Jeff Vance

If I asked you to pick the most over-hyped technology trend of the past year, you’d probably pick either “cloud computing” or “smartphones and tablets.” Pretty much every tech publication has wall-to-wall coverage of those trends, while plenty of vendors are busily slapping “cloud” and “mobile” on a slew of products that are only vaguely […]

This past year has been a good one for cloud computing. According to Gartner, the cloud services market grew to $68.3 billion in 2010, a 16.6 percent increase from 2009 revenue of $58.6 billion. Gartner predicts that by 2014, cloud services revenue will balloon to $148.8 billion worldwide. Gartner also reported that SaaS vendors raked […]

1. Top tech companies will make sure you start moving to cloud computing With the launch of Windows 7 and Windows Live, Microsoft is betting heavily on the cloud. Cloud services and cloud storage form the background of Office synching, file sharing, collaboration, rich media and more. Windows 7 means that even companies that have […]

Business Intelligence (BI) software promises to deliver fast ROI and an array of corporate insights, but the promises often fall short of the reality. IT loves to blame vendors, but how many projects failed because they were underfunded, abandoned halfway through the process or ignored by the rest of the organization? “One of the problems […]

Anytime a radical technology comes along, radical changes in business and work follow. For instance, the growth of Google, eBay, and Amazon directly piggybacked on the mainstreaming of the Internet. Similarly, in the pre-Internet years, people didn’t spend their entire days tethered to PCs. What shifts in business and work will result from the growth […]

Despite a dismal economy, analysts continue to be bullish on cloud computing. A few recent studies project continued momentum for cloud computing, which according to IDC, should soon “reach 12% of the size of traditional IT product spending, [while representing] over 25% of the net-new growth in traditional IT products.” IDC predicts that worldwide revenue […]

Augmented reality is all the rage in the smartphone world, but is this something IT professionals should actually be planning for or yet another over-hyped science project? My bet is on the former. With behemoths like Cisco believing augmented reality (AR) is the “future of shopping” and BMW considering it the “future of car repair,” […]

For many knowledge workers, smartphones have become essential business tools. However, in many situations, they’re incredibly clumsy to use. Entering text, especially on touch screens, is difficult and cumbersome. Creating documents is less than ideal, and editing them tends to be a pain. For many app developers, though, the smartphone’s limitations present an opportunity. Find […]

Practically every cloud computing provider – from Google to Rackspace, Amazon to Salesforce.com – has suffered through an outage at some point. When outages happen, skeptics question the viability of cloud computing. Talk to anyone invested in the cloud, though, and it doesn’t take long to understand that outages are just one of the costs […]

Smartphones are entering the enterprise through the back door. This is nothing new. Plenty of technologies (laptops, WiFi, thumb drives) first caught on in consumer markets and then sneaked their way into the enterprise. Employees began using the devices for work well before organizations adapted secure usage policies and IT controls. With an array of […]