On smart computing

 I realized that I have not posted in this Blog for two weeks,  I have not really disappeared;  I am involved in a proposal for EU project, and last Tuesday we had the "hearings", which is the second phase of decision about  who will win --- the competition is very tough, and we invested a lot in preparation - in fact, never in my life I spent so much time and energy in preparing to a one hour meetings,  as for the details -- if we'll win this project I'll write more about it.  One detail:  the meeting took place in Luxembourg, where many houses look like palaces (see picture above). 


For now -  catching up with some stuff that was published in the last couple of weeks,  I came across a  Forresters' article about smart computing.    Chris Mines from Forrester writes that smart computing is the next big things and viewing the planned investments of organizations, as seen in the figure below, many of the planned investments are in this area:

The claim is that smart is the next big thing - and mentions three points (copied from the posting)

• Improving transactional processes is yesterday's story. The back-office challenges of preparing financial statements, fulfilling customer orders, or tracking inventory are well addressed by enterprise and personal productivity software. These traditional workloads are migrating to cloud computing resources in some cases, but are not creating incremental technology investments nor opportunities to transform how a business operates.
• Optimizing assets is the next important challenge. Especially in service-based industries, favorable economics result from building an asset base and then selling access to those assets in the form of services. Managing and optimizing the use of those assets -- physical, human, financial, and intangible -- is the source of revenue growth and improved margins. Smart computing systems provide the awareness, analytics, and actions required to improve the utilization of a firm's assets. And in most cases, these systems represent incremental investments in computing resource, with the payback coming in the form of more efficient, more highly utilized, and therefore more profitable assets.
• Smart flexes to meet industry-specific challenges. Each industry has a different mix of assets with different optimization opportunities. In high-tech, development and channel resources must be marshaled in the face of accelerating development cycles, long supply chains, and unpredictable consumer tastes. In finance, mountains of data must be sifted to find the best investment opportunities, while managing market and compliance risk and keeping employees productive. Finding the right mix of online and brick-and-mortar, the right product portfolio, and lean inventories are paramount for retail execs. The right portfolio of smart computing solutions will vary widely across these and other industries

This is in line with my previous posting about the new world vs. the old world, we are in the new world, and the IT industry is gradually shifting towards this new world.     Optimizing assets (traffic, power, human) is certainly part of the game,  eliminating problems before they happen (proactive computing) is another aspect.