Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

China is an important market for software as a service (SaaS) due to its huge population and current rate of economic growth in an otherwise flat global economy. For the Chinese, as well as for other developing markets, SaaS offers the possibility of using advanced software without investing in expensive infrastructure.

The proliferation of mobile devices for business use, in part fueled by the popularity of the "bring your own device" (BYOD) strategy, is helping drive corporate interest in enterprise app stores. To date, however, adoption of enterprise app stores has been limited for the most part to larger organizations.

By the time you get to the bottom of this Advisor, you will have at least three new ideas on how to get people engaged in your meetings. That's a powerful suggestion. In fact, the only reason that some of you continue to read this is because I just made that promise.

In this Advisor, I want to introduce the book The Soul of Design: Harnessing the Power of Plot to Create Extraordinary Products that I coauthored with my friend and colleague Rob Austin. It is also an introduction to the webinar that I am hosting with Cutter on 24 October ("The Soul of Design: Plot, Coherence, and Resonance in the Structure of 'Special Things' ").

In this Advisor, I want to introduce the book The Soul of Design: Harnessing the Power of Plot to Create Extraordinary Products that I coauthored with my friend and colleague Rob Austin.

Many enterprises have successfully leveraged speech technologies to build interactive voice response (IVR) self-help applications. Such mechanisms enable customers to conduct an ever-widening range of transactions with airlines, banks, retail, and other portals via speech over the phone.

My Advisor last week on the battle between proprietary and open source cloud standards seems to have struck a chord in the cloud community (see "Who Is Driving the Bus? The Cloud Standards Battle").

Many people, when they think of Big Data development environments, tend to think of the main Hadoop distributors such as Cloudera, HortonWorks, or MapR. But other providers have innovative Hadoop offerings, too. One I've been examining recently is DataStax.