Opinion

Look ma, no batteries!

You know the story, you grab your handy dandy electric screwdriver off the tool bench to rack or un-rack a piece of gear only to find the batteries dead. You can't leave it in the charger since that would cause the batteries to develop a memory

SOTI Pocket Controller – Pro

As mobile devices creep into the enterprise, IT professionals are faced with a documentation and remote support gap due to the hassles of getting information off the mobile platform. Heck, mobile devices have been a pain for me whenever I've had

Here is the video of my presentation at the SOA Executive Forum…Enjoy

You can see the video here….

IBM opens PLM centers

IBM is unveiling nine "Product Lifecycle Management centers" Thursday designed to help customers launch new products in less time. The intent is to leverage proven business methodologies and software development models, IBM said. Clients ge

Don’t Get Caught in the Stampede

Apple and VMware took the rap when Cisco's warning and Oracle's virtualization announcement panicked tech investors. That was a mistake. Don't think the market is always rational. Investors, even smart ones, can get caught up in the da

Green strategies for the little guys

Enterprise companies with enormous power-draining datacenters aren't the only organizations out there feeling the pinch of soaring energy bills and struggling to keep the carbon footprints in check. SMBs are seeking strategies to lower electric

Wanted: Some nice German voting software

What do you get when you combine the worst of democracy with the worst of technology? The modern voting machine!

Capgemini deployment of Google Apps points to world of application segmentation

To the list of unintended consequences add the creation of a two-tiered system of applications and application users thanks to the phenomenon of Web 2.0 applications. I realized this after speaking with Robert Brillhart, global practice lead, Custome

Red Hat & Hyperic Finally Made Me Happy

I previously questioned Red Hat's apparent lack of love for Hyperic. Today, Stacey Schneider, Senior Director of Marketing at Hyperic, tipped me off to a joint Hyperic & Red Hat announcement. Stacey writes: "Finally today we announc

When Not to SOA

One of the things that I say that take many people back is that "SOA is not right for all enterprises." What? How can that be? Truth-be-told SOA is just a way to do architecture, and while valuable within most problem domains, it indeed may

Verizon recycling program fights domestic violence

November and December are busy months for me. There's Veteran's Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas/Channukah, my parents' anniversary, my sister's birthday, my brother-in-law's birthday, my own birthday, and my dad's birthday.

Virtualization: C’mon In!

The market for server virtualization software appears to have gotten a whole lot more crowded this week. Not only did Oracle announce free server virtualization software at the Oracle Open World conference, but Microsoft and VMWare also made announce

Microsoft readies ESP simulation platform

Microsoft announced Wednesday a visual simulation platform, Microsoft ESP, which uses games-based technology to enable use of simulation for learning and decision-making. Supporting off-the-shelf PC hardware and software, ESP enables simulations to b

My Nosy Uncle

I've got this Uncle with a problem. He can't keep his nose out of my business. My email, my web surfing – for all I know he's into my Quicken files, my Netflix queue and my Amazon account. Worse, he thinks it's perfectly jus

The magic formula for IT budgeting

Dear Bob …This is "Budgeting" with a follow-up question (from "Penetrating the mysteries of IT budgeting," Advice Line, 11/7/2007).All of what you say makes sense – especially in a large organization where duties and respo

Test Center Tracker: More virtualization for you

This edition of Test Center Tracker is all about virtualization with a preview of the new VMware server version, first thoughts on Oracle's just revealed virtualization server, and a preview of Accellion's file transfer virtual appliance. V

Red Hat, Hyperic join on systems management

Red Hat and Hyperic are extending their agreement to co-develop a common systems management platform, with development to continue under a new open source model. Hyperic offers monitoring and management software for large-scale online businesses and

IBM’s hosted Symphony: Will anyone listen?

IBM appears to be getting ready to offer its Lotus Symphony suite as a hosted application, competing directly with Google Apps and Microsoft's Office Live. Does the entry of IBM into the on-demand desktop application space signal trouble for Off

If Hollywood screenwriters worked in IT

TV writers are on strike, demanding a cut of the proceeds from the Web distribution of the programs to which they've contributed. Emboldened by the success of iTunes, which signed several networks to monetize their reruns, networks are venturing

Can Consolidation Be Good for CIOs?

Ben Worthen of the WSJ uses IBM's acquisition of Cognos to make the point that midsize tech companies are going extinct. The end result will definitely be a reduction in vendor choice. While conventional wisdom says less choice is bad, this is n

Oracle Jumps into Virtualization with Oracle VM – So What Changes?

Oracle is the latest player to toss its hat into the virtualization ring with the company's latest announcement of Oracle VM, a virtualization platform based on the open source Xen hypervisor. At Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco, the company an

Gear6’s CACHEfx Appliance and Xsigo’s ConnectEd Program Attacking the I/O Bottleneck

A big problem within today's data centers is the issue of I/O. As processors and memory continue to climb in speed, performance and size, I/O is one of the few areas in the server that hasn't improved much, and thus, is quickly being identi

Google Android: Initial Impressions and Criticism

Over at Javalobby, Jilles van Gurp, a Java developer who works for Nokia, posted some detailed comments about Android based on his initial impressions of the SDK. Basically, he criticized Google for re-inventing too many wheels: the Java profile impl

Preview: VMware Server 2 beta unleashes big changes

The next generation of VMware's free server virtualization product has hit public beta, and it's a doozy. So much has changed between the current version and what this beta promises that it's almost a completely different product. Brie

Cracking IE Protected Mode in Vista

I came across a fascinating article on Windows Vista and the Internet Explorer "Protected Mode." It seems that, even with User Account Control (UAC) enabled, a low-integrity process like IE can manage to grab the handle of a higher-

IBM needs to stop worrying about Microsoft

So now once again IBM is hot on the trail of trying to knock off Microsoft Office. Big Blue has been gunning for the Redmond giant ever since Bill Gates outsmarted them back in the last century. It is probably time to say to the giant of Armonk, &ldq

When IT is up the creek without a sponsor

Dear Bob …Over the years you have emphasized the important of a project having an executive sponsor. What do you do when you cannot find a single person who will ultimately take ownership for a project?In our recent case, we had a project with mark

One-stop Open Source support?

I just read Colin Baker's article about a European OSS support provider named Credativ. The Credativ website claims: "credativ support covers a large number of open source projects, including: Debian, Ubuntu, SuSE, Red Hat, Xandros, Mandriv

Video promise

My Take on the SOA Executive Forum

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The tech who almost killed Saddam

Everyone has stories of the Novell server that ran for 12 years and was found only after a Y2K upgrade. I, on the other hand, had a coworker with Saddam in his gun sights Bill was about 26 when I met him in 2001, and I instantly learned that he was a

Stop overpaying for support

Feel like your vendor is failing to live up to its maintenance fees? Consider third-party options If you are paying 20 to 25 percent in maintenance fees for an ERP application, you are burning a big wad of cash. Think about it. If you buy software ev

AT&T Fails to Communicate

<P>The big vendors are capable of bringing a lot of resources to bear on a project, but sometimes putting all those heads together means nobody hears anybody else. That's a feeling one reader has had on several occasions recently, most par

Hands on preview: Accellion Virtual Appliance

It's no mystery that e-mail systems can't handle easily numerous large attachments. Companies that need to transfer large files know all too well that crowding with large attachments an e-mail server is a poor solution that impairs the latt

Preview: Coveo Enterprise Search 5.0 unveils real-time ranking, more repository connectors, better security, and Ajax user interface

Enterprise search poses a dilemma for knowledge managers. Search engines must be easy for IT staff to manage, and results must be equally straightforward for users to navigate. At the same time, you have to index growing numbers of complex informatio

Score: Dead MacBook Pro gremlin vanquished

Nothing gets my Irish up as quickly as when a hunk of technology takes on the characteristics of a stubborn animal, to wit, one more so than I. It's been the better part of a week struggling, with little success, against some cowardly goblin th

Stoked With Stoakley

I'll come right out and say this: I'm an AMD kinda guy. My main workstation runs Opteron 2220s, I prefer Opterons in my servers, and I've been looking forward to Barcelona for, well, far too long. My attraction to the Opteron has been

IBM Cognos deal highlights a resurgence in upgrading the database

Gartner put it in perfect perspective when it positioned Cognos as the last remaining pure play $500 million plus business intelligence vendor. Now it, like Hyperion and Business Objects, is gone. I’ve written on the demise of the pure play or

Android SDK: It’s a Java API

I guess I shouldn't be surprised, since Google has been advertising heavily for Java developers with device experience: the much-hyped Google Android Open Handset SDK is basically a Java API. In addition, it supports XML-based layout files, and

HP lands green datacenter consultant EYP

Extending its reach into the ripening green-consulting space, HP today announced the acquisition of EYP Mission Critical Facilities, a consulting company specializing in strategic technology planning, design and operations support for large-scale dat

Third in a Series: IBM Acquires Cognos

Following on the heels of two major BI acquisitions this year by Oracle and SAP, IBM has announced the acquisition of Cognos for $5 billion in cash. This is a modest premium of around 9% for Cognos, but considering all that's going on in the ind

Test Center Tracker: Penguin buck-passing and Citrix app-speeding

Blame game: Enterprise Desktop Blogger Randall Kennedy has immersed himself in desktop Linux of late. He's been pleasantly surprised by Ubuntu — but he still sees one key barrier (at least) to widespread Linux adoption: a lack of accountability

The score so far: Hackers 3, Apple 2

Apple has finally fired back at iPhone unlockers, releasing version 1.1.2 of its OS for the iPhone and the iPod Touch that relocks devices that had been unlocked by the "Jailbreak Software" released last month.&nbsp;Besides relocking th

Actually READING the Mozilla Financials & Notes

There have been a few stories along these lines: "According to Mozilla's 2006 financial records…last year collected $66 million in revenue. Eighty-five percent came from a single source – Google. But, despite a pledge to use Firefox reven

MySQL Open Source Survey

We've kicked off our annual survey of MySQL users recently on the developer zone of the MySQL site. There are some new questions and some old questions so that we can gauge trends over time. For example in last year's survey we saw that: -4

VMware Updates Mac Virtualization with Fusion 1.1 Release

VMware has announced the immediate availability of VMware Fusion 1.1, the company's award-winning desktop virtualization platform for the Intel-based Mac. The latest release is a free upgrade to existing VMware Fusion 1.0 customers; and it can e

The InfoWorld 100: Our tribute to the IT community

Nothing defines what InfoWorld does best like the InfoWorld 100, our annual award to the 100 companies that have met their business and IT demands with innovative technology deployment. The InfoWorld 100 isn't just a collection of cool case stud

Why Desktop Linux Fails: A First-hand Account

Pass the buck. It's a way of life for politicians and Linux distribution publishers. When something doesn't work – as was the case with my recent ACPI headaches under Ubuntu 7.10 &quot;Gutsy Gibbon&quot; – the response is most often

Oracle’s Worst Case Not So Bad

Shares of Oracle got creamed Friday, plunging nearly 8% after Cisco’s John Chambers spooked Wall Street with his dire-sounding warning about tech spending. In essence, investors are worried that Oracle’s exposure to the financial services

Microsoft Releases SolutionAccelerators Doc and Slideshow Deck

Microsoft is releasing a series of solution accelerators, and the first of the series is dedicated to helping an organization with leveraging virtualization in their infrastructure planning and design phase. Microsoft says that the Infrastructure Pla