Each year we enter into uncertain territory because of existing and previously untested market conditions, however predicting the future, or at least having an understanding of what could happen, is largely predicated on understanding the past and observing the present.
As the saying goes, history repeats itself. In 2009, expect to see some stunning developments that are reminiscent of the past as well as out of the box thinking by vendors to continue to thrive in new and different market conditions...
We started the year with the New England Patriots posting an undefeated regular season record of 16 – 0. It appeared to be conclusive; the Patriots would win the Super Bowl – not so fast – the wild card New York Giants made an unpredictable and disruptive move by narrowly defeating the favored Patriots. It was inevitable that the Patriots lose at some point in the season, it just happened to be the last and most important game.
In July, the greatest sporting event, the Tour de France departed with no defending champion for the second consecutive year! Team Astana, with two of the three podium finishers of the 2007 race appeared to have very good odds of gaining one of the top three spots again. Surprise! Team Astana was banned and Team CSC with Carlos Sastre and company rode to an unpredictable and disruptive victory. It was inevitable that the Tour de France could not escape controversy.
Disruption and unpredictability seem to be the prevailing themes for 2008. In a year when radical and unexpected occurrences were commonplace, should technology be any different? Let’s take a look at the big issues that may have shocked us, but in reality, were inevitable...
Theresa Lanowitz, Lisa Dronzek | Monday, 17 November 2008
Following the economic downturn of 2000 to 2003, the Fortune 500 companies that pursued short-term cost-cutting strategies such as outsourcing and rollbacks in quality assurance found themselves ill prepared for future opportunities. New research suggests that those enterprise organizations that continue to invest in critical IT areas such as software development, virtualization, and core lifecycle solutions will be better positioned for the next cycle of growth and expansion.
Theresa Lanowitz, Lisa Dronzek | Monday, 21 July 2008
Major transformations of the enterprise IT organizations are underway. For competitive and successful enterprises, IT is an integral part of the business and is treated as such. Factors such as globalization, time-to-market and convergence are the driving forces to bring IT organizations back from the fringe of existence.
Here we examine the trends, emerging technology needs, and processes that are facilitating this necessary and timely transformation.
Theresa Lanowitz, Lisa Dronzek | Thursday, 17 July 2008
The global lifecycle transformation is an interconnected ecosystem of people, processes and technology within an enterprise and across its partners, suppliers, providers and customers. In this paradigm, the enterprise IT organization becomes a strategic business partner focused on delivering value. The transformation shatters barriers, facilitates collaboration and takes the risk out of software development to produce predictable reliable results for an optimized business outcome.
Theresa Lanowitz, Lisa Dronzek | Monday, 16 June 2008
The launch of ReplayDIRECTOR is an example of the power of virtualization permeating the application lifecycle in multiple phases. ReplayDIRECTOR provides an innovative solution using game changing technology.
The publication of the VMware whitepaper “Microsoft Virtualization Licensing and Distribution Terms” is a seminal moment in the 21st century computing industry. With the publication of this whitepaper, VMware is no longer just an interesting technology player; they are a bona fide catalyst to challenge Microsoft’s entrenched franchise business of the operating system.
Applications and their associated management are becoming more difficult yet more business critical. As enterprises watch the rise of complex distributed applications and teams, it is clear a solution to assist managing a constantly changing world must emerge. Virtualization technology is rapidly being deployed to assist these complexity demands. Virtualized environments solve a variety of problems yet introduce others.
Outsourcing and specifically the trend to move tasks to offshore providers is evolving. At the end of the 20th century, the concept of using an offshore provider was primarily a cost issue. As the nuances, positives, and negatives of using offshore providers became visible the idea of team virtualization was the most popular reason for outsourcing. Now, as teams are truly virtualized across boundaries, both real and imaginary, outsourcing is about to enter a new phase. Offshore providers will more than likely take on more technical roles and responsibilities while their clients concentrate on the core business and deliver strategic value. Emerging nations where populations are increasing their technical skills are a haven for entrepreneurs and venture capital investments. In this edition of the Future Watch, we hypothesize on where technical skills will emerge and why standards will be driven to acceptance.
Today’s IT model is flawed – the organization and management structure has not evolved to meet the demands of the 21st century. The enterprise IT organization of the future must be more focused on the business and satisfying the customer rather than tactical projects and the most recent technology. By 2010, enterprise IT organizations will have finally figured out what the model should look like to take advantage of a global environment where collaboration is essential. In this vokeStream Future Watch, we identify some of the issues enterprise IT management and organizations must be aware of and address to satisfy their business customers. Moving the model from a decidedly silo based organization to one that is customer focused for the 21st century is the ultimate goal for enterprise IT organizations to achieve.
Theresa Lanowitz, Lisa Dronzek | Wednesday, 13 August 2008
The business analyst role is gaining visibility and momentum, and driving competitive differentiation in the lifecycle market. From April through July 2008, voke conducted an independent survey of unique individuals in the emerging requirements definition segment of the application lifecycle market. The Market Snapshot survey set out to identify the state of the business analyst market segment based on roles, processes, and market readiness of technology.
How Virtualization is Enabling Self-Service to Transform the Global Lifecycle
Banks have ATMs; grocery stores have self checkout; airlines have self check-in. All of these self-service approaches provide convenience for customers and deliver ROI for the companies that offer them. Self-service has appeared within the corporate environment as well. Many companies are offering self-service access to computing resources to their business constituents. This increases the ability to provide infrastructure and services more efficiently and use resources in more strategic ways to benefit the business.
Cutting edge IT services are now available through a self-service model thanks to virtualization. Virtualization lets companies pool IT resources and provide them as needed throughout the entire global lifecycle.
Join analyst Theresa Lanowitz, founder of voke Inc., for this informative session where you will learn about self-service IT and:
Key components to the global lifecycle transformation
Current issues hindering the implementation of the global lifecycle and how to overcome them
Best practices and innovative technologies available for the enterprise
Learn how virtualization is enabling self-service to transform the global lifecycle!
Theresa Lanowitz, Lisa Dronzek | Monday, 21 July 2008
The application lifecycle is an integral part of today’s business. Regardless of core competencies, all organizations are driven by software that is created and customized to deliver a competitive advantage. The application lifecycle is now a strategic part of business.
This document examines the evolution of the application lifecycle and the importance of the core vendors in providing a sound foundation upon which to continue to build and define the application lifecycle.
Webinar presentation slides from virtualization and application lifecycle expert analyst Theresa Lanowitz, of voke, inc. and John Michelsen, founder and Chief Scientist of iTKO LISA, exploring the current and future uses of Virtualization to assist development and QA processes.
Software Production Management is a critical component in the creation and delivery of quality software and is a key ingredient in the ever evolving application lifecycle. Highly optimized organizations are experiencing tremendous return on investment (ROI) by recognizing and treating Software Production Management as a critical component of the application lifecycle. In this Market Snapshot, we will examine the organization and how it benefits from Software Production Management, use models and the state of technology in the Software Production Management market.
Presentation slides from the joint Borland/VMware webcast with Theresa Lanowitz from voke talking about what it takes to test and deliver applications that hit their mark using virtualization. And why getting the most out of virtualization depends on how seamlessly it can be integrated with your software testing processes.
Presentation slides from SQC Software & Systems Quality Conferences in Düsseldorf, Germany.
This keynote presentation focuses on the changes every Quality Assurance organization is experiencing and how to manage the transition in becoming a model organization for the 21st century.
Theresa Lanowitz, Lisa Dronzek | Wednesday, 28 March 2007
Virtualization is poised to become the defining technology of the 21st century. Virtual lab automation, a new use for virtualization in the application development and quality assurance organizations has made inroads to the pre-deployment side of the application lifecycle equation. In this Market SnapshotTM, we will examine the organization and its metamorphosis as virtual lab automation becomes more pervasive. We will also define the value and benefits of Virtual lab automation.
Get first hand the latest industry study on the tangible benefits of adopting Virtual Lab Automation. Theresa Lanowitz, founder of Voke Inc. will elaborate on the findings from a recent field study.
Learn how your peers are:
Tackling infrastructure and process challenges associated with supporting the development and testing of complex applications and systems
Making the decision to adopt Virtual Lab Automation
Benefiting from the results of virtualizing and automating the test lab
Make no mistake, the application lifecycle market is real, in turmoil, and critical to the success of every enterprise - globally. Without the products and solutions being offered in the application lifecycle market, enterprise IT organizations are relegated to technology controlling their destiny. The practice of allowing technology to control the destiny of business is fraught with peril. True focus on the application lifecycle and its integrated roles, responsibilities, and technology will continue to evolve and support the business. The application lifecycle ecosystem catalogs and analyzes the software suppliers in the market. Use this document as a way to evaluate potential partners for your own application lifecycle ecosystem. This document is virtual and updates are triggered by market events. Suppliers to the ecosystem will be added on a regular basis. Version 1.5 continues to build out the Application Lifecycle Continuum with Empirix placed in the “Contender” position.
This analysis is provided as historical reference for Mercury. The analysis was conducted prior to the announcement of HP’s intent to acquire Mercury. Please see the voke First Impressions analysis of the acquisition announcement. The Mercury segment of the Application Lifecycle Ecosystem will be updated once the intended HP acquisition is completed.
In this requirements.net exclusive podcast, Theresa discusses a rather unconventional report (titled: Fortune 500 Spending Required for IT Cost Savings”) which looks at the economy and smart moves for IT.
In this report, the voke research team makes some very interesting reminders about the fall out of the dot-com bubble bursting, and the lesson’s from IT’s reaction in 2001 and 2002.
The voke research teams make some important recommendations which tie directly to Business Analyst empowerment and investments in requirements definition as a critical element to surviving the IT downtown.
The Podcast is 40 minutes of a fact-based, fresh dialog on efficient outsourcing, IT virtualization, lifecycle management, and the importance of the BA and requirements.
Virtualization is, like, everywhere. Oracle got in on the act this week by announcing its own platform at its OpenWorld conference. Meanwhile, IBM said it would spend $5 billion on Cognos to anchor its information-on-demand strategy. Plus, listen as voke principal analyst Theresa Lanowitz discusses some up-and-coming companies with SD Times editor-in-chief David Rubinstein on "Week in Review."
This week at VMWorld 2007 it was apparent that virtualization is moving up the stack and tool vendors proliferated. Listen to voke principal analyst Theresa Lanowitz on this edition of "Week in Review."
Dave Rubinstein chats with voke principal analyst Theresa Lanowitz about this week's Tech-Ed and next week's IBM Rational Conference on this edition of "Week in Review."
