Briefings Direct

As part of the play-nice together movement between IT departments and lines of business in larger enterprises, the IT shared services trend is gaining steam. IT shared services goes beyond centralization to recast IT from a cost center to a powerful support system for business imperatives and general productivity. The shift is much more than semantics, it involves a customer-focused approach to providing IT internally, places an emphasis on efficiency without redundancy, and allows enterprises to gain flexibility on their future sourcing options for delivering IT services globally. To delve deeper into what IT shared services is and what the pay-offs and challenges are, this BriefingsDirect podcast taps the insights of two Hewlett-Packard executives, Peg Ofstead, the worldwide solution lead for HP’s IT Shared Services and IT Consolidation Services unit within HP Consulting and Integration, and Ewald Comhaire, director of the global practice for Next Generation Infrastructure and Technology at HP. Interarbor Solutions analyst Dana Gardner moderates the 37-minute discussion. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard. Have a listen to the podcast here, or read the transcript at http://briefingsdirect.blogspot.com/2006/08/full-transcript-of-dana-gardners.html.

A true test of a development environment's worth is in how well it benefits ISVs in reducing complexity, cutting costs, and in helping them remain competitive in fast-moving markets. To better understand the impact of Eclipse on ISVs, Interarbor Solutions analyst Dana Gardner moderates a sponsored podcast discussion with Damion Heredia, director of product management at Lombardi, and Maher Masri, president and co-founder of Genuitec. These two ISVs have much different customers -- Lombardi is a business process management (BPM) solutions provider and the maker of the TeamWorks suites, while Genuitec serves the developers within ISVs with its popular MyEclipse Enterprise Workbench productivity tools. Yet both companies are clearly benefitting from the community-based, open source efficiencies of Eclipse. Learn more about why they see an escalating productivity boost from Eclipse 3.2, how Eclipse and Microsoft .NET play well together, and how the Eclipse Rich Client Platform may further simplify ISV choices and costs in the future. Sponsor: Eclipse Foundation. Have a listen to the podcast here, or read the transcript at http://briefingsdirect.blogspot.com/2006/07/full-transcript-of-dana-gardners_20.html.

The Eclipse Foundation has grown in popularity for the past two or three years and really is on the cutting edge in de facto standards for development environments for major Java software projects, particularly among software companies themselves. To discuss this subject, we have Brent Williams, a Senior Analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets. Eclipse started out as an integrated development environment (IDE), but is branching out into some other areas to offer the best of both worlds in terms of commercial command-and-control development, as well as the viral and lower-cost development of the open source community approach. Podcast sponsor: Eclipse Foundation.

Banking on a significant new business opportunity, Akamai Technologies has rolled out a podcasting platform and business model support infrastructure for podcasting. Tim Napoleon, media and entertainment product line director at Akamai, discusses the solution, and rationale for delivering it to market now, in a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast, moderated by Interarbor Solution's Dana Gardner. While some surveys find that a modest slice of the population is actively listening to podcasts, Akamai's research shows that media companies are moving increasing amounts of audio -- and soon full multi-media -- content to the podcast delivery model. Akamai has tailored its applications and media delivery network to support the requirements of guaranteed massive podcast availability. What's more, Akamai has added support and reporting features to assist both amateur and professional content creators to better monetize their programs and track their traffic and use. Have a listen to Akamai's global response to the budding podcast opportunity.