By Charles King, Pund-IT®  August 31, 2022

Product development is often a delicate balancing act, especially when vendors are updating well-established devices like consumer and commercial laptops. Since it is all too easy to get things wrong, many laptop vendors simply let things lie and make incremental changes or simply add in next gen CPUs and other components. But there is a strong case for modernizing classic laptop designs to account for valuable new technologies and evolving customer preferences or habits.

That is certainly the case with Dell’s new XPS 13 Plus 9320, one of the boldest examples of a vendor reimagining and enhancing one of its most successful solutions. Let’s consider why and how that is the case. Continue reading →

By Charles King, Pund-IT®

The tech industry is well known for creating innovative new business solutions. However, just as important is the work vendors do to make those offerings practical and usable for enterprise clients. That is especially important when it comes to highly technical projects, such as applying artificial intelligence (AI) tools mainstream and in emerging business use cases. Without such efforts, even the most promising new developments can languish and fail.

Lenovo’s new AI Innovators program is a notable example of how one vendor is approaching this process and delivering practical new solutions with the help of strategic partners. Continue reading →

By Charles King, Pund-IT®  August 10, 2022

As cloud computing continues to evolve and mature, why businesses deploy processes and workloads in the cloud is just as vital to understand as when they adopt cloud solutions or which platforms they choose. It is also important to note that while public cloud providers’ portfolios share numerous similarities, some also offer solutions and services which are essentially unique.

A good example of that point is IBM Cloud’s Wazi as-a-Service (aaS) which provides enterprises on-demand access to zEnterprise mainframe development and testing capabilities. Why this is important and how one IBM customer, Eurobank, is using and has benefitted from Wazi aaS was the subject of a recent analyst briefing that is worth considering in detail. Continue reading →

By Charles King, Pund-IT®  July 27, 2022

Enterprises worldwide have clearly faced a wide array of serious business, logistical and operational challenges during the past 2+ years. Equally undeniable is the value that many or most have realized from technology solutions that helped them adapt to those challenges. As a result, companies have survived or even thrived despite elemental shifts in the way they deal with employees, customers, partners and business processes.

Unfortunately, it is a mistake to believe that these disruptions are over. Far from it, the continuing appearance of Covid-19 variants suggests that many of the changes that companies hoped were temporary fixes have become and likely will remain in place. The question then becomes what capabilities organizations should look for in new and next generation endpoint devices that help workers continue to thrive?

Dell’s new Latitude 9330 2-in-1 provides innovative answers that enterprises would do well to consider. Continue reading →

By Charles King, Pund-IT®  July 12, 2022

The close links between industry standard silicon and system vendors are clear every time new or next gen microprocessors hit the market. Intel or AMD issues a press release highlighting their latest achievements, along with a list of server vendors supporting those products. Those vendors highlight how they will utilize the chips’ features and advancements and then, over time, roll out new solutions.

A couple of decades ago, system vendors that developed their own processors, including IBM, HP and Sun followed similar paths with a couple of wrinkles. They certainly spotlighted new features, but they also focused attention on proprietary technologies developed for their customers’ specific business needs and requirements. Today, IBM is the only commercial system vendor that still develops its own microprocessors, so it is worth discussing how the company’s newest Power servers featuring its latest Power10 chips measure up to the competition. Continue reading →

By Charles King, Pund-IT®  June 29, 2022

IT infrastructure services are one of the least understood areas in enterprise technology. That is partly the fault of tech vendors who use the term as a bin to contain whatever data center consulting offerings they prefer or are promoting. But more importantly, difficulties in pinning down or defining the meaning of infrastructure services reflects their continuing evolution.

In essence, IT infrastructure services are designed to help enterprises adopt and deploy complex solutions and tools and adapt to or prepare for promising new technologies. Meaning that the shape and intent of offerings that service providers like Kyndryl provide are in flux according to its customers’ current and upcoming needs.

In other words, it is more important to understand how service vendors are adapting to those changes than to pigeonhole them into rapidly outmoded or redundant definitions. Kyndryl’s collaborations with hybrid cloud strategic partners is a good example of how this process works and can succeed. Continue reading →

By Charles King, Pund-IT®  June 22, 2022

Strategic relationships are commonplace in the tech industry and typically enable the vendors involved to better serve shared customers and markets. But a few vendors, such as Lenovo are highly skillful at launching and evolving strategic relationships with farther reaching benefits and consequences. That is particularly true in the company’s enterprise-focused organizations, including the Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG) and the Solutions and Services Group (SSG) that Lenovo launched a bit over a year ago.

The formation of PCCW Lenovo Technology Solutions (PLTS) that the company announced last week clearly demonstrates that Lenovo’s approach to M&A and strategic relationships is anything but “one size fits all.” Instead, it is exploring and will likely gain significant value from this investment which the company says it expects to be immediately margin accretive. Let’s consider that more closely. Continue reading →

By Charles King, Pund-IT®  June 8, 2022

Equating business with military strategies and tactics has been popular for years. In fact, not too long ago, you could scarcely attend an industry event or company conference without finding executives waxing poetic about the commercial usefulness of musings by Sun Tzu and Carl von Clausewitz. While many of these notions stretch credulity, some offer common wisdom that is applicable to specific business circumstances, including the development of innovative new solutions.

For example, IBM’s planned acquisition of Randori, a leading attack surface management (ASM) and offensive cybersecurity provider, clearly evokes Sun Tzu’s famous comment in The Art of War: “Know the enemy and know yourself in a hundred battles you will never be in peril. When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal. If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are certain in every battle to be in peril.”

Let’s consider that point more closely. Continue reading →

By Charles King, Pund-IT®  May 25, 2022

The tech industry’s problems with making innovative products and services fully accessible to people facing physical and mental challenges is anything but front-page news. Instead, there is a continuing flow of articles and opinion pieces discussing how the industry could and should clearly work harder at addressing the requirements of special needs individuals and groups.

But while the industry’s overall record on accessibility could be better, some individual vendors, such as Lenovo, have made accessibility a central issue organizationally and in their business and development processes. Let’s consider the announcements Lenovo made to highlight the recent 11^th Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). Continue reading →

By Charles King, Pund-IT®  May 18, 2022

Annual technology customer and user conferences take on any number of shapes, but their underlying structure typically indicates the subjects and themes that are closest to the host vendor’s heart. In most cases, new commercial products and services take pride of place. In fact, it is common for companies to save-up special announcements for conferences. In others, major customer and partner wins enjoy the brightest spotlights. Virtually all are used to clarify and amplify vendors’ strategic goals, a sensible exercise when you have an interested, attentive audience at your disposal.

Last week’s IBM Think 2022 conference contained many of these points, but the company used much of its time and energy to highlight forward-looking strategies and efforts in hybrid cloud, AI/automation, quantum computing, blockchain and ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance). Why that makes sense and how well it worked are worth close examination. Continue reading →