For as long as I have been in IT, the ‘right’ way to drive things has been towards openness and interoperability. Indeed over the past couple of decades we have…
By Dale Vile The idea of utility computing has been around for a long time, but until relatively recently the ‘pay as you go’ approach to consuming IT infrastructure services…
by Dale Vile There has been much talk and activity in the industry recently around ‘Infrastructure as a Service’ (IaaS), part of which is about meeting your server computing needs…
As an old timer in the industry, I remember the days when the term ‘decision support’ was commonly used in reference to the reporting and analysis capability embedded in IT…
Organisations in sectors such as manufacturing, distribution and retail have got better over the years at automating many aspects of their internal processes. This is in no small part thanks…
Some have accused me of being a cloud computing sceptic, and it’s true that I have not been one for pulling punches in some of my previous posts on the…
By Dale Vile The term ‘cloud computing’ is in routine use within the IT industry. Vendors, service providers, industry analysts and other commentators use the term freely. But what, precisely,…
There are a couple of major pivot points for activity within the IT landscape. The first is the mainframe – that beast sitting in the data centre doing all the…
by Josie Sephton and Dale Vile The proliferation of communications channels has set expectations around cost and productivity benefits. Unified Communications (UC) is proffered as a way of helping bring…
There was a time when the terms ‘ERP’ and ‘back office systems’ were almost synonymous, reflecting that the original incarnations of ERP offerings were very much concerned with processes running…
When we asked Reg readers to tell us about the factors that impacted the success or failure of the last ERP implementation they were involved with, 50 of you came…
OK, so perhaps we were a bit ambitious with the title of this article. With so many variables and dependencies involved in an ERP implementation, it would be somewhat naive…
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) has been around for a long time, yet there is no de facto guide to making it work or any guarantee that you’ll get what you…
As new ideas and technologies emerge and develop in IT, we typically go through a maturity curve. Lots of problems are reported in the early days as a result of…
by Jon Collins, Tony Lock and Dale Vile Most medium and large organisations need to run ‘compute-intensive’ applications of some form. While High Performance Computing (HPC) is not new, it…
The selection of an ERP system is a pretty strategic decision for most companies. Software of this kind tends to operate at the core of your organisation, and can therefore…
So you’ve been through an ERP implementation before and you know how it’s all done? That’s good to hear, but if your experience was a few years ago, it might…
By Dale Vile The consideration of Return on Investment (ROI) understandably increased during the downturn. In line with this, IT vendors have spent a lot more time talking about it…
For better or for worse, we are the owners of a mad Welsh Springer spaniel called Charlie. Buried in there somewhere is a set of gun dog genes reflecting the…
By Jon Collins, Tony Lock and Dale Vile IT management tools are finally, after many decades of masquerade, ready to deliver the functionality that their product descriptions infer, namely capabilities…
by Dale Vile and Tony Lock The personal computer is one of the few parts of the IT infrastructure with which the user interacts directly, and is often, rightly or…
If you were in the market for collaboration software, what would your reaction be if a major software publisher offered you an all-singing all-dancing suite of battle-hardened collaboration tools? What…
By Dale Vile We here at Freeform Dynamics have been tracking developments in the unified communications market for quite a while now. If we go back three years, it was…
By Dale Vile Research conducted by Freeform Dynamics a year ago suggested that the majority of IT departments were not accountable for the power used within the systems infrastructure. The…
