Opinion

Reader Voices: Eliminating Rebates

The recent news that OfficeMax plans to phase out most mail-in rebates, as Best Buy already announced it wants to do as well, raises a question. With major retailers recognizing that rebates generally make for a bad customer experience, can't th

What the heck is Windows Live, anyway?

This giant service set is more than just Google retaliation –  there are some useful business services inside

A product management approach to SOA

How Wachovia Bank applies product lifecycle discipline to SOA solutions

Banking on SOA

At Wachovia Bank, Tony Bishop and his boss, CIO Susan Certoma, made a huge bet on SOA. Now, they’re on their way to completing the platform for innovation the company needed

Let the summer storage tournament begin

Charged with new products, purchases, and alliances, storage vendors get ready to joust

Wachovia’s steps to SOA success

How Wachovia revamped its organization to successfully implement SOA

Where Have All The Good Product Managers Gone?

Comparing different interaction forums

Dear Bob …I have run into an interesting situation that probably is fairly common.Actually, what makes it interesting for me is not the situation itself, but rather a possible opportunity to learn something.I was involved in a discussion through a

Broaden your options: Don’t fear native code

The conditions that brought .Net and Java into being are no longer  today’s reality

Application UI goes back to basics

Users rediscover that an effective interface doesn't always need bells and whistles

SOA and Data Integration Part 2

Unlike SOA, which can support real-time data movement, data integration (typically) provides adequate business information (data replication) without up-to-the-minute access of information. In many cases, the data is weeks, even months, old, and the

Software-as-a-service model is maturing

As a growing number of companies experiment with SaaS, customers are the winners

“Just fix it” is not a viable strategy for complex IT problems

When your boss has more money than sense, look out when the rug starts moving underneath you

A License to Audit

Given the depredations that software publishers visit on us little guys in the name of license compliance — with Microsoft's WGA shenanigans just the most recent prime example — you might assume that the big corporate customers have it a lot e

SOA and Data Integration Part 1

I'm going to tackle SOA and data integration this week due to the number of e-mails I've been receiving on the topic. I did indeed address it in my Podcast this week, but I would like to hit this topic in my blog as well, perhaps provide s

SOA Report Podcast…SOA 2.0 and Data Integration and SOA

SOA Report Podcast…SOA 2.0 and Data Integration and SOA Listen to the latest SOA Expert Podcast…

The 10-Gig challenge: How we tested

Today's high-end switches demand heavy-duty challenges to truly assess their capabilities

Cisco hedges its networking edge

Can the No. 1 switching vendor win in 10 Gig by not playing?

Windows apps cross over to the Mac

CodeWeavers CrossOver Office's abstraction layer makes the move possible, but there's an even better option

Spirent melds voice, video, and data into networking test gear

Enhanced TestCenter and Abacus tools prove invaluable for gauging 10-Gig performance

10 Gig is enterprise-ready, but Cisco doesn’t play well with others

Storage and VoIP demands are driving 10-gig switching gear's evolution

Verizon Never Stops Lying to You

It probably isn't news to any of my readers that you can't trust anything any cell phone company tells you. Still, the story one reader recently sent me about his dealings with Verizon is too good an illustration of the point not to share.

When Mr. Negative is your boss

Dear Bob …I am in a situation here at work. I am extremely unhappy with my boss.Don’t get me wrong. We get along OK personally but he is like the kid in Peanuts with the dust cloud around him. I have been cleaning up after him fo

Bill, bills, and billionaires

Dell woes addressed, Ellison's largesse

Product management bug is spreading

It might sound dull, but it’s the best way to avoid pet projects and blind alleys

Keeping Tabs on Open Source Mixing and Matching

SOA 2 point Oh No!

It looks like the anti-SOA 2.0 on-line petition is passing 400 entries now, and growing. Proof positive that people are getting sick of the hype around SOA, and want the vendors and service providers to focus on the discipline, not the marketecture.

Storage consortium Aperi enters Eclipse without Sun

Controversy still surrounds the Aperi group, but joining Eclipse is an important step to better storage management

Effective security isn’t easy, but it is possible

Are you willing to do what it takes to truly secure your company's systems — no matter how unpopular the solution?

Netburst slinks away

Now that Core Microarchitecture is shipping, the Pentium 4 architecture gets a fitting send-off

Evolving WinFS still needs to embrace the Web

To truly succeed at search, Microsoft should acknowledge social networking

Don’t Click “Continue” at LendingTree.com

When lenders compete, you lose … your privacy, that is. That's what one reader discovered recently after making the mistake of shopping for a loan on LendingTree.com. "My husband and I have been thinking about taking out a home equity loa

10 Really Bad Ideas

Making ITIL happen

Dear Bob …About a year ago I launched a serious attempt to institute ITIL throughout the IT organization I lead (to give you a sense of scale, we have about 250 associates). The short version: We've had a very hard time making it stick. Employ

Dealing with salary complaints

Dear Bob …"Al" is one of my best employees. He's a top-notch engineer, very responsible, and handles anything I throw at him with a high degree of professionalism. If I could find three more just like him I'd hire every one of t

Watch your step — the boss may be out to get you

When someone is setting you up to take the fall, relief is spelled "written documentation"

IM as a unified collaboration platform

IBM hopes instant messaging will become the central portal for enterprise communications

Reader Voices: DRM and Crime

Does DRM fit the crime, or is copyright crime just an excuse for DRM? The suggestion by some in a recent discussion that various forms of digital rights management are necessary to protect copyright holders met with a strong rebuke from one reader. T

How about Some SOA Humor for the Long Weekend?

5 SOA Tips 1. Never have a Web service call itself…you'll go back in time. 2. Make sure to purchase a governance tool. Not that you'll need it, but it's just cool to say "governance tool." 3. Make sure to search and replac

Server virtualization enters its adolescence

Cost savings alone make this maturing technology virtually certain to be a fixture in the enterprise

Virtuozzo caters to high-volume server environments

Multiple virtual servers run on a single kernel with high performance and excellent management

Solaris Containers fill servers to the limit

Sun's built-in Unix virtualization scheme maximizes utilization

VMware maintains lead with Virtual Infrastructure 3

New version of flagship virtualization product improves hardware support

Virtualization gaining momentum in the enterprise

From OS and hardware makers to tool vendors and beyond, benefits for IT resource utilization are reflected in the bottom line

Xen 3.0 makes paravirtualization mainstream

Open source hypervisor builds virtualization into the OS kernel

Microsoft looks to Longhorn for virtualization speed-up

Hypervisor close to the kernel should outpace Virtual Server 2005

Hardware vendors are missing the opportunity of open source

Alternative Linksys firmware proves that customers can contribute more than just revenue

AMD and Intel bake virtualization into chips

Performance increases when software doesn't have to do all the heavy lifting

Holiday Spoiled by Epson Warranty Service

When a product that's under warranty stops working, the manufacturer is supposed to either fix it or replace it. But there's a third alternative, as one reader has discovered in trying to get warranty service for his Epson P-2000, a portabl

The depressing state of computer security