Today over 70% of CIOs have a cloud-first stance. Over the past decade, we've seen growing acceptance among enterprise companies in running production and analytics workloads in public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS). This interest has fueled a whopping compound growth of 34.6% in IaaS spending between 2013 and 2016. In four short years, public cloud has gone from being a novelty to taking its place as a mainstream choice. New production and analytics workloads supplement earlier use…

Last week, I attended the CIO 100 Symposium in beautiful Colorado Springs and spoke at length with leaders from a wide range of industries and company sizes. Three themes emerged as hot topics:

The development of industry collaborative clouds (ICC's). This is the phenomenon where consumers of IT become suppliers, and groups of companies within an industry start their own collaborative initiatives. ICCs are driving new business models; in many cases, companies are forging multi-sided…

We've heard it now for years. We have to go to the cloud. It's all in the cloud. Companies are blindly getting on the bandwagon that cloud is necessary for everything. I've met with several executives that simply set goals like,"By 2020 we'll have 50% of our workloads in the cloud. We have a cloud-first approach."

"Why am I spending my time and money on this investment?"

I don't necessarily disagree with the cloud-first approach as a management philosophy to force stale IT organizations to…

Today’s opening of an AWS region on December 8, 2016, and the recent investments such as in-country delivery of Microsoft’s Azure, could kick start the innovation engine in Canada. For too long, Canada has scored poorly and lacked much of the influence and technology resources of other countries. Recent moves by the federal government to make Canada a more favourable immigration destination; allowing more fluid deployment of out-of-country workers; the emergence of hubs such as the Waterloo…

It's been interesting watching customer uptake of SaaS applications, and in particular the interest from SBM customers. In IDC's Fall CloudView survey (n= 3462, 19 countries) IT buyers from firms with <500 employees stated they'd devote 23% of IT spend to SaaS, up 4% from the 2013 survey, and smaller firms (<250) were up even more - 6%, to 24%.   This is not a shocker to those of us who believe in future where startup employees get a tablet, 4G and a bunch of websites as their IT…

On September 23, 2014, IBM brought together the top IT services and outsourcing advisors in Canada. In a concerted effort to be more engaged and transpent about its strategy, IBM, led by its new North American GM, Brian Whitfield, reached out to this particular group that holds strong sway with how and where IT budgets flow. Third Party Advisors help in properly defining buyers' requirements, setting their expectations and guiding them through the transition to an outsourced environment.

IBM…

Less than ten years ago, technology scholars Frank Levy and Richard Murnane argued that driverless cars were likely not possible. The argument was simple. Computers could never reproduce the combination of reflexes, sensory inputs, selective attention, spatial reasoning, and coordination required to navigate traffic and park a vehicle. Google has proved them wrong. 

Along with players such as Amazon, Salesforce, NetSuite, and a slew of smaller firms, Google is also proving that traditional…

In keeping with springtime and a time for renewal, a number of major technology companies are rethinking their SMB strategies and planning game-changing moves. This is especially true for SAP, which has announced a number of tactical steps to support "profound" advances in the SMB market.

Like other Europe-based firms, SAP refers to the small and midsize business segment as "SME." While adhering to the basic definition of SBs as firms with <100 employees and MBs as firms with 100-999…