Columnist’s corner: There’s a new lightweight services model that lets SMBs “tap into the expertise and resources of larger, more specialized organizations and focus on the layer where you really add value,” David Margulius asserts in this week’s Enterprise Insight. The light went on inside the mind of Margulius upon realizing that instead of writing proprietary search for his niche Web site, he could more simply institute Google’s business edition. Margulius is not alone, either. Digisense skipped writing man-centuries of code to deliver its secure data management service, opting instead to build atop best-of-breed resources, such as Amazon’s S3, and open source modules. That way, Digisense can focus on the crucial piece, it’s specialty. “We little guys have more IT capability at our beck and call these days, and more affordably, than we ever imagined.” Best of the blogs: The notion that Apple is “a bunch of scaredy cats” ran through Randall Kennedy’s mind, he writes, upon reading David Marshall’s post about Mac OS X and virtualization. “It seems the company is finally ‘loosening-up’ and letting customers run OS X inside of virtual machines (previously, this was impossible due to various clauses in the OS X EULA). However, the new capability comes with some rather draconian restrictions attached,” Kennedy writes in What’s Apple so afraid of? “Apple is afraid that, if they allow virtualization, they will be tacitly endorsing the idea that the Mac OS and Mac hardware are separate entities. And once they do that — once they allow customers to start thinking about OS X running in non-Mac hardware environments (even virtual ones) — they open the floodgates to all sorts of insane requests.” From the Test Center: Though many in IT are not as aware of Adobe’s BPM strength as they are of its other wares, the company has achieved a lot, BPM-wise, during the past three years. “What Adobe hadn’t accomplished, until now, was to provide a unified solution that was easily managed,” Mike Heck writes in From BPM, ERP, Adobe LiveCycle bridges apps across the board. “This suite hones in on Adobe’s specialty — providing customers and employees with a gratifying experience when using your data-driven applications.” Careers: Bob Lewis is taking one last shot at the ethics of deception. The criticisms to his recent posting on the matter, you see, have him concerned because of their very nature. The matter concerns overstating positions, strawmen and, worst of all, cruelty. “Managers and professionals who make use of these polemical techniques on their staff or co-workers will find they damage their credibility and ability to collaborate at least as much as telling them Fred left under his own steam so as to concentrate on pursuing a new career direction.” Software Development