CIO2CIO Blog

The Business Value of the Internet of Things

While the Internet of Things (IoT) has not yet fulfilled the promise foreseen by the academics that first crystallized the idea at the MIT’s Auto-ID Center in the late 1990s, many IT analysts, commentators and executives believe its potential is about to be unleashed. While many discussions around the IoT center around the technologies that drive and support it, such as RFID, its pervasiveness and usefulness will ultimately depend on its ability to support businesses and other organizations in achieving their objectives. Let us look at 5 ways the IoT can do just that.

PaaS is Ready but Where is User Adoption?

Platform as a service (PaaS) is a core layer of the cloud computing architecture, and its evolution will affect the future of most users and vendors in enterprise software markets, according to research firm Gartner. PaaS is a common reference to the layer of cloud technology architecture that contains all application infrastructure services, which are also known as "middleware" in other contexts.

PaaS is the middle layer of the end-to-end stack in the cloud. It is the technology that intermediates between the underlying system infrastructure (operating systems, networks, virtualization, storage, etc.) and overlaying application software. The technology services that are part of a full-scope comprehensive PaaS include functionality of application containers (servers), application development tools, database management systems, integration middleware, portal products and business process management suites all offered as a service.

What Every CIO Needs to Know About Big Data

Advances in information technology over the past five decades have been nothing short of breathtaking. While this offers tremendous opportunities, it also creates some difficulties, for computing on a vast scale generates data at rates faster than can be managed, understood or analyzed. Which is why, though storage costs are going down every year, many large companies are experiencing increased total storage costs. One large financial-services company, in fact, saw its data stores grow from four to 40 petabytes in just the last two years.

Welcome to the “Big Data” era. In many ways, big data is a new frontier connecting consumers and companies, from which communications and activity can be mined to deliver personalized, relevant offers and messages, all executed with unprecedented speed, automation, and intelligence. The opportunities are vast.

Experienced CIOs see this opportunity in context. They know that leveraging big data to deliver real business results will require a focused strategy that leverages and protects their existing data assets, develops new capabilities that are production-ready and reusable, and is able to manage the deluge of new data that will be created in the process.

The Future of the Workplace

Back in the 1970s computers started making their mark on large organizations, and although very few had access to these computers, MIS started generating meaningful reports, supply chains started getting the very glimpse of optimization and managers started to gain some insight into their businesses.

During the 1980s information technology made another major impact on the workplace. Office buildings started filling up with personal computers, and lucky employees started using the first relatively easy to use computers in history. Usually high volumes of people congregating in single locations and work was contained in the office so managing people and the technology they used was relatively predictable.

In the 1990s the internet came along and the first practical forms of wide area networks enabled people to communicate and share information across vast geographies, application were re architected to work in a more global fashion.

Then the late 1990s saw the arrival of improved connectivity and mobile computing, which has revolutionized how and where work is done. Instead of going to work, or work being a place you go to, work can now go to people, wherever and whenever they choose. The implications ever since have been enormous for organizations, offices, cities and individuals. A new term was coined – Telecommunting.

Zero Email Policy - Maybe

You’ve got mail–no not if you work for Atos where employees will be banned from sending emails under the company’s new “zero email” policy.

CEO Thierry Breton of the French information technology company said only 10 percent of the 200 messages employees receive per day are useful and 18 percent is spam. That’s why he hopes the company can eradicate internal emails in 18 months, forcing the company’s 74,000 employees to communicate with each other via instant messaging and a Facebook-style interface.

Breton, the French finance minister from 2005 to 2007, told the Wall Street Journal he has not sent an email in the three years since he became chairman and CEO of Atos in November 2008. “We are producing data on a massive scale that is fast polluting our working environments and also encroaching into our personal lives,” he said in a statement when first announcing the policy in Feburary. “At [Atos] we are taking action now to reverse this trend, just as organizations took measures to reduce environmental pollution after the industrial revolution.”