Briefings Direct

Find the podcast on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Request an app marketplace demo. Sponsor: Partnerpedia.

As enterprises and most business users rapidly adopt smartphones and make them mission-critical to their work and lives, tablets are fast on their heels as a similar major disruptor. These fast-moving mobile trends together are also escalating demand for enterprise app stores.

The App Store is rapidly gaining admiring adopters, pioneered by Apple, thanks to its promise of reducing cost of distribution and of updates -- and also of creating whole new revenue streams and even deeper user relationships. RIM, Apple’s iOS, and Google Android devices are rapidly changing the way the world does business ... and the app store model is changing the way the world does software.

App stores work well for both buyers and sellers. The users are really quite happy with paying for what they have on the spot, as long as that process is quick, seamless, and convenient. Vendors, service providers, and communication service providers should therefore explore how such stores can be created quickly and efficiently to strike, as it were, while the app store iron is hot.

So the onus is now on a variety of business service providers and enterprises to come up with some answers for app stores of their own and to serve their employees, customers, and partner ecosystems in new ways. This can't be done haphazardly. The new app stores also must stand up to the rigors of business-to-business (B2B) commerce requirements, not just consumer-driven games.

To learn more about how the enterprise app store market will shape up, BriefingsDirect assembled a panel to delve into the market and opportunity for enterprise app stores, and to find out how they could be created quickly and efficiently.

The experts included Michele Pelino, a Principal Analyst at Forrester Research; Mark Sochan, the CEO of Partnerpedia, and Sam Liu, Vice President of Marketing at Partnerpedia. The panel was moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Find the podcast on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Request an app marketplace demo. Sponsor: Partnerpedia.

Find the podcast on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a transcript or download a copy. Learn more. Sponsor: HP.

The IT news headlines are full of incidents of major cloud instances brought down for days, and unfortunately often weeks, with some of the largest of these due to network issues in association with virtualization and storage sprawl. The price in the cloud era for such disruptions is very high and very public.

A big part of the solution to preventing such outages comes from comprehensive, automated, and increasingly integrated network management capabilities. The tasks before network managers have never been more daunting. There are far more devices, hybrid networks, hybrid compute resources, higher levels of virtualization, and there is a need to maintain security and compliance requirements throughout.

What’s more, the pressure to keep cost down and to seek lower cost alternatives for converged infrastructure remains a constant companion to business and IT architects, and therefore an ongoing network challenge.

Into this environment, HP this week delivered a wide-ranging update to its Network Management Center suite Version 9.1. The emphasis is on a comprehensive lifecycle approach to network management with deep data gathering, automated root cause analytics, and intelligent and proactive response features that enable consistently high performance and network reliability.

BriefingsDirect recently sat down with Ashish Kuthiala, Director of Product Marketing for HP Software’s Network Management Center, to dig into the new offerings and to better understand why previous fragmented approaches to network performance and stability just won’t hold up for most enterprises. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Find the podcast on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a transcript or download a copy. Learn more. Sponsor: HP.

Enterprise integration requirements are rapidly shifting to accommodate such trends as cloud computing, mobile devices' explosion, and increased demand for extended enterprise business processes.

Application-to-application integration inside an enterprise's four walls is well understood, but very quickly the demands placed on integration are spanning multiple enterprises, multiple types of applications, and varieties of service providers. As a result, software as a service (SaaS) and cloud computing are joining with legacy systems to form new and varied hybrid models that require whole new sets of integration needs and challenges.

Once these newer breeds of integrations are set up, can the old, brittle management and upkeep of them suffice -- or will agility and rapid upgrades and innovations require new tools to make integration a lifecycle function with ongoing management and more automated governance?

In the latest BriefingsDirect enterprise IT discussion, the panel examines how open-source integration projects like Apache Camel and lightweight integration implementations and graphical tools are making developers and architects more agile. At the same time, these open-source approaches are proving less vulnerable to the complexity, fragility, and cost that often plague aging commercial middleware integration products. [Learn more about the CamelOne conference May 24 in Washington, DC.]

Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, recently sat down with Rob Davies, Chief Technology Officer at FuseSource, and Debbie Moynihan, Vice President of Marketing at FuseSource, to examine the need for innovative, new, open and agile integration capabilities.

Find the podcast on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Register for CamelOne. Sponsor: FuseSource.