Opinion

No Turf? No Whining!

<strong>Just like people who don't vote don't have the right to complain about the governmental administration,</strong> brands that refuse to create their own 'turf', lose their right to complain about anything negati

By Lena West

Dec 4, 2007 3 mins

Microsoft to Buy SAP??

Reuters carried a short item out of London today, reporting speculation that Microsoft has revived its effort to buy SAP. Wow, that would be a story. However, it doesn’t look like Wall Street gives the rumor much credence. Shares of SAP closed

Hitachi and Transitive Team to help Migrate from SPARC

To help enterprise computing customers accelerate datacenter migration efforts, Hitachi said that it was teaming up with Transitive so that it could provide Transitive's QuickTransit for Solaris/SPARC-to-Linux on the company's BladeSymphony

Lies, Damned Lies and Benchmarks, Yet Again

I've noticed (well, who wouldn't?) that Randall Kennedy (RCK) is in a kerfuffle about Nick White, a Microsoft Vista Product Manager, who blogged a relatively mild discussion of "The right time to assess Windows Vista's performance

By Martin Heller

Dec 3, 2007 3 mins

Perhaps United Airlines Needs to Look at Their IT Architecture

Sorry about the lack of blogging this week. I've been on a whirlwind tour of Rochester, NY and Ottawa, ON. I always thought myself to have good travel karma, but that all ended on the way back from Ottawa, when I experienced firsthand the proble

By Dave Linthicum

Dec 3, 2007 4 mins

Test Center Tracker: Center on user identity

Federated identity 101: The allure of federated identity on the Web is enticing for IT admins. It "enables one organization to serve as an identity provider for another frees IT from having to manage the identities of partnering organizations&#0

When Microsoft Attacks!

I like to consider myself a patient person. After all, when you spend as much time as I do spouting off about this issue or that you're bound to take some flak. When the criticism comes from an impassioned individual with a differing viewpoint I

By Randall Kennedy

Dec 3, 2007 4 mins

Has Facebook jumped the shark?

Or maybe, like the late great Evel Knievel, it tried to jump the Snake River Canyon but suffered an equipment failure halfway over. Either way, I'm over Facebook. Oh sure, it was fun for a while — throwing bovine creatures at friends, writing o

By Robert Cringely

Dec 3, 2007 3 mins

Support Subscription vs. Software Subscription

On my previous post about the scalability of the "support subscription" business model, Joel Jackson said: "I’m confused Savio…what don’t you understand about a software subscription annuity model? $200-500mill today in b

By Savio Rodrigues

Dec 3, 2007 3 mins

Surgient’s Future After a Strong Third Quarter

I recently read about Surgient's third quarter success and about the release of their latest virtual lab automation product, VQMS. I spoke with the company's VP of Product Strategy, Erik Josowitz, to find out how these things affect the com

Dec 3, 2007 6 mins

Solving the digital identity crisis

All-encompassing digital identity solutions have been promised for years, but thanks in part to CardSpace and OpenID, we may actually be getting somewhere You can't help but be disappointed at the current state of digital identity. By now, weren

By Eric Knorr

Identity Management Solutions Security

Understanding OpenID and CardSpace

OpenID and CardSpace are at the forefront of user-centric identity. Here's how they work

By Phillip Windley

Dec 3, 2007 5 mins

Federating identity for the Web

User-centric innovations CardSpace and OpenID may finally bring the promise of federation within reach

By Phillip Windley

Dec 3, 2007 11 mins

Identity Management Solutions Security

Fit for Purpose – OSS & Commercial Products

Okay, so not everyone agrees about my claim that the support-based OSS business model does not scale. 🙂 Matt said: "The open source doubters continue to underestimate the power of open source as a business model tool. And Savio, though normall

By Savio Rodrigues

FAST Looks to Licensing Issues with Virtualization

The Federation Against Software Theft (FAST) was set up in 1984 by the British Computer Society's Copyright Committee. It was the world's first anti-software piracy organization working to protect the intellectual property rights of softwar

Dec 2, 2007 2 mins

Akorri Reaches Out to SMBs and Migo Goes Virtual with Portable Devices

Performance management is a hot market segment right now in the virtualization space. And Akorri is attempting to get their product into more hands by offering new packages and pricing that caters to the small and medium sized business market. And wi

Dec 2, 2007 1 min

Ignore mistakes?

Dear Bob …I think you missed a bit in this week's Keep the Joint Running ("Creating a learning organization, 11/26/2007). Granted this is a controversial subject and hard to solve in a column.From your column:"That means consistently

By Bob Lewis

Dec 2, 2007 3 mins

InfoWorld Virtualization Executive Forum Returns to San Francisco

IDG's InfoWorld Executive Forum returns for the fifth time, and once again takes place in the beautiful Hotel Nikko in San Francisco on Monday, February 4, 2008. This event is geared toward the executive level, and it offers a real-world guidanc

Dec 1, 2007 2 mins

Double-Take Software Updates Disaster Recovery Solution

Double-Take Software unveiled the latest version of its replication and recovery product, Double-Take 5.0. The company said that its latest 5.0 release is the only disaster recovery product to combine continuous data replication and full server prote

Dec 1, 2007 3 mins

Sell, sell Dell, says Wall Street

I have to admit I have a bit of a soft spot in my heart for Dell. It was the first major tech company I covered in a serious way, and I learned a lot about the industry from Dell execs and yes, pr folks. Moreover, I used to love their products and wa

A New Spin on Crime

OK, somebody's going to have to help me here. Apparently I don't even know what a crime is anymore. I just read an article on a SQL Server Magazine blog about this whole Idera lawsuit business. You can read it here. In there is an inberview

By Sean McCown

Nov 30, 2007 2 mins

Databases

Three New Products from the Bindows Folks

The Ajax developers at MB Technologies have been busy, and now have posted three new products on their Web site: a Bindows gauges library toolkit, BindowsFaces, and the Bindows 4.0 Beta. The Bindows gauges library toolkit (of which some sample images

By Martin Heller

Nov 30, 2007 2 mins

Remembering Mansour Safai

Mansour Safai, who passed away just over a year ago, is probably best known among the Java community for leading the development of the first Java Integrated Development Environment (IDE) Symantec's Visual Café. I had the pleasure of know

By Zack Urlocker

When your salary is capped

Dear Bob …Do many companies have the policy of down-rating annual raises when the rate is close to the band cap? I understand that one part of that is to motivate the employee to do enough to get promoted (stop complacency).However, that backfires

By Bob Lewis

Nov 30, 2007 1 min

Geek Week in Review

Danger, danger Bill Gates-son. Yes, it's the nightmare scenario we've all been dreading. Microsoft is building an army of robots that will eventually take over the planet – and then crash, leaving 7 billion people on hold with tech s

By Robert Cringely

Nov 30, 2007 2 mins

Microsoft links design tool to Visual Studio 2008

Microsoft this week released an update to its Expression Blend application design tool to enable Blend projects to work in the newly released Visual Studio 2008 application development platform, said S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice pres

By Paul Krill

Nov 30, 2007 1 min

Security Software Development

Go RBAC now

Implement role-based access control for stronger security in your environment

By Roger Grimes

Nov 30, 2007 6 mins

Error-proof your disaster recovery plan

RecoverGuard allows you to sync with confidence, promising iron-clad, automated control of configuration changes

By Mario Apicella

Data Management Security Technology Industry

Cash Fraudulent Check, Says HSBC

<P>The Internet has given new life to a lot of old scams, and perhaps one reason is that the institutions that should be fighting the hucksters don't always understand what's going on. That's certainly what one reader experienced

By Ed Foster

Nov 30, 2007 4 mins

Java Software Development

Get ready for immersive, cinematic apps

Information-intensive applications evolving faster than most realize

By Esther Schindler

Nov 30, 2007 5 mins

Another SMB review

Mike Heck has another review of a small-business-ready service, Google's GrandCentral, in the Test Center Daily blog. I've heard nothing but good things about GrandCentral — maybe it's time to check out this Google central-number serv

By Curt Franklin

Nov 30, 2007 1 min

Review: GrandCentral is one number for all your phones

Andriod and interest in the 700 MHz wireless spectrum may be generating the majority of recent press about Google’s future telephony plans. But GrandCentral, the VoIP online product that Google purchased in July 2007, shows this strategy in act

By Mike Heck

Nov 30, 2007 5 mins

CiRBA Announced New 4.5 Version to help Continue the Company’s Strong Annual Growth

CiRBA, Inc., provider of data center intelligence solutions, recently announced that the company has seen tremendous growth throughout 2007, noting that the virtualization and consolidation planning software markets have finally emerged. Consumers ar

The VMware YoYo

I’m not sure what metaphors to use about the treatment this stock has been getting on Wall Street. It leaped (sprang, zoomed) out of the starting gate this summer and soared (rocketed) to as high as $125.25 a share. My thinking at the time: too

Emerson delivers free Energy Logic blueprint for building a power-efficient datacenter

One of the most daunting tasks that companies face today is figuring out how to wring greater energy efficiency out of their datacenters. Certainly, many vendors are ready to step up and demonstrate where their respective products fit into the power-

Nov 29, 2007 5 mins

Take a Bite Out of Vista Services

Vista is "top heavy." While the NT Executive (i.e. the "kernel") is relatively unchanged from previous versions, Microsoft has saddled this latest incarnation with layer upon layer of Windows Services. Some, like t

By Randall Kennedy

Flex is Flash for Programmers

A few weeks ago I had a long conversation with Dave Gruber of Adobe about Flex. The short summary is that Flex was designed to be Flash for programmers, and that Flex has been gaining traction for Web applications in a number of areas. The first thin

By Martin Heller

The Scalable OSS Business Model?

I made the claim that the support-based OSS business model doesn't scale. Shaun (of JBoss fame), disagrees. ======================== Hi Savio, Funny how your $250M and $500M numbers are where Red Hat was a while ago and where Red Hat is headed s

By Savio Rodrigues

Build It and They Will Watch

Silicon Valley is littered with the corpses of companies that figured building something cool was a substitute for building a serious business plan. And I generally don't take that type of effort too seriously. But having said that, I have a hun

Case study: Clean-energy plan proves too risky for 365 Main customers

How much are you willing to pay to be green? It's a question percolating in the gray matter of many an individual, from the corner-office CEO to the average end-user. In some cases, investing in a green (or lean) initiative can result in long-te

Nov 29, 2007 6 mins

A cooling economy chills innovation

Big financial services companies will have less to spend on IT, but the real crisis for the tech sector is that VCs are throttling back on enterprise startups

By David Margulius

Software Development Technology Industry

Hardware Vendors Continue to Sign Agreements with Virtualization Vendors

The server virtualization software market is expected to grow to as much as $7 billion in 2011 from $800 million in 2006. Current penetration of virtualization on installed x86 servers is estimated at just 6% today. And most analyst firms conclude th

DMTF Releases Open Standards for System Virtualization Management

The Distributed Management Task Force, Inc. (DMTF) recently announced the release of a new standard for managing virtualized environments. Who are they? The DMTF is an industry organization leading the development, adoption and promotion of interoper

Google agrees to disclose IP address of Israeli blogger

We’ve had this discussion before but it is probably worth having again since it does not appear that the problem will go away anytime soon. As reported in The Register, Google has agreed to handover the IP address of an anonymous blogger to a T

By Ephraim Schwartz

Survey says companies would rather settle than fight in court

A survey, conducted for Fortiva, an email archiving solution provider, by a company called iTracks, unoovered that 20 percent of the corporations in the survey said they preferred to settle law suits out of court to avoid the costs incurred by archiv

By Ephraim Schwartz

Google to invest millions in seeding green energy

In a move with clear environmental and business benefits, Google has announced plans to pour tens of millions of dollars next year on research and development and related investments in renewable energy. The company also plans to invest hundreds of m

A look at RingCentral

There's no question that advances in telephone capabilities have helped small businesses compete successfully with larger enterprises. RingCentral is a service that can help the image of even the smallest organization, and Mike Heck has a hand&#

By Curt Franklin

Nov 28, 2007 1 min

Review: RingCentral online telephone service makes small businesses sound like enterprises

The first contact – and impression – of your organization is often by phone. To make clients and prospects feel welcome, enterprises typically use expensive Private Branch Exchange (PBX) systems that route calls efficiently and offer fanc

By Mike Heck

Nov 28, 2007 4 mins

Using IT Backlogs as Metrics for SOA

Joe McKendrick does a good job in highlighting a new notion: "How do you measure SOA success? Try IT backlogs." This was from a Podcast posted by Hub Vandervoort, CTO of Progress Software. Clearly, that's the case, but just looking at

By Dave Linthicum

One Way To Deal With Server Overheating

Looks like Microsoft has figured out one way to deal with data center overheating: Put the servers in Siberia. Ok, I am sure there are other good reasons behind this possible move. But it does raise some interesting issues about thinking globally as

By Zack Urlocker

Nov 28, 2007 1 min