Opinion

Green features bloom in unexpected places

With organizations becoming increasingly keen on green, vendors are injecting green-oriented features into a predictable set of products. We've seen a server management suite, for example, groomed to cap the amount of energy a machine will consu

Proprietary open source

Proprietary Open Source Proprietary Open Source Proprietary Open Source Proprietary Open Source…there, Marc said it, so I can also 😉 Matt will say: "OK. "Words, words, words," as Hamlet might say. I'm not worried about the nom

Server virtualization and the business of I/O solutions

When introducing server virtualization into your environment, you may also be introducing an I/O bottleneck at the same time. Xsigo Systems announced the management integration of the Xsigo VP780 I/O Director and VMware VI3. And Gear6 announced a new

Klocwork advances source code analysis

Klocwork this week announced shipments of Klocwork Insight, bringing system-wide source code analysis to the developer desktop, the company said. The company has filed multiple patents on what it calls ground-breaking advancements in the product. Wit

Skyway Software joins Eclipse

Skyway Software, which offers model-based collaborative tools for software deloivery, has joined the Eclipse Foundation as an add-in provider member, the company said. “Today’s announcement marks another milestone in Skyway Software&rsquo

Demo08 says help desk is on the way with unique problem solving services

The dull but important and necessary category of help desks received its due at this year's Demo08 conference with a handful of companies offering some new twists to the old problem of customer service. To my mind, the most innovative help desk

Vista and Server 2008: better together?

First came IBM and the whole "PS/2 + OS/2" mantra. Then Microsoft picked-up the theme with Outlook and Exchange (much to the chagrin of the DOJ). Now we have this half-hearted campaign by Redmond to convince us all that Vista and Se

O Verizon, how I loathe thee

Why must this be so difficult, so painful? Why must you spurn me at every opportunity, causing me to rend my clothing and speak in tongues? This hold you have over me is distressing… O Verizon, how I loathe thee. You tempt me with promises of on-li

Citrix introduces VMware rival for desktop virtualization

Citrix Systems chose Demo08 to launch XenDesktop, a desktop virtualization datacenter application. Using Xen Desktop software will allow IT managers to provision hundreds of end points with memory and storage. Deploying the virtual desktop is a three

A Working Distinct LINQ Query in C#

As I mentioned Monday and in my Visual Studio 2008 review, I've been struggling with the finer points of LINQ queries. In a talkback comment to my review, "CSharper" pointed me at one solution to finding the LINQ equivalent of a SQL &q

The measurement hustle

Test Center Tracker: Virtualization rules

Today's Test Center Tracker is all about virtualization and includes news about an upcoming event, new emerging products and an intriguing perspective on what the future of this technology could be. The "V" forum is coming to town If y

Happy birthday, Vista?

It hardly seems possible, but it was one year ago today that Microsoft foisted Windows Vista onto a wary world. (OK — OEMs and enterprises had Vista foisted on them in November 2006, but January was the "big launch" for most of us). But in

InfoWorld’s Virtualization Executive Forum days away

IDG's InfoWorld is gearing up for its fifth Virtualization Executive Forum, taking place Monday, February 4th at the Hotel Nikko in San Francisco, California. The executive-level event will explore enterprise commitment to virtualization in orde

Save XP? Why bother?

I'd love to defend Microsoft Vista against Mac, Linux, or some obscure OS — but instead, I find myself defending it against Windows XP. That's because all I hear is warring from within the Microsoft community about how unfair it is that th

Self-aware virtualization

A task, a block of memory, or a network socket that knows why it exists can move anywhere The pain point for any IT endeavor is marrying requirements to solutions. Much of the learned art of IT management is invested in planning, sizing, staging, and

Parallels announces Virtuozzo Containers 4.0

Parallels has been busy, as usual. The company has officially transitioned over from the SWsoft company name to Parallels full time. And they've also announced the release of its container-based server virtualization platform, Parallels Virtuozz

Demo08 goes green with a universal power supply and green Web site

In keeping with the times, Chris Shipley the director of Demo08 conference selected a two companies, GreenPlug and Celsias, around which to create the first DemoGreen portion of the conference. Having been around high tech for over 20 years, GreenPlu

Two more acquisitions

It's only Tuesday and there have been two more acquisitions in the open source market. While these aren't huge deals on the scale of JBoss or MySQL, they do signify ongoing consolidation in the market. -Nokia acquires Trolltech -SpringSourc

Demo08 demonstrates that traditional carriers are doomed

This year's Demo brought to light a telecommunications trend that must have the major carriers shaking in their boots. Simply put thanks to Web 2.0 and IP telephony, innovative startups are discovering they can create their own phone company and

Test Center Tracker: Turning Green into Gold

Spinning right action into good financial results, looking closely at Microsoft's Unified Messaging Server, and partaking of the Spirit of the Marathon — Winter storms aren't slowing things down here at InfoWorld. Green Pays: It's nic

Demo 08 sees wikis, translation and sales tools unveiled

This year's Demo08 conference in Palm Desert, Calif., got off to an unusually eclectic start. Typically, demonstrators are organized around categories like mobile, email, social networking and the like. Not this year. Each of the first dozen or

Felt Around the World

As I sit here typing I find I really don't know what to say. Ken Henderson, the author of the Guru's Guide to SQL Server series of books (and others), died Sunday. Ken was a good friend of mine and I just talked to him not long ago. I have

SpringSource buys Covalent

Just hours before my meeting with Rod to "get an update on what SpringSource has been up to", they go and pull the trigger on this…the nerve of these OSS upstarts! 😉 InfoWorld reports: "Through the acquisition, SpringSource plans t

Notes from the Open Group’s 17th Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference

I did the keynote yesterday at the Open Group conference held in San Francisco. The conference was well attended, as usual for Open Group events, and also as usual very talented enterprise architects made up the audience. I went for a different angle

Doing SOA Right

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Review: Brocade DCX Backbone Part 2

Review: Brocade DCX Backbone Part 2 Welcome to the second part of my first peek at the new DCX Backbone from Brocade. If you haven't already, please have a look at part 1 first. How physical security is implemented in your data center certainly

Behind the scenes at Net Promoter Miami

Black plasma

Nobody challenged the loud, overconfident marketing exec who thought an outdated idea was hip A high-profile exec was hired to do marketing, and find or create new ways to drum up business. He was smart, fairly good looking, and thought highly of eve

SaaS means business-to-business

Software as a service's ability to establish hubs for b-to-b data integration is winning over large and small converts alike For the most part, SaaS (software as a service) has been an evolutionary tale, one that offered quick wins to smaller pl

Quicken Users Can’t Put Stock in Intuit Reliability

<P>Intuit's never-ending campaign to force customers to upgrade by crippling older versions of its software has reached a new low. Quicken 2005 owners have been receiving "discontinuation" notices that as April 30, 2008, all the

Intel goes on green-tag buying spree

In an effort to fuel the growth of the clean-energy market, Intel today announced plans to spend an undisclosed sum purchasing more than 1.3 billion kilowatt hours per year in renewable energy credits (RECs). According to the U.S. Environmental Prote

Linux kernel update offered

Linux kernel developers have released an updated kernel featuring capabilities to offload processing and to boost power management. Released last week, release 2.6.24 of the kernel features a generic interface point for large receive offload support,

Can IT become the “nervous system” of business?

Businesses today face a tsunami of challenges unlike it has ever faced in history: globalization, geo-political, rise of the Internet consumer, customer mind-share dynamics, proliferation of information and content to manage and maintain (with regula

Ouch! VMware drubbed by Wall Street

VMware doubled its profit in the fourth quarter, and raised revenue by 80% year over year, but missed Wall Street’s sales target by $5 million. As a result, the stock plunged after hours, losing more than 20% of its value in a few minutes. I su

Nokia to acquire Trolltech to accelerate software strategy

I couldn't resist using the title from the press release. Mathew Aslett has a nice summary of Nokia's acquisition of Trolltech for about $153M USD. The deal appears to be for ~4x 2007 estimated revenues of ~$40M USD. Trolltech offers Qt for

Ecobutton a quick, slick reminder to power down PCs

Not only are tradeshows growing greener; so to is the promotional swag companies are doling out. One fine example is a clever device dubbed the ecobutton from called a company called BIG. The concept behind the ecobutton is pretty straightforward. Yo

Balancing strategic and tactical improvements

Dear Bob …My current boss has asked me to undertake an extensive review of organizational information practices, with an eye to (1) understanding how the business works, and (2) seeing what can be done to improve our practices.So far, I've doc

Test Center Tracker: Visual Studio 2008 a bright IDE

Visual Studio advances with few missteps: InfoWorld Strategic Developer Martin Heller has discovered a wealth of impressive developments in Microsoft's Visual Studio IDE, including expanded support for creating SOA, Web 2.0, Windows Presentation

Birds of a Feather

LINQ Queries Follow-up

When I was writing my review of Visual Studio 2008, I built a little console application that generated JavaScript data structures from a SQL Server 2000 database in C#, using LINQ to SQL. As I mentioned in the review, I never did figure out how to w

Amid AMD’s mounting losses market rumors could signal shift in HPC chips

Social media stuff you probably missed this week

Spirit of the marathon

This post is mostly off topic, but I do no know there are quite a few runners in the open source world. We have a modest-sized running club at MySQL with many marathoners, and there's also guys like Marc Fleury, Matt Asay who have also run marat

OLPC: Desperately seeking St. Nick

The One Laptop Per Child mishegas has hit the boiling point, and the hiss of steamed "Give One/Get None" donors has finally gotten the OLPC group's attention. After my last post about the OLPC problems, I received a flurry of messages

Black Duck offers Code Center for open source

Black Duck Software is announcing Black Duck Code Center on Monday, providing a software component selection, approval and tracking system designed to enable software development organizations to maximize benefits from reusing open source and other t

A tale of two Microsofts

Since InfoWorld launched its petition drive to save Windows XP two weeks ago, we've had over 75,000 people sign up. That's a strong message to Microsoft that people don't want to be forced to into buying Vista if Windows XP…

Windows 7: Will they or won’t they?

With all the speculation surrounding Windows 7 and its ever accelerating launch schedule, I found the following quote from an &quot;official&quot; Microsoft email to be most intriguing: &quot;We are still in the planning stages for Window

SMB Security: A Harsh Lesson

OK, so when you watch this video segment it's going to be obvious that a highly vindictive individual did very bad things, and I'm sure that there will be punishment: Watch the CNN video With that said, I was struck by the notion that any i

Bill Gates: An Impatient Optimist AND the Unified Messaging Server

I want to discuss two topics today. The first is the new direction for Microsoft founder Bill Gates. The second is an overview of the Unified Messaging Server. First off, Bill Gates is one of the richest men in the world — and one of the most genero