TECHNOLOGY

Too often, consultants complete an engagement without putting in place tools to sustain and enable their recommended changes and improvements.  Lombard Global has the unique ability to enable our business consulting with technology platforms that sustain top-line growth and long-term financial results. We offer solutions which Gartner has defined as being most strategic.  Gartner defines a strategic technology as one with potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt. These technologies impact the organization's long-term plans, programs and initiatives. They may be strategic because they have matured to broad market use or because they enable strategic advantage from early adoption.  In conjunction with our global business model, Lombard Global makes use of technologies from The USA, Europe, Asia and Latin America.

A description of the technology platforms we offer are listed below. Our Partner to Partner (P2P) ecosystem network model and  ME2, our Enterprise 2.0 platform which exemplifies our strategic technology emphasis is also described: 

NEXT GENERATION ECOSYSTEMS

WEB ORIENTED ARCHITECTURES

The Internet is arguably the best example of an agile, interoperable and scalable service-oriented environment in existence. This level of flexibility is achieved because of key design principles inherent in the Internet/Web approach, as well as the emergence of Web-centric technologies and standards that promote these principles. The use of Web-centric models to build global-class solutions cannot address the full breadth of enterprise computing needs.
Gartner expects, however, that continued evolution of the Web-centric approach will enable its use in an ever-broadening set of enterprise solutions during the next five years. Service Oriented Architectures and web services generate new challenges with access management.  

SOCIAL SOFTWARE AND SOCIAL NETWORKING

Social software includes a broad range of technologies, such as social networking, social collaboration, social media and social validation. Organizations should consider adding a social dimension to a conventional Web site or application and should adopt a social platform sooner, rather than later, because the greatest risk lies in failure to engage and thereby, being left mute in a dialogue where your voice must be heard. Lombard Global and its partners can provide strategic consulting, planning and execution services for B2C and B2B social media/networking needs. B2B Social Collaborative Ecosystems are also very big strategic plays. Building social ecosystems around traditional media (television, radio and printed) are also growing opportunities.

CLOUD COMPUTING

Cloud computing is a style of computing that characterizes a model in which providers deliver a variety of IT-enabled capabilities to consumers. They key characteristics of cloud computing are 1) delivery of capabilities “as a service,” 2) delivery of services in a highly scalable and elastic fashion, 3) using Internet technologies and techniques to develop and deliver the services, and 4) designing for delivery to external customers. Although cost is a potential benefit for small companies, the biggest benefits are the built-in elasticity and scalability, which not only reduce barriers to entry, but also enable these companies to grow quickly. As certain IT functions are industrializing and becoming less customized, there are more possibilities for larger organizations to benefit from cloud computing.  

VIRTUALIZATION

Much of the current buzz is focused on server virtualization, but virtualization in storage and client devices is also moving rapidly. Virtualization to eliminate duplicate copies of data on the real storage devices while maintaining the illusion to the accessing systems that the files are as originally stored (data deduplication) can significantly decrease the cost of storage devices and media to hold information. Hosted virtual images deliver a near-identical result to blade-based PCs. But, instead of the motherboard function being located in the data center as hardware, it is located there as a virtual machine bubble. However, despite ambitious deployment plans from many organizations, deployments of hosted virtual desktop capabilities will be adopted by fewer than 40 percent of target users by 2010.

ENTERPRISE MASHUPS

Enterprises are now investigating taking mashups from cool Web hobby to enterprise-class systems to augment their models for delivering and managing applications. Through 2010, the enterprise mashup product environment will experience significant flux and consolidation, and application architects and IT leaders should investigate this growing space for the significant and transformational potential it may offer their enterprises. 

UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS

During the next five years, the number of different communications vendors with which a typical organization works with will be reduced by at least 50 percent. This change is driven by increases in the capability of application servers and the general shift of communications applications to common off-the-shelf server and operating systems. As this occurs, formerly distinct markets, each with distinct vendors, converge, resulting in massive consolidation in the communications industry. Organizations must build careful, detailed plans for when each category of communications function is replaced or converged, coupling this step with the prior completion of appropriate administrative team convergence.

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

Business Intelligence (BI), the top technology priority in Gartner’s 2008 CIO survey, can have a direct positive impact on a company’s business performance, dramatically improving its ability to accomplish its mission by making smarter decisions at every level of the business from corporate strategy to operational processes. BI is particularly strategic because it is directed toward business managers and knowledge workers who make up the pool of thinkers and decision makers that are tasked with running, growing and transforming the business. Tools that let these users make faster, better and more-informed decisions are particularly valuable in a difficult business environment. Lombard Global and its business technology partners have strong references in delivering superior Business Intelligence solutions to retail property management, manufacturing and retail/hospitality. We can help with objective platform selection against strategic goals and manage the implementation of next generation BI solutions. This links to social media through SOCIAL ANALYTICS.

GREEN IT 

Shifting to more efficient products and approaches can allow for more equipment to fit within an energy footprint, or to fit into a previously filled center. Regulations are multiplying and have the potential to seriously constrain companies in building data centers, as the effect of power grids, carbon emissions from increased use and other environmental impacts are under scrutiny. Organizations should consider regulations and have alternative plans for data center and capacity growth.

Next Generation Ecosystems  

Lombard Global, in conjunction with its partner TELLUS Research has invested into studying leading ecosystems and how they have evolved. With technology trends, such as Social Software, Cloud Computing and Service Orientated Architectures (SOA), we are seeing a pressure to evolve from traditional hub and spoke ecosystem models to Partner-To-Partner (P2P) network models. Recent studies by IDC show conclusively the power of P2P networking and the performance gains can be achieved across the whole ecosystem.

Me2: Financial Challenges Spur Innovative IT and Business Solutions

With one of the most difficult economic situations facing government and business organizations today, IT departments around the Globe are re-evaluating their IT strategies and seeking innovative solutions that create competitive advantage.With limited budgets and a highly dynamic marketplace, it is imperative to meet the demands of constantly changing business needs.

Mindware’s Enterprise 2.0 (Me2) framework enables the next wave of knowledge worker productivity and collaboration. This next generation collaborative framework helps organizations shift from “information handling” to “information interaction” and superior management. With Me2 technical teams can collaborate more easily with business teams to create processes  in real time, reducing requirements gathering and cycle times creating a collaborative relationship between IT and  business – creating an agile enterprise.

Me2 can help transform the way IT departments build and deploy custom applications by offering a faster, more cost-effective and risk adverse alternative to traditional application development. Me2 streamlines all stages of the application development process – from requirements gathering, design, coding, testing, and delivery. 

For example, with the Me2 Framework, a non-technical person is able to build sophisticated applications from a drag and drop menu of pre-configured software modules without using any code and publish them as a web service instantly across the web making them available to other users within the organization for reuse and/or further development.

The advantage of developing from within a Browser is the speed of which an application can connect to other applications and business logic.  Me2 results in economies of scale in which each application deployed decreases the overall costs of all existing applications since it does not require additional infrastructure or resources.

Andrew McAfee of the HarvardBusinessSchool defines Enterprise 2.0 as” the use of emergent social software platforms within companies or between companies and their partners or customers.  Such software enables collaboration and promotes community”.

What Is Enterprise 2.0?  Enterprise 2.0 is the term for the technologies and business practices that liberate the workforce from the constraints of legacy communication and productivity tools like email. It provides business managers with access to the right information at the right time through a web of interconnected applications, services and devices. Enterprise 2.0 makes accessible the collective intelligence of many sources, translating to a huge competitive advantage in the form of increased innovation, productivity and agility 

Me2 BENEFITS

·         Facilitates greater business agility

·         Promotes organizational flexibility

·         User-driven technology                                                                        

·         IT and Business teams can be global

·         Simple to orchestrate

·         Organizational Transparency

·         Short time-to-market cycles

With Me2 Enterprise 2.0, users instantly access data from Internet Portals and applications, ERP, CRM, SCM, TMS, BI, Project Plans, Spreadsheets, Text/PDF files, Visio, CAD, OCR, Mainframes, AS 400 systems, EDI, and Databases such as DB2, Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase, etc.

The ability to manage, analyze, integrate, and correlate information from many diverse sources becomes an automated process through the introduction of Mindware’s Me2 Framework. This includes the ability to acquire, source, and automatically liberate data from most data sources.

Mindware’s Me2 Enterprise 2.0 Framework delivers the benefits of SOA and BPM, and fully complies with all standards, but without the massive coding effort, time, cost, and risk involved, in application development.

Me2 is unprecedented in the technology arena today and fills a vital need for business transformation and modernization for federal agencies and other organizations within our government. This pioneering solution augments and extends the life of existing technology investments--not replacing them by making it easier to integrate and extend legacy environments.

Me2 Enterprise 2.0 provides an affordable and workable framework, for quickly acquiring critical legacy data -- without writing any code -- and ultimately pushing these essential assets to designated authorities for decision acuity.

Finally, Me2 accelerates the refining existing processes and procedures and creates reusable business applications, processes and procedures, as needed, to enable controlled, accountable access to data sources and programs

 “The way we work is changing rapidly, offering an enormous competitive advantage to those who embrace the new tools that enable contextual, agile and simplified information exchange and collaboration to distributed workforces and networks of partners and customers”.

**No Desktop installations    

**No Programming     

**The Browser becomes the Desktop  

Lombard Global is a proud reseller, strategic marketing partner and implementation consultants for the above strategic technology. 

BUSINESS/TECHNOLOGY VENDOR SELECTION SERVICES 
Today’s decisions are complex, combining hard facts with expert intuition. Rapid business decision-making often requires collaboration across time zones, organizations and cultural norms. Lombard Global's process and/or software partners bring the power of proven collaborative decision-making processes and technology to your internal and external teams. With Lombard Global you will save time, make better decisions and improve your bottom line results.