Today, everything computes. Intelligence has been infused into things no one would recognize as computers: appliances, cars, roadways, clothes, even rivers and cornfields. Tomorrow, many of these things will think, thanks to breakthroughs in cognitive computing. Even the things that don’t think themselves will continue collecting and reporting the massive quantities of data that feed cognitive systems.

In today’s always on world, IT systems are so interdependent with business operations that even a few minutes of downtime can have big implications—for your productivity, reputation and finances. New technologies like cloud, mobile, analytics and social can help your business be more flexible and responsive, but at the same time they increase your risk.

Technological advances are transforming the way we connect, disrupting the status quo and creating huge turbulence. Industries are converging, and new opportunities and threats are emerging, as never before. So how are CIOs managing their way through the mayhem? In the first installment of our latest C-suite Study, we interviewed 5,247 top executives to find out what they think the future holds and how they’re positioning their organizations to prosper in the “age of disruption.” This report delves more deeply into the views of the 1,805 CIOs who contributed to our research – and what the IT gurus of the most successful enterprises do differently.

Welcome to IT as a Service For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition. IT as a Service is the emerging technique that gives technology leaders the flexibility of providing the right set of services to the business. The world of IT is changing dramatically. Businesses are increasingly discovering that IT services are becoming the foundation for the customer experience. IT as a Service isn’t simply a new delivery model for applications. Instead, IT as a Service is a new approach to providing an array of modular services that are targeted to solve changing business problems. While services can be as straightforward as compute or storage in the cloud, they can also be used to complex solutions. Other services may include microservices or integration services that enable a business to quickly create new solutions to help service customers in a more creative and efficient manner.

In the age of digital transformation and hybrid cloud, business expectations for seamless, personalized, always-on service run high. Technological advances such as cognitive capabilities and automation are blurring business distinctions and empowering competitors to emerge from any industry and geography. Staying ahead requires a willingness to change course and embrace constant reinvention.

Moving workloads from an on-premise software-defined data center to the cloud is an extremely stressful time for CIOs. But with the powerful IBM-VMware alliance, businesses can now extend their VMware workloads from on-premises environment to the IBM® Cloud within hours, not weeks.

Find out how you can take advantage of hybrid cloud by extending or migrating workloads using secure and seamless networking capabilities offered by VMware. All of this is available on secure, single-tenant IBM Bluemix bare metal servers on IBM Cloud, giving you the utmost control.

Find out how you can take advantage of hybrid cloud by extending or migrating workloads using secure and seamless networking capabilities offered by VMware. All of this is available on secure, single-tenant IBM Bluemix bare metal servers on IBM Cloud, giving you the utmost control.

This paper looks at cloud architecture in which the servers and networks in the data center can rapidly respond to changing demands.

IBM System Networking RackSwitch provides ultralow-latency switching inside a collocated network. Read more now.

Read this white paper to find out how IBM's VMready switches solve the most difficult VM mobility and visibility problems.

To maintain its position at the forefront of international research, the Institute for Computational Cosmology at Durham University wanted to develop a new high-performance computing cluster - find out how they did it.

Working with CVSI to deploy IBM Tivoli, BladeCenter and System Storage technologies

Download this IBM white paper from Web Buyer's Guide to learn the next generation solutions for application servers.

This exclusive resource explains more about the role of hybrid computing in modern computing environments.

Visa Europe addressed the unique nature of the European market by building a new payment platform which houses tens of thousands of business rules governing payment clearing and settlement. The result is greater business agility and competitiveness for both Visa Europe and its 4,000-plus member institutions. Read to find out more.

Enterprise decision management and decision intelligence are fundamentally decision-centric approaches. Organizations wishing to use them to become decision-centric should take a number of steps.

Built on IBM's market-leading business rules management system and enhanced with capabilities for detecting time-based events, this offering drives more responsive actions to business opportunities or risk conditions, increasing the value of each customer, partner and internal interaction.

A Practical Guide to Using Business Rules and Predictive Analytics

Using more than 70 criteria and combining feedback from customer interviews, IDC found that the providers in this evaluation bring diverse capabilities for modernizing SAP applications. Download this paper to find out more.

In this interactive document, we present the key results from the IBM Institute for Business Value’s recent report “Redefining Markets: Insights from the Global C-suite Study – The CMO perspective,” and examine how IBM and SAP can help CMOs meet the challenges of marketing in a digital world.

In this e-book, we look at the key topics CIOs have outlined as their priorities and discover how solutions from IBM and SAP can help CIOs achieve them.

Industry convergence is collapsing the barriers between formerly distinct industries. According to “Redefining Connections: Insights from the Global C-suite Study – The CIO Perspective,” produced by the IBM Institute for Business Value, CIOs believe this is the biggest trend transforming the business arena.

As technology has progressed companies have always taken advantage of it to evolve how they engage with their customers. But today, something different, more fundamental is happening. How shoppers and buyers want to interact and transact with companies is changing dramatically, driven by the fusion of physical and digital channels.

Today, SAP’s solution portfolio looks very different and addresses different business needs than the SAP of a few years ago. Instead of primarily managing back-office enterprise resource planning (ERP) processes such as finance and the supply chain, SAP is evolving into a new type of software company that’s poised to enable digital business. Numerous acquisitions — including leading eCommerce solution hybris and cloud solutions Ariba, Concur, and SuccessFactors — and a new platform strategy based on SAP Hana, an in-memory computing solution, mean that the SAP core is positioned to support real-time digital business in the era of connected everything.