another implementation failure; make it a success. Sensitizing yourself to the five mistakes common to many enterprise virtualization implementations is a good place to start.
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Microsoft Dynamics is a business management solution designed to allow your employees to customize and automate their Microsoft Office system user interface according to their preferences and work styles. Microsoft Dynamics helps your employees and your business work more efficiently—giving you a faster return on investment and an effective and profitable business.
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The open architecture of Microsoft Dynamics GP provides a flexible solution for organizations implementing a business management system. The foundation is provided by the Dexterity runtime engine and Microsoft SQL Server, helping Microsoft Dynamics GP offer many features and benefits. These include an extendable architecture allowing add-ons and vertical enhancements—so that organizations can grow today and tomorrow.
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Microsoft development tools will help developers and independent Microsoft software vendors integrate Microsoft Dynamics GP with existing applications. This accounting and business management system includes many features and benefits, as well as guidelines to help developers choose the right tools for various development tasks and create custom applications that integrate with Microsoft Dynamics GP.
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With ever-changing technology, businesses often spend too much time and money trying to sustain their outdated systems. But is it possible to maintain a legacy system without the substantial costs of frequently updating it? By adopting service-oriented architecture (SOA)—which provides a suite of automated tools and services for migrating and extending legacy platforms—businesses can maximize quality and minimize costs.
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Systems integration with service-oriented architecture (SOA) helps you reuse the functionality in your mainframe applications. Extending your mainframes to an SOA through Web services will accelerate your time to market, keep your costs low, and help you avoid undue risk. Keep your business dynamic and current, and stay competitive in today’s marketplace—modernize your existing mainframes with SOA.
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In the rush to explore the “next big thing” in software technology, it’s easy to forget the huge investment you’ve already made in mainframe assets. These assets have performed the business functions that they were designed for, but it’s OK to remain open to new solutions too. By leveraging existing assets while moving to a service-based architecture, you can extend your existing business resources while saving money.
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Color printing used to be reserved for only the most important documents, where the high cost was justifiable. As printing technologies have advanced, however, color printing has been added to the everyday office environment. Today, the demand for color printing is growing as more and more organizations discover that they can print in color as easily, quickly, and inexpensively as in black and white.
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Environmental concerns are a focal point for businesses wanting to “go green,” and they are looking at every aspect of their operations, including their printers. Replacing even a portion of energy-inefficient printers with environmentally friendly ones will have a positive impact on the environment, helping to conserve energy and reduce waste. Saving energy is not only good for the planet; it’s also good for business.
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To survive in today’s global marketplace, companies must develop a competitive advantage. Your business can thrive with the help of enterprise service-oriented architecture (SOA). With the ability to implement business strategies more quickly, this greater flexibility will help your new business processes and empower your information workers—giving your company long-term growth and an ongoing competitive advantage.
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Globalization is one of the top issues affecting organizations’ supplier management strategies. True supplier collaboration can no longer be avoided: working closely with suppliers around the globe is the best way to streamline and reduce costs and increase value. With practical tips and techniques on how to achieve your vision statement, you can attain sourcing excellence while setting a pace that’s right for your company.
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Storage area networks (SAN) continue to grow in size and complexity. Often, the ongoing cost of maintenance and upgrades exceeds the initial acquisition and implementation cost. The ideal solution is to find an architecture that provides a simple migration path without disrupting the existing infrastructure. A stackable fibre channel switch can deliver—without diminishing your ability to upgrade and expand in the future.
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VMware and blade servers have taken the IT world by storm. Virtual server use has grown over 50 percent, and blade servers account for 12.5 percent of all new servers. Can you incorporate them into your existing frameworks? Yes. Routers can scale server numbers with virtual interfaces, and with fibre channel storage area network (SAN) connectivity, you can reduce testing and development costs in VMware environments.
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Corporate e-mail usage is expected to jump 38 percent by 2009. Can our future data centers handle this load? By using QLogic’s fibre channel host bus adapters (HBAs) in the Microsoft Exchange environment, your data centers can handle the load without degrading overall performance—thus providing the bandwidth and throughput you’re going to need.
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The Solaris operating system has become the top choice for hosting data center applications. Sun Solaris platforms consistently exceed the reliability requirements of enterprise data centers while at the same time reducing total cost of ownership (TCO). QLogic fibre channel solutions are a perfect match for Solaris environments and successfully meet the input/output requirements of enterprise applications.
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IT managers know that choosing the Linux host bus adapter (HBA) for their data center infrastructures can impact the reliability of their systems. That is why Linux-based servers are being deployed in many enterprises. You can use the reliability of QLogic storage area networks (SANs) to drive more value from your SAN investments—giving your IT managers increased reliability and scalability in a hardware portfolio.
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Storage area networks (SANs) are key components in IT organizations, as they provide access to and protection of critical data. Managing data storage is becoming increasingly complex, with regulatory and corporate requirements dictating national disaster protection. Whether your company is near or far, remote SANs store your critical data, saving you and your company from losses in even the most dire of circumstances.
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Realize the benefits of storage area networks (SANs) by using public or private networks. The benefits of SANs include centralized data management, back up, and restoration of data, as well as remote archiving for disaster recovery and business continuity. Host bus adapters (HBAs), switches, and multiprotocol routers are the keys to the fibre channel network—and the high-quality of select remote sites.
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Most IT managers have proven, cost-effective ways to increase the return on investment (ROI) of existing infrastructures—that is, storage area networks (SANs). SANs provide high-availability storage to servers within corporate infrastructures. Connecting low-cost servers to SANs makes business sense, as it dramatically reduces the cost-per-server connection to well below $100 (USD).
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Server consolidation is the reason enterprises deploy server virtualization technologies across their data centers, improving server and processor use. As more virtual servers are consolidated onto a single server, demand is increased on the central processing unit (CPU) and host bus interfaces. However, you can do more with less by deploying a fibre channel host bus adapter, enhancing your server consolidation levels.
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Traditional disaster planning and recovery solutions, including tape backup, image capture, and clustering, fail to deliver the necessary combination of recovery speed and integrity within reasonable budgetary constraints. That’s why organizations are increasingly leveraging virtualization to achieve superior disaster planning and recovery operations. Find out how to make it work for you.
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Fibre channel storage area networks (SANs) used to be implemented in only high-end enterprise class data centers, but this is no longer the case. SANs have become more affordable and can be widely implemented without sacrificing performance. When you need to expand your frame-based computer network, consider stackable switches as a cost-effective solution for the infrastructure of a fibre channel SAN.
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Small to medium businesses (SMBs) must adapt to technology innovations as well as the demand-driven consumer market. The need for small computer system interfaces (SCSIs) on each server host, along with enhanced security needs have driven SMB costs upwards. Is there a solution? Yes. Storage area networks (SANs) built on stackable switches help reduce costs, and are a viable approach for SMBs.
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As clusters grow to address the problems of increasing application complexity, interconnect performance has become a key factor in overall application and clustered system performance. Finding the interconnect performance you need is a complex task— however, when compared with two other adapters, InfiniPath SDR Infiniband interconnected faster and scaled better on high-performance computing (HPC) applications.
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Industries involved in outsourcing and collaboration know that accurate data translation is fundamental to a project’s successful completion. Valuable engineering and manufacturing product data must be exchanged quickly and efficiently while protecting corporate assets—but with older technology, this is not always possible. Learn more about a number of integration solutions that can help you reengineer your supply chain.
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IT organizations today are faced with the constant pressure of reducing costs at the service desk, while at the same time ensuring optimal customer service. To accelerate their IT infrastructure library (ITIL) initiatives, many are implementing service resolution management (SRM) systems. With the addition of SRM, these organizations can address the core issues required to operate an efficient and strategic service desk.
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As products become more complex and customer expectations continue to rise, service and support become increasingly difficult. So how can service and support managers transcend these problems and use each customer interaction to build customer loyalty and drive service leveraged revenue? By empowering customers with Web 2.0 technology and enabling users to manage their own experiences. Find out how.
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Server and data center consolidation has never been more important. Issues such as server sprawl and increasing costs have made consolidation the number one priority among IT managers. New virtualization technologies, however, are helping data centers combat these problems. Learn about the factors that are driving consolidation initiatives today, and find out what best practices can be used for ensuring its success.
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As your business grows, so too does the complexity of your data center. Along with this complexity, there are problems such as the inflexibility caused by operating systems, applications, and associated data, which are bound to the hardware they are installed on. Discover eight ways to optimize the infrastructure in your data center using virtualization products designed to work with your current technologies.
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Today’s data centers are an increasingly complex mixture of server platforms, hardware, operating systems, data, and applications that have accumulated over time. So how do you take your data center from a tangled mess of suboptimal servers which may be hampering your service levels, to one that can maximize performance? With the use of virtualization technology, data center optimization can become a reality.
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As management visionary and author Peter Drucker once said, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” No statement rings truer—especially when it comes to security risk reduction. By having an accurate depiction of your network, however, you can identify real-world security threats and learn how to evaluate your organization’s ability to respond to them. Find out how, with these seven essential steps.
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With the growing global epidemic of data theft, tougher regulations are being enforced by government bodies worldwide. As such, organizations need to work harder at proactive security. With the right technology, identifying network vulnerabilities and measuring overall security exposure becomes manageable. By using these eight steps as your guide, you can put an end to network security vulnerabilities once and for all.
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Worldwide, various standards have been created to provide some form of structure with respect to delivering products and services. Over time, however, the adoption of industry compliance guidelines has seen many pitfalls, specifically with the advent of technology. Developing a sound compliance strategy requires a unified solution—one that includes all the necessary components, but also keeps the business users in mind.
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Joshen Paper & Packaging needed to update its enterprise resource planning (ERP) distribution system. Joshen partnered with Vormittag Associates Inc. (VAI) and found a solution that consolidates its financial reporting and provides its sales team with real-time inventory information access. The result: faster inventory turnaround and order fulfillment—and to date, about 100 new clients in its customer base.
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Whether you’re a manufacturer, vendor, or customer service company, the increasing pressure to make sales and decrease service costs affects you. The key to its success is to look at your customer experiences as repeatable life cycles. Instead of viewing sales and service as independent challenges—solved by using disconnected software packages—an integrated solution that accelerates the total life cycle may be the answer.
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Knowledge management (KM) can mean different things to an organization depending upon the nature of the initiative. KM is not a technology or set of methodologies, but a practice or discipline that involves people, processes, and technology. If implemented correctly, a KM initiative can improve the productivity and efficiency of an entire organization. With these ten basic principles, your organization can learn how.
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Today’s support organizations often face the challenge of providing efficient and effective customer service. Without the right tools, it can become an uphill battle. To gain true scale and effectiveness in service and support, many organizations are now turning to knowledge management initiatives like knowledge-centered support (KCS)—a business process that directly addresses the root causes of support inefficiencies.
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Are you moving to call-center multisourcing to save money? Did you know that many multisourced agents use varied and unreliable systems? This leads to unavailable agents and, consequently, long waits for your customers. Are all call centers like this? No. Call centers using a common hosted platform share tools and unify agent management, resulting in answered calls and positive customer experiences
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An ever-increasing demand on storage area networks (SANs) has meant a necessary evolution of throughput standards. SAN administrators are now burdened with multiple generations of SAN host bus adaptors (HBAs)—and unwieldy management overhead. A scalable HBA architecture might provide just the functions you need to address your cost, performance, backward compatibility, and future scalability concerns.
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Supplemental product or technical data is typically delivered separately from the information contained within portable document format (PDF) files. This can make it difficult for users to locate the additional content for download. With the CopyFILE plug-in application, however, companies can integrate supplemental product information by using links within a PDF file—thus allowing content to be easily distributed.
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To build or not to build—that is the question. Is building an enterprise application from scratch better than modifying existing application code? With a .NET framework, the answer is an emphatic yes. Building applications from scratch using only .NET code not only provides cost savings, it also allows software developers to extend applications to users via the Internet—without sacrificing functionality or security.
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Registry cleanup is inarguably an integral component of PC maintenance. However, many PC users may be wasting time and effort cleaning their registries more often than necessary, depending on the age of their computers, as well as how often software and other utilities are installed. In order to save time and get the most out of your PC, there are a number of myths about registry cleanup you ought to dispel.
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Bridging the gap between an application’s problem domain and its code can be difficult, even for the best software engineers. Bridging these two diverse worlds—each with its own language—requires a finished application that creates an intersection between the two. By building a domain-specific modeling (DSM) language and generator using MetaEdit+, engineers close the gap and pave the way to better productivity.
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There is a high demand for economical and efficient enterprise applications. The Internet and open source software are creating opportunities for software vendors to deliver their software as a service. By transforming your own applications, you give your clients access to your solutions on the Web, on a per-use, per-project, or subscription basis—giving them the inexpensive, accessible service they want.
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Stable revenue and stronger customer relationships are what software companies want, and more are turning to software as a service (SaaS) platforms to reach these goals. Building an SaaS infrastructure is complex, and you need operations and engineering experts to manage your infrastructures. Start by following a step-by-step process—thus helping to increase your revenue and strengthen your customer network.
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In today’s datacenter, management costs have eclipsed all others. Server management puts a huge strain on IT budgets and, as a result, solutions that reduce costs by simplifying IT infrastructures and automating management processes are in high demand. Thankfully, a Linux-hosted management tool delivers automation for key management process—allowing your IT talent to focus on real-time business needs.
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For independent software vendors (ISVs), software delivery creates big operational challenges. Integrating an application with the latest operating system and service pack causes headaches for customers and suppliers. However, pre-built server devices or appliances contain one convenient, ready-to-go system, minimizing configuration glitches and letting customers and suppliers step back while the appliance does the work.
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Businesses and security threats alike are evolving. Strong protection of client data is a necessity for any organization handling credit card information, especially if it’s subject to payment card industry (PCI) compliance. As a result, many businesses are looking for ways to ensure proper security controls. Thankfully, there are solutions adapted to the challenges of meeting PCI compliance—and staying secure.
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Reducing server management complexity and total cost of ownership (TCO) are key IT goals. There’s a new generation of automated management tools designed to enable provisioning, monitoring, and control of blade systems in infrastructure deployments. This means more work in less time, ensuring IT talent is responding to business needs—resulting in improved TCO metrics rather than time-consuming manual processes.
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In stark contrast to a few years ago, IT executives now rank power and cooling among their top concerns. As IT continues to support more servers, power and cooling have become limiting factors to the number of data center servers. However, there is a solution. Blade server thermal technology optimizes power and cooling while improving energy monitoring—real benefits that reduce the overall IT total cost of ownership (TCO).
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For organizations deploying many servers, total cost of ownership (TCO) analyses favor blade over rack-optimized systems. Blade server systems—reducing both capital and operating expenses—exploit economies of scale when deploying servers in volume. Saving power, cooling, and space by more than 25 percent, the blade advantage is particularly relevant for servers working in conjunction with storage area networks (SANs).
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Implementing IT solutions that fulfill all corporate requirements requires exhaustive research and analysis. But the reality is that most organizations have neither the time nor the resources to do all this. Indeed, such an approach is largely impractical, since by the time you’ve built your perfect solution, it may already be out of date. So what are your real options? Three words: Business. Process. Integration.
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Slowdowns, scalability issues, and security gaps hit Web applications where it hurts. Data center consolidations put distance between application servers and users—producing long round-trips and slow response times. Luckily, there is a solution. Deploying a wire-speed application system—in a unified single-platform design—boosts response times, improves infrastructure scalability, and safeguards against security threats.
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There is no single antivirus engine on the market today that is the fastest and most effective at identifying viruses, spam, or other threats. According to a recent survey, 97 percent of organizations have antivirus software installed, yet 65 percent have been infected at one time or another since. One way to reduce the chance of virus infection is to install multiple antivirus scanners at the mail server level.
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Is it beneficial to use multiple types of virtualization software together? The answer: yes. Combining complementary virtualization technologies provides a stronger, more robust solution that reduces costs, maximizes return on investment (ROI), and minimizes the number of servers to manage. By consolidating these technologies, organizations can get the most out of the application, hardware, and operating system (OS).
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Customers, employees, and partners are an integral part of any business—each playing an important role in its success. But how is it possible to share vital information between them? In order to access information, understand trends, and build better processes, a system that enables multi-user collaborative technologies is required. Without these collaboration tools, business process management (BPM) cannot be successful.
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As the digital era evolves, media content companies are faced with a number of new challenges. One such challenge is that they can no longer specialize in one communication format. The advertising market is now a dynamic and complex forum making it difficult to manage multiple channel revenues. A standard, integrated solution, however, can facilitate the management of advertising revenues while increasing customer satisfaction.
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Today more than ever, retailers are faced with the challenges of selling locally while competing globally. To be successful, they must provide a shopping experience that inspires customer loyalty. Retailers that understand their customers’ shopping habits can build strategic global supply chains that anticipate demand. One way to achieve this is with a scalable technology platform based on industry standards.
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As the creator of performance apparel, Under Armour has become the fastest-growing designer and distributor of its category of apparel in the world. In 2005, to sustain growth and compete on a global scale, it needed a flexible IT landscape that could offer better visibility to data and scale over time. With an out-of–the-box scalable solution, Under Armour is on its way to reaching the $1 billion (USD) revenue mark.
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Just when you thought you had all your security measures figured out, along comes the portable storage device to make you question them all over again. With the popularity of portable consumer products—and their ever-increasing storage space—comes a greater risk of losing sensitive corporate data. To secure corporate data, companies must not only focus on perimeter security, but on internal security weaknesses as well.
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In 2004, there were 1.3 billion credit cards in circulation in the US. With fraud incidents on the rise, credit card companies are at constant risk of losing sensitive cardholder data. At the same time, strict payment card industry (PCI) requirements are forcing companies to put better systems in place to ensure clients are adequately protected. By implementing the right software tools, achieving compliance is possible.
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Improving the supply chain is essential for any company that wants to gain or maintain a competitive edge. To do this, companies are adopting sales and operations planning (S&OP) strategies. Years ago—when the pace of market change was slow—S&OP was a nice-to-have; today it’s a business imperative! But it doesn’t have to happen overnight. By taking a five-step approach, companies can implement S&OP at their own pace.
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When it comes to disaster recovery (DR) software, companies should think of it as an insurance policy—not just software that recovers lost data. Being prepared for disaster makes good business sense, but oddly enough, few companies are. Because Linux distributions don’t include DR tools, companies must look to a file-based recovery solution that can recover the entire system and eliminate the need to rebuild.
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As with any hot market, point-to-point wireless is bait for the pathologically
opportunistic. In this atmosphere—often termed "anarchy"—trust can t be a matter of faith. To get in on the wireless opportunity without getting shafted, you need to know a few basic and incontrovertible facts concerning the difference between licensed and license-free wireless. In fact, a successful outcome depends on choosing the right one.
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"Wild West" is a metaphor often used to describe the wireless wide area network (WAN) business. But it s worse than that. In the Old West, everyone had a gun. In this business, customers are defenseless. What s going on? Well, for one, vendors are playing fast and loose with terminology that should mean something. Wireless is compelling, but how do you decide what s right for you—and who do you trust?
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Why do some customer relationship management (CRM) implementations fail? The answer: companies’ lack of understanding of their current CRM environments, and of what areas need modification or improvement. Companies with a clear understanding of what they need from a CRM solution—as well as of what CRM means to their business—are more likely to succeed. To clinch that success, some key elements should be assessed first.
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In business, planning plays a fundamental role in analyzing and forecasting key financial data. While forecasting future events is one benefit of planning, it can also be used to achieve a series of objectives, including regulatory compliance. In order to achieve these objectives, companies should consider implementing a unified customer performance management (CPM) solution—one that takes compliance into consideration.
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As a supplier to Wal-Mart, appliance manufacturer Haier America was required to implement a radio frequency identification (RFID) tagging system. To satisfy this requirement and to keep costs to a minimum, Haier needed a solution that would seamlessly integrate with its current enterprise resource planning (ERP) application. That’s why it turned to a custom-designed modification package. But was it enough for Wal-Mart?
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For most companies, e-mail is an integral part of the business workflow and a primary channel for communication. For these reasons, e-mails can be considered legal business documents and should be retained for a predefined period to satisfy government regulations. With an e-mail archiving system, message contents and attachments are stored in a read-only format, ensuring they are archived in their original state.
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Research shows that between 65 and 95 percent of all e-mail is considered spam. On an individual level, spam is an annoyance more than anything else, but on a company-wide basis, spam causes significant problems—and the cost to manage it is sizeable. Spammers are always one step ahead of antispam vendors, so to combat this persistent problem, companies need a single-source product that can eliminate spam for good.
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Although layer-two networks are a viable, cost-effective alternative to traditional wide area network (WAN) services, they have some major security deficiencies. One of the key drawbacks of layer two is its inability to handle identity authentication—which creates serious theft and vulnerability problems. With a layer-two data protection solution, however, you can mitigate these types of security issues.
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Storage area networks (SANs) are complex structures that contain an infinite number of configuration possibilities—making the process of configuring the devices to be installed into the SAN a lengthy one. To simplify the process, QLogic’s configuration wizard provides users with some basic tools to guide them through common SAN tasks, enabling them to easily build stable and secure SAN fabrics for their storage solutions.
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The days of storage area networks (SANs) built with hubs and based on private, arbitrated loops are gone. Today’s fully public switches—which include a variety of switch features—make managing large SANs a lot easier. The key to a flexible SAN is the switch’s ability to create zones, which allows the SAN to be partitioned into various groupings and enables SAN managers to allocate storage where it makes the most sense.
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The first step to a successful storage area network (SAN) implementation is preplanning. Architecting a SAN not only helps solve issues of storage consolidation, it facilitates day-to-day data center support and maintenance. A SAN investment should save support dollars, not require additional support resources. With a sound implementation strategy, costly upgrades—and many headaches—can be avoided.
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With data theft on the rise, many companies are forced to improve their network security. And although they spend millions of dollars every year on securing these networks, the focus has largely been on securing the access to the network rather than protecting the information itself. Secure information sharing (SIS) solutions integrate additional intelligence into the process—and protect your data without added overhead.
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Research shows that the occurrence of multivendor Internet protocol telephony (IPT) environments is on the rise. As such, an increasing number of companies are faced with the challenges of using multiple tools to manage these environments. With a single, specialized IPT management solution, companies gain a unified view across the entire voice infrastructure—which can significantly impact total cost of ownership (TCO).
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Now that you have planned and assessed your new system, it’s time to explore the next phase of the integration process: design and pre-deployment testing. Part 4 of this 4-part e-book series provides a basis for the exploration of network design. In addition, it includes a report card that will help you select the appropriate design and validation software tools for your Internet protocol telephony (IPT) system.
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When deploying any new system, preparation is key—and Internet protocol telephony (IPT) systems are no exception. Part 3 of this 4-part e-book series provides some basic steps you can take to successfully deploy voice and data network services. A complete capabilities inventory has been included to help you ensure that every feature of your current system will be considered for inclusion in your new system.
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The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) provides a common process framework for driving service quality improvements and cost reductions. That’s why organizations must ensure they clearly understand the objectives of their ITIL implementations, while implementing robust governance processes to measure and report progress—or else risk implementations that fail to live up to stakeholder expectations.
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The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) has become an answer for many IT departments trying to solve their business problems. But many organizations find that their investment in ITIL has failed to yield the anticipated return on investment (ROI). So what’s the key to maximizing ITIL ROI? First, understanding that the term “ITIL-compliant” has as many meanings as there are outsourcing service providers.
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Chapter 2 of this 4-part e-book explores the Internet protocol telephony (IPT) life cycle, and discusses how understanding the key phases of this packet-based system can increase implementation success. By harnessing your knowledge about this system's natural rhythms, you will begin to establish key concepts that you can put into action—facilitating the management of the system and reaping its long-term benefits.
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As the era of traditional telephony draws to a close, the doors to the next generation in communications open. Chapter 1 of this 4-part e-book discusses electronic human voice communication and its importance in business today. It documents the underlying beliefs, philosophies, and observations of the future of telephony, and provides the basic concepts readers will need to guide them through the rest of the series.
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Data loss can be damaging to a business—hurting short-term stock prices, impacting customer relationships, and reducing revenues. As more companies conduct business via network communication, the need to protect their customer data and intellectual property becomes greater. With a data protection solution, organizations can secure their data in motion—without introducing unmanageable cost and complexity into the network.
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When it comes to security architecture, choosing a system that’s scalable and applicable to a broad set of security needs is a wise move. New security services for Internet protocol (IP) networks are emerging that enable new levels of scalability and manageability—while remaining completely transparent to the network. By applying this type of system, you build an optimal framework for future security applications.
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Spam considerably lowers user productivity, as it delivers unwanted, irrelevant, or anonymous e-mail messages. The best way to manage the incidence of spam is to measure it. The Spam Index—a tool for measuring improvement in spam control systems and for comparing spam control performance with competitors—is a method used by businesses worldwide to achieve lower spam levels and improve business performance.
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E-mail is a powerful business tool that most enterprises can’t live without. Unfortunately, along with its capability of accelerating commerce, productivity, and social interactions, there are some drawbacks—such as spam! Companies that rely on e-mail to do business simply can’t afford the negative affects of spam. However, new technology is emerging that helps stop spam and allows users to get on with business.
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In this new era of corporate governance, risk avoidance, and responsibility, organizations are more than ever held accountable if their data is not properly protected. As such, many are finding new ways to address security risks, by developing multiple layers of defense to reduce points of weakness. Deploying data encryption technology is a good place to start—but the key is making the right choice.
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Heightened awareness of vulnerabilities in sensitive stored data has resulted in the increased application of encryption technology. To secure data at rest, a well-defined process for handling the keys used to encrypt data—as well as the keys used to safeguard the data encryption keys—is essential. With the proper key management controls in place, companies can ensure that data is effectively secured and recoverable.
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In order to stay competitive, growing organizations need technology that allows them to react quickly to changing industry. According to recent polls, nearly 40 percent of midsized businesses are getting that technology through customer relationship management (CRM). With a rapidly growing market of choices, it’s important to look within your company to assess its needs and goals—before you commit to a CRM solution.
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If you could have a 360-degree view of your business, wouldn’t you want to take a peek? Most companies would say yes, but no business could benefit more from this panoramic view than large enterprises. Today, they’re getting that view—and more, from customer relationship management (CRM) technology. For large enterprises, CRM represents a powerful opportunity for positive change—and you ignore it at your own risk.
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You can’t pick up a business or IT magazine today without seeing numerous articles about the growth of mobile and wireless technologies. Why are these technologies so trendy? The answer is simple: developments in mobile computing, wireless communication, bar codes, and other data collection and communications technologies help businesses extend visibility and control over the operations that really matter to them.
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It s hard to go anywhere these days and not see ads for mobile wireless carriers. But the technology is so confusing and the choices so overwhelming, it can be impossible to know which solution to choose. Before making the wrong choice, it’s best to have a basic understanding of mobile wireless communication—how it is currently being used in the industry, and how it can benefit your organization in the future.
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How can you establish a priority-based mobile networking system that provides workers access to company and customer records that they can manipulate from the field? By employing a total solution system that provides various methods of transmitting data. While this type of system may be more costly to implement than a stand-alone pager or cell phone, the benefits it offers can directly impact your bottom line.
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When it comes to two-dimensional (2D) symbologies, less is more. While 2D bar code symbols may be less costly to print, they are considerably more expensive to read, because of the complexity of developing decode algorithms. However, with the integration of public domain 2D symbologies into a range of application standards, solutions employing these codes are beginning to reach their full potential.
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For manufacturers, improving internal processes and supply chain responsiveness can help maintain profitability. That is why many are tuning into radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. With RFID, the benefits are immediate throughout the supply chain, and organizations that take the time to understand its capabilities and limitations can increase their inventory visibility while streamlining their operations.
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Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology has retailers talking. The reason: RFID helps reduce labor and improves the ability to gather data. Retailers can use this data to make positive changes to business processes, which can be tremendously advantageous for them. With careful planning, an RFID system can provide immediate benefits, as well as long-term competitive and total cost of ownership advantages.
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Imagine this scenario: an infected laptop within your company has accessed the network and is spreading malicious code to thousands of other devices. This incident could cripple any business, but with network access control (NAC) products, companies can rest a little easier. NAC’s ability to measure, enforce, and report on an array of security issues has gained it attention amongst security conscious organizations.
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As proprietary network hardware appliances become obsolete, unified network platforms (UNPs) are slowly gaining momentum. UNPs are the new paradigm for networking and security—operating on a single system that can be implemented on off-the-shelf hardware. With a UNP, organizations can design, build, manage, and maintain secure networks, without the limitations and expense of vendor proprietary hardware and software.
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Malicious hacking and illegal access are just a few of the reasons companies lose precious corporate data every year. As the number of network security breaches increase, companies must find ways to protect data beyond the perimeter of their businesses. But how do they build a data-defensible architecture that will protect data on an ever-evolving network? The answer: by first developing an in-depth defense strategy.
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The supply of multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) services and service providers has grown exponentially with the demand for Internet protocol (IP) and Ethernet services. But while MPLS enhances packet processing speed and network performance, it lacks in security. As government and industry compliance regulations increase, organizations must invest in tools that can ensure security without affecting network performance.
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Wide area networks (WANs) are essential to the majority of businesses, enabling effective communications within the organization and with customers, partners, and suppliers. As more bandwidth-intensive applications are added to the mix, these networks are expected to handle the extra load—which can decrease its performance. Ensuring WAN usage is well-managed eliminates unwanted traffic and accelerates business activity.
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Small to medium businesses (SMBs) face the same challenges as large businesses when it comes to IT management—they have increasingly complex systems they rely on to drive their businesses and gain a competitive advantage. Operating and maintaining a complex IT infrastructure requires specific skills, but getting the right staff at an affordable price can be a problem. Outsourcing IT management may help to ease the strain.
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In any organization, people remain one of the largest sources of value when it comes to business processes. But providing them with tools that can be easily accessed and used has its challenges. As we move into the era of service-oriented architecture (SOA), portal and collaboration software now delivers the essential people-focused capabilities businesses need, while adding significant value to the organization.
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Today, companies are looking to improve work processes, comply with legislation, and increase productivity—and they’re implementing electronic document management systems (EDMS) to help them effectively manage their information. By deploying EDMS—which are capable of capturing, storing, and retrieving records, files, and folders—these companies are achieving unprecedented levels of control, efficiency, and automation.
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One of the first and seemingly simple questions that companies ask when making IT investments is “how much does it cost?” Many often find themselves wondering why—even after a successful implementation—their costs keep going up. When evaluating a mobile workforce automation project, companies should take the time to conduct a thorough total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis to detect hidden costs—and avoid nasty surprises.
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In the $1.8 billion market of document management services, only 10 percent is billed by dealers. So how can they increase their share of the managed print services trend? The dealer’s path to advantage lies in its service and supply organization. To make this transition, the dealer needs a tool that gathers knowledge of the client’s fleet and identifies where printing dollars can be saved.
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How do companies address the out-of-control costs associated with network printing? Many look to control them by outsourcing their managed printer services. The transition from basic dealer services to a holistic approach—where the dealer manages the print services for the entire organization—has its challenges. With printer fleet management tools, companies gain a competitive advantage and save on printing costs.
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With an impressive 160-year history procuring and blending teas, the Harris Tea Company is the largest blender and packer of private label teas in North America. As sales grew, Harris Tea wanted to upgrade its supply chain technology to efficiently process orders it received from stores around the country. After researching and evaluating the wide universe of integration vendors, Harris Tea selected Boomi.
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When considering any software solution, two things come to mind: flexibility and cost. With virtualization technology, multiple applications can now be hosted safely and securely on a single server, eliminating the overhead of running multiple operating systems (OS) per server. This capability can greatly reduce costs and help organizations deliver consistent service levels despite unpredictable workloads.
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The computational complexity of problems faced by programmers today is growing exponentially. With accelerated changes brought on by the Internet, companies need to explore new methods of enabling their programmers to focus on these complex problems. When dealing with complex data, an object caching database system can alleviate the task of programming special code for persistent data while writing applications.
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It’s no coincidence that the surge in counterfeiting over the past decade has coincided with a huge increase in Internet access around the world, and the more recent shift toward broadband connections. The Web provides a shop window to the world, yet it is impossible to police. New, intelligent, automated monitoring technologies are beginning to offer powerful solutions to this rampant online problem.
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Just about every IT professional has a fragmentation horror story about a system so severely degraded by fragmentation that it was unusable. But very few IT professionals can offer more than anecdotal evidence regarding the importance of defragmentation software. That’s why we decided to put fragmentation to the test, with the intent of answering the basic question: is fragmentation really a problem in your organization?
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The exponential growth of storage requirements is driven by the information age—the thirst for information and the increased complexity and size of applications, operating systems, and data. There are bigger disks storing an abundance of larger files than ever before, so the effects of fragmentation can worsen noticeably over time. To keep up with same-day performance degradation, disks must be defragmented in real time.
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As organizational storage allocation requirements multiply, the time required to back up file-based data also continues to increase. While software vendors continue making advancements in technology to speed up the disk fragmentation process, it continues to remain an issue—one that needs to be addressed at the file system level. Defragmenting the hard drive volume prior to performing the backup may be the answer.
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SANs, NAS devices, corporate servers, and high-end workstations all suffer the effects of fragmentation because of their multiple physical disk drives. This is attributed to the impact of fragmentation on the logical allocation of files and their physical distribution. The solution to this problem: implementing an automatic defragmentation software solution, together with intricate modern hardware technologies.
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The power sector realizes the importance of information technology (IT), and its potential to contribute to the power reforms process. The global IT market for this sector provides a wide range of technology and solutions that can address the entire business value chain in power distribution—from setting up distribution network and service connection, to distribution load management, power delivery, and customer service.
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In recent years, the rapid succession of virus attacks has created an intense security environment. The capacity for quick response to new anti-virus attacks is a critical component of any organization’s security plan. Antivirus scans are significantly faster on desktop systems with regularly defragmented files and free space—which means that using software to automatically keep systems defragmented should not be overlooked.
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.NET technology is a wake-up call, and some people are sleeping through it! Remaining competitive means mission-critical software systems, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications, must be designed from the ground up for connectivity and integration. But software developers don’t advertise their shortcomings, and some ERP vendors—and by association, their customers—are being left behind.
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Effective communication uses many senses, but visual communication provides huge amounts of information, and can convey all sorts of meanings. Face to face, we can rely on visual cues; however, the amount of information transmitted via distant communication is limited by cost and complexity. And when the costs of transportation rise, broader use of remote visual communications becomes increasingly practical.
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There is a considerable need to understand how technical performance and the problems within the technical infrastructure impact the capabilities of the business itself. The majority of companies can only measure specific asset and application performance, whereas many issues within the infrastructure lie at the transport level, where packet switching can present both great opportunities and major issues.
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Predictions of the death of software are overstated. In reality, businesses are becoming more reliant on technology, not less. What’s changing, however, is the number of options available for managing, delivering, and paying for software applications. Many independent software vendors recognize the benefits of offering software as a service--a delivery alternative that can present long-term benefits for all parties.
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The greatest threat to the security of the modern network is complexity. Threats to network security almost always play on missed details in the design of a network or a piece of software. These overlooked details enable much larger and potentially devastating security breaches to occur. However, this threat can be countered with a well designed network and vigilant safeguards.
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Increased complexity, coupled with the adoption of voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), demands additional management overhead for enterprise- and carrier-class networks. This management need is compounded by requirement for corporations to implement IP version 6 (IPv6)-compatible networks to ensure capacity and service over the next decade. This transition will require careful planning, and naming systems will play a critical role.
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A modern weight control system must support data entry from humans, as well as direct acquisition from weigh scales and devices. However, it cannot operate as a stand-alone point solution. It must span geographic space, hosting data from multiple lines and even divisions. And because of the proliferation of co-packers, it must sometimes even span company boundaries.
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In times like these, when IT spending is increasingly subject to cutbacks, finding out how to get "more for less" is as crucial to a company’s IT department as making sure that applications run smoothly. In Rome, Italy, Gruppo Tosinvest managed to prove that this challenge—which keeps legions of IT managers awake at night—can be solved.
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There are several ways to virtualize the front office, with at least four different solution choices available. The soundest advice may be for companies to start the process, and evaluate the alternatives based on their ability to solve real business needs. It’s time that the personal computer (PC) find its place in the data center—not proliferated around the workplace.
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As a mid-market company, you’ve been using electronic data interchange (EDI) for a number of years. It saves time and money—and most importantly, your trading partners need you to. But new technologies offer a streamlined and cost-efficient approach to EDI. These capabilities mean you don’t have to settle for "workarounds," "good enough," or "my vendor left me no choice."
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The service-oriented architecture (SOA) integration framework enables organizations to map IT processes to business needs, with new business processes being defined on demand for business agility. However, SOA is predicated on an ability to integrate loosely-coupled services, one application to another: users are not necessarily involved. This creates challenges for governing how service assets are developed, provisioned, and invoked.
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XML gateways, a new class of networking device, manage message-level security, service-level agreements (SLAs), and performance in service-oriented architectures (SOAs). XML gateways specialize in application-level protocols rendered within the XML or Web services message itself. With the ability to rapidly inspect and process XML messages, they can perform security, transformation, routing, and SLA operations at wire speed in the network.
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There’s no universal solution for Web services security. Sometimes, access lists programmed into the Web services themselves are sufficient. Other times, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) may be more than adequate. However, when granular message processing and auditing is essential, dedicated extensible markup language (XML) and Web services security technology will prove necessary. Which options are right for you?
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IT managers undertaking any implementation of IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) processes should understand the concept of process maturity. As a foundation for process improvement, these key practices improve the ability of organizations to meet goals for cost, schedule, functionality, and product quality—the ultimate goal being to improve efficiency, return on investment, and effectiveness.
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Today’s n-tier infrastructures make significant demands on the problem management process. Isolation of performance problems in these environments is difficult at best, and traditional monitoring tools are not equipped to deal with the multiple dependencies and complexities they present. Indeed, even effective problem management processes may not be sufficient without improved tools.
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While many monitoring frameworks support commercial applications and application infrastructures, very few offer organizations the capacity to manage the custom application components that are inevitably a part of their infrastructure. But as these applications tend to be the most critical components of the target infrastructure, a framework that cannot provide insight into these ultra-critical components is offering severely limited value.
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The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) provides a comprehensive and consistent set of best practices for IT service management (ITSM), promoting a quality approach to achieving business efficiency in the use of information systems. The key paradigm shift that ITIL s ITSM best-practices taxonomy seeks to achieve is the movement away from management of silos, towards management of services spanning multiple silos.
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One of the most challenging areas in any Siebel implementation has traditionally been setting up and maintaining interfaces between Siebel and other back-end systems. However, it is now possible to create a real-time web service interface to other applications from Siebel 7.8 or 8.0, without writing a single line of code.
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Traditionally, IT infrastructure operations teams are organized as domain experts—one expert for network devices, another for the Citrix MetaFrame Server, another for the database, and so on. Most monitoring systems mirror this approach, with separate solutions for monitoring different network elements and applications. This approach is rife with complications, but alternatives do exist which can simplify your day-to-day activities.
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With hundreds of monitoring solutions available, which ones are right for you? Many organizations spend months assessing different products, but find it difficult to distinguish between them, thanks to industry jargon—“proactive monitoring,” “root-cause analysis,” “service-oriented user views”… There are different ways to compare them, but before you even begin, you need to be clear on what your objectives are.
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For years, organizations have had to settle for inadequate approaches to front-office to back-office integration. However, with Scribe’s component architecture, when a new version of Dynamics GP or Salesforce comes out, you can plug in a new version of the Scribe Adapter for the upgraded application, and your existing Dynamics GP to Salesforce Template will experience little or no disruption.
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Thanks to pressures in the telecom equipment manufacturing industry, application-ready platforms (ARPs) in Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (ATCA) are increasingly indispensable. ARPs must provide standards-based platforms to support diverse sets of applications. The ATCA ARP provides such a platform, but in light of the ATCA specifications that define the basis for the platform, ARP implementations still present some interesting challenges.
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Storage is a vital part of enterprise IT infrastructure, with Internet protocol (IP) telephony storage leading the way as an effective technology. With the increased adoption of open standards-based architecture by the enterprise telephony market, IP telephony storage will gain acceptance as an entry-level storage tool and a viable low-cost alternative to Fibre Channel storage area networks (SANs).
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Monitoring the end-to-end performance of applications and services at all infrastructure tiers is the "holy grail" of IT organizations. But most companies use silo-based monitoring tools incapable of monitoring events and activities occurring elsewhere in the infrastructure. A "collaborative" approach for deploying such tools stands a greater chance of adoption than the typical top-down implementation method commonly used today.
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There was a time when companies went with one platform, and stuck with it, hiring IT staff with that technology in mind. That time has passed. Today, heterogeneity is the name of the game, with orga¬nizations having combinations of legacy software and distributed systems, across multiple platforms and applications. But while heterogeneity brings multiple benefits, it also involves serious risk.
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In the past, most businesses have operated more or less effectively with a certain level of downtime—whether required to maintain systems, applications, and data, or to produce daily analysis reports. Unfortunately, today’s emphasis on ever-greater productivity and profitability means that downtime becomes an obstacle to improving perfor¬mance and delivering value—the two essential conditions that make your business competitive.
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Everyone wants the biggest bang for their IT buck—the most functionality and ease of use, deployed to the widest audience, for the lowest cost. But for years, packaged software, despite high up-front and recurring costs, has been a must-have. However, business professionals are beginning to recognize a more efficient approach to their software needs: the smart client.
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Developers obviously need to leverage best techniques to migrate MS Access applications to the MS SQL Server and Oracle Client/Server database platforms. However, they can also benefit from a presentation of specific migration procedures; guidance on which migration path makes the most sense; and a list of criteria to assist with the decision on whether to migrate at all.
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Software testing is carried out primarily to unearth system defects, and to prevent defective products from reaching customers. It’s also carried out to convince customers that a product conforms to and fulfils the agreed-upon specifications and functionality. However, in order to evaluate potential approaches to estimating test efforts, it’s vital to understand what the activity of testing actually consists of.
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The later in the system development life cycle (SDLC) major errors are discovered, the more expensive it is to fix them. In fact, errors in released software are up to 80 times more expensive to fix than defects in the specification stage. That’s why you should adopt a methodology that brings the early stages of the SDLC up to a high level of maturity, in a way that’s consistent, proven, and optimized for success.
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Internet protocol (IP)—used for transmitting data across networks everywhere—is now used pervasively, transmitting data to and from a multitude of devices. Arguably, IP is the most successful open standard ever, but as network communications converge under a single standard used for an increasing number of applications, we need to understand how effectively these critical assets are being managed.
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Today’s software developers face requirements that were previously unknown in the industry. Businesses now demand reduced time-to-market, lower costs, and greater stability. And although collaboration is key to addressing these issues, it’s not always as easy as it sounds. Thus, an automated change management system can help you increase the predictability, reliability, and speed of the software development cycle.
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The benefits of e-learning have been amply demonstrated and extensively documented. However, less attention has been paid to the business benefits of implementing learning management systems (LMS). The misconception is that LMS and e-learning are irrevocably linked. But that isn’t necessarily the case. In fact, an LMS can provide real benefits, in the broadest—and most critical—business sense.
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Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a driving force for future functional use within organizations. However, these functions must be viewed as being shared services for all processes. Functional re-use will be the main means of ensuring that organizations can respond rapidly and effectively to market dynamics, and that improvements to specific functions will have the optimum impact across the whole organization.
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Data centers are squeezed by a variety of pressures, such as power consumption, heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC) requirements, new servers, human error, patching, asset tracking, and more. On top of this, you have to keep up with dynamically changing business requirements. One of the key ways you can address these dilemmas, however, is through server consolidation using virtualization.
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Low-cost hardware and a plethora of connectivity options should make it easier for employees to be more productive. However, outside the perimeter of the business location, additional controls need to be applied to ensure data security and integrity. What’s the best approach to getting the most out of mobile productivity? And how to avoid the six most common mobility pitfalls?
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Installing software and patch updates can be frustrating and time-consuming for IT staff and users alike. But it's critical to update your computers regularly to keep security filters current. This need increases exponentially if your users are mobile and geographically dispersed. Should this continue to be the responsibility of your IT staff? Or should you outsource this function to a managed service provider (MSP)?
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Employees with laptops can do their jobs anytime, anywhere. They are empowered to respond to customers, partners, and colleagues faster and more effectively. Sales, service,
marketing, and logistics improve... but if your company’s technical support strategy isn’t up to scratch, these gains can be quickly erased by hidden costs—or overturned by critical security risks.
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A single view into the health of the IT infrastructure is essential to efficiency. However, comprehensive monitoring is inaccessible to many IT organizations, thanks to limited resources: not only must they deliver performance and availability at service-level agreements, but they must find efficient ways to do it, to address other priorities such as innovation, training, development speed, and revenue support.
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To function as a business partner, IT must deliver service at predictable levels—and also contribute to enterprise strategy, by planning for services that enable growth. That’s why IT needs end-to-end infrastructure views that reveal issues as they happen, and track trends that predict future needs. But how can IT create unified views of the environment without draining critical resources?
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Information technology (IT) executives are beginning to seriously re-evaluate their highly hyped, service-oriented architectures (SOA) strategies—and consequently, their IT outsourcing, hosting, and enterprise system management strategies. However, creating long-term strategies is complicated by the wide range of available service delivery models. That’s why it’s vital to uncover the important concepts—and decision points—relating to these different delivery models.
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Intelligence agencies cannot afford delays in uncovering insight, whatever the source. At the same time, they must work within operationally constrained environments. Unfortunately, traditional IT approaches simply fall short when it comes to providing a solution that can reliably process massive amounts of data in a timely fashion. But with national security at stake, failure is simply not an option.
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GeoEye is the leading provider of map-accurate commercial imagery to the US military and intelligence community. In the past, GeoEye lived by the motto that “big problems require big machines.” However, this was presenting the company with significant—and escalating—cost and complexity issues. The solution: a self-managing and self-healing distributed computing environment that required no custom application development.
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A global telecommunications provider was mired in a hardware-centric architecture for its network applications. Even with a sizeable computing infrastructure investment, failure of server components was inevitable, and application failover schemes were risky. The provider needed a more cost-effective way to scale its operational support system (OSS) applications—without sacrificing dependability.
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Application software companies often find themselves in positions where their products and services depend heavily on software that they may not be equipped to optimally engineer. This typically results in misallocated resources, inferior products and services, and ultimately business decline. Companies need to know when to outsource critical integral design, development, and delivery requirements that they cannot effectively meet themselves.
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Application software companies unwittingly but consistently overlook significant portions of their application software life cycle, resulting in consistent under-performance of products and services, a reduced harvest, dissatisfied customers, and missed opportunities for growth. In fact, you could be neglecting up to 70 percent of the energy necessary to have your products reach and maintain peak performance throughout their life cycle.
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Companies using earlier versions of the JD Edwards family of products may be considering upgrades to the EnterpriseOne versions. However, the decision to upgrade is often overshadowed by the considerable costs of doing so. Approaches to reducing these costs lie in rigorous approaches to several critical project activities, ranging from a thorough upgrade assessment to the transfer of knowledge.
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IT managers understand the difficulty of demonstrating returns on investment for technology projects. The issue is particularly acute for large multiphase deployments, such as IT infrastructure library (ITIL) implementations: massive projects which are hard to sell to management, and which promise returns many years in the future—after significant investment. So how do you get management to buy into your vision?
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Compliance with the US Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) is not a one-time project, but a sustained effort to gain visibility into processes affecting financial reporting accuracy. Most IT controls are manual, error-prone, and resource-intensive. However, there’s a new, radical solution: an automated IT control framework in which all the information required to verify compliance is available in a single reporting system.
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X1 Enterprise Edition lets users search enterprise data with desktop, mobile, or browser clients. Thus, when integrating X1 Enterprise Edition security with an existing Microsoft network installation, it’s important to understand how X1 security features are configured and deployed (including web server security), and how X1 and Microsoft Windows security layers work together at runtime.
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Knowledge workers by the millions are leveraging desktop search (DTS) tools. However, with change comes risk, and failing to proactively establish policies and lock down a centrally managed DTS solution can result in significant civil and criminal liabilities. But by following a few basic principles, companies can realize the full benefits of this new technology, while enhancing their information security.
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To date, the best option for discovering and extracting information from software applications has primarily been manual, with automation tools serving in support. These initiatives are tedious, long-term, and high-risk. Companies try to lower monetary cost by outsourcing such projects. However, the time to completion and risks remain unchanged at best. The solution? Automated documentation and transformation of software applications.
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The warehouse management system (WMS) concept has matured into a collection of time-tested technologies that reduce inventory costs and increase overall inventory management efficiencies. By implementing WMS technology, organizations can achieve a higher return on their software dollars and provide better service to their customers. A WMS can provide organizations with tangible benefits that improve warehouse operations without adding headcount.
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For compliance with vendor requirements, Source 1 Enterprises, a supplier of health and beauty products, needed a solution to automate bill-back revenue and current deal sheet promotions. Reporting and alert systems were also needed, to collect potential revenue based on standard vendor terms, in conjunction with the latest promotions. For a solution, the supplier turned to SAP Business One.
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When selecting integration solutions, the only certainty is that there’s no way of telling what systems and databases will need to be integrated in the future. As your business becomes more dependent on electronic relationships with suppliers, customers, and partners, it becomes harder to impose your own best practices. That’s why you need the flexibility to adapt to any conditions.
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One of the biggest decisions that must be made in the support and evolution of a purchased software application is whether to upgrade or reimplement. This one decision has far-ranging implications on the entire organization, and can drive the technology direction for years to come. The key is to understand the difference between an upgrade and a reimplementation.
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IT plays a critical role in any outsourcing effort. Organizations engaged in or pursuing business process outsourcing (BPO) must ensure that they truly understand the capabilities of their existing software environment, as well as the capabilities of candidate BPO service providers. Embedding IT requirements and capabilities from the start will thus improve the likelihood of success for any BPO endeavor.
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There is a common perception that supply chain automation has created an environment in which transactions move quickly and efficiently in industries such as the retail supply chain and high-tech manufacturing. However, this perception is challenged by a recent research study, based on interviews with 400 management representatives of medium to large organizations in the USA, UK, Germany, and France.
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Technology decision-making in larger organizations is about making existing IT platforms as efficient as possible. However, there are weaknesses in the day-to-day operation of such environments, particularly in storage and information management. Positioning information lifecycle management (ILM) in the context of infrastructure management provides an understanding of where we are today—and of how much further there is to go.
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In August 2006, Microsoft conducted a Microsoft Dynamics AX 4.0 standard distribution benchmark to measure the performance and scalability characteristics of the application in a simulated distribution scenario. This benchmark exercised core accounts receivables scenarios around order entry through invoicing, in addition to procure-to-pay processes around purchase order creation through receiving of goods. We look at the methodology and results.
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The client/server trend in multi-tiered computing has been made possible because of reductions in the cost of hardware and software components, as well as the availability of high-performance database engines. The utility of this technology is reflected in the Microsoft Dynamics AX application. Its three-tier client/server technology provides a solution that can be accessed through networks, even with limited bandwidth.
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La abstracción es el ejercicio de comprender una serie de problemas a la vista heterogéneos y darles comprensión homogénea. Una de las principales abstracciones del mercado actual de las entidades es la administración, motivo por el cual se anunció el Microsoft Business Framework, el cual afectará el ERP clásico de las supuestas Best Practices.
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Across the public sector, cost savings will be decisive when considering an investment in blade computing. The decision can be made on a fairly straightforward cost basis—does the investment pay back? But blade computing also offers advantages in terms of the ability to respond to business needs, which should make it a core part of public sector IT strategy.
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We are now seeing a high level of uptake of grid computing, with pilots resulting in implementations. However, these implementations are based on advanced clustering of single applications—and large-scale grid implementations covering an enterprise’s total IT infrastructure are still rare. The key to mainstream adoption may lie in a better understanding of the business value of grid computing.
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Una vez atravesados los problemas del ERP en los noventa, en el año 2000 logra alcanzar su madurez, enfrentándose al mismo tiempo con problemas tales como la regionalización y la actualización de versiones, entre otros. Actualmente se acerca otra etapa en la resolución del modo administrativo, en la que el problema del ERP será atacado con productos de plataforma.
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How you decide to deploy and implement new Internet provider (IP) telephony infrastructure, as well as new applications or services to end users, will vary greatly based on the scope of the project and the degree of complexity involved. However, whether you are deploying to small remote offices or to large core sites, it is vital to establish standardized procedures.
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Enterprises looking to understand their Internet provider (IP) telephony implementation costs must go beyond simple analyses of return on investment. A total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis is required to help drive the bigger picture, as it considers both tactical and strategic goals, including management of the overall IT budget (annual operational and capital expenditures), risk assessment, and strategic objectives.
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Customer relationship management (CRM) is growing in importance as a competitive tool. However, a successful CRM solution must consider many factors, including a well-defined implementation strategy, the people factor, and the need for integration with the incumbent enterprise resource planning solution. If these conditions are met, CRM can have a dramatic impact on internal processes, customer satisfaction, and company profitability.
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Webcom Limited is a Canadian book manufacturer specializing in custom book production. Its heterogeneous IT infrastructure was resulting in discontinuous information flow, which impeded staffers’ abilities to collaborate throughout the steps of a book’s production. But when Webcom Limited migrated to an integrated Microsoft business management system, it saw a 33 percent improvement in the automation of job production workflow.
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The hub and spoke concept refers to a parent or holding company that uses one business software system (the hub), which is integrated with the systems used by its individual subsidiaries or divisions (the spokes). We look at the hub and spoke concept with SAP R/3 at the hub, and Microsoft Dynamics NAV at the spokes.
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The exponential growth of storage requirements is driven by the increased complexity and size of applications, operating systems, and data. In this environment of bigger disks storing not only larger files, but more files than ever, the effects of fragmentation rapidly grow on systems each day. To combat the daily degradation of system performance, disks need to be defragmented daily.
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The recent explosion of virtualization as a technology coincides with the trend of consolidating systems on to less, but more powerful, hardware. With more robust hardware, consolidation makes cost-effective sense. And given the reduced management overhead and more efficient hardware use, virtualization makes a great deal of sense indeed. However, it’s also important to be aware of its dangers.
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Managed well, service-oriented architecture (SOA) offers a tremendous opportunity to make positive changes and lay a foundation that will allow IT to become responsive and cost-effective. But SOA is also a potential minefield: hype is raising expectations beyond reality in an environment that is already stressed. In fact, managed poorly, SOA can be an expensive and spectacular failure.
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In a world that’s constantly demanding better communication to improve the level of perfect orders, while optimising working capital and reducing supply costs, it is vital to provide an electronic trading network across all customers and trading partners quickly, easily, and at low cost. But how to go about establishing a single integrated electronic supply network for collaboration and trade?
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File fragmentation is a primary factor in the most common system stability and reliability problems. For this reason, advanced daily defragmentation of every server and workstation should be considered. In fact, when advanced site-wide defragmentation is fully automated, it is one of the most effective system maintenance activities for protecting and improving the stability and uptime of an entire network.
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In the converging network and security infrastructure, relating what is reported from security products to what is observed on the network is critical. Q1 Labs’ network security management product, QRadar, combines network behavioral analysis with vulnerability assessment and security event correlation into one platform. Ultimately, this convergence reduces IT acquisition and operations costs, and enhances responses to network security incidents.
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The anti-spyware industry is going in two separate directions. First, there are suite products that come with other security applications, along with anti-spyware. Second, there are best-of-breed products that are purely focused on detecting and eradicating spyware. Depending on the type of organization, choosing a suite-based anti-spyware over best-of-breed software can leave a company vulnerable.
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Security measures that repel spyware attacks are critical to any comprehensive security plan, thanks to laws requiring companies to notify their customers if they experience a data security breach. But it’s not enough to have a plan for complying with breach notification laws. Every company’s goal should be to avoid having to give such a notification in the first place.
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Organizations wanting to create a more flexible, responsive environment to support their business processes must consider removing the process dependencies from the underlying hardware and software infrastructure. This can only be done through suitable intermediary technologies such as a service-oriented architecture that uses application servers with integrated middleware providing solid support for existing application integration and future business process requirements.
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The frequency of breakdowns in the IT client relationship is reaching epidemic proportions. Indeed, an IT client breakdown is comparable to the onset of an illness. If caught early enough, treatment is often relatively painless. However, if left to advance to the later stages, or full maturity, the treatment will not only be invasive, but also require significant recovery time.
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A survey of existing IT event resolution processes suggests organizations are unsatisfied with current processes, despite the importance of ensuring that severe service outages do not occur. In fact, over 75 percent of participants identified significant gaps in existing processes. However, it is possible to identify the components of an effective interactive event notification platform to mitigate current process gaps.
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The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) is the world’s largest financial services post-trade infrastructure organization, having cleared and settled more than $1.4 quadrillion (USD) worth of securities in 2005. In the highly competitive financial services industry, the secure processing of transactions is vital to DTCC's success, which is why DTCC integrated security testing into the application development processes.
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Businesses are being held increasingly accountable for their business application security—by customers, partners, and government. Unfortunately, most businesses are playing catch-up with security. What’s really needed are processes that fix the software development cycle by weaving security expertise into software acquisition, development, and deployment. Businesses that don’t take a process-oriented approach today may end up chasing application security forever.
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In searching for tools to implement an effective application-security strategy, managers have a choice between two technological approaches: dynamic analysis and static analysis. Available in a variety of freeware and commercial automated tools, both approaches promise comprehensive detection of security vulnerabilities. But a truly effective strategy may require a mix of both.
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Application security is an important emerging requirement in software development. This article introduces CLASP, an application security process and plug-in to IBM 's Rational Unified Process environment. It was developed by Secure Software, and gives organizations a structured way to address security concerns during the software development lifecycle.
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Consider the case of two hypothetical companies—Company A and Company Z—each using an identical enterprise software package delivering identical core functionality. Company A has the same number of users, but the total cost of ownership (TCO) experienced by Company Z is about twice the TCO enjoyed by Company A. Why? We explain.
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IFS Applications is built using the same principles employed by successful manufacturers—the production and assembly of components. This allows change and evolution within a component without affecting other components. With a proven track record of building for change, IFS provides step-by-step, non-disruptive introduction of new technologies into operational systems.
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E-government webs are among the largest webs in existence. Thus, creating a semantic web infrastructure to organize them is highly desirable. At the same time, the complexity of existing e-government implementations also challenges the feasibility of semantic web creation. This paper explains challenges in semantic web development, identifies Wiki advantages, illustrates a potential solution, and summarizes major directions for research.
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The globalization of discrete manufacturing is forever changing the notion of what a "small manufacturer" is. Even companies that are considered relatively small in revenue, employment, or client base, must now operate like the largest corporations when structuring and conducting their businesses. Infor examines how today's mid-market manufacturers are transforming themselves—focusing on business processes and employing ERP systems for their own operations.
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Data centers are complex mixtures of legacy platforms, hardware, operating systems (OS), data, and applications. They are inflexible, costly, and difficult to manage, so instead of optimizing the current OS, users are adding new ones. By using OS Portability and streaming servers across physical or virtual infrastructures over the network, users better utilize their data centers.
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Small and medium businesses (SMB) generally purchase integration solutions that conform to plans of their larger business partners. Their decisions are reactive, rather than proactive. Understanding the SMB market can help integration solution providers better understand SMB needs. This white paper addresses integration in the SMB market in two parts: the first deals with understanding the nature of the SMB market; the second deals with what SMB integration solutions should address.
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This white paper describes the real world collaboration process and presents a survey of the web software tools that are available today to support the collaboration process.
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Business intelligence (BI) capabilities transform vast amounts of data into relevant information that organizations rely on to make decisions and manage performance. Most companies have some form of BI, and most are familiar with its benefits. However, in order to extract maximum advantage from BI initiatives, it is necessary to be aware of—and avoid—their seven “fatal flaws.”
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Just uttering the term "blade server" creates confusion and spawns many questions. That’s because the term is applied to a wide range of hardware and software products that can vary greatly in terms of value, functionality, and fit in the enterprise. This is akin to using the term "automobile" to describe everything from a three-cylinder compact car to an eight-passenger SUV. In this buying guide, we’ll sort out the confusion and provide you with a practical checklist for evaluating current market offerings. There is a place for blade servers in your enterprise, but not every enterprise needs every offering available.
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The past decade saw the emergence of the storage area network as a way to centralize, consolidate, and virtualize deployment and management of storage resources. This architecture was developed to address complex problems that arose as storage moved from a central point (the mainframe-based data center) to a distributed model due to growth in departmental systems and applications.
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Server consolidation is a hot topic. As a supplier of enterprise-class servers, Egenera has participated in many consolidation projects, with both customers and prospects. This paper summarizes what we’ve learned about consolidation, and provides a roadmap for driving consolidation in your organization. We answer the question most often asked by our customers: How do we get started?
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How many times do you hear network administrators scream at the top of their voice, "I have spent millions of dollars buying expensive and the best antivirus software solutions and yet every two months, when a new virus strikes, I have my entire network go down!" This is a common complaint you will get to hear from one and all network administrators, primarily because most security vendors today concentrate more on a "reactive" approach to stop virus attacks, than a “preventive” approach!
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Spam is unsolicited junk mail sent to you or your mail server. People who indulge in such activities are called spammers. These are sent by commercial advertisers who may offer dubious products, get rich schemes, products that do not suit your life style, promote illegal activities, etc. The intent here is to make you spend money. Almost 60% to 70% of spam is related to porn. There is another type of spammer who sends large number of e-mails that flood your mailbox or mail server. This white paper provides
information about spam, losses caused by spam, how spam works and suggests key features that a good anti-spam software should have.
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Unwanted pop-up ads are intrusive Internet advertisements that are displayed when you access web pages. This white paper provides information about different type of pop-up ads, losses they cause, how they work, and suggests key features that a good pop-up ad filter software should have.
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Life cycle development can be a complicated and intimidating process for many organizations. Are you
struggling to adapt the development process successfully to your own projects? Do you want to use various formal life cycle processes such as Agile, Incremental, Spiral, and Waterfall, or various informal processes, such as extreme programming (XP) and others? Are you burdened by the development process? This paper will explain how you can simply and easily adopt any life cycle process.
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Decison support systems range from simple electronic filing cabinets to complex data intensive and analytically sophisticated executive information systems. This primer provides an overview with real case studies.
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