The commercial potential of cloud computing and cloud services is widely accepted, both in private industry and in the public sector.  The opportunities for cost reduction and efficiency in the UK public sector are real and achievable, but require significant changes to procurement practices, delivery frameworks and across the supplierlandscape. 

The inaugural issue of BI Trends & Strategies offers sound advice to help you in ensuring your organization is on track to keep up with the rapidly changing landscape of BI and analytics. In this issue, readers will learn about a big data definition and the impact it will have on BI and data warehousing, agile development methodology and more. 

Watch this brief video about the Cedacri Group’s mainframe modernization experience  to learn about the cost and performance advantages of a re-hosting strategy as well as how to ensure its success. 

In this week’s Computer Weekly, we look at the IT challenges facing retailers, as consumers turn increasingly to web and mobile shopping channels. Oracle president Mark Hurd talks about how the supplier intends to simplify IT infrastructures. And new government CIO Andy Nelson discusses how he plans to transform Whitehall IT. Read the issue now. 

This study evaluates the leadership role that Chief Information Officers performs in helping their organisations achieve their commercial goals 

Over the past 18 months we have seen the irresistible rise of a new phenomenon, cloud computing. This term is given by the IT industry to a new business model for computing, one where capacity for computer, storage and networking can be dynamically acquired, on demand,and paid for according to usage. 

Companies are increasingly dependent on technology to achieve business goals. As a company grows, changes, and reaches for new opportunities, IT infrastructure tends to expand. 

In the Fall 2011 issue of IT in Europe, Manek Dubash explores how open-source storage could be the key to breaking the chains of vendor lock-in. 

This white paper addresses common data center cooling challenges and describes five strategies for deploying ultra-high power racks, with practical solutions for both new and existing data centers. 

Access this exclusive resource to discover the efficiency benefits of containment and learn about the differences between hot-air and cold-air strategies. 

Modularity is an established technique for organizing and simplifying a complex system. In data centers, modular design has already taken root in new fault-tolerant architectures for servers and storage systems. The mission of this paper is to illustrate how modularity delivers a profound reliability benefit: fault tolerance 

The challenges faced by today’s government agencies and commercial operations are many and varied—and to stay afloat, these organizations must not only promote change from within, but they must also be agile enough to quickly adapt to evolving markets, policies, regulations, and business models. 

Over the course of 2010 and 2011, Forrester Research spoke to hundreds of customers about their enterprise service bus (ESB) activities, and conducted briefings and demonstration reviews as well as over twenty customer interviews to evaluate five commercial and four open source ESB product vendors. Access this paper to examine Forrester's findings.