ReadWriteWeb: ReadWriteEnterprise Weekly

ReadWriteEnterprise is a blog for IT managers and business executives with resources and analysis about the dynamic nature of the enterprise. We hope the discussion provides insights into the tools, technologies and trends that matter when making strategic decisions about the fast changing nature of the workplace and the market at large.
IT Poll: Do You Use a Proprietary Database? Over the weekend we told you about Oracle's killer quarter. One of the interesting things about how well Oracle is doing is that a large part of the company's revenue growth is coming from new licenses for its proprietary database software. Even as database types are diversifying and open source competitors step up their game, Oracle is still crushing it. David Linthicum wrote earlier this year that the won't open source won't gain in the cloud. I disagree. Plenty of open source software is being used to build clouds. But I think what we're seeing is that the cloud isn't curbing the adoption of proprietary software. Are you still using proprietary databases in your enterprise? Are you expanding the use of proprietary databases, or phasing them out? Continue reading... OpenFlow: The NoSQL of Network Protocols In the early 1960s, Paul Baran invented packet switching. Packet switching became the foundation ARPANET, which later gave way to the Internet. Baran died at the age of 84 last Saturday. But packet switching lives on after all these years as the primary foundation of computer networking. But just as chips, databases and programming languages have entered a period of increased specialization, we may be seeing the beginnings of specialized network topologies. Last week several Internet giants, including Facebook, Google and Yahoo formed the Open Network Foundation, a group dedicated to promoting Software-Defined Networking (SDN). The group's first priority is a protocol called OpenFlow. The key idea is to give network engineers more control over switches by giving them customizable firmware, supplanting the one size fits all paradigm of modern networking equipment. Continue reading... iPad for Business Round-Up: 26% of Enterprises Planning to Support Tablets, Secure Browsing and More The iPad isn't just a hot new consumer device, it's also an increasingly popular tool for business. Every week we take a look at the latest developments in its use in the enterprise. This week we look at what may be the first mobile-only business suite, a new secure broswer for viewing enterprise Web applications on iOS and the rate of tablet adoption in the enterprise. Continue reading... 11 Features to Watch for in Windows 8 (Part 2) In part one we took a look at several features expected in Microsoft's forthcoming Windows 8 operating system, including facial recognition, instant-on and tablet support. Now we'll delve into a few more, including a special bonus section with some improbable but possible changes to the flagship Microsoft product. Continue reading... 11 Features to Watch for in Windows 8 (Part 1) No one knows what exactly the next version of Windows will look like, or even what it will be called. Internally it's called Windows.Next, but Microsoft developers refer to it as Windows 8 on LinkedIn. The details we have come from LinkedIn, the portfolio of a developer at Microsoft India R&D, a official statements and presentations by Microsoft and slides supposedly leaked by an HP engineer responsible for OEM relations. Together, these pieces begin to form a picture of what the next generation of Microsoft's operating system will look like. Let's take a look at some of what may be in the next version. Continue reading... Is Apple a Social Company? Paul Greenberg described Apple as a product and engineering centric company, as opposed to a customer and social media centric company, in the interview with Dennis Howlett we posted yesterday. But today, Mindtouch Executive Vice President of Sales Mark Fidelman, writing for Cloudave, identifies Apple Senior Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing Phillip W. Schiller as the top social Chief Marketing Officer of the Fortune 100. What gives? Is Apple a social company or isn't it? Continue reading... 3 Lessons Learned in Social CRM Social CRM, as a concept, has been around for five or six years now, according to Paul Greenberg and Estaban Kolsky, two analysts interviewed on the subject by Dennis Howlett. But we're only just now starting to understand the concept, and it may be several years before we have any real success stories in the area. Never the less, we can already learn a few lessons from the pioneers of social CRM. Continue reading... IDC Executive Brief: The Extended Enterprise: Manage Complexity, Cost, and Compliance New technologies, such as collaboration tools and mobile devices, create new opportunities for enterprises to innovate and provide better customer service. But they also introduce new costs and new risks. In an executive brief sponsored by Qwest Business, IDC outlines the security, compliance and cost issues facing the organization of today. Continue reading... How to Choose and Migrate to a Cloud E-Mail Provider Forrester released two reports on cloud-based e-mail this week: one on selecting a provider, and another on migrating to the cloud. Although Forrester doesn't recommend any specific providers, the firm does cite three areas to consider when comparing providers. For the migration report, Forrester looked at the lessons learned by major companies that have moved to the cloud. For example, GlaxoSmithKline moved about 90,000 users to Microsoft Online. Continue reading... 2 Looks at the The State of LinkedIn [Infographics] The news comes today that LinkedIn now has 100 million users. We have two infographics to show the growth and what it represents. LinkedIn created its own infographic and the Italian blog Vincos has a number of other nuggets of interest in an infographic of its own. LinkedIn's infographic has some data points that fit with the infographic genre: Continue reading... IT Poll: Does Your Company Use a Dedicated Idea Management Tool? Ron Shulkin, VP of the Americas at CogniStreamer, recently wrote a blog post titled "Trust me: You do NOT want to go through your company's idea list manually." Shulkin makes the case against using a basic electronic idea box for ideation, or shoehorning ideas into existing tools, instead of an application dedicated to managing ideas. "Without a proper mechanism for automatic idea promotion, someone is going to end up with a thousand ideas on their desk and have to filter them manually," Shulkin writes. "They'll have to read them all, sort through them, put them into categories, combine similar ones, somehow score them, rank them and decide which ones are the best." The result is that the person in charge of filtering through all these ideas won't be able to do a very good job, good ideas won't be implemented and people will be discouraged from submitting ideas. How do you gather ideas at work? Are you using an idea management platform, dropping ideas into a box, or dealing with it all through e-mail or a forum? Continue reading...	Sponsored by
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