Sponsor: IBM Corporation

In this Advisory, Clabby Analytics looks more closely at the importance of implementing an integrated infrastructure - and its relationship to business analytics. The paper will examine the business analytics workloads, discuss how these workloads put different demands on the underlying systems and infrastructure, and provide guidance designing an integrated business analytics environment that will provide organizations with high performance, resiliency, and a scalable growth path.

Forward-thinking organizations are recognizing the superiority of Power Systems technology. The Power Systems family offers the ultimate system for today's compute intensive business applications and databases. Power Systems continues to prove itself as the ultimate system for compute intensive workloads, high performance analytics, high performance UNIX, and high performance computing.

The cloud decision may be the easy part. For most businesses, the benefits promised by cloud computing - including agility, process optimization, speed to market, and cost reduction - warrant a closer look, if not a test drive. At least at the decision-table, curiosity and hope in the potential for transformation are winning out over caution. This practical guide offers steps for moving your company into the cloud, at whatever pace you prefer, with a focus on the SmartCloud Services portfolio offered by IBM and its partners.

It's not easy being today's CIO. As growing numbers of employees bring their own computing devices to work, CIOs are faced with a tough choice: Find a secure way to let employees conduct business on their own devices - or simply say no. If you'd rather say yes, read the article to learn how IBM balances openness and risk management in the enterprise mobile workplace. You'll take away five steps to consider when embarking on a "bring your own device" (BYOD) program.

IT managers and industry experts talk a lot about performance and capacity, but those are often only replacement terms for the real issue: economics. Storage decisions are only necessary because of economics -- otherwise all data would be stored in main memory. With the data avalanche always looming and growing, two key trends are critical: simply storing less, and then tiering or caching what is ultimately stored.

Is your storage management solution making your life easier or more difficult? In a world where 32 percent of IT budgets are eaten up by labor costs, storage is one of the main culprits: today's storage solutions often require additional expert administration due to their complexity and the sheer volume of data being handled. With the right storage management solution in place, you can take steps to manage complexity and free up more of your budget to go where it's really needed. IBM Tivoli Storage Manager Operations Center is a next-generation graphical user interface that provides advanced visualization, built-in analytics, and integrated workflow automation features that leapfrog traditional backup user interfaces, dramatically simplifying the backup administration process.

As new threats emerge every day, the need for qualified security staff is growing. But there aren't enough people with technical security skills to go around. That gap is leaving organizations exposed. In fact, in a recent survey conducted by Forrester Consulting and commissioned by IBM, 92% of security leaders said that staffing issues contribute to heightened levels of risk.

A white paper details IBM's approach to planning, managing and executing business resilience and continuity across six defined layers of resilience. It also covers recent trends and best practices used in today's evolving business resiliency management programs, as well as IBM's portfolio of business continuity and resiliency services.

Flexible workplace forward thinkers are reporting productivity increases and cost decreases of 20% or more. Learn to achieve these benefits for your business by downloading the IBM executive report Achieving success with a flexible workplace: Forward thinkers' best practices to enhance productivity, spur innovation and reduce costs. The report contains findings from a recent IBM survey covering user mobility, user support, collaboration and security.

For a network that better supports your cloud and brings the most value possible to your business, its design has to be considered in the early stages of cloud planning. Read the white paper "Networking for cloud computing" to discover specific networking considerations for public, private and hybrid clouds.

"According to a survey by the IBM Center for Applied Insights and Oxford Economics, business leaders are becoming increasingly focused on the business value of cloud. Although the participant's cloud strategies differ in terms of scope, platform and delivery models, the chief takeaway from the survey is that cloud is not just about cutting costs and driving efficiency - cloud fuels growth."

IBM PureSystems offers highly integrated solutions that can help you deploy and tune applications for cloud architectures with ease. Read the research report to take a deeper look at PureFlex Systems within the PureSystems family and learn how PureFlex Systems can help you streamline management and accelerate client time-to-value with a new integrated and modular system/subsystem.

The IBM SmartCloud™ Entry on Power Systems™ solution provides a cost-competitive, entry-level private cloud solution that helps speed time to value of your service deployments on your IBM Power Systems servers.

For IT personnel looking to manage cross-platform workloads, IBM VMControl can provide an advanced solution. Read the white paper and learn why this technology beats the competition in terms of automated provisioning, systems integration and resource pooling. Also see how this environment offers advanced image management and higher resilience.

Watson's success in the Jeopardy! challenge was inspiring, but the business impact of optimized systems design is just beginning. With smarter analytics solutions optimized on IBM Power Systems, you can put Watson's technology to work.