Gartner Says Companies Must Embrace Consumer Technologies As Additional Opportunities to Innovate
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Corporate attitudes toward consumer-led technology extending into the  enterprise must shift from "unavoidable  nuisance" to "opportunity  for additional innovation," according to Gartner, Inc.
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New mobile devices such as the iPhone and the OQO ultramobile PC pose compatibility and security challenges that IT managers will have to resolve, said attendees at a Gartner conference.
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Alexander Linden, a prominent Gartner Research analyst will be talking about the future later this week in Cannes, France. Smart Web was held ahead of this week&#39;s ITXpo symposium, an annual event held to identify the future of technology.
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K. Ananth Krishnan has a hard enough job handling the technology requirements of a global IT consulting behemoth with 89,000 globally dispersed employees and 34 to 35 percent annual growth. But as an avid follower of Clayton Christensen, author of the classic business book "The Innovatorâs Dilemma," he would never be content to merely stay on top of things. Innovation is part of his regular diet.
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AMSTERDAM -- A smarter internet and a host of cheap, web-enabled mobile devices will allow access to a whole range of services on the move, research group Gartner Dataquest said on Sunday, ahead of its ITXpo symposium.
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As Maytag Corp. MYG.N cuts costs to  boost profits, analysts also say the appliance maker needs to  develop innovative products that stand out to capitalize on a  consumer shift to washers and refrigerators with extra  features.
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PC Magazine - The issues of patents, indemnification and the potential risk of using open-source software took center stage at the keynote panel of industry leaders at the Gartner Open Source Summit.
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By Simms, Jane  Despite what the analysts say, technology companies should learn to play by the same rules of business we all adhere to-and don't forget the customer  I wrote two articles recently which, technophobe that I am, fell well outside my comfort zone.
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(InfoWorld) - Cisco Systems Inc., the techie's tech company, is learning how to please novice users. The shift comes as the company both moves into the consumer arena through service providers and its Linksys brand, and tries to give networks a bigger role in enterprise applications that face regular employees, Cisco's development and marketing chiefs said Wednesday at the C-Scape analyst conference in San Jose, California. Video has emerged as a prime topic at this year's conference as Cisco absorbs set-top box maker Scientific-Atlanta and aims to equip its service provider customers with the infrastructure for triple-play or quad-play services. Those bundles, including data, voice, video and eventually mobile service, are expected to be the lifeblood of carriers in the future. Along with Linksys consumer gear, they will make Cisco much more of a consumer company, said Charles Giancarlo, Cisco's chief development officer and president of Linksys. "While I don't expect us to be the equivalent of Sony any time soon, more and more we'll be in front of the consumer, and more and more we'll be certainly in front of the business user, with our phones, with the user interface on the PCs, with Telepresence, et cetera," Giancarlo said. The Telepresence Meeting system, a high-quality video and audio system Cisco unveiled earlier this year for enterprises, is likely to reach home users within three to four years, Giancarlo said. Cisco's development approach is changing as the consumer and enterprise worker experience becomes more important, he said. Even network administrators may benefit, as the company is giving its switches and routers the intelligence to do more configuration on their own. In a wide-ranging, moderated discussion, Giancarlo also laid out some future visions. One area of networking where Cisco has had some holes is the wide-area wireless arena, he acknowledged. The company probably won't go into the radio or cellular equipment business, seeing its role instead as building infrastructure for carriers to deliver the same content across IP (Internet Protocol) to different devices. Cisco will also take steps this year to flesh out the SONA (Service-Oriented Network Architecture) initiative it announced at last year's analyst meeting. SONA is designed to give the network a greater role in enterprise applications. Much effort in SONA this year will be focused on unified communications, the combination of different forms of IP communications and blending of them with applications, Giancarlo said. Cisco also plans SONA components for mobility and security, he said. The company, with as many as 90 million consumer devices in homes already, plans a big push in that area at the International Consumer Electronics Show in January, said Chief Marketing Officer Sue Bostrom. She and Giancarlo were vague about whether Cisco will keep the Linksys and Scientific-Atlanta brands alive. The executives downplayed Microsoft's new competitive threat in unified communications. "Some people looked at it as a new and powerful entrant coming into the market. I viewed it as five powerful existing players leaving the market. Because I think it said, 'It's all about unified communications, it's not about hybrid PBXes,'" Giancarlo said, referring to the PBXes (private branch exchanges) sold by telephony vendors such as Nortel Networks Corp. and Avaya Inc. that combine traditional and IP telephony.
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Enterprise IT executives attending this week's Gartner Symposium ITxpo  in Orlando, Fla., got a peek at several forthcoming products for security, CM (content management), wireless, and SOAs (service-oriented architectures).
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Devices seen as good entry point to consumer electronics market.
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Devices could be available to consumers next year, company says.
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NEW YORK  - Comcast CEO Brian Roberts will try to show the cable industry has embraced innovation by unveiling initiatives today to promote new technology, speed Internet connections, help customers manage video options and expand HDTV selection.
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Virtual worlds, mobile coupons and  bar-code readers on cell phones are the next technology wave  that U.S. chain stores must ride if they hope to stay  competitive in the fast-changing world of global retail.
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IT researcher GartnerÂ will pay about $162 million to acquire Meta Group, which also does IT research as well as consulting, Gartner announced Monday.
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As Maytag Corp.  cuts costs to boost profits, analysts also say the appliance maker needs to develop innovative products that stand out to capitalize on a consumer shift to washers and refrigerators with extra features.
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Microsoft preached its "new world of work" mantra at the company?s Global High Tech Summit 2007 conference in San Jose, Calif. on Thursday.Noting synergy between the disciplines of business and IT, the event is intended for professionals from both realms, said Tyler Bryson, Microsoft's newly announced general manager of the U.S. Manufacturing Industry portion of the company?s Industry Solutions Organization."At Microsoft, we believe that alignment [of business and IT] is critical to innovation," Bryson said. Also featured at the event were speakers from chipmakers Intel and Freescale Semiconductor, who talked about modernizations to their systems and processes.Trends are accelerating, such as globalization and market growth that are creating a new world of work, Bryson said. Other relevant trends include the pressure to improve operation performance, quality-driven regulatory compliance, and rapid cycles of product innovation.Globalization and technology create entirely new ways that people think about work, and everyone must adjust and respond, said Bryson. "The world is transforming what it means to be at work," he said.The morning's presentations had a bent toward high-tech manufacturing. Bryson said the National Association of Manufacturers expects a 40 percent turnover in the manufacturing work base; companies must cope with transferring knowledge to employees."Most manufacturers are reporting a shortage of skilled workers," he said. A culture of innovation must be created that can attract the best talent, said Bryson.New tenets of work, according to Bryson, include creating a culture of innovation, empowering the workforce, driving operational excellence, running a customer-centric business, using compliance as a tool of transparency, and operating in a global environment.At Freescale, the company is undertaking several upgrades, including moving to a single global instance of SAP for supply chain operations. Freescale is what Janelle Monney, senior vice president of business operations at the company, described as "a 50-year-old startup" that was part of Motorola until 2004.The company also has initiatives in manufacturing and business intelligence, she noted. Freescale's business intelligence platform is intended to bring multiple data streams altogether into a single data warehouse."One of the key objectives of IT is to turn data into information for decision-making," said Monney.Also, employees can access e-mail on cell phones equipped with Windows OSes, she said.With Intel, the company is extending itself to accommodate three market opportunities: mobile Internet devices, consumer electronics, and development of low-cost PCs, said Stuart Pann, an Intel vice president and co-general manager of customer fulfillment, planning and logistics."One of our goals is how do we configure the supply chain to take advantage of these new opportunities," Pann said.Intel is running a new manufacturing process on Intel systems and Microsoft operating systems at its high-volume plant in Arizona, Pann said. "That is virtually run on Intel architecture and on Microsoft operating systems, so we've made the transition over the years, and we've found that the combination of these two products is more than robust enough to run $3.5 billion factories," said Pann.Among other improvements, the company is developing a new workspace that is a fundamental change to the company's cubicle culture, he said. Phone booths will be created, more privacy options will be offered, and the company will get rid of underutilized office space, said Pann.Also, author and consultant Geoffrey Moore, managing director of TCG Advisors, lectured on the challenges of finding a competitive advantage and innovation in a marketplace that faces frequent commoditization."You must innovate in order to continue to sustain advantage," Moore said.Differentiation also is important, he said. Apple with its iPod has customers acknowledging it is different, he said. But past differentiation can erode so that a company?s core competency is no longer core, he said."Our friends at Dell are dealing with that right now," with the industry catching up and Dell having to reinvent itself, said Moore.Microsoft officials briefly noted the company's new unified communications platform, which features Office Communications Server and provides such capabilities as IM, voice, and videoconferencing.