Opinion

Were Virtual Iron’s Announcements Loud Enough?

Virtual Iron recently made a few announcements, but because of the timing of those announcements, they might not have been loud enough to overcome all of the chatter around VMware's IPO stock offering or the rumors and then the actual acquisitio

Top 5 Reasons SOAs Succeed

Now that we know what fails, let's talk about what works. The enterprise has invested in education. The professionals who are building the SOA are schooled in the approaches and technology needed to solve the problem. You can count on spending u

Free open source legal training webinar

Jason Haislmaier from Holme, Roberts & Owens LLP is doing a free legal session about open source and "copyleft" on August 29. Here are the details: What: 1-hour session covering open-source legal issues (e.g., What counts as software di

Apple MacBook sales soar at the expense of Dell

To be honest, I was certain that Apple's adoption of the Intel processor was going to be the beginning of the end for the company that has always dared to be different. However, while the story on our site attributes the huge increase in Mac not

Doing the right thing…

It was a bad week for the folks at Skype, with a system wide outage due (they say) to an algorhythm problem in the login process. I use skype to keep my international long distance charges under control and depend upon it to coordinate vendors for sh

Skype: You got some ‘splainin to do

When Skype went AWOL for 48 hours last week, it came back smelling of cheap perfume and rotgut gin. Some 220 million users waited in their doorways wearing curlers and holding rolling pins, demanding to know where Skype had been. Naturally, Skype had

Test Center Tracker: App limits

By now, pretty much everyone is aware that Skype suffered a massive meltdown last week, with bazillions of users unable to log into their P2P VoIP accounts. Skype says the problem was caused by Microsoft's Patch Tuesday, but not everyone is buyi

When fun isn’t very much fun

Dear Bob …You may not be full of beans on this one ("Fun for fun and profit," Keep the Joint Running, 8/20/2007), but you're close.Our company has a policy: Win and have fun. And a lot of managers I know try to follow it. We have qua

The Growth of SaaS Linked with SOA

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Add-On Services to Open Source

Stephen O'Grady, analyst over at RedMonk, has a good posting on how open source companies are coming up with new revenue streams based on automated services. As Stephen points out, we've gone from "How can you make money from open sour

Detail-obsessed CEO misses the big picture

Our chief preferred to micro-manage the small stuff than deal with substantive issues I thought I had found my dream CIO job when I scored an interview at a key firm in the financial services industry. My subsequent first-round interview meeting with

Customer service gets human again

Eschewing automation, Netflix puts folks on the phone in hopes of achieving competitive advantage Customer service sucks. For everybody. Not only for those who require it, but also for those who have to provide it. So the news that Netflix is investi

Skype gives VoIP a black eye

The Skype outage news should have a lot of business people thinking twice about deploying a VoIP (Voice-over-IP) system for their company. This is mainly because it is neither the first time something has gone wrong, nor an isolated incident. This ye

Recovering from a Senior Moment

The other day around the dinner table, we were discussing movies adapted from books. I wanted to add something specific to the conversation, but the memory wouldn't come. I remembered that the movie was an adaptation of Emma, by Jane Austen. I r

Green trickling down to local government

Demonstrating how green-tech awareness is touched all levels of government, Erie County, New York has passed a law requiring county officials to purchase Energy Star appliances when possible.

Google search dominance boggles

Nielsen//NetRatings issued its search engine share rankings for the month of July this afternoon and I thought it would be worthwhile sharing them with readers. It is a bit mind-boggling that in July, Google had more than 4 billion searchers. The tot

Building Customer Trust with OSS

I was reading this BusinessWeek article about the recent financial market mess: "If you don't trust the value of an asset, you won't be willing to buy it no matter how cheap your borrowing costs are….What brings this to an end, ultim

Input for Microsoft on Mix 2008

A buddy of mine from Borland days, Ben Riga, is helping to drive the content for Microsoft's Mix '08 conference. He's looking for input on what would make Mix attractive to startups and venture capitalists. To be honest, I haven't

Test Center Tracker: Microsoft’s Groove is a bit off

Not feelin' so Groove-y: Senior Contributors Oliver Rist and Brian Chee are tackling Microsoft server after server, and the most recent project on their plate: Groove Server. "For companies with more than 100 seats that really want to explo

Corporate cartels gone wild

Maybe it's from listening to all that rap music. But if any organization has acted like original gangstas, it's the RIAA. And now, it seems, someone's about to bust a cap in their assets. Last week Tanya Andersen filed a class action s

SWsoft Reaches New Milestones This Year

With all of the hoopla over VMware and Citrix this past week, SWsoft didn't get the chance to properly pound their own chest very much. Many people, both new and old to the virtualization market, may not realize it, but SWsoft would like them to

Fujitsu installs Silicon Valley’s first hydrogen fuel cell generator

Fujitsu has become the first high-tech company in California to boast its own hydrogen power plant that, according to the company, provides clean, efficient power for the campus data center and other operations.

Pundits on parade: What’s next in tech

InfoWorld bloggers shrug off the heat, look into the future

Verizon Locks Out a Spectrum of Features

<P>On Jan. 16th 2008, the FCC will <A href="http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3695046">start auctioning off</A> the 700-MHz band that is expected to host the next generation of wireless services. But how man

Top 5 Reasons SOAs Fail

1. The enterprise considers SOA a project versus what it is; a more holistic notion. Thus, management thinks they can implement an ESB or other SOA technology, and they're done. I've been ranting about this enough that I won't do it h

On Change

Πάντα ῥεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει. All things flow; nothing stands still. — Heraclitus Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. The more things change, th

VMware Answers Security Questions with Acquisition of Determina

In a similar fashion to its quiet acquisition of the VDI desktop broker Propero, VMware has quietly acquired a company called Determina and its host intrusion prevention software – although terms of the acquisition have not yet been disclosed. On Aug

Dell Creating Consumer PCs Complete with Virtualization

It looks like PC maker Dell is climbing onboard the virtualization train with its consumer PC division. It has been confirmed that Dell is developing a consumer PC line that will run multiple versions of Microsoft Windows and Linux software at the sa

Windows Version Trends

In the comments to my posting yesterday about maintaining backward compatibility, I was induced to reference the graph of Windows versions over time that PC Pitstop generates every month at http://www.pcpitstop.com/research/os.asp. Here it is: PC Pit

SourceFire Acquires ClamAV

SourceFire, which has built a good business commercializing the open source SNORT intrusion detection system has now acquired ClamAV, the leading open source anti-virus software. This is a good move for SourceFire and helps them expand their footprin

Spot On

OK, so it's not particularly cool to blog and point to your own article, but that's the way the cookie crumbles on this fine Friday in August, so bear with me… If you're like most of us, cell phone reception has moved far beyond &quo

Another look at exit interviews from the interviewee side

Dear Bob …I've been out of work for 7 months, now, and I'm wondering whether it is because I did something I thought was reasonable and moral.Just before I was about to leave, I found out that our IT Manager had been slipped in by the Sup

Serena eyes “Business Mashups”

Serena plans on September 10 to offer a tool called Vail for creating "Business Mashups," which are simple business applications that combine content, services, workflow and other applications building blocks. The tool is intended for semi-

Burned by Skype!

As I mentioned in my previous entry, I just completed the transition to my summer home on Mauritius. For those of you who skipped Basic World Geography 101, Mauritius is a small, sub-tropical island off the coast of Madagascar (which, in turn, is off

Is Sun Exiting the Server Business?

Dana's post on the Sun &amp; IBM deal has two very interesting statements: "This is part of Sun’s exit strategy from the server business." And: "In many ways, Sun is becoming Red Hat." On the conference call, Schwar

IBM and Sun tighten Solaris partnership, quantum computing takes another step forward, scientists claim speed of light violated

<p>In today's enterprise HPC roundup IBM and Sun strengthen their Solaris relationship, researchers move the ball forward on inexpensive quantum computing, and German scientists announce a finding they claim proves the speed of light is no

Geek Week in Review

The days fly by and so does the news. Here are some items that snagged on my brain as they passed. Because ZXQVX! was taken. Sprint executives are betting that a $3 billion investment in wireless Internet infrastructure is going to save the company.

VMware and Citrix Prove Value in Virtualization

VMware's IPO and stock trading success combined with the acquisition of XenSource by Citrix further validates the virtualization market and everything that we've been doing in the community. If all eyes weren't set on virtualization be

Hunting down dark fiber

Leaving stealth mode after a long R&D phase, XKL seeks to unearth the benefits of DIY WAN connectivity

Old apps, new vulnerabilities

Updates that don't clean up after themselves are trouble

Case for Social Networking

Open Source Outsourcing

IBM to OEM Solaris on x86 Servers

I really try not to write about IBM news but this one is more about Sun than IBM….. IBM &amp; Sun announced: "IBM will distribute the Solaris Operating System and Solaris Subscriptions for select x86-based IBM System x servers and BladeCen

Reader Voices: Institutional IE

<P>Why do so many large institutions, intentionally or not, force website visitors to use IE instead of the browser of their choice? Readers had much to say on that subject after we <A href="http://www.gripe2ed.com/scoop/story/2007/6/15

Maintaining Backward Compatibility

One of the banes of my existence is maintaining backward compatibility to versions of Windows from 15 years ago while supporting new features of Windows Vista. It's quite a juggling act. I use three tactics. The first is pre-emptive: every time

The network grows greener

Through evolving hardware and standards, as well as its broad datacenter reach, the network is becoming a green beneficiary and catalyst

Should IT care about the credit meltdown of 2007?

Memories of the dot-com bust still linger for many of us. This year's credit bust may or may not be so severe for IT, depending on where you work

What the XenSource acquisition says about Citrix

I was quite busy at work today so I'm only catching up on blog reading now. My arch nemesis has been busy 🙂 BTW, when do you do your day job? Can I get a job at Alfresco???? 🙂 Kidding aside….Matt says: "$500 million is a hefty premium

Citrix Acquires XenSource for $500m

Following fast on the heals of VMWare's successful IPO earlier in the week, Citrix has announced the acquisition of XenSource for a cool $500 million. Considering that XenSource is less than three years old and has around $1 million in revenues,

VMware Stock Soars in a Down Market – Proving Virtualization Technology

VMware's initial IPO was a happy day for VMware, investors and the virtualization industry, although it wasn't a great day for the market overall. Coming out of the IPO gate at $29 a share, VMware's stock saw an immediate gain that da