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Features

• 5 things CIOs need to know about data lakes

  1.The concept is still quite new. The term data lake, credited to Pentaho CTO James Dixon, has been bandied about for several years. But the idea of data lakes as corporate resources is still in its infancy, according to IDC analyst Ashish Nadkarni. A data lake is defined as a massive--and relatively cheap--storage repository, such as Hadoop, that can hold all types of data until it is needed for business analytics or data mining. A data lake holds data in its rawest form, unprocessed and ungoverned.

• 10 things you need to know about bi-modal IT

  1. Bi-modal IT is real, and it's likely to be embraced by your company

• Windows 10 fragmentation? What fragmentation?

  Microsoft's Windows 10 will not have a fragmentation problem, analysts argued, even though its rapid development tempo and a host of update cadences will spin off so many versions that not everyone will be running the same code, or even have the same features, at any one time.

• Does Fortinet's Meru buy mean we're in for even more Wi-Fi industry consolidation?

  Cybersecurity firm <a href="http://www.fortinet.com/press_releases/2015/fortinet-announces-agreement-to-acquire-meru-networks.html">Fortinet's purchase last week of wireless network manufacturer Meru Networks</a> for $44 million is the second major acquisition of a Wi-Fi hardware vendor in three months and, potentially, the start of a broader pattern.

• Android Pay likely at Google I/O as Samsung preps its own service

  Google is expected to reveal details about Android Pay at its annual I/O conference this week, even as Samsung readies its own separate mobile payment service.

• iPaaS: A new approach to cloud Integration

  <em>This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter's approach.</em>

• Microsoft answers Windows device share slump with freemium strategy

  Microsoft's strategic shift to creating apps and services for rival operating systems was born from the hard realization that Windows' share of the total device market was in the middle of a three-year slump, according to new forecasts Thursday by research firm Gartner.

• What should public sector CIOs do about ‘shadow IT’?

  Gone are the days when government CIOs could expect to exercise total control over how their agencies invested in ICT.
  

• BYOD brings corporate contradictions

  During a roundtable discussion on the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend, a tech leader candidly offered this bit of real-world insight: "My wife is a nurse. There is no BYOD policy at the hospital. But all of the nurses communicate with each other via SMS, because that's the most efficient way to do their job."

• Enterprise IT Crosses the Chasm

  One of the most -- perhaps the most -- influential books in Silicon Valley over the past two decades has been "Crossing the Chasm" by Geoffrey Moore. In it he posits the existence of a technology adoption bell curve (Figure 1) -- starting with innovators, who eagerly grasp new technologies to gain competitive advantage, through to laggards who typically wait for technology to be established as a service, thereby requiring no internal technical expertise.

• Gartner's Cloud showdown: Amazon Web Services vs. Microsoft Azure

  Gartner IaaS research director, Kyle Hilgendorf, says one of the most common questions he gets from enterprise customers looking to go to the Cloud is: AWS or Azure?

• How to use a crisis to move towards digital government

  Constant budget cuts in times of crisis are undermining IT’s ability to deliver digital services across government, argues Glenn Archer.
  

• Is the CIO-CMO Transition of Power Becoming a Reality?

  The Gartner report landed on the CIO's desk with a thud: In five years, Gartner predicted, marketers will spend more on technology than IT will. That report came out almost three years ago, and CMOs are well on their way to making good on Gartner's prediction. The transfer of power is nearly complete.

• Why we live in an anti-tech age

  Though it seems as if we're sourrounded by innovative products, services and technologies, there's a growing counter argument that we're living in a dismal era. Science is hated. Real technological progress has stalled. And what we call innovation today really isn't very innovative.

• Cloud giants do battle backed by distinctly different partner networks

  When evaluating the marketplaces of the big three public IaaS cloud providers - Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft - AWS stands out in terms of the maturity of its platform for partners to offer products and services on top of its cloud. But Microsoft, too, has a formidable partner program that could rival Amazon's in the future, analysts predict.