Best of the blogs: In the newly-minted blog, The Real-Time Enterprise, Tony Bishop takes on the weighty topic of business transformation through a virtual-oriented utility strategy. A mouthful, indeed, but Bishop writes that, “if you want to create a business aligned IT operation, the approach, the methodology, the technology and the operating model must be top down driven — not bottom up. The value of this lesson resulted in 10-50x greater efficiencies than the traditional bottom approaches firms take and vendors sell.” That brings me a back a few moons to Tom Yager’s virtualization-oriented architecture piece, VOA takes SOA to the next level. Platforms: While some IT shops are holding off on Vista for the time being, those intrepid early adopters already are learning lessons about deploying with minimal disruption and how to get the most of the yearling OS. Take YMCA and its incremental strategy, for instance, or capacitor manufacturer Kemet, which began planning some 18 months ago. Vista deployment secrets. In the words of another Vista practitioner, Collegiate Housing Services IT director Sumeeth Evans, “security, stability and ease-of-use — that’s what I’m getting.” Related: Save Windows XP. The news beat: Major vendors join OpenID board, those being IBM, Google, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo. Japanese company Access says it will show off a browser widget for cell phones that could be used to provide weather reports, news, favorites from YouTube and so on. Indian outsourcers target infrastructure management services with hopes that doing so will double revenue. And, in surprising ways that actually include hardware, software and Wi-Fi, technology gets chic. Software Development