Sponsor: IBM Corporation

CIOs and IT Executives are being asked to "do more with less". With a complex and poorly understood application portfolio at hand a large percentage of IT funds are consumed, it leaves these CIOs and IT Executives challenged to find the funds needed for creating real value in form of innovation and enabling new business opportunities. Organizations spend too much (up to 90%) of funds on maintaining and operating an expanding application portfolio.

Intelligent Transportation Systems projects in government are growing rapidly as demand increases and technology advances. Learn how to deliver successful systems and services to overcome critical transportation challenges.

The IBM Rational Intelligent Transportation Systems solution addresses the challenges with complex projects for the planning, development, deployment and lifecycle management of transportation software. Learn more by reviewing the ekit resources.

Requirements definition and management is recognized as a necessary step for the successful delivery of systems and software projects; the discipline is also required by standards, regulations and quality improvement initiatives like Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI).

Today's fast-moving world makes DevOps essential for any business aspiring to be agile and lean in order to respond rapidly to changing customer and marketplace demands. This book helps you understand DevOps and how your organization can gain real business benefits from it. You'll also discover how a holistic view of DevOps that encompasses the entire software delivery life cycle - from ideation and the conception of new business capabilities to implementation in production - can bring competitive advantage in a continuous delivery world.

Cloud computing represents an opportunity for enterprise and service provider datacenters to become more agile and flexible by using self-service infrastructure provisioning; automated, dynamic resource pooling and scaling; and consumption-based metering to improve accelerate cloud infrastructure configuration, provisioning, and life-cycle management. Integrated systems, such as the IBM PureFlex System, pre-integrate and optimize software stacks with compute, storage, network, and management software resources to enable optimal performance of mission-critical applications and workloads. Many IT organizations are using integrated systems as core platforms to enable private clouds and public cloud service delivery environments. IDC interviews show that organizations using IBM PureFlex System as the infrastructure platform for cloud realized over $640,000 in benefits related to improved infrastructure deployment, performance, and operational economics.

To keep up with the demands of mobile usage and social business you have to manage huge amounts of data. This means you need your IT to support rapid development of new applications, particularly mobile and social apps, to keep pace with the competition. You need to be able to analyze big data to uncover new insights, business models and revenue opportunities. You have to be able to act quickly so you can respond while findings are still relevant. Cloud computing is the delivery model that can support these imperatives. Over 10,000 clients rely on IBM technology to optimize their social, mobile, and big data workloads on cloud infrastructure. PureSystems solutions build on this cloud experience, integrating it into the system to improve efficiency and simplify deployment.

This paper shows how the new IBM systems with X6 technology were designed to take clients to a new frontier of x86 computing. These new X6 systems are ideal platforms for meeting business-critical demands with data base, business analytics, virtualization and ERP applications.

The paper discusses the rise of Big Data and the importance of analytics for rapidly extracting insights from this data for improved business decisions. It outlines key market requirements for Big Data servers, and explains how the new System x3650 M4 BD includes the right performance, storage capacity, availability, and energy efficiency to meet the demands of Big Data analytics. It concludes by describing additional benefits that IBM brings to the Big Data market, such as the Big Data Systems Center with its panel of SMEs and offered services, and IBM InfoSphere Big Insights software.

IBM PureApplication System: An expert integrated platform system Consolidate workloads, simplify infrastructure and deliver services rapidly using built-in expertise. The IBM PureApplication System is a platform system designed and tuned specifically for transactional web and database applications. This workload aware, flexible platform is designed to be easy to deploy, customize, safeguard and manage. Whether you operate in a traditional or private cloud environment, this IBM solution can provide you with superior IT economics. With the PureApplication System, you can provision your own patterns of software, middleware and virtual system resources. You can provision these patterns within an innovative framework that is shaped by IT best practices and industry standards - standards that have been culled from many years of IBM experience with clients and from a deep understanding of smarter computing. These IT best practices and standards are infused throughout the system.

A social business is an organization whose culture and systems encourage networks of people to create business value. Social businesses connect individuals, so they can rapidly share information, knowledge and ideas by having conversations and publishing informal content. They analyze social content from multiple channels and sources, in addition to structured data, to gain insights from both external and internal stakeholders. When those things happen, innovation and business execution rates increase, better decisions are made, and customers and employees are more engaged and satisfied. Social businesses enjoy lower operating costs, faster speed-to-market, improved customer and employee engagement, and increased profitability. Many organizations don't fully appreciate the magnitude of the value creation potential of social business.

People, machines, data, processes are more connected than ever before, in more ways, and at a pace not previously envisioned. Because of this, the means of user interaction are evolving rapidly, and the outcome is an explosion of information increasing at epic rates. Both the opportunity and the challenge for an organization is to execute a strategy to most effectively participate in, exploit and derive ongoing value from the expansive digital world. To evaluate and ultimately better facilitate this, many organizations are specifically defining a digital strategy as part of their overall general business strategy. Central to that digital strategy is the digital experience.

Big data promises valuable insights that are enticing organizations to invest in analytics and BI tools. Yet many overlook the need for a DBMS that can stand up to the strain big data places on the underlying infrastructure. This ePaper explores the DBMS characteristics of most importance in a big data setting.

In this era of big data, business and IT leaders across all industries are looking for ways to easily and cost-effectively unlock the value of enterprise data that resides in both transactional processing and data warehouse systems. They are trying to quickly implement new solutions to gain additional insight from this data to improve outcomes across all areas of the business, while simultaneously optimizing resource utilization and reducing costs. IBM® DB2® for Linux, UNIX and Windows is a multi-workload database management solution built for these challenges. Built with CIOs in mind, this interactive online tool offers new insights in form of analyst research papers, problem/solution guides and direct client feedback about Total Cost of Ownership and overall efficiencies gained by selecting DB2.

High reliability and system availability are absolutely crucial for database and the underlying server hardware. A 67% majority of organizations now require that their databases deliver a minimum of four, five or six "nines" of uptime for their most mission critical applications. That is the equivalent of 52 seconds to 52 minutes of unplanned downtime per database/per annum. Those are the results of ITIC's 2013 - 2014 Database Reliability and Deployment Trends Survey, an independent Web-based survey which polled 600 organizations worldwide from August through October 2013. IBM DB2 and Informix databases, followed closely by Microsoft SQL Server, achieved the highest overall reliability and customer satisfaction ratings for product performance, security, technical service and support and the value of its pricing and licensing agreements. Oracle DB scored high for reliability and performance but lagged far behind IBM and Microsoft in customer satisfaction with pricing, licensing and technical support.