Opinion

Change management strategy for legacy IT transformation

One of the biggest challenges facing IT executives and organizations trying to transform their legacy applications, infrastructure and operations is the resistance to change. In many cases, this resistance to change is likely justifiable for numerous

New virtualization surveys and data hit the streets

Gartner recently said that virtualization will be the highest-impact trend, changing infrastructure and operations through 2012. But Gartner isn't alone these last two weeks coming out with new data and survey information that covers virtualizat

BitNami makes it easy for mom & semi-geeks to use OSS

I recently caught up with BitRock's CEO, Erica Brescia, & founder Daniel Lopez to hear more about BitRock & BitNami. BitRock's goal is to help drive the widespread use of OSS products by reducing barriers for both customers

MySQL conference preview

After our late night April Fool's dolphin stunt last week, I got roped into doing an early morning video shoot to preview some of the upcoming items for next week's MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara. I did this on about 4 hours sle

A service-oriented Test Center Tracker

It's Tuesday in the Test Center, and there's a wealth of blogging on services of one sort or another. There are services from large to small, internal to external — it's just a service-oriented world out there. Google leads Salesforce

Bitter fruit and broken promises: My “hackintosh” odyssesy (and more)

A week ago I solicited suggestions on which version of *nix to try next. I'd been "jonesing" for a new OS experience, and it made sense to see how some of my previous choices had evolved during my six month hiatus. So, after co

Does SOA mean “social-oriented architecture”?

It seems that IBM views SOA as needing a dating service, and has formed a "social network" to assist SOA builders in communicating, one to another, according to this article. "LAS VEGAS –Amidst a marching band, a Harley Davidson motor

Laptop follies

I did tech support for a company with a few dozen account managers scattered throughout the U.S. Most of them had many years of experience in a business with a multitude of nuance and detail that had to be attended to with the initial contract, and o

SaaS favors Google over Salesforce

To say that strategy and technology are finally becoming interlinked in business is pure BS. It has always been thus. I'm certain that when the first cash-register salesman convinced the first general-store owner to buy a cash register, the sale

RIA vendor Curl shifts to Eclipse

Rich Internet Application (RIA) vendor Curl, named InfoWorld's 2008 Technology of the Year in the RIA category, announced that they will be rebasing the Curl IDE on Eclipse. The Eclipse-based product, named Curl Development Tools for Eclipse (CD

Free Web-based content management for sites

Let's start with the press release: On Tuesday, April 8, Stateless Systems will launch a private beta of CushyCMS, a fast, simple and free Content Management System that aims to make Web designers’ lives a lot more comfortable. Unlike

Can OSS infrastructure vendors thrive in a cloud computing future?

Many of you likely read highlights from Gartner's "The State of Open Source, 2008" report a few weeks back. You can read the report here. Considering all the hype around cloud computing, I re-read Gartner's comments on OSS and clo

Don’t look back

While I was on my way to the Open Source Goat Rodeo gathering in Utah, Bill Snyder, another blogger over at InfoWorld, posted a story called "Open Source Databases: The 97 Pound Weakling?" Despite the odd headline, Snyder's post has so

Yahoo’s not getting the message

<P>I couldn't help but shake my head a bit over <A href="/article/08/04/07/Yahoo-previews-online-ad-management-platform_1.html">today's announcement about</A> Yahoo's plans to re-make

Swallowing Yahoo may make Microsoft want to take a nap

If Microsoft succeeds in buying Yahoo for $40 something billion I got to wondering how long will it take Microsoft to achieve ROI on the acquisition? Well, last year Yahoo's gross profit was a bit over $4 billion. If revenue and profits continue

The SMB Security Parfait

I'm here in San Francisco, at the quiet first day of the RSA Conference, listening to a bunch of very smart people talk about computer and network security. There are a few things that pretty much everyone seems to agree on. The first of these i

Apple fights NYC over green apple logo

Look at this logo for a moment: If you saw it on a reusable cloth shopping bag, would you think for a moment, "Hey, that must be Apple's new iBag!"? Apparently, Apple is worried that's the case. The above logo is actually the embl

Oops, you just spilled Quechup on your pants

Just when you thought it was safe to re-enter the online dating pool (actually it's never safe) comes news from Cringester E. T. about social network Quechup putting spam sandwiches back on the menu. It seems that all of a sudden she's gett

Generating data

OK, I found a couple things this weekend that were pretty cool. First, Red-Gate has a new data generator. It's been a long time since a standalone data generator has hit the market. I'm not sure why, but so many think that they can get away

Will you like Curl?

As Doug Dineley and I were discussing my draft review of Curl last week, now posted here, he asked me a serious question: You essentially recommend readers to give Curl a try. Is there a way to tell who is the best kind of match for this product? I m

Test Center Tracker: Packeteer sizzles at CIFS; RIA development heats up

WAN speed record: For several years running, our testing of WAN acceleration appliances has served mainly to chronicle the superiority of the Riverbed Steelhead, whose approach to byte- or segment-level caching and CIFS optimization has made it the p

Fuzzy thinking

I've had my head in the clouds the past few days, mulling the nature of cloud computing. Some might ask: Why bother? It's just another marketing concept cooked up by vendors that has no real meaning. Call me credulous, but…

Whether to mention a pregnancy in a job interview

Dear Bob …I have a real ethical dilemma and would appreciate any advise. Two weeks ago I was notified that the company I worked for for the last eight years is closing down. It was an "effective immediately" kind of a notice. A week later

eG Innovations tackles the virtualization management market

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Srinivas Ramanathan, founder, president & CEO of eG Innovations, Inc. I stopped by their booth at VMworld Europe, and was happy to follow up with Ramanathan a few weeks later to find out more about the

WOA vs. SOA?

Dana Gardner is for WOA, or Web Oriented Architecture, as mentioned in his most recent blog post. You can think of WOA as SOA meets the Web 2.0, but perhaps it's not that simple WOA may indeed lead to SOA, and evolve differently albeit using the

VMware predicts the death of the OS. Well, sort of.

If you've gone to one of the recent VMworld events, you might have heard once or twice that VMware predicted the death of the operating system. I've heard something to that effect, and found it quite interesting. Predicting the death of som

What happened to the server in VMware ESX Server?

Without any press announcement or ticker-tape parade, VMware decided to quietly remove the "server" from the VMware ESX Server product line. In case you missed it, VMware's hypervisor product is no longer called VMware ESX Server. At t

Why we still need Windows XP

This week, the blogosphere has been chock full of ranting about Windows XP's impending demise. The confirmation by Microsoft that Windows XP will cease to exist as a commercial product at the end of June has triggered all kinds of commentary, in

A possible meeting protocol

Dear Bob …[In response to "Running an effective meeting," Advice Line, 3/24/2008)] An old military tradition when soliciting consensus or opinion on a specific topic is to ask the meeting participants in reverse seniority order. The think

Is support for OSS optional in your business?

Jon Williams, CTO at Kaplan Test Prep co-founder of the New York CTO club, and InfoWorld blogger, wrote something very interesting: "….Matt Asay, OSBC organizer and also an open source vendor. He asked me the following:- "If an open sourc

Geek Week: XP’s not sacked, iPhone dev kit hacked

Full speed behind. It seems the rumors of XP's death have been greatly exaggerated. Microsoft has bowed to overwhelming demand and decided to give XP a reprieve, kinda sorta. Scheduled to get the gas chamber in July, XP will continue to live and

SOA benefits

I thought that this post by Scott Draeger, EDP, Senior Product Manager, Exstream Software, was a pretty good description of the good, bad, and ugly of SOA. He lists the benefits as: "Easily integrates existing systems with new technologies, busi

Nokia N810 Tablet + WiMax

This week at the CTIA conference in Vegas, Nokia showed off their next generation N810 Internet tablet now with WiMax access, giving even higher speed browsing than Wi-Fi enables. This is the 3rd (or 3 1/2?) iteration of the Nokia tablet and it shows

HP aggravates its failure rate

<P>It's annoying enough when you suffer a high failure rate on the PCs you're getting from a vendor. But, as one reader has recently experienced with HP, what can be vastly more aggravating is when you can't get them to tell you

IBM combines Systems i and p into greener Power System

IBM has made some notable green strides with its newly unveiled line of Power System servers, according to an analysis piece by Joe Clabby. The water-cooling design for example, which brings H2O directly to the microprocessor, is pretty darn innovati

AIR is nice, but probably not the next big thing

InfoWorld's Test Center chief technologist, Tom Yager, sometimes gets a little carried away in his enthusiasms, at least from where I sit. His deification of Adobe AIR in his recent posting AIR gets rich apps right is one of those cases: I'

Open source is good for IT

Vendors need to right-size their products

I've used the term "Right Sizing Your Infrastructure" to describe one reason that OSS penetration grew and continues to grow. Looking back 5 years at the enterprise middleware market, most vendors offered ~3 different editions of their

Virtualization helping to push Infiniband technology

For years now, Infiniband technology has been trying to push its way into the datacenter. However, lately, it seems to be getting a name out there as a serious technology to help overcome some of the limitations that come with virtualization. One com

A Windows user’s first time with a Mac

I'm a longtime user of Windows, but I recently got a chance to test out a new iMac, courtesy of Apple. While I plan to remain a loyal user of Vista, I did find there was a lot to like about this machine. (As I wrote in another post, I'd eve

Centrify unites Group Policy and Mac (and more)

Suppose you're an IT admin at a Windows-centric shop, yet you want to bring Macs (or other non-Windows desktops) into the fold. Can you? Yes, Macs can be controlled mildly through an Apple server — but you have an Active Directory domain using

Is the Mac ready for the enterprise?

Not long ago, Apple sent me a beautiful new iMac to play with and test in the hopes I would "convert" to the Apple world — or at least be more aware about what's happening there. For a Windows pro like myself (that is, the author of t

Open source databases: the 97-pound weakling

Linux, Apache, JBoss, and other open source technologies are kicking sand in the faces of the big boys on the operating system and middleware tiers, but when it comes to the database world, open source is still a 97-pound weakling. And despite some h

Harnessing datacenter heat for savings

The heat that pours out of your datacenter machinery represents a hefty chunk of your monthly utility bills. After all, were it not for that heat waste, you wouldn't be pouring dollars into running that pricey cooling equipment to ensure your va

The universal SOA?

It's clear that many of the services we consume and mange going forward will be services that exist outside of the enterprise, such as subscription services from guys like Salesforce.com, or perhaps emerging Web services marketplaces. This is ou

More on the downside of VDA

Download file…

Citrix XenServer 4.1 comes with new features and new pricing

Citrix announced the availability of Citrix XenServer 4.1, the company's first release since Citrix acquired XenSource in late 2007. The release included enhancements to the product as well as a major shift in the product's pricing. The com

The VMware Workstation and ACE Beta upgrades

The latest version of the incredibly popular desktop virtualization solution from VMware, Workstation 6.5, is now in Beta and available for download. At the same time, the company also announced a new version of ACE, VMware ACE 2.5 Beta. What's

Event: Uptime, IT heavyweights to tackle data center power crisis

IT energy consumption is growing at such a rapid pace that we'll need another 30 power plants in the United States alone to meet demand. That is one of the findings of a recent datacenter study by the Uptime Institute pointing to a power crisis

Managing Switches for Policy-Based Networking

My recent blog post about Lockdown Networks demise seems to have struck a chord. I've heard from a few enterprise users and product vendors as a result, and NetClarity recently disclosed their patented approach for connecting to switches in exis