So, what technologies and projects are on IT managers’ docket this year?  Our new report includes insight and data on:

• Which of the following IT initiatives are on your organization’s project list for 2012?
• Will your IT budget increase or decrease for 2012?
• By approximately what percentage will your IT budget increase for 2012?
• What are your overall business technology priorities for 2012?
• How and by what departments are specific projects like MDM, Big Data and Private/Public Cloud  being funded?

Download the full report today and see where your technology falls on the priority and spending list.

2012 IT Spending Priorities Survy
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InformationWeek’s third annual Government IT Leadership Forum was held at the Newseum on Pennsylvania Avenue, within walking distance of the Capitol and many federal agencies. In addition to the Federal CIO and CTO, our impressive speaker lineup included Department of Defense CIO Teri Takai, FBI CTO Jeff Johnson, and Al Tarasiuk, CIO of the U.S. Intelligence Community (whose member agencies include the CIA, National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, and others).

The big tech challenge in Washington these days is how agencies can get by on the $79 billion federal IT budget. That sounds like a lot, and it is, but the feds haven’t had an IT budget increase in three, going on four, years, and much of their spending goes to support legacy computer systems. New, innovative approaches are needed. The White House, DoD, Department of Energy, Intelligence Community, and other agencies talked about shared services, cloud computing, BYOD (bring your own devices to work), and some of the other non-traditional approaches they’re taking. A growing number of people are using the “agile government” to describe this better, faster, cheaper way of working.

Federal IT execs are looking outside of the Washington beltway for ideas on what more they should be doing. The Forum included a session titled “Brainstorming with the Private Sector,” where two business CIOs–Lorraine Cichowski of the Associated Press and Steve Phillips of Avnet–shared ideas with the government IT managers in the audience. This kind of collaboration between the public and private sectors is desperately needed, and it’s something that InformationWeek, with our many years in the enterprise IT market, is uniquely positioned to facilitate. You may remember that last year we arranged a meeting between a dozen public and private sector CIOs at the White House, at the request of Vivek Kundra, who was Federal CIO at the time.

The Government IT Leadership Forum is a place where attendees can rub elbows with the power brokers of federal IT. Many of the 18 speakers are people that InformationWeek’s editors know directly, having worked with them over the past year.

We have posted a series of articles from the Forum on InformationWeek.com, and there’s more to come:

• 10 Lessons From Leading Government CIOs
• NASA Blue Marble Project: Visual Data Lessons
• Pentagon CIO Talks Security, Mobility, Shared Services
• DOE Hybrid Cloud May Be Model For Future
• Federal CIO Touts Shared Services Model

Videos of each session will be posted on our Website shortly, and the June digital issue of InformationWeek Government will be devoted to best practices, anecdotes and takeaways from the Forum.

Yet many vendors squander this opportunity by failing to provide the kind of content potential buyers need, according to new UBM TechWeb research. Based on survey of 240 business technology decision makers conducted in March 2012, the new research sheds light on what prospects want—and what they don’t—when it comes to vendor content.

Think you’ll find the data very interesting. Download the research brief now — and let us at CreateYourNextCustomer.com know what you think!

Research Brief: Buyers Research 2012
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“We are pleased that Interop is a platform for highlighting advancements in business technology, from companies like NEC and all Best of Interop award winners,” said Jennifer Jessup, Interop General Manager. “The Best of Interop Awards is one of the highlights of Interop Las Vegas- showcasing the companies that are playing a vital role in helping shape our future. We want to congratulate all participating companies for their continued innovation and participation in Best of interop.”

“The Best of Interop Awards presents leading edge technologies of the outstanding IT vendors in the industry,” said Art Wittmann, Vice President and Director, InformationWeek Reports.   “NEC and each of the category winners represent a true commitment to innovation in business technology and deserve recognition for helping build and strengthen today’s IT marketplace.”

The 2012 Best of Interop Awards winners in each category are:

• Cloud Computing & Virtualization: Citrix Systems – Citrix VDI-in-a-Box
• Collaboration: Alcatel-Lucent – Alcatel-Lucent OpenTouch Conversation
• Data Center & Storage: Panzura – Panzura Quicksilver Global Cloud Storage System v3.0
• Management, Monitoring & Testing: NEC Corporation of America – NEC ProgrammableFlow Controller, PF6800
• Networking: Gnodal – New GS-Series Switch
• Performance Optimization: Cisco – AppNav Virtualization Technology
• Security: McAfee – McAfee Network Security XC Cluster
• Wireless & Mobility: Cloudpath Networks – XpressConnect Enrollment System

In addition to these eight category winners, special recognition was also awarded to V3 Systems for Best Startup.

Best of Interop recognizes some of the world’s most innovative technologies across eight major categories. More than 130 companies’ submitted products for consideration and judges selected finalists based on the products they believe have the greatest potential to impact and advance business technology efficiencies.  The panel of judges chosen to select the Best of Interop finalists was made up of 16 award-winning editors and analysts from InformationWeek Reports.

Best of Interop is hosted by InformationWeek Reports.  For more information on Best of Interop categories and awards, visit www.bestofinterop.com.

Rob O’Regan of eVitals captured UBM TechWeb’s story of how it overcame its data challenges from the inside out perfectly.   I wanted to share his assessment and the lessons we are learning here at UBM TechWeb.

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*This article originally appeared on emediavitals.com on May 3, 2012.*

Media companies seeking to become more “customer driven” are adopting practices commonly used by consumer marketers, such as loyalty marketing or behavioral targeting. As publishers invest in these efforts, many are running into a barrier that most marketers can relate to: an unclear or incomplete view of who their customers actually are.

The problem stems from all the different ways multi-platform publishers collect and manage information about their audience, within and across publications and brands: through print subscriptions, web visits, email lists, event attendance, app downloads … the list goes on. Often, this information is collected by different tools, stored in different databases, and viewed by different groups.

That’s a challenge for any publisher looking to improve the way it serves its most valuable customers: regular visitor who consume multiple content assets and other products across different channels. This audience segment is far more valuable than fly-by web visitors or print-only subscribers, especially as publishers look to generate more customer revenue as a way to offset declining ad sales.

UBM TechWeb, publisher of technology brands such as InformationWeek, BYTE, Dr Dobb’s and BlackHat, has addressed this challenge from the inside out, building a consolidated customer database that serves as the core of the company’s multi-channel marketing approach, which it has dubbed “Curvonomics.”

Curvonomics is UBM TechWeb’s way of measuring the value of its audience of IT professionals based on the content they consume. As a visitor digs more deeply into TechWeb content – viewing a page, downloading a white paper, attending a webinar or a live event – his or her value increases. The more UBM TechWeb learns about each visitor’s engagement and activities, the better they can serve them, in order to increase their value further.

The “curve” represents a customer’s economic progression from low-CPM display advertising to high-end paid conferences, said Scott Vaughan, UBM TechWeb’s chief marketing officer. “A visitor can come in at any point on the curve, and we assign a value to each of those engagements,” he said. “The goal is to logically move the buyer up or down the curve, with a focus on ARPU [average revenue per user}. And the data tells us where to take them.”

24 databases into 1

Ah, the data. That brings us back to the consolidated database. Five years ago, UBM TechWeb had 24 databases storing various types of audience information across multiple brands. Now, it has one primary customer database.

It’s not quite a 360-degree view of the customer – but it’s getting there. UBM TechWeb has increased ARPU by 5 percent, and the number of active registered users (defined as users who have engaged over the last 12 months) has grown by 19 percent. Audience revenue now accounts for 45 percent of the company’s total revenues, withmarketing services (including advertising) accounting for the rest.

4 areas of focus

At the beginning, Curvonomics was more theory than reality. To build out the concept, UBM TechWeb focused on four key areas:

The model: ”We had to really think about the different components that we wanted to measure and understand,” said Vaughan. “Who are the customers, what are the segments, what products are they engaging with, and how should we measure those engagements?”

“We used to segment by things like title or size of company. Now, we can do it by behavior,” he said. “The ability to understand what a person is interested in allows you to do more effective targeting.”

The technology: UBM TechWeb needed tools that would allow for continuously monitoring user engagement and interactions. A home-grown registration system was integrated with marketing automation software from Eloqua. A single sign-on system, which will enable users to keep their ID across all brands and assets, is under development.

The process. ”Instead of looking at marketing automation for things like traditional lead generation, we flipped it to look at how users are engaging with specific content – from newsletter subscriptions to conference attendance,” Vaughan said. “That gave us a pretty good thumbprint of individual users.”

From there, data teams segmented users into behavioral groups, which are targeted in different ways. One segment, for example, is “lurkers,” the people who visit a website regularly, download an occasional white paper, but are not quite ready to “raise their hand” and fully engage.

“We continue to nurture this group with high-value content, to keep them engaged and to get them to share more information – on their terms, not ours,” Vaughan explained. “It takes tremendous discipline to deliver that information in the right way at the right time.”

The culture: The biggest challenge is getting everyone at the company comfortable with this new data-driven approach to publishing. Emphasis is placed on understanding how to use and act on the data – without becoming captive to it. “There’s so much data, it can freeze you if you let it,” said Vaughan. “Data will tell you a lot, but there’s still a lot of art in how you communicate with your audience.”

Vaughan’s advice for getting the workforce to buy into this type of strategic shift: “Don’t get bogged down in the way you’ve always done things. Start with aspiration, then move to inspiration, then motivation. You’ll quickly see the people who are excited by the challenge.”

*This article originally appeared on emediavitals.com on May 3, 2012.*

Cloud security provider Zscaler’s report analyzing the Web activity of its enterprise customers during the first quarter of 2012 shows some interesting data about how organizations are–and aren’t–using social networking.

Based on URLs its customers are accessing, Zscaler examined the Web content categories most commonly used by enterprise employees. Social networking accounted for 5.23% of activity, compared with 9.16% for Web search, 11.3% for Internet services, 12.8% for corporate marketing, and 13.13% for professional services. The biggest category was “other,” at 21.79%.

When it comes to the Web app transactions logged in the first quarter by Zscaler customers, Facebook was far and away the leader, at 41.07%. Following far behind were Gmail (18.26%), YouTube (8.29%), and Twitter (7.24%).

However, Zscaler found that while Facebook was the top Web app from its customer database, Facebook usage has been declining month to month. For example, during the first quarter of the year, Facebook made up 41.72% of traffic in January and 40.54% in March. “This matches up with the Facebook data points we have from last year, in which we are seeing a decline with a slope of about negative 2.8% per quarter,” the report stated. Conversely, Zscaler has seen an uptick in Twitter traffic over time.

Zscaler posits that the drops in social networking traffic it has seen (including a drop in LinkedIn traffic) can be attributed to an increase in the application of social networking policy by enterprises. Indeed, said the report, there are indications that companies are placing more controls on what it being accessed over the Web by employees: Zscaler noted that it has seen policy blocks against users attempting to access social networking sites increase from 2.46% in January to 3.99% in March; policy blocks on users attempting to post/write content to social networking sites increase from 0.01% in January to 0.18% in March; and streaming media blocks increase from 0.38% to 0.46%.

As the use of social networking becomes more tightly ingrained in enterprise activities, numbers like the ones Zscaler presents in its Q1 2012 report will be more challenging to parse. For example, in its Web content category, Zscaler breaks out social networking from corporate marketing. However, the two are often one and the same for companies these days. Further, we will likely see companies continuing to experiment with different social media platforms to see what “sticks,” which will no doubt cause Facebook, Twitter, and other social sites’ traffic to rise and fall accordingly over time. And what about rising social stars such as Pinterest? We may see traffic to sites such as Facebook and Twitter drop as organizations and their customers spread their social time over more and more sites.

The increasing use of social media policy at organizations–including stricter governance around who can and can’t post for the company and what can and can’t be posted–will also continue to affect traffic stats moving forward.

What percentage of Web traffic does social media represent at your company? Is the traffic all business, or is social not yet on the radar as a business app for your company? Please share your insight in the comments section below.

The study includes data on:

• Biggest IT Security Challenges
• Security Breaches Over Past Year
• Most Effective Security Practices
• Top Security Threats
• Security Spending

On the mobile device front, a full quarter of respondents say smartphones and tablets represent a significant threat to security.

It’s clear from the survey that organizations take cloud security much more seriously than in the past. The percentage of respondents who conduct their own risk assessments of cloud providers jumped to 29% this year, from 18% in 2011. Even better news is that the percentage of companies that don’t bother with a risk assessment dropped by almost half compared to 2011.

The report drills into data on secure software development as well. This is an important component of a risk management practice because flaws and defects in software can be exploited by attackers. InformationWeek’s recommendation is for organizations to invest in a secure software development life cycle. Only a third of our 946 respondents do so. That’s a number that needs to grow. For those that do use a secure SDLC, 33% rate it to be very effective.

This year’s report also delves into why IT decision makers should pay more attention to access controls, the importance of user education, the benefits of collecting and analyzing security metrics, and the usefulness (or lack thereof) of cyber-breach insurance.

Read this year’s report to get inside the minds of more than 945 IT and security decision makers.  Download the full report today.

2012 Strategic Security Survey
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During a Focus roundtable that took place on May 4th, UBM TechWeb CMO Scott Vaughan shared his thoughts on:

• How IT and business professionals are consuming information and media today
• What media companies did to deal with these new content consumption patterns
• What marketers can learn from the B2B media companies that have navigated this market transition

Listen to this 45 minute podcast for some great insight and advice on how to market and engage business and technology professionals.  Listen now.