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Apr 09, 2013
As technology and business trends continue to converge, companies are beginning to rethink their IT infrastructure and how best to integrate on-premise with cloud-based services and enterprise applications.
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Mar 31, 2013
In recent years the IT industry has been confronted with the convergence of several highly disruptive trends that are irrevocably changing the technology landscape. Mobility and the rise of consumer-owned devices entering the business IT environment, social media, and the commoditization of information assets have all played a role in the transformation of the industry. But perhaps no shift has been more seismic than the ascendance of cloud and SaaS based applications in the enterprise, and that expansion has, in turn, created unprecedented demand for solutions that can help streamline the integration of these new solutions. Indeed, according to a recent report by analyst firm MarketsandMarkets, the global Cloud Brokerage Services (CSB) market is on track to grow from $1.57 billion in 2013 to $10.5 billion by 2018, a compound annual growth rate of more than 45% over the five year period.
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Mar 26, 2013
Industry analysts predict that in 2013 mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide and that by 2015 media tablet shipments will reach around 50 percent of laptop shipments. A new era of development is on the horizon, particularly in the area of data integration. As the consumerization of IT fully dominates the enterprise IT landscape, many CIOs are concerned with how device proliferation will impact data integration and cloud-based enterprise apps.
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Mar 12, 2013
Integrating and managing data in enterprises requires people with different skills, knowledge, and vested interests to work together. People build things, not tools; and people make decisions, even if data guides the decision. At Liaison Technologies, as our name implies, we realize how essential the human is for managing and integrating data.
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Feb 22, 2013
No doubt about it, the complexity of integrating IT systems is proliferating. More regulations, diversification and federation of data, and growing security considerations, coupled with the diaspora of on-premise and hosted software, infrastructure, and platform offerings have made efficient integration a challenge.
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Feb 15, 2013
Combination of Claims and Clinical Data is the Holy Grail for ACO Analytics? Direct from Naveen Sarabu from eHealth's Annual Conference, 2013
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Jan 28, 2013
Some companies reorganize so often that it seems they can't get their act together. Yet some of those companies keep doing well, often really well. Perhaps those companies reorganize because they outgrew their previous structure and think that reorganizing will let them grow more.
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Dec 06, 2012
Paul Dottle, CIO of American Express Company, wrote an insightful article "A New Way to Assess Software Risk" in today's CIO Journal. For instance, he discusses automation to analyze source code complexity before an application is tested, rather than measuring quality by how a program runs.
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Oct 22, 2012
Everyone has heard it before; the definition of insanity is repeating the same task but expecting a different result. The reason we have all heard it is because there is truth behind it, especially in business.
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Oct 01, 2012
One thing I do on the road is interact with people other than the client. A typical project employs more than just Liaison personnel. There’re always teams from different companies working on other parts of the project. We often interact outside of work. One talks business, or goes to the pub. I learn about what they do and the value they provide to the clients. It’s good for the client when the vendors have a good rapport and work together. It’s also good for Liaison, enabling partnerships to be formed with other companies.
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Jul 26, 2012
It’s not unusual for smaller companies — and even some pretty large ones — that do on-premise data integration to have inadequate testing processes for new and modified translations maps and software upgrades. Changing a map or putting a new one straight into the production environment, or upgrading an application that uses maps without testing the consequences, can be costly. If it doesn’t work correctly, you have three choices: figure out how to fix the map, roll back the upgrade, or call tech support — all of which take time, effort and can seriously impact operations.
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May 17, 2012
Recently I sat down for an interview, with Robin Smith from Virtual Logistics, for an episode of Integration Television. We had an informal discussion about what goes into building an integration stack – specifically, what kinds of things one must consider when dealing with all of the technical components that comprise an integration stack. This is intended to be a follow-up to Robin’s interview with Hollis Tibbetts, who did a nice piece on “Build vs. Buy” with regards to data integration.
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Apr 11, 2012
If you hear the sound of enthusiastic cheering, it’s coming from Liaison. One of our favorite customers—Paul Stamas—is a finalist for the Technological Advancement Award, one of six SearchCIO-Midmarket.com 2012 IT Leadership Awards to be announced later this month. The Vice President of IT at Mohawk Fine Papers was selected for his innovative cloud strategy, which has resulted in a major return-on-investment for the mid-sized paper manufacturer. Stamas revised his cloud strategy to reap the benefits of cloud computing more quickly and save his company money in the process. Tapping into Liaison’s Cloud Services Brokerage model, Stamas took advantage of our enterprise-class integration platform at a fraction of the purchase cost of comparable on-premises middleware products.
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Apr 09, 2012
I was recently at the at Interconnected Health 2012 conference in Chicago, and amongst the various topics being discussed, the most common theme popping up is the need for more standards to allow PHR, EMR and HIE networks to really take hold. I'm in no position to disagree with this, but I do find it interesting that an industry that uses so many acronyms (many of which represent existing data model and messaging standards) still feels like they don't have standards that are sufficient to solve their data integration challenges. Is it too much of a 'pie in the sky' idea to establish just a few data model and messaging standards that cover nearly all use cases, and expect wide adoption of the standard across the industry? Maybe it is.
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Mar 21, 2012
This is the last of a three part blog series that gives a techno-hug to underappreciated older technologies used in cloud-based data integrations. Last up: legacy systems!
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Mar 01, 2012
I am currently reading a great book about enterprise software entitled ‘How to Succeed in the Enterprise Software Market’ by Craig Le Clair. Even though the book was published back in 2005, many of the core ideas and principles still apply.
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Feb 08, 2012
The other day I was cleaning out a pile of old magazines and came across the October 2004 issue of Wired with the article by Chris Anderson called The Long Tail. Chris published a book in 2006 on the subject, which was followed by a TED talk in 2007, where he takes a concept from statistics to describe the long tail in business. He proposed that in some cases the bulk of a company’s business comes from a long tail approach – low turn over items. Apple iTunes is often given as an example of long tail at its best. ITunes has thousands of songs and generates the bulk of its revenue from one-off sales. Amazon is another example.
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Dec 20, 2011
It’s tough to run most businesses without revenue, and in most cases difficult to run a business without customers. In the HIE world, it’s the same with the exception that they can do without those when they have government funding. But funding eventually runs out and this means that they must generate revenue through “customers” – providers, payers, patients or other third parties like life sciences organizations for secondary use of information. The good news is that HIEs, like traditional businesses, can sustain themselves when they have lots of customers; the bad news is they can’t when they lack customers.
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Oct 27, 2011
Typically for an integration project you start with defining the source and target. A successful project starts off by being able to produce an accurate representation (a model) of your data.
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Oct 25, 2011
I have a cough. I had a cold. That passed. But, as is too often the case, the cough remains. Our child’s pulmonologist once explained that lungs often don’t seem to react quickly to shocks and stress. As I recall the conversation, months after a sickness stress the lungs, the lungs may react, causing symptoms which can last surprisingly long.
In any data integration project, or in the data architecture of an organization, you will find what I will here call eyes, lungs and livers (please forgive the awkwardness of the metaphor). Let me explain what I mean, and then why this line of thought was worth the musing.
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