IDU NEWS

It’s been ten years since Oracle’s Larry Ellison had his Thomas Watson moment, dismissing cloud computing as a fad, nonsense and absurd. Clearly, in the same way that the number of computers in use around the world didn’t cap out at five units, as IBM’s Watson predicted in 1943, cloud computing has gone from strength to strength, with worldwide spend on cloud infrastructure in 2018 estimated at in excess of $80 billion and still growing. Fast forward a short decade, and it’s

That the world is a much smaller place thanks to the internet and digital communication technology has probably not escaped anyone’s notice. But are you truly harnessing this to do your business better, and to grow beyond South Africa’s borders? Gone are the merchant vessels of yesteryear circumnavigating the globe by sea to sell your products. Today the internet creates an even more extensive marketplace at the click of a button. To me, this presents three clear benefits for

Last year this time I wrote that you should take an entrepreneurial view of your organisation and start experimenting and breaking stuff. Why? Because if you don’t foster a culture of entrepreneurship and innovation, you’re going to get left behind. If you thought 2017 was fast-paced and disruptive, hold onto your seats as we enter 2018. Virtually every major industry is going to be shaken up by technology and what it enables. Not for its own sake, though, but because custome

Like the wheel or the printing press, cloud computing is more exciting because of what it enables, rather than for its own sake. Much has already been written about what the cloud allows us to do: from launching new economy businesses such as Netflix and Airbnb, to saving money through processing elasticity, to gaining access to new services and capabilities. And, despite security still being the number one concern when implementing cloud, we’ve recently been very starkly rem

Ask anyone how they are nowadays, and the answer is likely to be ‘crazy busy’ or something along those lines. Today’s world, designed around convenience and speed, seems to have had the exact opposite effect. We’re trying to cram more and more into the same 24 hours and wearing our ‘busy-ness’ like a badge of honour. Part self-imposed, part a reality of modern life, we’re a bit like the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass — we’ve got to do all the running w

Although there has been a trend towards cloud services over the past years both locally and internationally; there is a part of me that wonders if it is just a fad we are caught up in or if it is really here to stay. It is easy to suppose that it may be a fad in South Africa as we lag behind the rest of the world for a number of reasons. Although we are making constant strides in the right direction, we still have a lack of infrastructure to support the high speed connectivit