With much of the EU and US in an uproar over the news that the NSA has been monitoring communications from Verizon and some of the biggest intent giants (including Google, Facebook, Yahoo and many others), conspiracy theorists are having a field day while Dropbox, Apple, and others are going on record to deny their involvement in the NSA’s PRISM surveillance program. We’ll be following this developing the story as new information and opinions emerge. In the meantime, our analysts at GigaOM Research(freshly rebranded from GigaOM Pro) were focused on other news items this week, such as the IBM/SoftLayer acquisition and what it means for the cloud industry at large. Also on GigaOM Research this week: rethinking innovation and the future of the IT department.
Note: GigaOM Research, previously known as GigaOM Pro, is a subscription-based research service offering in-depth, timely analysis of developing trends and technologies. Visit pro.gigaom.com to learn more about it.
Cloud: Impacts of the IBM-SoftLayer deal on the cloud industry
Larry Carvalho
On the heels of IBM’s June 4th acquisition of SoftLayer, a major cloud infrastructure provider, analyst Larry Carvalho provides a brief analysis of the implications that this deal may have on the greater IT ecosystem. Carvalho provides a quick overview of IBM’s corporate history, and specifically investigates how the acquisition, estimated to be worth about $ 2 billion, will affect competitors such as HP and Dell, and what benefits and challenges IBM will face in the near-term future.
Future of Work: Shadow IT is growing because everything is IT
Stowe Boyd
Analyst Stowe Boyd opens with a provocative statistic: shadow IT — the IT not handled by the official corporate IT group — is expected to become 90% of all IT purchases by 2020. With that in mind, Boyd goes on to select four major trends in IT, including BYOD and ubiquitous computing, and demonstrate how and why they portend the end of the traditional CIO role, as well as the end of IT as we know it.
Social: Rethinking innovation: How to manage ideas systematically
Haydn Shaughnessy
How can we rethink innovation in the face of a rapidly-changing market? Analyst Haydn Shaughnessy looks at innovation on a systemic level, and explores four major trends that will play a major role in innovation in the near-term future: enterprise crowdfunding, narrow innovation strategies, a rebirth of manufacturing, and moving from Six Sigma to algorithmic innovation. Shaughnessy provides an overview of current innovation strategies, particularly how open innovation and narrow innovation have been met with systematic innovation, and four ways innovation will evolve through 2013.
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