Opinion

Virtual Appliances – Winning Awards and Changing Delivery

Virtual Appliances just seem to keep staying in the virtualization news lately. In today's discussion, one virtual appliance gained recognition from a panel of industry analysts and senior press representatives. And the other topic looks at new

Mar 6, 2007 1 min

SAP exec says Oracle deal changes PM landscape

The acquisition of Hyperion by Oracle has spurred a great deal of debate on this site and many others. I wrote in my analysis that many CIOs are reluctant to buy a performance management [PM] solution from enterprise ERP vendors like SAP or Oracle. T

By Ephraim Schwartz

Preview: JRules 6.5 steers into SOA

As SOA continues to gain momentum, integration of business decision logic into service architectures becomes increasingly important. ILOG JRules version 6.5 smooths the way with a wizard-based deployment mechanism, called Transparent Decision Service

By Steven Nunez

SOA Software adds infrastructure for IBM

SOA Software announced on Monday the availability of SOA infrastructure for IBM's WebSphere application server. The company has released agents and delegates for WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere Business Integraton Message Broker. Thes

By Paul Krill

Mar 5, 2007 1 min

ColdWatt powers energy-efficient servers

Techies tend to get a little giddy about a blazing, state-of-the art CPU or a sleek, powerful new server — sort of how an auto enthusiast gets excited about a souped-up V8 engine or a sexy, sleek Italian roadster. But for a power supply (or a fuel

By Ted Samson

Imation RFID tracking system brings tapes back to the future

RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags have already been used for a variety of tasks, such as tracking people or animals or the movement of goods in a warehouse. Why not use RFID to track computer tapes and make tape management, until now an erro

By Mario Apicella

Why cubicles tend to be one size fits all

Dear Bob …I liked your column, "Office biogeography," (Keep the Joint Running, 2/26/2007). I appreciate that you covered the topic of workspace from the perspective of setting a physical environment to help people and teams to accomplish

By Bob Lewis

Oracle’s big gulp: How will the Hyperion acquisition shake out?

Oracle's acquisition of Hyperion Solutions is wonderful for stockbrokers and people who play the markets for a living, but mergers always generate uncertainty… and uncertainty is a vicious overhead element for IT. What does the merger mean for

By Jeff Angus

Mar 5, 2007 4 mins

Preview: Hyperion Smart Search puts friendlier front end on BI data

Hyperion Solutions is hammering against a trend that has seemed intractable to the entire analytical data vendor market: only 20 percent of the end users who are in a position to do something with BI deliverables receive data from BI systems. There&#

By Jeff Angus

Awesome Desktop Support Gadget

So the Iomega StorCenter network hard disk flaked out this weekend. I get freaked when hard disks flake out because you never know when they're just going to die entirely. And while I had most of the work data in other places, I had about 60GB o

By Oliver Rist

Intuit Quickens the Pace of Reverse Change

Even mature software products are supposed to keep changing for the better. To hear some Quicken customers tell it though, you might think that Intuit is actually trying to subtract features from its venerable personal finance package. Intuit's

By Ed Foster

Mar 5, 2007 5 mins

Test Center Tracker: Virtual PC woes and open-source definitions

Virtual bomb?: Randall Kennedy says Virtual PC 2007 isn't up to snuff (actually, he says it "sucks"), and he thinks it stems from Microsoft's reluctance to embrace desktop virtualization. What do you think? Post your comments on t

By Stephanie McLoughlin

Mar 5, 2007 1 min

RWars

Years — no, decades — ago, I moderated several forums on BIX, the Byte Magazine Information Exchange, an early threaded online discussion system. We would frequently encounter blind zealotry in support of operating systems, programming languages, o

By Martin Heller

Don’t do everything on your list

<p>Here's something that virtually no one will ever tell you. I don't think anyone ever told me this, either, but I've found time and again that when I make real progress I'm following this rule: don't do everything on

By John West

Mar 5, 2007 4 mins

Careers

New appliances squeeze more data into your SAN

Storewiz, Inc. is announcing today two new appliances, the STN-6300 and the STN-6500, capable of compressing files on the fly and without delays. Data compression is certainly not a new technology, and has been applied with success to segments such a

By Mario Apicella

Open Source Small and Medium Business Technology Industry

Free software is nothing to fear

Enlightened software companies and customers are turning away from watered-down open source

By Neil McAllister

Mar 5, 2007 5 mins

IT as a service: taking care of business

To play a truly strategic role, the modern IT organization must run itself as a separate operation. Here’s how four enterprises are reinventing the relationship between business and IT

By Dan Tynan

Mar 5, 2007 12 mins

Software Development Technology Industry

Teaming up for SOA

Governance policies chiseled in stone aren't SOA, they're DOA. Here's how to keep governance collaborative and effective

By Phillip Windley

Mar 5, 2007 10 mins

Game plan for Team SOA

You need all the backing you can get, both personal and logistical, to get an SOA initiative off the ground

By Phillip Windley

The importance and possibility of trust

Dear Bob …I read your Advice Line post, "Problems with project estimation," (2/5/2007), in which you stated that trust is a precondition for successful project estimation and execution.Trust? TRUST?!?No one trusts the IT guys in the room.

By Bob Lewis

Mar 4, 2007 4 mins

AccuRev Announces Support for Virtualization Software

AccuRev, a provider of process-centric software configuration management (SCM) solutions, offers a best-of-breed approach to application lifecycle management (ALM). According to the company, this approach enables unlimited, adaptable, and compliant p

Mar 4, 2007 2 mins

Tehuti Networks Offers VMware Environments 10GbE Networking

As the density of a physical server continues to climb, networking performance demands will continue to rise. To try and solve that problem, companies like Tehuti Networks are looking ahead to provide the high-performance networking that the future s

Mar 4, 2007 1 min

HP VMware Solution Sizing Tool

For an organization just starting out with server virtualization and a server consolidation project, one of the first questions asked is about how to properly size the environment – capacity planning. HP is stepping up to the plate to try and help th

Mar 4, 2007 2 mins

Funny SOA Video

I got a kick out of this, hope you will as well….

By Dave Linthicum

Mar 3, 2007 1 min

Small and Medium Business Software Development

Why Virtual PC 2007 Sucks

Virtual PC 2007 Sucks. It's slow. It lacks any competitive features. It's nothing but a warmed-over Virtual PC 2004 with a few bug fixes. But that's OK. Microsoft wanted it this way. In fact, Virtual PC 2007 is exactly what they envisi

By Randall Kennedy

Mar 3, 2007 2 mins

Dell’s Little Black Box

Awhile back, Dell sent me an RD1000. It's an attractive little external removable drive, fed by USB2, with 40, 80 and 120GB cartridges. The cartridges are really just SATA hard drives, but they're cheap and easy to handle. I've put my

By Paul Venezia

InfoWorld LIVE! #6: Challenges for Today’s Technology Entrepreneurs

And here's another episode of InfoWorld LIVE! radio. This week it's all about technology startups. The challenges we're facing today vs. the easy times of gravy and gold from ten years ago. My co-host shares his technology lawyer wisdo

By Oliver Rist

Mar 2, 2007 1 min

USMT trumps Windows Easy Transfer for Vista upgrades

Tempting though it may to rely on Windows Easy Transfer Tool when upgrading user PCs to Vista, you'd be well served to read the documentation on Microsoft's User State Migration Toolkit (USMT). Now in Version 3.0, it can provide a superior

By Oliver Rist

Visual Studio Help

Periodically, I encounter an annoying but not fatal problem with Microsoft Visual Studio: the help takes a long time to display the first time I launch it in a session. Sometimes I expect this to happen, because of having recently i

By Martin Heller

SOA as a SaaS…What to Plan For

I've been working with a number of clients that use outside-in services, or services that are hosted remotely, but leveraged within one or many internal systems. Typically this is around some ad-hoc business driver, such as using a remote servic

By Dave Linthicum

Test Center Tracker: Analyzing Vista deployment tools

Fresh from the Test Center: This week's Test Center missive analyzes Microsoft's free tools for deploying Vista. According to Oliver Rist and Brian Chee, "The company — shockingly — has succeeded" with much thanks due

By Stephanie McLoughlin

Mar 2, 2007 1 min

Reflections of a 20-year IT security veteran

New job, same goals: Improve computer security, protect end-users

By Roger Grimes

Mar 2, 2007 5 mins

Security

Can HPC become a commodity?

HP's acquisition of PolyServe suggests commoditization is possible, but some assembly is still required

By Mario Apicella

Mar 2, 2007 3 mins

Prepay and Pay More With Earthlink

When you pay an Internet provider for a year's worth of service in advance, you would expect that would mean you'd wind up paying less. But one reader recently discovered that using Earthlink's prepay option worked out to a much higher

By Ed Foster

Mar 2, 2007 3 mins

VMware Answers Parallels with Fusion Beta 2

With Parallels announcing the GA release of their latest Desktop for Mac product along with all of its new and cool features, you knew VMware wouldn't be too far behind with something up their sleeve. VMware is working on Beta 2 of its VMware Fu

Mar 2, 2007 4 mins

Parallels Latest Desktop for Mac Goes GA

Parallels announced on Tuesday the release of a major update and refresh of their Desktop for Mac virtualization platform – the product that lets Intel-based Macs run Windows, Linux and other operating systems within virtual machines that run inside

Got amazing tales, real-life experiences, lessons learned the hard way, or war stories from the trenches where IT and business intersect? Perhaps you've been inspired by our Off the Record column and want to share your story. Spill your guts via

By InfoWorld Anonymous

Data Management

Dell Shows off a Demo of VMware VMotion

If you've never had the opportunity to see VMware's VMotion in action, you might want to check out this video clip published by Dell on its VMware Alliance Center site. Scott Hanson from the Dell TechCenter creates a three and half minute v

Hewlett-Packard to buy PolyServe

Hewlett-Packard announced on Monday that the company has agreed to acquire privately owned PolyServe, a provider of storage virtualization software for application and file serving utilities. According to HP officials, the transaction is expected to

Red-Gate Answers Back

Red-Gate has answered the blog and all the hype it created earlier this week. A comment was posted to the original blog, and I'm going to just copy it here, partially to make sure that everyone sees it, and partially because I'm really bad

By Sean McCown

Mar 1, 2007 2 mins

Databases

Preview: Attensity 4.1’s Industrial-Strength Text Mining

One of the key tools in any truly knowledge-managed organization is a business analytics feature set for mining and analysing text. Attensity recently updated their line to version 4.1, and the results are impressive. Text mining tools plumb unstruct

By Jeff Angus

Mar 1, 2007 3 mins

Austin tops U.S. green-tech incubators

Green technology. Clean technology. Soy bean technology. Call it what you like, but make no mistake: Venture capitalists and entreprenuers are sowing the seeds for what will be a booming alternative-energy market. If you're curious as to just wh

By Ted Samson

Mar 1, 2007 2 mins

Visual Studio SDK touted

Microsoft has released Version 4 of the Visual Studio 2005 Software Development Kit, enabling developers to build custom tools, editors, designers, languages and other extensions for the company's development environment. The new SDK includes br

By Paul Krill

Test Center Tracker: Symantec probes Vista

Symantec points out Vista security holes: Microsoft poured lots of resources into making its newest OS secure, an effort that some analysts have praised. But now Symantec has released a report citing out security shortcomings in the OS. Among them: i

By Ted Samson

Microsoft hails Orcas, beginning developers

Microsoft this week launched the March Community Technology Preview (CTP) of its Visual Studio "Orcas" release and also set up its Beginner Developer Learning Center. The CTP, accessible here, features a WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation

By Paul Krill

Mar 1, 2007 2 mins