Midsize Insider is a valuable repository of expert content tailored for small-to-midsized business owners and IT decision makers. Expert insights and perspectives in the Midsize Insider are gleaned from actionable business experiences and will assist readers in creating efficiencies, cutting costs and delivering results.
A leading vendor of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software has chosen the IBM SmartCloud platform as launch vehicle for the latest version of its ERP toolkit. The ability to deploy into a full range of public, private, and hybrid cloud ...
For the community of IT professionals at midsize firms, both analytics and business intelligence (BI) are familiar terms that convey a straightforward meaning. Analytics is the art and science of finding patterns in data. As such it has been a ...
Once upon a time, IT departments had only a couple of operating endpoints to handle. IT professionals fed input into a "giant electronic brain" from a card reader. They ran a process or batch of processes, and got reams of ...
A new study of advertising on Facebook suggests that the impact of Web advertising is more subtle than online advertisers have assumed. It isn't all clicking on ads. Just seeing the ads can influence users - an influence that can ...
The customer is an elusive creature, difficult to entice, and all too ready to bolt into a nearby thicket - or competitor's front door. Such trickiness is why attracting and holding customers has always been a primary concern, especially for ...
At least according to one analyst, there are signs that the iPhone 5 and its tablet cousin, the iPad, are beginning to lose their consumer cachet. For the IT community at midsize firms this trend - if it is real, ...
Chess was mastered many years ago. Jeopardy! was overcome last year. Now in search of new challenges, the team behind IBM's Watson has taken on a task that most people would hardly associate with artificial intelligence: Whipping up a good-tasting ...
Virtualization is often associated with cloud computing, and indeed it is largely virtualization that made the cloud a practical business model. But for many midsize businesses, virtualization is not just servers in the sky.Virtualization in the on-premises back room can ...
In the cloud computing era, the operating environments that IT workers at midsize firms must deal with are far more complex than they once were. At one time, no one even used terms such as "operating environment." There were simply ...
The midsize business world operates in a sea of data. Much of it - the sort that most people think of when they hear the term "data" - is quantitative. It is numerical, or at least it can easily be ...
Hybrid clouds offer great operating flexibility and economy, which is why IT managers at many midsize firms are looking at hybrid options. But the hybrid environment also poses a variety of cloud security challenges.Data and applications that once resided in ...
Twitter advertising just got easier with the microblogging network's release of an application programming interface (API) tailored to support advertising initiatives. Release of the advertising API marks a major step forward in Twitter's efforts to make itself attractive to marketers.For ...
In the emerging era of cyberwar and highly sophisticated cyber-security threats, ensuring the security of computer systems is becoming more critical than ever. The IT community at midsize firms must not imagine that its systems are even slightly exempt from ...
In 2012, without much fanfare, IBM received more than six thousand US patents, the largest number granted to any applicant. This total was five percent higher than for last year's winner - which was also IBM. This year also marked ...
A study of last year's post-Thanksgiving "Black Friday" shopping spree suggests that social media as a force in commerce is already plunging, off sharply from 2011. At the same time, a study also suggests that social commerce is gaining a ...
A lot of ingredients go into keeping restaurant kitchens moving smoothly to serve their customers. One of those ingredients is data - not just the pattern of customer orders, but the availability of fresh ingredients and a host of other ...
The latest beta version of the Chrome for Android browser comes with some interesting experimental features. The experimental toolkits allow users to explore capabilities ranging from CSS graphics options to WebGL.The new beta also comes with a robust warning message ...
Cloud computing has become a rich and varied environment, far more complex than the singular term "the cloud" might suggest. For example, alongside the public cloud there are now private and hybrid clouds. Furthermore, cloud computing as a whole can ...
Consumer behavior and marketing strategy are, in principle, intimately related concepts. Marketing strategy is all about reaching out to consumers and doing so effectively, which means understanding how consumers think and act - that is to say, their behavior.This has ...
Big data is not just a buzzword. Big data is ... really, really big. It is estimated that 2.5 quintillion bytes--or 2.5 exabytes--of new data are generated every day. About 90 percent of the data now stored anywhere in the ...