In IT, we’ve been fixing company problems large and small for decades and meeting the challenges of highly technical demands, whatever they may be. But now we have a major problem of our own. It’s a labor shortage that’s nothing short of a crisis. And it demands the same kind of innovative solutions we’re used to delivering every day in our jobs. …

An Interview With Lloyd Carney, CEO of Brocade

Enterprise Executive recently caught up with Brocade Communications (Brocade) CEO Lloyd Carney to discuss the company’s long history of providing networking technologies supporting both ESCON and FICON, its relationship with IBM and growth opportunities in the mainframe market…

The University of Florida (UF) sought to help students stay connected with university activities and news. With 50,000 students and staff using smartphones—and that number rising quickly—the Gainesville, FL, university realized it needed to develop an information-rich mobile Web application. An IBM System z mobile technology solution provided the foundation for its UF Mobile Web…

As companies continue to rely on the cloud to deliver their more business-critical systems, they must consider how much they can trust this new paradigm. For a cloud solution to be robust enough to host the most important systems, it must be built on top of a virtualization stack that can deliver the necessary service levels…

Trade secrets. Corporate brand. Financial information. Customer data. These are some of the most valuable assets to businesses and organizations around the world. …

Your competitors may already be using cloud services. If you believe the right business applications can make a difference, and if you consider how much easier it is now to start using powerful applications, you can easily understand how quickly one company can gain an advantage over another…

It’s time to think big—about Big Data, that is. Big Data is the idea of using statistical analysis of enormous quantities of data to draw conclusions that lead to positive actions. Given the publicity Big Data receives these days, you need to address how and whether to deal with it. Here we discuss the information you need to consider regarding the risks, your situation and possible courses of action…

Enterprises that trusted in the mainframe myths and moved their corporate databases to distributed platforms are spending 100 percent more than necessary on database servers, creating data integrity issues and increasing the data risk exposure by constraining the ever-shrinking backup window. By moving databases from shared-nothing distributed data servers to the shared storage environment of IBM zEnterprise systems and putting the applications on Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL) processors and an IBM zEnterprise BladeCenter Extension (zBX), IT executives can reduce their ecosystem costs by more than 50 percent per year…

The mainframe has long been a stable, reliable, consistent platform for high-value, critical transactions such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), online order-taking and financial transaction processing. Mainframes today continue to touch most transactions worldwide. According to Independent Assessment, an industry authority on mainframe computing, 72 percent of the world’s financial transactions are processed on mainframes…

The leading issue in just about every IT shop I visit continues to be cost-containment. This issue sits on the enterprise IT decision-maker’s annoyance scale somewhere between “pebble in the shoe” and “royal pain in the neck.” Though it hurts most during budget-setting season, it nags at you all year long. …