Opinion

Invasion of the pod people

I've had a long, satisfying IT career — and hopefully you have, too — but I bet you've never experienced anything like this. Our company hired a highly skilled, high-end contractor. Or at least, that's what management told us. As she

Another step toward 10 Gig SANs

New switch from startup Woven Systems spells trouble for both FC and Ethernet competitors

Time for a pervasive emergency alert system

The Virginia Tech tragedy highlights the need for a warning system that cuts across all devices and systems

Reader Voices: Software Locks

Many readers were shocked by my recent story about how Eaton Powerware uses software locks to force its high end UPS customers rely on it for maintenance. But while the shock for some was that such a large manufacturer would stoop so low, the surpris

Workday — ERP startup targets Oracle and SAP

A conversation with the co-founder Workday is a two-year old software as a service [SaaS] ERP vendor with all of ten customers. Yet, co-founder and president Aneel Bhusri says they are gunning for SAP and Oracle. It reminds me of the story of the fle

SOA for Federal Government featuring David Linthicum and ZapThink!

There are a few spots left in the: SOA for Federal Government featuring David Linthicum and ZapThink! Special One Day In-Depth Seminar April 26, 2007Sheraton Tysons Corner8661 Leesburg PikeVienna, VA 22182 That's next week. Click here for more i

Michael Dell runs Ubuntu

I have to admit that I am impressed and somewhat surprised that Michael Dell runs Linux at home. Good for him. Specs below: Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn VMWare Workstation 6 Beta OpenOffice.org 2.2 Automatix2 Firefox 2.0.0.3 Evolution Groupware 2.10 (this

Yahoo’s carbon-neutrality is a smart investment

Yahoo has raised the green bar substantially amongst IT companies, announcing ambitious plans to become carbon-neutral by the end of this year. What that means, basically, is the company is measuring its environmental impact, reducing that impact whe

Apparently failure IS an option

Thousands of hollow-eyed Crackberry addicts have been seen roaming the streets, accosting strangers and asking to borrow their cell phones and laptops so they could please please please check their email. The reason? A systemwide server outage at Res

Preview: HardMetrics goes for deep — not broad — BPM solutions

Most of the vendors in the BPM (business performance management) arena are working to diversify and broaden offerings, through development, acquisition or private labeling. HardMetrics, however, is going its own way with many of its choices, includin

Pentaho gets into the skin of OpenOffice

Pentaho is going places. By integrating its Reporting product into OpenOffice, it's actually going lots of places. Tens of millions of them. As announced today,With the integration of Pentaho’s reporting engine and the new OpenOffice.org R

Keep on truckin’

Yesterday's item about Dell and the Ford Flambe produced emails and comments from Cringesters suggesting that Thomas Forqueran blew up his own truck in an effort to squeeze money out of Dell. That dog won't hunt, and here's why. If yo

Microsoft’s anti-Linux whisper game

Well, Microsoft never committed to play fair. The company has entered into two more patent agreements with Fuji and Samsung, as reported by Matthew Aslett. As ever, Microsoft doesn't actually say there are any IP infringement problems with Linux

Success: point it out, make some more

<p>When I'm talking to new managers I'm often asked about dealing with people and "how to get them to perform." I talk about it quite a bit in my own book, and nearly every other management and leadership author does the sam

Test Center Tracker: Desktop virtualization horse race

The virtual destkop evolves: Representing the next evolutionary phase of virtualization, desktop virtualization products are giving organizations a way to securely and inexpensively push application and data via VMs to users. Contributing Editor Rand

The “gaping void” in Hugh MacLeod’s understanding of open source

And Microsoft had been doing so well vis-a-vis open source. Well, for a few days, anyway. I still think the company has a lot of opportunity in open source, but it's aggravating to watch the constant backsliding. Case in point: Hugh MacLeod&#039

Aberdeen Releases Research Report on SOA Governance Progress

iTKO Co-Sponsors Fact-Based Survey Measuring Value of Services-Based Software, you can see the release here. I'm always a bit skeptical about sponsored reports, because they are, well, sponsored. However, some good information nonetheless that I

Day at Sybase

 I received an invitation to speak at Sybase on Tuesday…just an internal conference, but fun nonetheless. I always enjoy speaking to developers, especially product developers, considering I ran 4 R&amp;D shops in

SMB Tech News Today; 4/19

* New legislation to revamp patent system. FINALLY! The Patent Reform Act was introduced yesterday. Grants patents to those first to file rather than first to invent, limits damages and has a new procedure for challenging patents. (Source: ComputerWo

Red Hat: Let’s open source science next

Red Hat, ever the open source innovator, has kicked off a partnership with the University of North Carolina and the North Carolina Research Campus to help germinate the open source mindset and mechanics in biotechnology, bioinformatics, public policy

Corporate librarian replaced by Web app

Lesson learned from the Web 2.0 Expo: Tags rule, top-down taxonomy is dead

Surviving through serving

Still here at Coss.fi (where I learned that I am Finnish – what a great country! I knew I'd fit in when the hardest drink anyone had for lunch was milk :-), and still learning a lot. Stephe Walli called out something this morning (and last night

Choosing which boats to burn

I just finished presenting at the COSS.fi Verso open source program, and received a lot of useful feedback (both today and over dinner last night with Matti, Petri, Mikko, and Stephe Walli). I was discussing how difficult it was for proprietary vendo

Reading assignment: “The Power of Green”

In between Reality Checks, perhaps, my colleague Ephraim Schwartz pointed me to a rather excellent article on NYTimes.com titled "The Power of Green." Written by Thomas L. Friedman, the article argues that in order for America to regain its

Momentum in commercial open source communities

I received a few different press releases over the past two weeks. (For those of you who don't send me information on your company, don't complain when you don't get mentioned. I have a day job. I can't scour the web for news on y

Dell’s reputation: Up in smoke?

Regular Cringe readers may recall several posts I've made about Thomas Forqueran, the 62-year-old hunter whose Dell laptop turned his grandfather's vintage 1966 F250 pickup into the smoldering heap you see here. After seven months, Dell&#0

Microsoft tries to maintain its monopoly…are you surprised?

Linux.com has a juicy story about Microsoft's efforts to quash open standards legislation in Florida. No one (including Novell) should be surprised that Microsoft is talking out of both sides of its mouth on open source and open standards. It&#0

Test Center Tracker: Apple cages Leopard for six more months

Leopard in waiting: Apple extended the wait time for Leopard (aka OSX 10.5) by six months, and Tom Yager says there's a greater goal behind the delay than just final tweaking of features — and it involves the iPhone (speaking of which, Cisco ju

Road bumps for a new Vista User

As I mentioned last Wednesday, my oldest daughter bought a new HP laptop running Vista Business the previous&nbsp;Thursday. We visited her that Sunday, and she was just starting to get the computer set up. Like many people with home wireless rout

SMB Tech News Today; 4/18

* IBM announces new Web 2.0 portal. IBM is announcing a WebSphere Portal redesign with new tools designed to let businesses do quick mashups with disparate software, including both Web-based and enterprise silo-type software. Testing to follow. (Sour

The method behind Apple’s madness

Putting Leopard on the back burner keeps iPhone hot Apple's decision to push the release of Leopard (OS X 10.5) from June to October is provoking responses ranging from "so what? There are no indispensable new features in Leopard" to &

No warm fuzzies for iSCSI?

SMBs have been slow to adopt iSCSI so far, but that may change as virtualization spreads

Citrix desktop management and Neoware devices

Many of today's desktop admins are looking for a solution to help them with the management and security of the desktops within their organizations. And Citrix hopes to have an answer for them. And speaking of Citrix, Neoware has recently announc

Is Google more of a lock-in than Microsoft?

I just realized that I was setting myself locked into Google. They already have me for search and Gmail and I have to admit the new Powerpoint app does lower the barrier to get MS Office out of many places. Is it wrong for me to want to rebel? Despit

4,444 Virgins

No, I'm not describing the scene backstage at a Justin Timberlake concert. A Minnesota artist named Robert Delutri says he plans to auction off 4,444 "virgin" domain names in the .com, .net, and .org TLDs. He claims the domains are: hi

InfoWorld LIVE! #11: Identity Theft & SMB

This week we're talking about identity theft. Not just how to protect yourself, but how to protect your business. To help, we've got Joanne McNabb, the Chief of the California Office of Privacy Protection; Pat Dane, the chief revenue office

Who’s the greenest of them all?

Back in the '80s, it was hip to be square (if you believe the dogma of the prophet Huey Lewis). These days, being green is where it's at, and while many companies are scrambling to tout their eco-friendly, energy-efficient ways, the media a

Gartner Jumps on the Bandwagon…

While we’re on the subject of Vista …

I'll be the first to admit that I'm figuring this out as I go along. So I might be wrong. On the other hand, I'm going through exactly what you'll go through when you switch to Vista and Office 2007. So here's what I want to

VMware’s Virtualization Benchmarking Tool Goes Public

VMware has finally released the first public beta of VMmark, the company's virtualization benchmarking tool. First announced just before VMworld 2006 (the company's annual virtualization conference for developers, partners, and end-users),

VMware Releases a Free TCO Calculator for Virtualization

VMware has released a free, self-service Web-based TCO calculator to help virtualization users estimate their return on investment using VMware Infrastructure, and it includes a detailed report on potential cost savings. VMware describes the calculat

Test Center Tracker: Oracle reveals Project X

Does X mark the spot? Oracle has unveiled a flexible new platform called Application Integration Architecture (AIA) that may be the answer to the prayers of companies suffering the rigidity of ERP (enterprise resource planning) software. "Throug

STORServer Announces Backup Storage Appliance for VMware

STORServer, manufacturer of the all-in-one suite of Business Continuity Appliances, announced at Storage Networking World the company's new STORServer VCB Appliance. The backup appliance is designed specifically to protect vulnerable VMware envi

Vizioncore Releases esxReplicator 2.0

Vizioncore has released its latest version of esxReplicator v2.0, the company's real-time replication solution for the VMware VI3 Server environment. The company says that its esxReplicator 2.0 product offers a completely new approach to virtual

SMB Tech News Today; 4/17

First, our sincere condolences to the victims' families of yesterday's senseless violence at Virginia Tech. * Vonage customers better have a backup. They'll most likely figure something out, but for now, SMB Vonage customers are workin

First SCA Solutions Out of the Gate for SOA… HydraSCA

We've been hearing about the Service Component Architecture (SCA) standard for some time, a product of the Open SOA Collaboration group. Rogue Wave Software, a division of Quovadx, Inc. (QVDX), announced the release of Rogue Wave HydraSCA, a ser

When bargain cabling is no bargain

If you won't listen to the IT people you hire, what's the point of having them in the first place? I work IT at the corporate headquarters of a midsize company in Los Angeles; our network includes about 250 computers. We moved to our curren

Best of breed vs. trusted partner

A battle royal is shaping up over two distinct IT/business strategies Best of breed vs. trusted partner — it's the perfect example of why the execution of a business strategy cannot be disentangled from the implementation of IT operations. To m

Open sourcing marketing: Loopfuse goes live

Yesterday, one of the industry's most interesting open source startups launched: Loopfuse. Founded by open source veterans Roy Russo (JBoss Portal) and Tom Elrod (JMX, JBoss Remoting), the company is designed to innovate on the work that proprie

Are Acquisitions Killing SOA?

Are Acquisitions Killing SOA? Download file…