Dexter Siglin

Mar. 19,2020 | Insider, news, Procurement, Maintenance and Support, Market Alerts, Operations, Negotiation, Hardware, Infrastructure

Unlike consumers who have been panic-buying bathroom paper products in bulk over the last few weeks, IT executives have prepared for security threats and natural disasters for many years and have deployed highly resilient solutions with varying degrees of business continuity. Clients have spent millions for things like network redundancy, contact center contingency planning, remote workforce support, and business application and underlying compute and storage infrastructure availability. The list could go on. In fact, there is a whole industry set up to help IT leaders face this business continuity challenge. What many of those plans fell ...

Dave Young

Feb. 27,2020 | Security, Hacking, Managed Services, Outsourcing, Infrastructure

As technology marches ever forward, the threats to Enterprise Security have seemingly multiplied exponentially. Our ability as organizations to stay ahead of the risks that technological advancements have brought to the forefront are challenged daily. Literally. They are challenged everyday by threats from: Foreign governments trying to access data and networks Cloud security as more and more corporate data is stored outside proprietary networks Shadow IT Ransomware Phishing attacks on unaware employees Internal bad actors (i.e. employees who wish to do harm) Malware installed on endpoints surreptitiously by external bad actors There are ...

Steven Zolman

Feb. 18,2020 | IBM

Leave it to IBM to bring in fresh new blood. After nearly 40 years at IBM. Ginni Rometty steps down and Arvind steps forward; someone with only 30 years in at IBM, so we can expect a radical departure from the past, right? Jokes!! Of course, we are jesting, but maybe (just maybe) this guy is different. Let’s see. IBM’s new CEO (who currently heads up IBM’s Cloud and Cognitive Division), is credited with being the primary architect of IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat. Certainly, he will be measured by how well IBM becomes more like Red Hat, rather than Red Hat becoming at all like IBM. If Arvind is to be successful, IBM will need to become the de ...

Steven Zolman

Feb. 18,2020 | IBM

Virginia “Ginni” Rometty has agreed to step down at IBM, and it’s without a doubt the best thing she has done for the company in her 8+ year tenure as its CEO. The news sent the markets reeling and IBM stock soaring; up 5%. The market clearly agrees that this is a long overdue and much needed move. Ginni plans to step down as CEO in early April and retire officially by the end of the year with nearly 40 years of experience at IBM. NET(net) has been somewhat critical (but fair) of Ginni over the years. Shortly after she was named CEO, we documented our Top 10 Reasons Why Ginni Rometty Will Fail as IBM’s New CEO, and fail she did. The ...

Matt Ryan

Jan. 30,2020 | Software, Oracle, Audit, Cloud

As 2019 drew to a close, many of you may have missed a significant development that came out of the U.S. District Court of Northern California. On December 17th, the lawsuit brought by the Sunrise Firefighter’s Pension Fund against Oracle Corporation for misleading investors on their cloud business – was dismissed. They have until February 2020 to make some changes and refile the case, but what the real take-away from this case is that we can expect ‘business as usual’ from Oracle on the audit front. To get a real sense of just how egregious and critical the audit practice was (and is) to Oracle’s revenue machine, you need only read some of ...

Steven Zolman

Jan. 30,2020 | Cloud, Hardware, Infrastructure, Amazon, AWS

Do you have AWS Zombies lurking in your environment? If you are an AWS customer, probably you do. AWS Zombies are likely roaming your cloud instances gaining power, destroying all they touch, and if you don’t kill them off soon, they may take over your bills altogether. What are AWS Zombies? AWS Zombies are described as unused (and often hidden) assets that keep contributing to the ongoing costs of your AWS Cloud without producing any value. What are the four most common types of AWS Zombies? 1: Unattached EBS Volumes Clients should seek out and kill AWS Zombies like unattached EBS Volumes: When you provision an Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) ...

Steven Zolman

Jan. 30,2020 | Software, Oracle, Negotiation, Cloud

Clients are well advised to include specific language governing Oracle audits. Most important is the ability to purchase any compliance licenses as a result of an audit action at the contractual price hold discounts (#12 on our Oracle's Most Egregious list), and in the event that the price hold expires, at a mutually agreeable discount at the prevailing discounts available in the market for similar deals not to be unreasonably withheld. The current contract language in the standard Oracle agreement requires clients to purchase compliance licenses at list price. In the case of a 75% price hold discount, this would mean you are acquiring the ...

Dave Young

Nov. 25,2019 | Software, SaaS, Cloud, Infrastructure

In Part I we discussed consideration of a multicloud strategy. Pricing and product transparency were the themes for part II. In part III we address the last in this series: Application Portability. To see all three in our Multicloud eBook, please visit here. The enterprise’s application processing workloads must be compatible to portability between Cloud providers, including technology stacks that are common across all Cloud provider platforms, such as the use of application microservices and open stack services such as containers and Kubernetes. It is also important to consider how you'll integrate data and applications residing in ...

Steven Zolman

Nov. 25,2019 | Software, SaaS, Oracle

What is Auto-Install? Auto-Install is an executable file in the Oracle software kit that activates when a customer installs certain software and automatically loads various options that may or may not be included in the purchase price of the acquired software. Why is it Important? It’s important because generally the people who install the Oracle software are not contextually aware of all the intricacies of software licensing, nor perhaps are they even aware of the particulars of the commercial arrangement between your company and Oracle. They are, however, generally fans of the Oracle technology, and want all the added features, so when ...

Tjeerd Edelman

Nov. 25,2019

You may know the parable “The Blind Men and the Elephant,” and the moral behind it: It is a story of a group of blind men, who have never come across an elephant before and who learn and conceptualize what the elephant is like by touching it. Each blind man feels a different part of the elephant's body, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then describe the elephant based on their limited experience and their descriptions of the elephant are different from each other. In some versions, they come to suspect that the other person is dishonest, and they come to blows. The moral of the parable is that humans tend to claim ...