For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Deliver Cloud Benefits Inside Your Walls

Economic And Self-Service Gains Are Within Reach

by James Staten, April 13, 2009

While the excitement about cloud computing centers on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and other public infrastructure-as-a-service products, many enterprise infrastructure and operations professionals are taking this concept in-house and building their . . .

For Technology Product Management & Marketing Professionals

There Are Three IT Architectures, Not One

Cloud IT Joins Organic IT As A Key IT Architecture For Marketers

by Frank E. Gillett, December 24, 2007

Forrester launched Organic IT as the ideal IT architecture in 2002. Server virtualization is driving recognition of this vision of a highly shared, automated, and virtualized infrastructure. But it has become apparent that two other IT architectures will . . .

Forrester Big Ideas

Setting Long-Term Directions For Technology Leaders

by Christopher Mines, May 30, 2006

Forrester Big Ideas bring clarity and shape to future markets, business practices, and business models that are forged in the cauldron of technology change. Big Ideas are bold pictures of new states of business, describing emerging demand trends, predicting . . .

Shared Services Need Metering: IBM Buys CIMS

Virtualization And Organic IT Kick Off A Drive To Link IT Usage And Costs

by Frank E. Gillett, March 28, 2006

IBM bought CIMS Lab, a privately held California software company with more than 170 paying customers, to improve its capabilities in IT cost accounting and financial management. Forrester believes that IBM's move is important because firms need this . . .

Server Virtualization Goes Mainstream

Virtual Servers Will Motivate Firms To Embrace Organic IT

by Frank E. Gillett, Galen Schreck, February 22, 2006

Server virtualization has quickly surpassed other forms of infrastructure virtualization, including techniques for virtualizing storage and networks. Globally, 75% of 1,221 enterprises surveyed by Forrester say they are aware of server virtualization . . .

Digital Business Networks

A Framework For Firms Competing As Networks Of Specialists

by Bobby Cameron, January 20, 2006

Firms increasingly operate and compete as part of networks of functions and companies —Forrester calls these Digital Business Networks (DBNs). Organizations participating in DBNs provide one or more of three specialist services: brokerage for orchestration, . . .

Organic IT In Japan

Conservative Users And Emerging Vendors

by Richard Fichera, November 21, 2005

A recent trip to Japan uncovered a maturing market for Organic IT technology. As consumers of Organic IT technology and services, large Asian enterprises have been more conservative about technology adoption than their North American or European peers, . . .

For Application Development & Program Management Professionals

Digital Business Architecture: IT Foundation For Business Flexibility

An IT Architect's Introduction To Forrester's Digital Business Architecture

by Randy Heffner, November 7, 2005

Forrester's Digital Business Architecture lets diverse IT domains work together as one, enabling IT to deliver unified solutions to business problems that cross IT domains. This either: 1) drives down a firm's total spending on IT, or 2) lets IT deliver . . .

Who Is Using Organic IT Technologies?

North America Enterprises Generally Lead European Enterprises

by Michael Speyer, Frank E. Gillett, October 11, 2005

Usage of Organic IT technologies in North American and European companies is firmly in the early-adopter stage. The difference in usage rates between the two regions is small, except for in grid computing, where European firms are nearly twice as likely . . .

Organic IT Challenges IT Organizational Practices

New Infrastructure Technologies Require New IT Role And Process Definitions

by Frank E. Gillett, Alex Cullen, August 18, 2005

Organic IT technologies deliver IT infrastructure capabilities for improving resource efficiency and flexibility, which drives improved IT responsiveness and cost savings. But adopting these technologies presents challenges — a mismatch between existing . . .

Cisco Gets Some Topspin For Organic IT

The Acquisition Makes Cisco A Player For Grid And Organic IT Technologies

by Frank E. Gillett, Richard Fichera, April 29, 2005

Cisco Systems announced that it will acquire Topspin Communications, a seller of InfiniBand-based server fabric switches, for about $250 million. Though it may appear that Cisco is simply buying into InfiniBand, Forrester believes that the firm aims to . . .

IBM's Organic SAP Initiative

IBM's Answer To Fujitsu FlexFrame Makes Its Appearance

by Richard Fichera, February 8, 2005

With the introduction of Fujitsu FlexFrame offering for SAP, Forrester predicted that competing vendors would quickly follow suit.1 In announcing IBM Dynamic Infrastructure for mySAP Business Suite, IBM joins Fujitsu in offering a set of infrastructure . . .

Decoding Grid Technology

How To Understand Grid In Relation To Organic IT And Utility Computing

by Frank E. Gillett, January 20, 2005

Hype about grid technology has grown, with new standards bodies and informational Web sites joining grid pioneers from the late 1990s. Grid has many meanings and claimed benefits, so how are users supposed to figure out what it means for them? Forrester . . .

Fujitsu FlexFrame — Organic IT For SAP

by Richard Fichera, November 2, 2004

The Fujitsu Group's FlexFrame is the first commercially available implementation of an infrastructure offering to support SAP's NetWeaver Adaptive Computing Infrastructure Initiative and offer the potential to reduce operating costs and improve availability . . .

For Application Development & Program Management Professionals

New Business Tools Fuel "Do-It-Yourself" IT For Business Users

by Henry Peyret, October 29, 2004

Capturing business users' knowledge to include that experience in a program has always been a concern in IT computing science. Business users' frustration continues today because of project delays and IT features that fail to align with business expectations . . .

Kick-Start Organic IT With Domain-Specific Automation

by Galen Schreck, Richard Fichera, September 30, 2004

Taking an Organic IT strategy from PowerPoints to production is not a simple task. Many firms are daunted by the sheer magnitude of building a solution that can encompass multiple application domains and remain flexible in the future. Firms with complicated . . .

Organic IT Case Study: Cavalier Virtualizes Servers

by Frank E. Gillett, September 16, 2004

Cavalier Life Insurance, a pseudonym for a company that wishes to remain anonymous, faced Windows server sprawl and complexity because of its typical one app, one server strategy. With Intel-based virtualization software, Cavalier has virtualized 70 servers . . .

Organic IT Network Infrastructure

How Virtualized Network Services Create More Automated Networks

by Galen Schreck, Frank E. Gillett, September 15, 2004

Though network bandwidth can be shared like a utility, networks are not provisioned or run like a utility. Mirroring the way firms assign one server per app, Internet infrastructure is often procured separately. What's more, thanks to hard-wired connections, . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Route Analytics Technologies

A Big Step Toward Automating Network Management

by Thomas Mendel, Ph.D., August 4, 2004

On average, the network causes 15% of all problems resulting in downtime at $1 billion-plus companies. However, only 2% are caused by actual networking hardware failures: The other 13% are due to different issues like human error, unmanaged changes, misconfigurations, . . .

IT Cost Cutting Is Still A High Priority

by Galen Schreck, Frank E. Gillett, June 25, 2004

Forrester surveyed 149 US firms about their IT priorities for this year and beyond. The majority still say that their top short-term priority is reducing the cost of IT. When asked about future plans for 2005, lowering business and IT labor costs takes . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

IP Address Management

A Market Still Waiting To Happen

by Thomas Mendel, Ph.D., June 21, 2004

With 55% of $1 billion-plus companies not using any automated IP address management systems, the market should be growing at a healthy pace. This has not happened so far, and Forrester does not expect strong growth for the next year. The key reasons for . . .

The Big Strategic Impact Of Organic Business And Service-Oriented Architecture

by Randy Heffner, June 18, 2004

Forrester's Organic Business vision begins with using Web services standards to embed your enterprise into your customers' and suppliers' business processes, leading to loyal customers, efficient suppliers, and a lean enterprise. Going beyond Web services . . .

Automating Server Management

An Organic IT Case Study: Implementing Utility-Style Automation

by Frank E. Gillett, May 18, 2004

At a multibillion dollar Fortune 100 products division, which we'll call Specialty Machines (SpecM), it once took two weeks of work by three people to patch 400 servers — and the configurations were inconsistent. Fed up, SpecM implemented a server automation . . .

Organic IT 2004: Cut IT Costs, Speed Up Business

The Architecture Behind Grid, Utility, On Demand, And Adaptive Technologies

by Frank E. Gillett, May 18, 2004

Organic IT, Forrester's vision for next-generation data center architecture, offers firms massive IT cost savings and business agility — if they can get past the confusion of ideas and offerings. IT executives must deploy technology for virtualization, . . .

CNET Founder Halsey Minor Drives Toward A Business Services Internet

by Frank E. Gillett, March 23, 2004

Halsey Minor is best known for founding technology news company CNET Networks — but he's now leading a B2B integration company, Grand Central Communications. Halsey's vision of a business services network matches Forrester's belief that a business services . . .