Tag Archives: mobility

The Risks Of IT Consumerization

Leave a reply

As end users bring their own devices to work, download apps and sign up for cloud services, it’s getting harder for IT to maintain application visibility and control performance. In addition to introducing IT management blind spots, trends such as consumerization, mobility and cloud computing are also increasing business risk, according to a survey of CIOs from around the world.

“The age-old disconnect between business and IT is at risk of widening,” said Steve Tack, CTO at Compuware, which commissioned a study into the impact of consumerization. “Employees are clearly hungry to use the same technologies in their business environments that they are already using in their personal lives. This is creating more challenges for those responsible to keep these technologies up and running.”

Among 520 CIOs polled, 77 percent said they worry that further consumerization of IT will lead to greatly increased business risks. At the same time, consumerization is blurring the lines of IT responsibility. At 74 percent of enterprises polled, CIOs said consumerization fuels unrealistic expectations, as end users start assuming IT will address tech issues that sit outside the core infrastructure.

Few IT departments have visibility into how services outside the corporate firewall perform, says Compuware, which specializes in application performance management (APM). Its tools help IT managers optimize the availability and quality of their applications, whether they’re Web-based, non-Web, mobile or streaming or in the cloud. As application environments grow more complex, and as employee-owned smartphones, tablets and apps make their way into the business environment, the art of APM is getting trickier.

“Users now access applications via this intricate chain, starting with an array of browsers and mobile devices, traversing the Internet, cloud services, mobile or third-party providers, the corporate WAN and a multi-tier data center. At any time and any point, problems that jeopardize end-user or customer satisfaction, revenue and brand loyalty can arise,” Compuware asserts in its report, The International CIO Study on Impact of IT Consumerization.

A majority of the CIOs polled believe that having insight into how applications are performing for end users is important; it helps improve IT maturity, according to 86 percent of survey respondents. But a lack of transparency into the performance of cloud and SaaS providers is reversing that maturity, 64 percent of CIOs said.

For instance, more than half of CIOs said adequate support for employee mobility is almost impossible due to reliance on external networks, which make it much harder to control performance and the end-user experience. Likewise, 73 percent of CIOs said their IT departments are currently prevented from supporting SaaS and social media applications because they cannot provide associated SLAs to the business.

At some companies, a lack of application performance management capabilities will wind up restricting the consumerization trend (cited by 73 percent of CIOs). At others, end users will simply circumvent IT departments. At 64 percent of enterprises, for instance, CIOs said enterprise mobility projects are forging ahead without the full involvement of IT.

The International CIO Study on Impact of IT Consumerization was conducted by research firm Vanson Bourne, which polled 520 CIOs from large enterprises in the U.S., Europe and Asia-Pacific.

Source

Mobile Cloud Use Tripled In 2011

Leave a reply

Mobility and cloud provider Model Metrics identified mobile cloud computing as the number one enterprise cloud priority in 2011 and said that mobile use among its cloud computing customers has increased three fold in the first half of this year.

According to the Chicago-based cloud and mobile VAR, more than 80 percent of its customers have smartphone and tablet adoption plans as part of their broader cloud computing initiatives, making mobilizing the cloud the top enterprise cloud priority this year. Whether customers are using dynamic illustrations of medical products on an iPad to guide surgeons in operating rooms to custom mobile applications to track product inventory, enterprises that make the cloud mobile seek to boost business processes and gain a large return.

Model Metrics based its findings on more than 150 customer engagements and found that cloud computing has evolved in the first half of 2011, with new technologies like mobility and social technologies leading the charge as the top customer priorities.

“The cloud has taken a new shape in 2011,” said Model Metrics CEO Adam Caplan. “It’s no longer just moving business processes to the cloud; it’s about deploying cutting-edge mobile and social apps that enable businesses to change the way their employees work.”

Following mobile, Model Metrics said that engaging communities with social technologies is the second biggest cloud priority for enterprises.

“In addition to leveraging social technologies such as Facebook and Twitter to more closely engage with their communities, 60 percent of Model Metrics’ customers are exploring social enterprise technologies to improve employee collaboration. Enterprises are looking for guidance on how to turn this new paradigm of community engagement into business value using the cloud,” Model Metrics wrote in its report.

The need to transition any business process to the cloud ranked third. From compensation and supply chain management to customer facing retail systems, Model Metrics said, “the sky is the limit” when it comes to what enterprises are building in the cloud.

Custom apps built on cloud platforms continue to accelerate and touch new areas of business, like mobilizing customer-facing business processes, budget management and vertical industry apps.

Another business priority Model Metrics has identified is the need to design cloud business apps that drive adoption.

“Enterprises want customized business and customer-facing apps that reflect their brand and are designed for usability, especially when it comes to mobile apps,” Model Metrics wrote. “This requires new design methodologies specific to cloud user experience (UX) and user interface (UI).”

Model Metrics found that 80 percent of customers customize their UI and UX, including designing the most efficient clickstream for specific business processes.

And lastly, enterprise cloud customers want to deploy globally and customize locally, Model Metrics found.

Sixty percent of Model Metrics’ cloud deployments in 2011 have a global reach, double the amount from a year ago. That results in multinational enterprise adoption of the cloud and an increase in enterprise-wide use cases and feature multilanguage support, localization and customer and partner access from anywhere in the world.

Source

VoIP and the Future of Small Business Collaboration

1 Reply

Just a few years ago, the small business tech catch phrase was Voice over IP (VoIP). By now VoIP is the standard in telephony. A Computer Economics study shows that by 2009, nearly 60 percent of organizations had adopted VoIP and more than half are investing in VoIP. The initial draw for small businesses to make the switch to VoIP related to cost savings — namely, there are no toll charges or long distance fees with VoIP. Now many IT managers wonder, what’s next for VoIP?

While the technology hasn’t changed, the number, quality and maturity of VoIP applications has grown. The answer to the “what’s next” question centers not around the technology itself but the unified communications applications businesses can use over the VoIP platform: immersive telepresence, IM, soft phones and video can now all run over the same IP network as the voice service. In fact, VoIP will be a key platform to support new business needs and processes as employees’ work methods continue to evolve. VoIP can become a keystone in a small business’s unified communications suite.

The Future Lies in Collaboration

Video conferencing, made possible by VoIP, is the future of corporate communication. Video conferencing enables collaboration between employees while they’re working remotely, while simultaneously cutting travel costs. And at a moment’s notice, you can hold that important face-to-face meeting with a top client, without all of the associated planning and travel costs of an in-person meeting.

VoIP will also make everyday business processes simpler. Think about how your organization collaborates on document edits, for example. Perhaps one employee saves a file and sends it to another for review. Inevitably, there’s the headache of multiple versions and identifying which one is up-to-date and includes everyone’s edits.

With communication-enabled business processes run over VoIP, employees can work on a document simultaneously and collaborate over Web, video or IM. For small businesses with tight budgets and little time, improved business processes can be the difference between completing a project on time and going over budget.

Going Mobile with Wireless VoIP

Mobility is a major competitive advantage for today’s small business workforce. As the number of teleworking and work-at-home employees increases, wireless VoIP is quickly becoming a necessity. The biggest benefit of wireless VoIP for small businesses is giving employees one phone number where they can be reached no matter where they’re located.

Single-number access is a risk-avoidance measure that’s worth taking. Previously, when an employee was away from the office he or she would give customers his or her cell phone number to be reached remotely. This may not seem like a problem, but it means that the customer will have the employee’s cell phone number after said employee leaves the company, which could potentially be harmful to business.
User-friendly Open Source VoIP

Open source options, for any technology, have always been more affordable from a licensing standpoint, but they can be more difficult to implement. Though open source offers a lot of room for customization, it can be intimidating for those not intimately familiar with the technology.

With VoIP, there are some open source options coming out on the market that are more user-friendly. For instance, businesses can now buy a pre-built appliance that includes traditional applications plus the flexibility inherent in open source options. This can be a good fit for smaller businesses with a smaller budget.

It is helpful to think of open source VoIP options in comparison to the operating system world, where most people consider Linux as the main open source platform. For example, when comparing Linux to Windows, they both have the same inherent feature set, but there is only so much customization possible with Windows.

While Windows offers a rich, thoroughly-tested feature set, Linux gives users the option to turn on or off many features. Open source VoIP solutions offer that same functionality, allowing customers to enable or disable many features that they would be locked into with standard solutions.

Tips When Considering VoIP for Small Business

New uses for VoIP may seem straightforward but, as with any technology, it pays to be prepared and think things through before you dive in. Here are a couple of things to keep in mind.

  • Today’s networks have improved capabilities, but bandwidth is still a commodity. As technology progresses, network service providers have adapted to new kinds of traffic to deliver faster speeds. One of the keys to running new VoIP applications is that speed – and the capability to prioritize voice traffic over normal data traffic, such as email or downloads. Voice traffic is classified as high-priority so that end users do not experience problems, such as choppy calls. Network providers achieve this by enabling Quality of Service (QoS), which assigns different priority to different types of network traffic. Be sure your provider can support the applications you’re moving onto their system.
  • Security is always a concern for small businesses, and IT managers will have to be especially vigilant with new applications of VoIP. These applications often enable new forms of communication for small businesses, and it is important to capture every piece of communication to ensure both secure connections and compliance to company policies. For instance, the capability to save IM correspondences will allow you to ensure employees adhere to your company policies

VoIP has moved beyond being an affordable alternative to traditional telephony to become the standard platform for unified communications. If your business’s network can support it, VoIP will help your employees collaborate, be more efficient and effectively work remotely.

Source

Cloud Computing Top ‘To Do’ List For Midmarket CIOs

Leave a reply

Business analytics is the top technology priority for CIOs at midmarket companies and organizations through the next five years, according to the results of an IBM survey of 3,000 chief information officers around the globe.

The survey also found a 50 percent increase in the number of midsize organizations that plan to invest in cloud computing, compared to a similar study IBM did in 2009, and a big jump in the number of companies investing in mobile IT.

The survey included 622 CIOs at midsize companies and organizations. IBM has expanded its focus on midmarket customers in recent years and it relies exclusively on the channel to serve those customers.

“This is an area that’s critical to us and our growth,” said Ed Abrams, vice president of marketing for IBM’s global midmarket business, speaking at a press conference where the CIO survey results were unveiled. IBM is investing $100 million this year in such activities as lead generation to aid channel partners’ midmarket efforts, Abrams said.

Eighty-three percent of the midmarket CIOs identified analytics, including the ability to glean actionable insights from large volumes of data, as their top priority for investment over the next five years.

“We see this as a tremendous opportunity for us and our partners,” Abrams said.

That was backed up by Dane Adcock, vice president of business intelligence solutions at Sky I.T. Group, an IBM channel partner that develops business analysis systems for customers based on IBM WebSphere, DB2 database and other products.

Sky I.T. is particularly focused on the retail industry, developing systems that collect data from point-of-sale, EDI (electronic data interchange), supply chain management and ERP systems into a single reporting system. “Customer retention is a primary objective,” Adcock said of what his customers are trying to achieve.

The Boston-area-based pizza chain Papa Gino’s is among the midsize companies that have adopted IBM’s business analytics software, IBM said. The restaurant chain is using the technology to track information from its customer rewards program, measure the effectiveness of customer promotions, and more effectively tailor its online ordering campaigns.

IBM channel partner QueBIT, which resells IBM Cognos business intelligence software, developed and implemented the business analytics system for Papa Gino’s, said Martha Lieber, director of business systems, at the press conference.

CIOs of midsize companies are using a wide range of IT tools to turn data into actionable information, according to the survey, including data warehousing (64 percent of respondents), visual dashboards (64 percent), master data management (63 percent), and client analytics (63 percent).

The number of midsize companies that plan to invest in cloud computing over the next three to five years increased by 50 percent from the 2009 survey, IBM said. “Cloud has moved out of the experimentation phase and into the implementation stage,” Abrams said, adding that IBM offers sales and service opportunities for its channel partners.

And the percentage of CIOs at midsize companies who plan to invest in mobility technology, including smart phones and mobile applications, increased to 72 percent.

Source

SIP Trunking Gets Serious

Leave a reply

Regular attendees of the Enterprise Connect conference (formerly VoiceCon) couldn’t help but notice that this year everyone was talking — and talking more seriously — about implementing session initiated protocol (SIP) trunking. Although other conference topics such as Unified Communications and mobility may have been more glamorous, SIP trunking was often in the background as an enabling technology that can make those things work, or work better.

SIP is an Internet standard for establishing and managing voice and video connections and is commonly used within organizations that have implemented voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) telephony. With SIP trunking, it also becomes the means of placing calls over carrier networks, allowing enterprises to consolidate their carrier trunk connections from many offices to a smaller number of data centers or communications hubs. They can then avoid long distance tolls by routing more calls over their wide-area networks.

“A lot of people are trying to save costs — that’s a major factor,” said Courtney A. Mobley, an information systems coordinator from George Washington University who is working on a SIP trunking project. The preliminary engineering work has already been done, and the university is testing an initial implementation. “I think it’s going to happen in the next year,” he said.

Mobley said he was at the conference looking for practical tips, both in terms of understanding what users are looking for from Unified Communications and the kind of troubleshooting he will need to do to keep them happy. The university is already starting to deal with some of these challenges as more staff members rely on the IP network for voice. “If you can prove where the problem is and get the right people who need to solve the problem, that’s really important,” he said.

Mobley was among a hardy group of conference goers who got up early on Thursday, the last day of the conference, for a “coffee talk” discussion of the practicalities of SIP trunking. Sorrell Slaymaker, VP of communications architecture at Unified IT Systems, led a question and answer session on building the business case, getting the implementation right, and putting the right support in place.

SIP trunking is not an initiative to be taken on lightly, Slaymaker said. “Voice is one of those critical applications where if it doesn’t work, everyone is unhappy.” Although vendors make very expansive claims for return on investment, Slaymaker said the biggest savings he has ever seen from the transition is 70% — with 45% to 50% being more common. Some of the savings are diminished by the “cleanup” aspects of the transition, such as chasing down and eliminating all the individual phone connections a big organization has established over the decades.

The business case is most compelling for large organizations with thousands of telephone trunks to replace. That also means it tends to be a multi-year process, since it’s impractical to convert more than a handful of sites per week, Slaymaker said.

Among the questions raised by IT and network managers were how to handle fax lines, how to troubleshoot problems, and how much of the work can be delegated to a carrier, rather than implemented internally.

Slaymaker said many business processes and many older workers still depend on the departmental fax machine, so converting them to IP has to be part of the project. Some organizations run into trouble trying to implement voice compression on their VoIP systems, which tends to interfere with fax transmission. He doesn’t recommend voice compression anyway because “it doesn’t buy you much” and risks degrading voice quality.

For troubleshooting, his top recommendation is to include border session controller appliances as part of the network architecture. These are often included to improve security, but also offer monitoring functions that make it easier to trace problems with dropped or low-quality sessions. Acme Packet and Sonus Networks are two of the best specialty vendors in that niche, he said.

SIP trunking requires a “rock solid” wide-area network between branch offices and the data centers that will be routing calls, Slaymaker said. If your WAN is not up to the task, consider having a carrier provide it as a managed service, he said. “You don’t necessarily have to have a private MPLS [multiprotocol label switching] network — the carriers will give you very good SLAs [service-level agreements] if you are using their Internet [connectivity] on both sides,” he said.

Source

Virtualization: A Solution For The Tablet Security Conundrum

1 Reply

Tablet computing use has been proliferating faster than rabbits in springtime. Tablets bring with them increased mobility and ease of use coupled with a more interactive and immersive experience. Whether you fancy the Apple iPad or one of its rivals, there’s likely a tablet in your future.

Executives and other persuasive users are demanding that tablets be allowed access to their work resources. And these users don’t understand why IT departments see the trend as a security risk.

The problem: the application, networking, systems and security architectures in place within many organizations are not designed to support tablets or other unmanaged devices on the enterprise network. IT departments fear losing control. Traditional IT infrastructure isn’t sufficient to support unmanaged devices. Systems were built around the requirements for end-to-end ownership and device control – assumptions that are no longer valid. The time has come to evolve security: a new IT architecture is required that focuses on data control.

A key objective for most organizations is to protect and secure truly sensitive data at all times. The use of personally owned and managed mobile devices like the iPad presents an even greater challenge in protecting access to sensitive information. With today’s expanded mobility, the resulting security of data is highly dependent on situational information, factoring in security of the device, location, user, network and the applications.

Malware like viruses and spyware are a familiar and critical threat. But malware is not the primary threat in mobile data loss today. Sensitive data must be protected against all of the following high-level threats:

* Data Exfiltration: The unauthorized movement of data outside the control environment and general data loss
* Data Tampering: The unintended modification of data
* Data Unavailability: The unavailability of data when use or other action is required

Control measures must be in place to protect against any successful attack that would exercise these threats. These control measures begin with well-planned security architecture, and extend to specific configuration steps taken to protect individual data elements. Any data use policy that allows access to sensitive data by unmanaged and highly mobile endpoints, such as tablets, will need an enhanced security architecture to protect against expanded threats.

How can a tablet user work with sensitive applications and data that aren’t on their device? By connecting to these sensitive applications and data using virtualization.

Virtualization allows tablets and other mobile devices to display and interact with sensitive data – but the data is never copied to the tablet. In this way, tablet users can run the same Windows applications and access the same documents they would have in the office.

Virtualization is core to enabling tablet use within enterprises. The benefits of keeping data in the data center, combined with advanced security features have propelled virtualization to be a top business initiative.

One other major advantage of virtualization is the fact that breach reporting is a non-event. The loss of a device does not mean the loss of sensitive data. Enabling virtualization – and keeping sensitive data off the device – ensures that tablets, laptops and other highly mobile devices keep sensitive data safe.

By enabling a security architecture centered on data control, IT solves longstanding security problems through empowering the environment to protect sensitive data regardless of access method, device, network, ownership or location. Virtualization enables tablet users to work and play from anywhere, with the security to protect sensitive enterprise data.

Source

Cloud Set For Promising Future: Vint Cerf

1 Reply

Google vice president and chief internet evangelist Vint Cerf today delivered the keynote address to open source enthusiasts at Linux.conf.au 2011 in Brisbane, saying that cloud computing is on the verge of becoming as big a concept as the internet itself.

“I feel we are at the state in the cloud world now that we were in the internet world back in 1973,” Cerf said.

The Google VP and evangelist also said, however, that a lack of interconnected standards for cloud computing was holding it back.

“We have many different cloud implementations for different sources. Whether it’s Amazon or Google or Microsoft or IBM and so on, they aren’t built the same way, they don’t have all the same functionality,” he said, adding that there aren’t any standards for getting different to talk to each other in a co-operative way like the internet does.

He said that a standard cloud language should be drawn up to enable this cross-cloud collaboration.

“None of the vocabulary which has grown up around the internet for this remote peer-to-peer interaction has been developed for clouds yet. If you’re looking for a dissertation topic, this is one of them! This exploration of how to get clouds to interact with each other.”

Cerf, considered one of the fathers of the internet, said that cloud was unlike the internet in that it was one grand collaboration, adding that the notion of interconnection is just as important as it was in the days of the early design.

Faults of our fathers

While delivering his keynote address, Cerf openly admitted the mistakes he and his colleagues made in the design of early internet infrastructure, including a frank admission that he thought the design of IPv4 left enough addresses for the whole internet.

Cerf said that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers and the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority were likely to run out of addresses by early February, with regional internet registries set to feel the pinch by 2012.

“The time for just talking about [IPv6] is over. We need to now just get down and busy with implementing it,” Cerf said.

Cerf also said that one of the biggest challenges for the future of the internet will be solving the problem of mobility.

“There are probably something like a billion, a billion and a half more devices that are connected at one time on the net and something on the order of two billion users, which is kind of small considering there’s about seven billion people on the planet,” he said. Cerf joked that he and his team could be forgiven for designing TCP/IP in the way they did in 1977, because back then, computers couldn’t be moved around with the user.

“Back then they were all [giant] and needed air conditioning and cables all over everywhere,” Cerf joked.

“As we [now] move around and our computing goes with us, the way we use the internet has changed,” he said, adding that traditional TCP/IP and phone number tracking standards were no longer valid in the new mobile space.

Source

Clouds, Mobility and Security Problems

1 Reply

Cloud computing, mobile applications,smart phones and tablets will all play an important role in driving Thailand’s information and communications technology industry in 2011. But executives of the industry emphasize the growing challenges of security in the new age of mobility and devices of all kinds, when asked to share their visions for the year ahead.

The managing director and general manager of HP Enterprise Business for Hewlett-Packard (Thailand), Beng Teck Liang, said the adoption of mobile and cloud computing was making everything “connected and immediate”. Customers and people generally expected responses in seconds,if not instantly, instead of weeks and days.Recent research conducted on behalf of HP reveals that the role of IT in Asia Pacific is shifting from chiefly being the administrator of an enterprise to becoming one and the same with the enterprise.

Eighty per cent of senior business and government executives believe that to better serve customers and citizens they must rapidly adapt their enterprises to meet changes in consumer expectations. Seventy-three per cent believe that technology is the key to business and government innovation;76 per cent indicate that in order to be successful, technology needs to be embedded in the business or government service. Beng said there were new technologies that would support consumer expectations of businesses and government, including Instant-On Enterprise, Application Transformation and Converged Infrastructure. Others include enterprise security and information optimization.

In many enterprises, rigid infrastructure along with both physical and virtual sprawl has inhibited enterprise agility, he said. Instant-On Enterprise delivers differentiated competitive advantage, serving customers, employees, partners and citizens with whatever they want and need, instantly.He said Hewlett-Packard believed in transforming applications and processes that were designed for another era. Application Transformation helps enterprises to gain control over aging applications and inflexible processes that challenge innovation and agility by governing their responsiveness and pace of change. Beng said organizations and governments were embracing new and increasingly open ways of connecting with customers and citizens, through mobile applications, social networking and cloud services, and security was becoming a greater challenge. Enterprise security is necessary to protect assets without constricting the flow of information between enterprises or governments and their customers or citizens.

A recent independent report found that consumerisation is the new technology trend that brings most concern to security executives, Beng said. Nearly half (46 per cent) of respondent enterprises cited concerns about smart phones, and 38 per cent were concerned about Web 2.0 technologies. Beng said Information Optimization was aimed at helping businesses and government agencies facing challenges associated with rapidly expanding data. Growing legal and compliance requirements are being placed on IT, while budgets to manage that are often flat or declining, he said. At the same time, business and government leaders are also demanding timely delivery of better information to aid real-time decision making. According to new HP research, only 18 per cent of senior business and technology executives in Asia Pacific believe that IT provides them with the information they need all of the time. This problem will only get worse, Beng said. In 2005, mankind created 150 exabytes of digital data. In 2010, it was expected to create eight times more than that.

Eight-eight per cent of senior technology and business executives believe that storage assets will grow by at least 20 per cent over the next two years. More than half of the 88 per cent believe that storage assets will grow by more than 30 percent. Reactive legal discovery costs about US$1.8 million (Bt54.1 million) per terabyte of data, Beng said. Meanwhile, computer security firm Symantec’s country manager in Thailand, Pramut Sriwichian, predicted that mobile devices would become a leading source of confidential- data loss in 2011. The use of mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets to meet both business and personal connectivity needs is growing at an unprecedented pace, he said. Market analysis firm IDC estimates that by the end of last year new mobile-device shipments increased by 55 percent and another analyst, Gartner, believes that be the end of 2010, 1.2 billion people were using mobile phones capable of rich Web connectivity. Since the proliferation of these gadgets shows no sign of slowing in the coming year, enterprises will gravitate to new security models to safeguard the sensitive data that will be on and accessible through these devices,

Pramut said. At the same time, employees are becoming increasingly mobile and are “working-on-the-go”, so enterprises will have to address the associated challenges by adopting new models, such as security in the cloud, for suitable solutions that will work seamlessly across multiple platforms and devices. IT managers can be expected to be forced by business necessity to implement more granular and refined web security policies, as well, Pramut said. Increasingly, the same mobile devices are being used for personal and business use. This creates complex security and management challenges for three key groups: IT organizations, consumers and communication-service providers.

For IT organizations, consumers are driving the innovation of mobile devices and bringing them into their enterprises: evidence of the ongoing consumerisation of IT. This is especially true as organisations cut costs and require employees to use their personal devices for business.

However, many enterprises lack an all-embracing solution covering numerous mobile operating systems that can keep enterprise data and application access safe while allowing the use of personal devices. For consumers, their “IT-isation” means they have more technology in their homes for everyday use, but no dedicated IT staff to manage all those devices. Pramut said communication service providers would see decreasing subscriber satisfaction, resulting in customer turnover and increased costs associated with out-of-control mobile bandwidth increases, network misuse,malware proliferation and spam.He said carriers needed a single solution to manage customer preferences and security across all types of services, including voice, e-mail, SMS, MMS, Web, IM and P2P.

Such solutions should be installed while devices continued to become more sophisticated and while just a handful of mobile platforms cornered the market. Pramut said that according to companiesandmarkets.com, Thailand’s IT market was projected to grow at a compound annual rate of 12 per cent over the years from 2010 to 2014. Thailand’s domestic spending on IT products and services was expected to exceed US$5.4 billion last year, and is expected to reach US$8.7billion by 2014.According to Gartner, security will remain one of the fastest-growing areas within the enterprise-software market for the next few years. This positive upward direction, the Thai government’s investment in infrastructure projects and stimulus programs and continued investment from the private sector, lays a solid

foundation for growth in new areas for Thailand. As well, the recent announcement of a data privacy bill and new regulations in Thailand provide the stimulus for government and enterprises to be compliant and continue investing in IT security and infrastructure software,the global analysis firm said. NetApp (Thailand)’s country manager Weera Areeratanasak pointed to dramatic growth this year in data management technology. He said there were forecasts of growth in data exceeding 30 per cent, and business would need to make an effort to put this huge volume of data to more intelligent use. This will drive the need for data-management products and solutions that are more efficient and flexible in their response to individual needs.

Source