Judith's Balancing Act
IBM’s Big Data Strategy: the sum of the parts
In researching our new book, Big Data for Dummies, it became clear that Big Data is not simply about a specific tool or technique for Big Data analytics. You would never know this by examining the hype around this emerging market. Yes, Hadoop is important but it not the entire big data ecosystem. Big Data is not one tools
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Dell’s Next Move: Turning Software into Gold
Dell is a company in transition. As we have seen with many companies that have a hardware legacy, Dell is transforming itself into what it calls “an end-to-end solutions and services company that services mid-sized enterprises”. Software will clearly be the key to this executing on this strategy. This is not a transition that can be undertaken lightly. It is
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April 15, 2013 Boston
I know you think that this will be an analysis of Big Data or Cloud or something else. But I wanted to pause for a moment and provide my thoughts about the bombing at the Boston Marathon. A poem: Normal Were we normal yesterday before we heard about the bomb? Will we ever be normal again? Were we ever
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Revolutionizing the Traditional Data Center to Support Systems of Engagement
Many organizations are looking at cloud computing as an extension to their traditional data center. The private cloud is often envisioned as a technique to provide a segregated set of services that can be used for such requirements as supporting peak loads, creating new applications, or more easily deploying services on demand. But as with many technology trends, there are
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Can Meg Whitman Save HP?
This article was first published in Bloomberg BusinessWeeks’s online site. It was published several days before the October 3rd HP financial analyst meeting. On Oct. 3, Meg Whitman, Hewlett-Packard’s (HPQ) current and fourth chief executive in the past seven years, will meet with Wall Street analysts. Investors, customers, and employees better hope Whitman starts channeling Lou Gerstner, the former IBM
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Back to the Future: Getting back to integrated systems
Back when computers were a shiny new concept, the hardware and software were tightly linked together. This tight coupling was mandatory because of the costs and technical immaturity of computing. The most powerful computers in the 1970s had less computing power than a smartphone has today. Over time as systems became more powerful and less expensive vendors began decoupling
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What is the big deal about big data?
I have begun writing a weekly blog for Bloomberg BusinessWeek. I am pleased to be able to republish my discussions on my blog site. In this blog I discuss the value of big data and its implications for the business. Your comments on this blog are welcomed. The ability to analyze mountains of data is important, but managers need
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Is Facebook Responsible… for Security?
A few weeks ago I wrote a guest blog on Harvard Business Review’s Online site. The blog which is linked to below basically explains what happened to me when my Facebook account was hacked. One day after this article appeared I received the following message from “Barry” at Facebook: After reviewing this report, we determined that the profile you are
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Predicting 2012: What’s old is new again – or is it?
Maybe I have been around the technology market too long but it appears to me that there is nothing new under the sun. The foundational technologies that are the rage today all have their roots in technology that has been around for decades. That is actually a good thing. Simply put, a unique technology concept often will not be commercially
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What does it mean to transform the customer experience?
When I started working on my latest book, Smart or Lucky? How Technology Leaders Turn Chance into Success, I thought a lot about what makes one company sustain itself over decades while other companies fade away. What does innovation really mean and how does it happen? Innovation is not an easy achievement. Many companies that find themselves in trouble
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Judith Hurwitz is an author, speaker and business technology consultant with decades of experience. 
