Opinion

When do you Cancel a SOA Project?

What? Linthicum is talking about canceling SOA? How can this be? As we discussed in previous blogs around defending SOA during budget cuts, there are indeed instances when a SOA project should be shut down in the interest of the business. This does n

Microsoft’s broadened virtualization strategy

Over the last few years, I've read and listened to numerous complaints from people about Microsoft not being fully invested in virtualization, that the software giant was simply sticking their big toe in the virtualization water to test it out.

PHD Technologies reaches company milestone: 1,000th customer

For many, the debate continues as to whether or not server virtualization is ready for the enterprise. But don't try and debate that issue with PHD Technologies, a backup and replication solutions provider for VMware Infrastructure 3 environment

Quest acquires Vizioncore on its virtualization journey

Quest Software is now the proud owner of virtualization backup and disaster recovery solution provider Vizioncore. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed. The company originally acquired a controlling interest in Vizioncore back in 2005 while on it

End-user-supplied metadata – problem or solution?

Dear Bob …Do you know of any cases where a large enterprise has used a Wiki for their metadata, allowing most people (after registering) with access to the intranet update the metadata?The problem we are having is that IT does not want to own (seem

Privacy? Paranoia?

Over on LooseWire (which I found via AllThingsD) Jeremy Wagstaff asks "Who Needs Enemies When You Have Facebook Friends?" He goes on to suggest that "It might be time to remove a) all your data and b) all third party apps f

Upcoming open source conferences (updated)

Here are a few upcoming open source conferences worth paying attention to: – SugarCRM Developers Conference, Feb 6-8, San Jose, CA – PHP Quebec, March 12-14, Montreal, Canada – EclipseCon, March 17-20, Santa Clara, CA – OSBC, March 25-26, San Francis

Adobe ships Flash Media Server 3 products

Adobe Systems said Friday it is shipping its Adobe Flash Media Server 3 family of products for streaming media and real-time communications. Featured in the line is the Flash Media Streaming Server 3 software for live and on-demand video streaming an

Geek Week in Review

Statue of limitations. So it turns out the Republic of Estonia's Internet infrastructure was taken down not by the Russian mafia or Vladimir Putin's cybergoons, but by a ticked-off 20-year-old. Dmitri Galushkevich has been fined $1,640 (a y

Visual environment eyed for Ruby on Rails

SapphireSteel Software, which has specialized in development tools for Ruby programmers, plans to soon release a visual design environment for Ruby on Rails, to be named The Visual Rails Workbench. Due in late-February, the environment will be an add

Control user installs of software

Learn how to verify the status of applications and data without wresting all control over what users put on their hard drives

Smaller drives nurture green IT

The world's first enterprise-class storage array to feature 2.5-inch drives reduces power consumption as well as footprint

Surgient awarded three interesting virtualization patents

Surgient, a virtual lab solution provider that is perhaps best known for their software testing product (VQMS), just announced that it has been awarded three new patents from the US Patent and Trademark Office. The company directly competes with Virt

Report: Green tech could save Feds nearly $275M per year

Efficiency doesn't tend to be a hallmark of the federal government, which might explain why the words government contract induces salivating amongst some CXOs the way bells caused Pavlov's pups to slobber. Green technology stands to reduce

LoopFuse launches, and so does Microsoft

Many of you likely missed Microsoft's earnings announcement. Considering all the news about LoopFuse, "a JBoss alumni-led startup" today, who could blame you? Since Roy Russo (whose life goal appears to be making fun of Canadians and m

Putting EULAs in a New Light

<P>We've seen a remarkable array of restrictive license agreement terms on hard goods over the years — <A href="http://www.gripe2ed.com/scoop/story/2003/10/22/221921/32">a woodworking tool</A> that only one person ca

Visual WebGui: Easier, More Secure Web 2.0 Apps?

The basic goal of Web 2.0 applications is to provide the user experience of a desktop application on the Web. As we all know from using Ajax and RIA applications, it's possible to get fairly close. As developers who have built such applications

Once Again…Setting the Record Straight

Dan Foody took me to task as a "flip flopper" in his recent post. "It's only two months ago that Dave Linthicum gave me a lot of flack when I criticized his statement to (and I quote) 'resist the temptation to redirect resour

Has open source sold out?

As open source goes mainstream, big commercial software companies reap as much revenue as scrappy independents Has the open source software movement become a victim of its own success? A provocative new study by a longtime software analyst suggests t

Dell’s shiny green blade server

The PowerEdge M-series from Dell has it all, from a hyper-efficient power supply to superior cooling and power management From a green-tech perspective, the most intriguing server I've ever known (from a distance) was the Gemini Green Series fro

The future is now — Java development in 2008

What do the past 12 months tell us about the year ahead?

Compete solely on price? No thanks.

A while ago Roy Russo had made a comment to the effect: "OSS needs to stop competing on price". Regardless what you read about him on the Interweb, I say, he's a smart guy! 😉 I've never really looked at the price of Windows vs.

Save XP?

I stumbled across a "Save XP" petition that InfoWorld is hosting: "Microsoft will end OEM and shrink-wrapped sales of Windows XP on June 30, 2008, forcing users to shift to Vista. …. Millions of us have grown comfortable with XP and

Vista successor already in the works

Well, we had to assume something would come after Vista — or did we think Microsoft just folded its hands, looked at all it had created, and said, "It is good" in the Biblical way? Windows 7, ladies and gentleman. What cool name will the m

A New SMB Podcast

We've got a new SMB IT podcast up, and it's a good one, with an interview covering questions about the value of a security information manager (SIM) for the small business space. It's a paradox, really: small businesses are most likely

Hackers gone wild

It's a hackers' world; we just surf in it. It's a truism that sites get hacked every day, and some may even deserve it. But we're no longer talking about individual hacks by disgruntled geeks. We're looking at massive, well-o

VersionOne adds Eclipse to agile development

VersionOne this week announced an upgrde to its V1: Agile product suite for managing agile software development projects, featuring what the company calls a simpler, more intuitive user interface and Eclipse integration. With Release 8 of V1, Users g

Microsoft and VMWare go one more round

In the battle for the virtualization title, VMWare, the underdog scrapper from Palo Alto, Calif. is pitted against the mammoth-sized contender out of Redmond that is Microsoft. I say contender because, although Microsoft has managed to pummel just ab

Sharp science leads to smart decisions

Experiment, explore, and play so that you, not those who sell convenience, are your most trusted source of knowledge Everyone needs an avocation they pursue with passion. For you, it may be cars, clothes, Greek food, or detective novels. Now that Ahe

VMware VirtualCenter gets continuous availability

If you are using VMware's VI3, you more than likely use VMware VirtualCenter to manage your VMware ESX Server farm. VirtualCenter provides the monitoring, remote management and rapid provisioning capabilities you need in your virtual environment

Gartner on Sun’s acquisition of MySQL

There's been a lot of positive coverage of Sun's acquisition of MySQL last week (with one or two odd-ball conspiracy stories). To me the most significant element is that Sun has long recognized the disruptive nature of open source and is no

MacGyver and generalizations about software

A reader commented that MySQL isn't "enterprise ready", to which another reader wrote: "I hate it when snobby DBAs or managers scoff at MySQL as if it isn't ready to play with the big boys. Google called, they'd like to

Bomb sniffing laptops and radiation detectors in your cell phone

The news out of Purdue University that they are developing sensors which fit inside a cell phone that can detect radiation, and thus perhaps stop the detonation of a nuclear bomb by terrorists is a bit outlandish to my way of thinking. "It is me

Oxymoron of the Day: Efficient XML

My title is a bit unfair: &quot;Efficient XML&quot; does sound like a contradiction in terms, but the Efficient XML design chosen to be the basis for the proposed encoding specification by the W3C Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) Working Group

Virtualized Microsoft Office: just around the corner?

I found the following tidbit buried at the bottom of a recent Microsoft Press Release. Titled &quot;Microsoft Announces Vision and Strategy to Accelerate Virtualization Adoption,&quot; the release goes on to note: Microsoft announced today th

Why Some Enterprise Architects are Failing SOA

Download file…

Review: Brocade DCX Backbone – Part 1

InfoWorld Exclusive Review: Brocade DCX Backbone Perhaps it’s because of a recent survey where 59 percent of Brocade customers asked for less difficult management. Or may be it’s because last year’s acquisition of McData (together w

Some Thoughts on Service Descriptions and SOA

With the advent of Web services, most enterprises that I deal with now have thousands sometimes tens of thousands of services under management. To make matters even more complex, we also have to consider services that are out of our direct control, t

Rich niche communities

mValent advances configuration management

MValent with its Integrity v5 product for change and configuration management is adding capabilities for provisioning configuration settings to large-scale distributed environments. Also featured is detection and management of configuration changes a

Naivete and cheapness kill a launch

The dot-com heyday of excess may be over, but dreams of bootstrapping a Web-based business are not. I was part of a small team hoping to launch a demographically targeted job- and consultant-matching site in 2007. The principals, myself included, wer

WiMax multi-hops to hyperconnectivity

Technical advances keep expanding the horizon for WiMax — if only carriers could get down to delivering on its promise While two key WiMax spectrum owners, Sprint and Clearwire, haggle over bringing broadband wireless to the masses, thanks to compan

How an Advice Line situation turned out

Dear Bob …So, awhile ago I wrote you about what to do when I found out my boss was looking to replace me ("When you hear you're going to be replaced," Advice Line, 12/15/2007). Well, I took Lewis' First Law of Business ("We

EMC Dips a Toe Into SaaS

EMC has never been shy about straying from its core business of enterprise and network storage. It jumped into virtualization via the purchase of VMware and moved into document management when it took over Documentum. The results have been good. In i

VMware growing in many different directions

VMware is facing increased competition from its competitors such as Microsoft, Citrix, Sun and SWsoft/Parallels. And now, people are starting to view virtualization differently as they become more familiar with the technology. No longer are they thin

Unprotected From Antivirus Vendors’ Autorenewals

<P>Symantec has long had the biggest slice of the antivirus market, but one area in which McAfee has been the clear leader is in the number of customer gripes generated by its automatic subscription renewals. But I'm beginning to see signs

OLPC: Give one, get none

First, let me say I am a big fan of One Laptop Per Child, at least as a concept. Connecting the developing world's children to the Internet in a seamless and low-cost way is a great idea. Heck, I wouldn't even mind if the XO machines ran Wi

Thinking about a ComCast business circuit? Think again.

This is unfortunately a tale of woe. There are no names in this story to protect the innocent, but rest assured, dear reader, this is completely true. Over six months ago, a signed contract and $1,000 in build-out fees were sent to the ComCast Busine

More on Sun’s acquisition of MySQL

I thought I'd get a chance to do some more blogging on Sun's acquisition of MySQL last week, but I was focused internally at our company meeting, spending time with employees and working on our objectives for 2008. Needless to say it was a

Learning from the flubs of others

Some people have difficulty remembering their painful mistakes. Not me: At the drop of a hat, I can call up any number of past gaffes in excruciating detail. And if I leave out the best (worst) parts, some longtime friend…