Letters to Redmond
May Reader Letters: Apple and ERP
After reading "Nostrabarney," Doug Barney's April column concerning IT industry predictions, a reader had this response:
I believe Apple is going to break into the enterprise market despite itself in one major way: via the iPhone and iPad and ERP [enterprise resource planning] software, like that from SAP and Oracle. I work with SAP software, and every event I go to now is talking about bringing the SAP apps onto one of these platforms. Sure, the Android and BlackBerry will continue to compete with ERP integration being written for them, but more of the market share seems to be going to iPhone and iPad. Just follow sapteched on twitter, and you'll see that about every other tweet will be about iPhone and iPad integration with SAP.
I don't believe Apple will be in the enterprise desktop -- at least not in the near future. That's my two cents.
Mark Musser
Received via e-mail
IT Strategies
I just finished reading Doug Barney's column in the March edition of Redmond (Barney's Rubble, "Ask Doug"). I agree with everything Barney wrote. I especially appreciated the point he made about dropping the attitude and getting about mentoring. Too many folks that I run across in my duties as an IT person have an overabundance of arrogance and pride. It's one thing to be confident, but often people feel the need to let everyone know how smart they are. The response from the receivers of that message is pretty universal -- we tune out and disregard.
Barney's article also reiterates something I picked up at a course that I attended at Santa Clara University a few years back called Information Technology Leadership Program. Pete DeLisi, the instructor, made this same point: An IT person needs to understand what the business purpose of the organization is in order to predict what will be asked next. My boss likes to call it the "build it and they will come" method. Of course, the phrase has been borrowed from the "Field of Dreams" movie, but it's an accurate description of the process. We often work on new systems that we can see are needed -- but the business staff doesn't see it yet. So we build the systems and look for some low-hanging fruit to start the operational process on. Then we look for other things, which are perhaps a little more difficult to continue to weave into the business process. At some point a business visionary in the organization sees the connection and adoption comes, hopefully followed by funding to further grow the fledgling system out. This has proven itself out more than once. This also falls loosely into the "Be Strategic" part of Barney's column.
I appreciate Barney's articles whenever I run across them. His approach seems so real world and humble. This is a refreshing attitude in the industry.
Art Robison
Oroville, Calif.
Diskeeper Data Performance Technology vs. Fuzzy Logic
Because the February 2011 product review of Diskeeper 2010 attempted to inappropriately compare it to a manual defragmenter, Redmond magazine readers were misled. This was rather "fuzzy logic." You should know the facts.
Diskeeper data performance technology is the market and technology performance leader and has been for more than a quarter century. Over 95 percent of all defrag products sold through distribution are Diskeeper. It's on-site at more than 90 percent of all Fortune 1000 companies and 40-plus million licenses have been sold to date. Diskeeper solves performance problems that would devastate IT sites if left unhandled. It's one of the most tested products in real-world datacenters and endorsed by the most results-driven IT executives and margin- watching CFOs in existence.
Diskeeper is relied upon by many of the corporations and government institutions that this nation depends upon. Diskeeper gets results.
Diskeeper is a fully automatic performance solution that brings systems to their peak speed and efficiency and keeps them there while at the same time lowering the cost of operations. Diskeeper contains the most advanced defragmentation engines ever built, but it is more than a defragmenter. It prevents up to 85 percent of all fragmentation. It runs with complete invisibility in the background. No resource conflicts ever. It comes packed with the ability to authoritatively optimize performance on SANs, thin-provisioned disks, multiterabyte enterprise server volumes and the thousands of workstations and laptops used daily in the workplace. Diskeeper is easy to install and administer globally and provides customized network-wide performance and reliability reports that give the IT manager a deep insight into the health of his systems.
Any "thinking" that a defragmenter doesn't have to evolve is false. Our newly released Diskeeper 2011 is a revolutionary turn of events for any IT manager interested in true efficiency.
NEW Diskeeper 2011 Features Overview
IntelliWrite technology - Dramatically improves system performance in a way never before possible -- fragmentation prevention. Saves I/Os that would otherwise be spent writing files in pieces and scattering them around the disk.
InvisiTasking technology - Intelligently uses inactive system resources, even in I/O active environments, for true background processing with zero resource conflicts.
Instant Defrag technology - For the first time ever, no newly fragmented files can slow performance, because Instant Defrag immediately defrags those files before they can be read.
Efficient Mode - Offers the greatest net gain in system I/O resource savings ever available. Intelligently determines what fragmentation is a problem and immediately targets and eliminates it before it can affect system performance.
Free Space Consolidation - Free space fragmentation aids IntelliWrite and Instant Defrag in performing their tasks in the shortest possible time.
All system performance suffers from fragmentation but eliminating it without incurring additional cost requires a sophisticated approach that takes the entire operation of the system into account. Diskeeper has continually innovated and with the newly released Diskeeper 2011, the IT manager is armed with the magic of fully automated intelligence to ensure optimum performance.
Howard Butler
Director of Product Application
Diskeeper Corp.
About the Author
This page is compiled by the editors of Redmond magazine from your letters. Write to us at [email protected] and if your letter is printed in the magazine, you'll be entered into a drawing for a free Redmond T-shirt.