Opinion

Compuware offers IT portfolio management

Compuware is announcing the release Tuesday of Changepoint 12, an IT portfolio management package that can automate IT processes. With version 12, users can define decision-making scenarios encompassing existing and potential demand on IT, with graph

The high price of data loss

It's hard to say which was worse: the humiliation of losing the data or the punishment from the company we hired to recover it We maintain a storage server for our users home directories and as hard drives do, ours crashed. Not a problem, we tho

Gambling on the iPhone

Never one to let a free marketing opportunity go to waste, offshore gambling site BetUS.com is making book on the iPhone. For example, BetUS says odds are better than even the iPhone will sell more than 12 million units in 2008 (5 to 6) and Apple&#03

The art of e-discovery

With terminology in the FRCP left vague, companies need to create their own archiving strategy There's a new buzzword and acronym to go with it, and if you haven't heard of ESI (Electronically Stored Information) yet, you'd best get up

Lawyers Virtually Call the Tune in Redmond

<P>You can usually divide tech companies into two groups: those that are basically run by their engineers and those that are run by the marketeers. But the current squabble Microsoft is having with itself over the virtualization language in the

More Longhorn Reloaded and Virtual Vista Follow-Up

The "Longhorn Reloaded" folks are in the news again. I blogged about these guys a few weeks back. They reminded me of the good old days of OS/2 zealots and similar "denial" cults. Well, it looks like they finally received a cease

Economic Infrastructure

I wrote in my last blog about the massive economies that companies such as Microsoft and Oracle have created. I also wrote about the massive tolls those very same companies take in the form of overhead in the procurement and licensing processes. What

Drags to Innovation

Savio's not the first person to tell me I'm wrong and I'm sure he won't be the last. Somehow, though, this makes me think of that line, "I've been thrown out of better places than this." My comments had to do with t

BusinessWeek: The Worth of Open Source? Open Question (MySQL)

BusinessWeek asks: How much is MySQL worth? MySQL, a fast-growing maker of database software used by some of the Internet's most recognized brands, is preparing to file for an initial public offering, perhaps as soon as late 2007. The offering c

Web 2.0 and SOA and more SOA Consolidation

Download file…

Question: How will you switch carriers for iPhone?

All iPhone units sold in the U.S. will be locked to AT&T's GSM/GPRS/EDGE mobile network. If you're already an AT&T subscriber, iPhone is a painless transition. If you're on a month-to-month contract with another operat

Only the best get a company’s best service

I filed a story today on Nexidia, a company that has technology to analyze the quality of spoken English, as well as other languages, in order to assess whether or not someone speaks with enough clarity to be understood in a customer service setting.

Why we lag in wireless

The article on the InfoWorld site today, U.S. lags behind other nations in broad-band speeds, is a common complaint I've heard for many years. And if you really want to be aggravated, read this story on our site about what they are doing in Kore

Reader Voices: Who Pays for Content?

<P>As newspapers and other print publications shrink while the webosphere grows ever larger, will the quality of content available to us all get better or worse? Ever since I raised that question in my comments about InfoWorld ceasing its print

Ruby on Rails IDEs: An Update

As you might expect, the Rails IDE market is continuing to evolve quickly. RadRails, which I reviewed last August, has been taken over by Aptana. What's Aptana? It's Paul Colton's new company. Paul was the founder of Live Software, and

Test Center Tracker: The trials and tribulations of keeping data safe

To dream the impossible dream: It's an ongoing nightmare for business management and IT staffs alike – how to protect enterprise data from misuse or theft, while still making it available to the applications and systems that need it? Throw in th

New leaders set the tone

<p>As I've said before one of the things that is your job, and that you must never shirk, delegate, or otherwise avoid, is to set the tone. “Tone” is the general atmosphere that you create in your workplace or for your

Truths That Become Less So

Matt and Dave D. are good guys that I respect, but they are also wrong. There, I said it. We Canadians aren't known for being so blunt, but this needed to be said. I may get a few eggs directed at me, but so be it. You can argue with me, but you

Altair and Bull, Sun’s big HPC announcement, NVIDIA puts TFLOPS on your desk, and much more

In today's enterprise HPC news summary, Altair and Bull team to offer PBS Pro on Bull's hardware, Sun's has a big HPC announcement planned, NVIDIA puts TFLOPS on your desk with its Tesla offering, and much more.

Advice from CTOs – Top 10

SOA and Web 2.0

I'm off to NYC again to speak at the SOA World Conference and Expo. My talk is entitled: 'Web 2.0'? – It's the Universal SOA taking place tomorrow, Tuesday, at 12:40. If you're at the event stop by. I'm just doing

Open source tools project set by JBoss

JBoss.org will introduce on Monday Exadel Eclipse software development plug-ins as part of the new open source JBoss Tools project. The intent of the project is centralize tooling for JBoss middleware. The Exadel plug-ins provide for split-screen dev

Microsoft: The hole enchilada

Apple's redefining the cell phone and Google's tossing up $600 million data centers like they're Starbucks franchises, but up in Redmond, they're building a parking garage. And people say Microsoft has forgotten how to innovate. A

HP injects power-capping tool in Systems Insight Manager

Feature limits energy-use on a per-machine basis, potentially reducing overall datacenter power consumption by 70%, HP says

The struggle to protect enterprise data

The problem of enterprise data protection is so big, companies have just begun wrapping their arms around it. Here’s how they’re discovering their vulnerabilities, and what they’re doing about them

Bloggers, welcome aboard

New blood for Open Sources, New York for CTOs, and a new day for the iPhone

Surgient Announces New Software and New Delivery Mechanism

Surgient announced that it was about to release a new version of its Virtual Lab Management Application – version 5.3. The company's software enables its customers to automate and enhance their software development and QA/Testing processes. But

IBM Virtualization Software to Reduce Datacenter Complexity

IBM introduced a new release of its server virtualization management software that adds new automation capabilities for the management of both virtual and physical systems across multiple platforms. The software is now available on IBM's POWER-b

Benchmark Paper: Networking Performance With Multiple VMs – VMware vs XenSource

VMware has created yet another technical paper in the hopes that its benchmark numbers and charts will showcase their hypervisor solution, VMware ESX Server 3.0.1, over that of its competitor, XenSource 3.2.0. In this paper, scaling and performance o

Egenera Awarded Disaster Recovery Patent

Marlboro-based virtualization datacenter solution provider, Egenera, has been awarded US Patent No. 7,178,059 by the US Patent and Trademark Office for its new N+1 disaster recovery system. According to the company, their disaster recovery technology

Are values personal or universal – and why it matters

Dear Bob …I found lots of good insights in "Iacocca's alliterative leadership list," including some that are new to me. Thank you very much. I especially appreciated the one about planning rather than blurting. However, I question yo

Mendocino Adds VMware Into Its Platform Support List

Fremont, California-based Mendocino Software announced that its InfiniView software offering now supports VMware ESX Server version 3.0 and higher. If you aren't familiar with InfiniView, it is an enterprise-class continuous data protection solu

The software industry evolves…

I'm increasingly convinced that we are at a critical juncture in the evolution of the software industry

VMware Updates Fusion to Beta 4.1

Virtualization giant VMware announced last week that it was releasing an update to its Mac virtualization product, Fusion, which is still currently in Beta. The latest update, Fusion 1.0 Beta 4.1, re-enables support for USB devices for those users th

Scalent Systems Releases V/OE 2.5, DR Edition

With virtualization and disaster recovery on the minds of IT organizations around the globe, Scalent Systems announces an update for their solution that seems to fit right in. The company announced the release of Scalent V/OE software version 2.5 – t

Common sense isn’t necessarily good sense

Dear Bob …In this week's Keep the Joint Running ("Iacocca's alliterative leadership list," 6/18/2007) you said this about common sense:Oh, dear. Whether you call it common sense, good instincts, or trusting your gut, the notion

Application Virtualization Having the Best Month Ever

Server virtualization is usually the hot topic within the virtualization space. People generally love to talk about and argue who does what best. But what about Application Virtualization? This market is definitely heating up, and more players are en

Yesteryear’s Success

I’m reading an otherwise unremarkable book by Kevin Phillips titled American Theocracy, and I’m struck by a phrase he uses, “Yesteryear’s Success,” where, speaking about world economic powers, he writes, “The infra

Kaizen management meeting

WSJ: Linux Shoots for Big Leagues

A Wall Street Journal article "Linux Shoots for Big Leagues" (subscription required) by Chris Lawton discusses how open source continues to make inroads in IT departments. The examples show Linux and open source providing cost savings of 50

The Geek in Review

Warning: There is absolutely nothing in this post about the Apple iPhone (except for this sentence… oh and this one, too). In fact, this may be the last thing you read for the next few weeks that doesn't have some iPhone news/hype/speculation

Riding the Winds of Change

Sometimes it can be really difficult to get changes made in your company. And most of the time the more important the change is, the harder it is to make it happen. However, there can be a way to get things done that lights a fire under their butts.

Vista + Virtualization = Poor Performance

Everyone knows by now that Vista is slower than Windows XP. In fact, my own testing shows it to be roughly twice as slow on the same hardware (see our upcoming Test Center study for more details). That's because Vista is a far more complex opera

Test Center Tracker: Full OS X 10.5 Leopard preview now online

Four parts, no waiting: Now that it's been leaked to the masses, check out what makes Leopard so interesting. Tom Yager's four-part developer's-eye preview covers the major pieces of OS X 10.5. Click here to read all about it: Part I (

How I made the jump to technology manager

SOA governance hailed in partnership

LogicLibrary and Mindreef plan next week to announce a partnership intended to produce an end-to-end SOA governance and testing solution. The companies have integrated the LogicLibrary Logidex SDA (Software Development Asset) governance hub with the

Is money a good measure of OSS success?

This comment from Stacey (Hyperic) got me thinking…is money a good measure of OSS success? Before I go on, let me clear something up. My 1.8% comment was not meant to minimize the importance of OSS to the software market or to customers. I disagree

A developer’s-eye view of Leopard, part IV

64-bit Darwin, Dashcode, Time Machine, and Ruby on Rails call on developers to trade out established skills for new ones

A secure Internet requires a secure network protocol

Implementing — and requiring — stronger authentication and cryptography standards is the next step toward a new Internet

Classic Storage Insider, part I

Two SAN-oriented Storage Insider columns for your summer reading list