In early 2012, IBM acquired Green Hat to round out its own cloud-based testing offering. The acquisition, which completed January 11, 2012, gives further validation to the growing market of virtual cloud testing. Green Hat’s solution creates a virtual testing environment for developers that can simulate a range of IT infrastructure elements. It becomes a continuous test environment and enables developers to test software earlier and more often throughout the typical software development lifecycle. Read our IT Briefcase column on IBM and the cloud testing market for the complete story.

When it comes to politics some have said that sunlight is the best disinfectant. It’s pretty much the same when it comes to business. Routing out poor performing products, services, or business lines takes the ability to shine a light on them. That’s where business intelligence (BI) is increasingly coming in.

Business intelligence has performed well as a corporate housecleaning agent – reducing the inefficiencies related to manual data entry for report creation and corporate ‘Excel farms’ creating one-off reports to satisfy individual stakeholders. Now it’s time for business intelligence to move closer to its ultimate goal of shedding light on all the dark corners of an enterprise’s data stores. New technologies, such as mobile accessibility, and better integration capabilities that can extract and normalize data from multiple, disparate legacy systems are features of the latest crop of business intelligence tools that reveal the promise for companies to seek a previously unavailable level of insight into their businesses, and drive top-line growth along with the standard cost-savings associated with BI and analytic tools.

Read our full IT Briefcase column on the value that business intelligence can deliver to corporations.

We’ve written a lot about both enterprise social networking and sustainability. But now we’re seeing the emergence of enterprise social networking tools for furthering sustainability initiatives.

For example, Enablon, a leader and ten-year veteran in corporate sustainability solutions, recently launched Wizness (wise business). Wizness is a social networking platform that seeks to help companies promulgate and share information on sustainability issues throughout their supply chains. It includes company-specific profiles that can be created and managed to filter news-based content around sustainability. It also includes expert communities on a variety of sustainability topics, forums for sharing best practices, and the ability to track metrics on a company’s sustainability performance.

Read our recent IT Briefcase article for more information on Enablon, Wizness, and social networks for sustainability.

Upside Research believes that Wizness is a brilliant idea for furthering sustainability efforts within a specific industry. The key challenge to its success will be for Enablon to attract the key thought leaders in the various topic areas of sustainability to participate in the Wizness communities, and share best practices and information about industry-specific

Social media tools are becoming an increasingly important part of most enterprise IT and business strategies. Read our latest enterprise social media column at IT Briefcase for an update on tools like Tibr, Oracle WebCenter, and IBM Connections.

IBM recently upped its commitment to cloud computing, with an announcement of a portfolio of private cloud offerings. The offerings have been designed from the ground up for enterprises, and seek to eliminate some of the concerns that large enterprises have over the security and readiness of the cloud for business-critical computing.

The offering, called the SmartCloud Foundation portfolio, includes a core set of private cloud functions that are based on IBM’s significant volume of client engagements and its management of cloud-based transactions for enterprise customers. It is designed to appeal to the demand by enterprise clients for secure, private cloud resources as they seek to transition from virtualization toward cloud infrastructures.

Read our IT Briefcase column on IBM’s updated cloud offerings.

With all types of applications moving to the cloud, it’s never been more important for organizations to consider their application performance management strategy. In fact, new approaches to application performance management such as ones offered by ExtraHop Networks offer organizations a way to ensure their applications are performing and scaling at the speeds needed.

ExtraHop is packaged as a network appliance that provides passive, real-time transaction-level analysis for application delivery assurance. ExtraHop’s appliance approach provides some interesting differentiators from its software-only competitors. Because the product comes ready to install, ExtraHop can be deployed in a data center in under a day. Its agentless technology provides automatic discovery of devices and applications and is a passive network component. The product is affordable, with a per-appliance cost that includes the necessary software. The largest of the two versions of ExtraHop supports up to 10GB of processing, making it fairly economical to deploy across large data processing environments. Companies like Alaska Airlines, The Seattle Times Company , and Applied Discover/Lexis Nexis are utilizing ExtraHop’s product to pinpoint and troubleshoot the root cause of application performance problems.

Read our application performance management column at IT Briefcase.net for the complete rundown on ExtraHop and other application performance management solutions.

We’ve blogged in the past about the growing importance of Enterprise Social Media tools. Well, the market continues to grow and change, so we’ve put together a round up of some of the important enterprise social media players to help CIOs understand the dynamics of the market and how each of the vendors are attempting to distinguish themselves in a crowded space. The first segment of our overview of Enterprise Social Media players covers some of the fresh, new faces that have helped define the social media space. Future segments will cover a few more of the trailblazers in social media, followed by some of the enterprise software vendors’ entries in this exciting market.

Software Configuration Management (SCM) is a critical core infrastructure tool for all software development organizations. While often taken for granted or below senior management’s radar, SCM is an extremely important component of an organization’s software infrastructure. Historically, a significant number of organizations have used open-source SCM, such as RCS, CVS and more recently Subversion, to form the backbone of their development environments. However, such solutions can have hidden costs associated with them. This paper was written to help organizations understand when such free tools make business sense and when commercial SCM solutions may be more appropriate.

In this report we provide context for answering those questions and analyze a composite scenario of an organization that has used both types of solutions, based on interviews with enterprise developers and industry research.

Click here to download the complete Upside Research report on OpenSource SCM

There’s no doubt that sustainability issues are more important for some companies than others. But perhaps the recent annual report from the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) might change that.

The CDP’s report reveals a surprising trend in corporate sustainability. For the first time since it began reporting on sustainability practices in the S&P 500 in 2003, the latest survey results reveal that a majority of the S&P 500 participating companies integrate sustainability efforts into core business strategy. This is without any major mandates driving participation. Considering that, according to the CDP, over 3,000 organizations in some 60 countries worldwide measure and disclose to the CDP their greenhouse gas emissions, climate change strategies, and water management, it is apparent that sustainability is taking a top place on the corporate hot-button list. Read more about the CDP’s report and it’s impact on corporate sustainability initiatives in our IT Briefcase column.

Enterprise social networking continues to be an increasingly important factor for many companies. While companies continue to search for the best way to incorporate the new collaboration functionality into an already crowded enterprise software environment, software vendors are adding new combinations of technology to their offerings. Recently, computing giant Cisco announced an acquisition that moves it ahead several steps in the race to develop the killer unified communication platform. Read the full story on Cisco’s Enterprise social network acquisition in our IT Briefcase column.