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"Technology leaders are disenchanted with the current state of their IT infrastructure. According to a study released Tuesday by global technology provider Insight Enterprises, tech leaders give their companies' current IT infrastructure a "B minus" grade. For its first Insight Enterprises Intelligent Technology index, Insight Enterprises used Market Intel Group to conduct an online survey of a random sample of 403 IT professionals with decision-making responsibilities between Nov. 30, 2015 and Dec. 8, 2015. How to use Windows 10 backup and recovery features Sooner or later, you're going to experience a hard drive failure, usually when you least expect it. READ NOW The study found that 55 percent of respondents felt the current technology in place at their business was a hindrance to incorporating or adopting new technologies, even as 65 percent of respondents were worried about disruption from technology innovation. While 65 percent of tech leaders overall were worried about the prospect of disruption, tech-decision makers at larger companies are especially feeling the pressure: The study found that 74 percent of tech influencers at large companies and 75 percent of tech influencers at medium-sized companies were concerned about disruption. "

"Uber, the car-sharing service, has become ubiquitous. It's now a multi-billion-dollar global business. It's even become a noun of sorts - uberization - which people use to describe a disruptive change to a staid industry ripe for innovation (though, to be sure, the popularization of the word "disruptive" means that it is often used in ways that the concept's author, Clay Christensen, didn't intend). But I would argue that the real reason Uber is disruptive is because it is reshaping how we can think about organizing people, not cars. Uber has shown how you can actually empower many thousands of people to self-organize to tackle a task (shuffling people to their destination in this case) without the preplanning that is the norm in traditional enterprises. Put another way, Uber's business model extends a very complex supply chain beyond the boundaries of a corporation in a way that creates real results without any planning in advance. That is a remarkable example of how technology will reshape how we organize to get work done at scale in the future. For context, I worked at Delta Air Lines for many years before I joined Red Hat, the open source software provider where I am now CEO. When I was at Delta, we spent enormous resources in terms of time and money on planning. Airline operations are a huge optimization challenge. There are hundreds of planes, thousands of pilots, flight attendants, mechanics, and ground crews that must be properly deployed for the system to work efficiently. We needed to process reams of data using expensive and sophisticated software and computers to predict demand, know the capabilities of each aircraft type, and to understand each work group's constraints. We also had an army of PhD-caliber people whose full-time jobs involved figuring out this puzzle in a way that we could still make money. Uber's value chain has a similar optimization challenge - it needs to deal with variable demand, thousands of drivers,

"Few academic management theories have had as much influence in the business world as Clayton M. Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation. But how well does the theory describe what actually happens in business?"

"It says something about the state of collaboration tech that the disruptors of a few years ago are at danger of being disrupted.  For example, take Google Hangouts. A novel development when it was released by Google in 2013, Hangouts can be used to message a friend or co-worker or up to one hundred people for a group chat. But now it could conceivably be displaced by San Francisco-based Slack Technologies, a workspace collaboration tool that has quickly grown in popularity as well as third-party features - and is now adding video and voice to the menu. So could Skype Technologies, for that matter, which Microsoft acquired in May 2011 for $8.5 billion. Indeed, Google Hangouts was referred to as a Skype-killer when it was introduced some two years later. Spot the Pattern? New York City-based BetterCloud did and it discusses this trend in its unbelievably well-timed report, "Real-time Messaging Research and Comparison Real-Time Messaging: Data Unearths Surprising Findings on Usage, Distraction, and Organizational Impact." However, the report's finding take on a surprising twist. The disruptors-get-disrupted story line does not pan out. Instead it finds that, as of right now, there is enough room for multiple messaging apps in the enterprise and indeed, we can see with our own eyes that Google Hangouts didn't kill Skype.  More than likely, Slack is not going to turn out to be a Hangouts assassin. More than half, or 57 percent, of respondents told BetterCloud that their organizations use two more real-time messaging apps with little conflict."

"he Enterprise File Synchronization and Sharing (EFSS) marketplace is ripe for disruption, but probably not via a huge technological breakthrough of some sort. EFSS options are maturing quickly and it's becoming quite commoditized. Consider that, according to Gartner, there are more than 140 vendors in the space - and that's too many. Sixteen of them meet the criteria for Gartner's Magic Quadrant (MQ) for EFSS. That's probably more than the market needs, but it's likely to be a problem that solves itself. Industry Consolidation Monica Basso, Charles Smulders and Jeffrey Mann, who researched and wrote the Gartner report, expect less than 10 percent of today's stand-alone EFSS offerings will exist by 2018. To be frank, not every vendor in the MQ wants to be classified as an EFSS player. Alastair Mitchell of Huddle has told me that he thinks of EFSS as an "albatross" and doesn't want his company to be known for "shuffling files back and forth." More on that in our next article. Gartner defines EFSS as a "range of on-premises or cloud-based capabilities that enables individuals to synchronize and share documents, photos, videos and files across mobile devices, such as smartphones, tablets and PCs." The analysts noted that "sharing" can take place between coworkers, suppliers, customers and others, mobile devices and as content exchange between apps. "Security and collaboration support are critical aspects for enterprises to adopt EFSS," they wrote. The Gartner analysts also wrote that beyond standard EFSS functionalities, the vendors they selected might offer additional features around mobility, security, administration and management, back-end server integration via connectors to corporate servers (for example, SharePoint) and cloud services, content manipulation, collaboration and more. Software EFSS products may or may not have one main repository. Some products integrate with existing third-party repositories that are deploy

"Dropbox made a number of headline-grabbing moves over the past few weeks, but Storm Ventures partner Anshu Sharma's more concerned than impressed. He sees a company that's failing to figure out what customers truly need - falling for what he calls the "Stack Fallacy," a term he coined to describe how successful companies in one area often overvalue what they know and misjudge what they need to build next. "Companies fail when they take the 'what' for granted," Sharma told Business Insider, referring to companies that falsely believe that they already know "what" customers want. "

By Mitch DeFelice Recent announcements from Google and Microsoft regarding machine-learning capabilities will provide the ability to transform corporate Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system from a simple unstructured data repository into an oracle of corporate data. In their book Smart Customer Stupid Companies…Why Only Intelligent Companies Will Thrive, and How to Be One of Them - the authors Michael Hinshaw and Bruce Kasanoff articulate how customers are becoming "smarter" with technology advancements.  The book presents a sound case that companies that do not evolve with their customers will become irrelevant. There have been two recent announcements that have occurred (November 9th, 2015 and November 12th, 2015 respectively) that have the potential to turn the metaphorical phase "Stupid Companies" to mean literally that.

"There's a new coalition in D.C., and big players like Apple, DuPont, Ford, GE, IBM, Microsoft, and Pfizer have all signed up. Unfortunately, launched on the day the Senate was supposed to take up the latest effort to reform the patent system, the coalition's sole purpose appears to be an effort to derail the important strides we've made toward fixing the patent troll problem via the proposed Innovation Act legislation. So what is it about the Innovation Act (and other legislative proposals being discussed in the Senate) that this coalition thinks will harm both their businesses and ability to build innovative products? These companies were all startups themselves once, and protecting startups that cannot afford to protect themselves from patent trolls is at the heart of the Innovation Act. The startups being targeted by patent trolls have less than $10 million in revenues. They are in no position to hire a patent lawyer to understand the scope of the threat they face - let alone pay the millions of dollars it would cost to take case to court. Even worse, startups are too often short on talent, so they do not have the luxury of using their current employees to read and understand vague patents with "fuzzy boundaries". Today's trolls send out scores of demand letters that make vague assertions of patent infringement while requesting "licensing fees" of $100,000 or more. The cost of trolling, on the other hand, is minimal. Trolls also typically render themselves litigation-proof by creating shell companies with no assets, should they fall into legal trouble from a wrongful suit. We need real reform that will stem the tide of the troll epidemic, while maintaining protection for patent holders to enforce their legal rights. This is precisely what the current proposals would do."