​Florin Rotar was named chief technology innovation officer and Stella Goulet chief marketing officer at Avanade, Seattle.

​Avanade, a consulting company with more than 17,000* employees, has found a way to break free from the email collaboration trap by establishing a company-wide enterprise social network -- and you can learn a lot from how they did it.

​Technology consulting firm Avanade has entered into an agreement to purchase eight-year-old Seattle technology company Azaleos. As a result of the deal, terms of which weren’t disclosed, the 200 employees at Azaleos will be offered positions at Avanade.

​Premier 100 IT Leader Chris Miller also answers questions on long-term unemployment and coping with a woefully understaffed IT department

Windows 8 is suitable for all businesses, but some companies are better off with Windows 7, according to Avanade CTO Adam Wengert.

​Microsoft Windows 8 is expected to further accelerate use of tablets and smartphones in the enterprise, according to Avanade.

​Enterprises are beginning to leverage mobility to transform their business processes rather than simply providing always-on access to email and calendaring. Healthcare, financial services and retail are at the forefront of using mobile to transform their businesses, and Windows 8 may accelerate the process.

​Gamified applications are configured to encourage adoption -- not to fool employees into thinking they are having fun, said Barry Givens, director of product management for CRM at Avanade. "Gamification techniques are valuable tools for measuring employee activities and providing feedback to them on their performance," he added, and are "best leveraged with a rewards system in place."

Brian Boardman, responsible for developing CRM industry solutions, strategic sales engagements and CRM marketing for Avanade, a joint venture between Microsoft and Accenture, recently discussed with Loyalty360 some of the CRM challenges and opportunities facing companies today.

​A lot of hype surrounds the term big data, but there's also a lot of action. Like the Oakland Athletics under Billy Beane in the Moneyball era, a majority of organizations today are making the transition to a culture that leverages data and analytics to increase revenue and improve efficiency.

For our 90th anniversary, Workforce Management ran two bracket challenges to determine the most important topic in the workplace and in pop culture as it relates to the workforce. The contest took place on our 90th anniversary website (workforce.com/90th). The winners of the tournaments were the Internet for the Workforce Impact bracket and "Seinfeld" for the Pop Culture bracket.

​The term “Big Data” may be vying for status as one of the most over-used marketing phrases of the year, but that doesn’t mean the concept isn’t real.

​Finding developers with the skills to create MapReduce jobs in Apache Hadoop is challenging, but you can ease that hiring pain with Cascading, an open source Java application framework for building enterprise Big Data applications on Hadoop.

​Big data has become an increasingly pressing issue for the IT community over the last year, with many people debating the actual value of it all. Sure, big data offers a lot of potential, but if you don't have plans for how to make use of that data, then it's not much help to anyone.

Recently I had the opportunity to chat with Jason Waxman, the General Manager of Intel‘s Data Center Group. Waxman is responsible for the chip behemoth’s initiatives around Cloud Computing and is currently helping to organize an Open Data Center Alliance event in New York next week. It was an enlightening conversation covering a wide range of topics. What struck me was his level of excitement around not only cloud computing, but also what he describes as the fundamental driving force behind companies moving to the cloud.

​Business intelligence is used by a majority of companies, according to an Avanade survey. But the software also offers challenges.

​Avaya and other networking vendors are creating offerings to make it easier and more secure for employees to access the corporate networks with their smartphones and tablets.

​Juniper joins other vendors, including HP and Cisco, in offering products and features to ease the management and security of mobile devices accessing the corporate network.

​Measures of user experience and engagement can be difficult to harness, but the concept of gamification in the enterprise has already started changing the mentality of IT departments by disrupting preconceptions about superficial contests and silly prizes give way to more legitimate use cases.

Accenture and Avanade are providing customers with complete end-to-end public cloud solutions, from design and delivery through operations and management – something no other service provider can offer.