Category Archives: Application ILM

Stop Hoarding Data – Retire Your Old, Redundant Applications!

Claudia Chandra

Just like your house needs yearly spring cleaning and you need to regularly throw out old junk, your application portfolio needs periodic review and rationalization to identify legacy, redundant applications that can be decommissioned to reduce bloat and save costs. If you have a hard time letting go of old stuff, it’s probably even harder for your application users to let go of access to their data. However, retiring applications doesn’t have to mean that you also lose the data within them. If the data within those applications are still needed for periodic reporting or for regulatory compliance, then there are still ways to retain the data without maintaining the application.  Read More »

Lean Architecture

John Schmidt

Lean management practices have been applied in recent years to virtually all business functions and processes, including of course Lean Integration.  IT architecture is no exception. But what exactly does a Lean Architecture look like and how could you measure its “leanness”?  Since there is no generally accepted definition lean architecture, and since I won’t bore you with mine, it might be easier to describe what a non-lean architecture looks like. Or to ask it differently, what are some non-lean approaches to architecture? Read More »

ANNOUNCING! The 2012 Data Virtualization Architect-to-Architect & Business Value Program

Ash Parikh

Today, agility and timely visibility are critical to the business. No wonder CIO.com, states that business intelligence (BI) will be the top technology priority for CIOs in 2012. However, is your data architecture agile enough to handle these exacting demands?

In his blog Top 10 Business Intelligence Predictions For 2012, Boris Evelson of Forrester Research, Inc., states that traditional BI approaches often fall short for the two following reasons (among many others):

  • BI hasn’t fully empowered information workers, who still largely depend on IT
  • BI platforms, tools and applications aren’t agile enough Read More »

How Do You Handle the Recent Storage Shortage?

Informatica

Gartner hosted a webinar on January 10, 2012: Gartner Worldwide IT Spending Forecast. One of the topics covered was industry IT spend for 2012.

In covering that topic they made a point of saying that due to severe flooding in Thailand, they expect storage to become in short supply (as much as a 29% global shortfall) through the end of 2012. It is expected that the price of storage/GB will increase as a result and supplies will fall short of demand. They recommended finding alternatives to purchasing storage to keep costs down. Read More »

What it Takes to Be a Leader in Data Virtualization!

Ash Parikh

If you haven’t already, I think you should read The Forrester Wave™: Data Virtualization, Q1 2012. For several reasons – one, to truly understand the space, and two, to understand the critical capabilities required to be a solution that solves real data integration problems.

At the very outset, let’s clearly define Data Virtualization. Simply put, Data Virtualization is foundational to Data Integration. It enables fast and direct access to the critical data and reports that the business needs and trusts. It is not to be confused with simple, traditional Data Federation. Instead, think of it as a superset which must complement existing data architectures to support BI agility, MDM and SOA. Read More »