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Tech giants chart research goals Power consumption, parallelism, and the rapidly-expanding world of mobile communications are among the leading areas of research and development currently being investigated within some of the IT world's largest companies. Fear of insider threats hits home The more money that companies spend on securing their IT operations from external attack, the more it seems they become aware that the potential threat posed by their own employees remains their most significant risk.  September 18, 10:42 a.m. PDT Best of open source in enterprise monitoring Open source software has had a foothold in the enterprise monitoring sphere for almost as long as open source has existed. One only needs to look at the sheer ubiquity of small applications such as MRTG (Multi Router Traffic Grapher) and its RRDTool back end to see that. What we haven't had from open source is the big application -- the comprehensive, community supported open source enterprise management suite that provides the depth and breadth of functionality that businesses need and generally find in closed-source competitors. That is changing in leaps and bounds. In fact, open source enterprise monitoring solutions are evolving so quickly, we won't even try to declare a clear winner yet -- but we're working on it. September 10, 3:00 a.m. PDT Mobile business apps middleware catches on Industry experts maintain that many business applications vendors are still struggling to successfully port their tools to mobile handsets. But some software makers claim that by partnering with wireless specialists to develop their systems, they are selling more licenses to end-users today. September 7, 9:45 a.m. PDT Desktop technology: Streaming to a screen near you Shrink-wrap is dead. The era of the traditional end-user seat license is coming to a close. Tomorrow's enterprise desktop is all about subscription-based delivery of customized computing stacks via application virtualization. August 20, 3:00 a.m. PDT Sourcefire acquires ClamAV open-source anti-malware project Network security specialist Sourcefire announced Friday that it has acquired ClamAV, an open-source gateway anti-malware project whose technologies are used in the products of a number of other vendors. August 17, 8:58 a.m. PDT Hospital undergoes wireless surgery For years, wireless technologies have only shown up in many U.S. hospitals in the form of rolling computers with Wi-Fi network access, but as evidenced at Chicago's Northwestern Memorial Hospital, times are changing. August 13, 2:37 p.m. PDT Novell buys endpoint security firm Senforce Novell announced on Monday that it has acquired Senforce Technologies, a provider of endpoint and network security tools, for an undisclosed sum. August 13, 9:40 a.m. PDT McAfee sets Rootkit Detective free On July 26, McAfee will begin offering a new application called Rootkit Detective, designed to detect and remove dangerous rootkit attacks. The software will also help end-users ward off the threats, as well as funnel new intelligence into the company's ongoing research operations. July 25, 1:12 p.m. PDT Using mobile logistics to streamline your business Field service automation is one of the most advanced areas for mobile applications development among enterprises, and at $280-million-per year laundry services provider Mac-Gray, IT managers say such a project has helped the company clean up both its operations and fuel growth. July 24, 2:44 p.m. PDT Sun anticipates moves to software services In the IT shop of the near future, personnel likely will manage services instead of systems, a Sun Microsystems official said Monday in elaborating both on Sun's internal plans and what can be expected of the IT landscape at large. July 17, 3:05 p.m. PDT BSA offers $1 million reward for turning in software pirates Earlier this month the Business Software Alliance (BSA) upped the ante from $200,000 to $1 million for anyone who turns in a company that is illegally circumventing software licensing agreements. July 9, 3:15 p.m. PDT Senators seek delay in patent bill A group of five Republican senators is seeking a delay in legislation, supported by several large tech vendors, that would overhaul the U.S. patent system. June 12, 8:39 a.m. PDT Zenoss: Bringing open source to enterprise management If you curse your "tier-one" IT management solution as too cumbersome, too complex, and too expensive, you're not alone. In arecent Gartner study that declares the "Big Four" -- BMC, CA, HP, and IBM -- increasingly vulnerable to SaaS (software as a service) and open source alternatives, surveyed users gave their vendors mostly C's and D's, and a good number of incompletes. May 31, 3:00 a.m. PDT OpenSpan: Beyond the enterprise mashup The dream of every CIO, says Francis Carden, CEO of OpenSpan is to instantly turn all of their legacy applications into reusable components. May 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT What the enterprise can learn from consumer technologies Today’s corporate end-users are far more tech-savvy than their productivity with IT tools indicates. After all, screen-deep in IMs, widgets, and elaborate consumer Web apps, they’re proving themselves well-versed in the production and distribution of content as facilitated by the consumer Web 2.0 craze. April 9, 3:00 a.m. PDT Collax puts Web face on application management Linux vendor Collax wants use the Web interface it has built for managing small-business servers to manage applications from other vendors too. March 19, 4:42 a.m. PST Novell to manage Windows desktops with Zenworks Novell hopes to cut out some of the complexity small and medium-size businesses face in managing Windows desktops with new software it is demonstrating at CeBIT in Hanover, Germany, this week. March 15, 9:16 a.m. PST Timely coverage Usually daylight-saving time is no big deal. We “spring ahead,” grumble briefly about an hour of lost sleep, and get on with life. This year could be different. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 advanced DST by three weeks, forcing IT managers into a feverish patch-fest, as they scramble to make sure their systems can handle the March 11 transition. March 12, 3:00 a.m. PST Improve availability of enterprise data Ask an expert about data availability and how to ensure it, and the conversation quickly turns to the subject of human error. Not that IT mistakes are the leading cause of unplanned downtime; the research firm Gartner identifies software failures as the chief culprit, and “operator error” as the second most common cause, ahead of hardware outages; building or site disasters; and metro disasters, such as storms or floods, in that order. But of all of these major causes, human error is the one that IT can really do something about. March 12, 3:00 a.m. PST Deploying Microsoft Office 2007 A Microsoftee will tell you that deploying Office 2007 is as simple as adding it to a WIM (Windows Imaging Format) file. Theoretically, we don’t disagree, but practically, no way, no how. You’ll need additional tools for this job, and the best places to look are Microsoft’s BDD (Business Desktop Deployment) 2007 kit and the Office 2007 Resource Kit (see also the Test Center Analysis "Microsoft tools ease Vista deployment"). March 1, 3:00 a.m. PST Google Apps upgrade threatens Office Google pushed further into the communication and collaboration applications market with a major upgrade Thursday of Google Apps, a hosted suite for organizations of all sizes that analysts say could soon become a real competitor to Microsoft Office. February 22, 4:16 a.m. PST Symantec to buy asset management vendor Altiris Symantec will acquire Altiris, a maker of asset management software for mobile devices and other hardware, for $830 million, the companies said Monday. January 29, 5:21 a.m. PST Citrix buys Ardence Citrix Systems Inc. agreed to buy Ardence Inc., the developer of real-time provisioning technology, for an undisclosed sum. December 20, 6:14 a.m. PST Health insurers create personal health records Two large health insurance trade groups based in the U.S. have released a model for personal health records, a portable, Web-based tool that includes a customer's insurance claims, immunization records, medication records and other health information. December 13, 1:10 p.m. PST Springhill Medical Center emerges from the paper age For software developers, a crucial metric of success is the ability of their organization’s employees to get solid results from the applications the developers build, a practice known in the industry as “eating one’s own dog food.” Mark Kilborn, a regional CIO of Eclipsys, has spent the past three years helping Springhill Medical Center in Mobile, Ala., in its effort to automate emergency department procedures. He got to witness the results of his team’s project when, in early October, his 14-year-old son broke his wrist playing football. November 13, 3:00 a.m. PST 2006 InfoWorld 100 Awards: Education Open Source Lab at Oregon State University www.osuosl.org 24/7 On-Demand Systems and Applications Availability Project Lead: Corey Shields, Infrastructure Manager Project Description: Provides free hosting for the Linux Kernel Project, the Apache Software Foundation, Debian Linux, Gentoo Linux, OpenOffice.org, KDE, Mozilla, and Drupal. The lab's size has more than tripled in the past 18 months and hosts 130 servers. The servers run a variety of Linux distributions, mostly Gentoo and Debian. They host a range of Apache-based Web services, source control systems, content management systems, wikis, and many underlying databases, mostly MySQL. The project leverages Splunk, Xen, and Cfengine combined with Revision Control. November 13, 3:00 a.m. PST Open source rule management Considering that a high-end BRMS (Business Rule Management System) costs about $50,000 just to get started, and that annual maintenance, runtime fees, and professional services can drive the total toward a hefty half-million or more, organizations on a tight budget have incentive to seek alternatives. Thankfully, good options exist. Two of the better low-or-no-cost tools are Jess from Sandia National Laboratories, and JBoss Rules from JBoss, a division of Red Hat. November 2, 5:00 p.m. PST AMD CEO envisions users, not vendors, in control of IT The head of Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) is predicting a seismic shift in the balance of power in both the chip industry and the world of IT as a whole, with influence shifting from vendors to users. The move could particularly benefit the health-care industry, which is still struggling to find ways to move forward with technology. October 23, 2:06 p.m. PDT HP extends offer to buy Mercury for a third time Hoping that the third time's a charm, Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) has again extended the deadline for Mercury Interactive Corp. shareholders to approve HP's US$4.5 billion pending purchase of Mercury. October 16, 7:36 a.m. PDT Oracle broadens its applications management Oracle is to broaden its Enterprise Manager 10g software to include comprehensive applications management. The vendor will make the new capabilities available with the upcoming release of three new management packs for three of its different enterprise applications families. October 13, 4:44 a.m. PDT Microsoft buys DesktopStandard Microsoft has bolstered its group-policy desktop management offering with the acquisition of New Hampshire software vendor DesktopStandard. October 2, 11:37 a.m. PDT Klir Analytics shares IT management advice Inspired by the communal wisdom generated on sites like Wikipedia.com, Klir Technologies launched an IT management product Monday intended for system administrators at small and medium businesses. September 25, 6:29 a.m. PDT Pay as you go, but how much? Missing from a future of pay-per-use software licensing are the tools that users will need to gauge just what they are paying for. And, given that most users still haven’t bought the software management systems they need just to keep track of the licenses they do have, this hole is not too surprising. September 25, 3:00 a.m. PDT Technology with no past To the extent that it’s possible, I’m declaring today the beginning of recorded history in information technology. On this day, the phrase “information technology,” abbreviated IT, came into being as shorthand for electronic devices that aid humans in storage and sharing of, analysis of, protection of, and access to significant amounts of digitized content. Content? That’s anything you’re capable of holding in your brain for even a nanosecond. IT is not a department or a group of people. It’s a smart phone. It’s a room full of SPARC servers. A telephone headset? A keyboard? I don’t know. They’re new terms. We’ll work that out as we go. I do know that if we didn’t have such things, information technology would be inaccessible. September 20, 3:00 a.m. PDT Segway recalls scooters for software glitch Segway Inc. has recalled all 23,500 of its electric scooters to fix a software glitch that can topple users off the platform and that has caused six head and wrist injuries. September 14, 1:00 p.m. PDT Microsoft legacy support costs set to rise for some Microsoft revised its Custom Support Agreement (CSA) program on Monday, signalling possible higher costs for suppport for customers with certain versions of the company's software. August 28, 12:41 p.m. PDT BMC updates batch management In a real-time world, batch processing has all the sex appeal of an old gray filing cabinet, but as Gur Steif, a product marketing vice president for BMC, said, "Almost every Web transaction we execute online actually ends up being processed in batches." So when you buy your Motorola Q phone with one click, the processes that order kicks off will crank some time later with a barrel full of others. August 28, 3:00 a.m. PDT BEA snaps up metadata registry tech When Mercury Interactive plunked down $105 million for Systinet last January, that left just two prominent pure-play vendors of SOA registry/repositories standing: Infravio and Flashline. That number was cut by half last week, when BEA Systems bought Flashline for an undisclosed sum. August 28, 3:00 a.m. PDT Telecommunications: Grappling with M&A mania The challenges telecommunications carriers face are not so different from those of their enterprise customers. They’re just a lot bigger. And IT managers are meeting them by pursuing consolidation -- that is, reducing the number of systems and personnel -- with a vengeance. August 21, 3:00 a.m. PDT Lessons from the verticals Every industry presents unique challenges, where IT must marshal more than the usual chunk of resources to solve extreme headaches. That may mean walking out to the edge of grid computing to garner greater compute performance, or it may involve management challenges such as accommodating a mobile workforce or connecting hundreds of far-flung offices. The greater the problem to overcome, the greater the potential to learn from successful solutions. August 21, 3:00 a.m. PDT Update: Microsoft updates fix PowerPoint, Windows flaws Microsoft has issued nine security updates addressing critical flaws in its Office and Windows products. The updates patch two worrisome PowerPoint flaws that could allow attackers to seize control of a PC, the company said Tuesday. August 9, 4:20 a.m. PDT Inventors object to new patent reform bill A patent reform bill introduced in the U.S. Senate last week is earning praise from large IT vendors, even as small inventors and some technologists say the legislation would hurt the little guys. August 8, 1:51 p.m. PDT InfoWorld NewsMakers: Hewlett-Packard's Tom Hogan In the Jane Austen novel that has become Mercury Interactive’s financial story in the past 12 months, it was HP playing the role of Mr. Knightley last month, riding to the rescue with an offer to buy Mercury for $4.5 billion and, thus, save the company from itself. August 7, 3:00 a.m. PDT HP buys CIO access with Mercury deal Why did Hewlett-Packard plunk down $4.5 billion for Mercury Interactive? Two words: Adaptive. Enterprise. July 31, 3:00 a.m. PDT HP to acquire Mercury for $4.5 billion HP said Tuesday that it was buying Mercury Interactive for $4.5 billion in a deal to become a leader in IT management software. July 26, 9:00 a.m. PDT SAP updates application maintenance software SAP is updating its software maintenance application designed to help administrators manage upgrades, patches, and other changes to the company's software. July 25, 4:53 a.m. PDT Clash of the Java rule Titans Editor's Note: In this review, we inaccurately stated that we ran the WaltzDB benchmark on ILOG JRules 6 and Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor 6.1. Although we were able to run the benchmark on Blaze Advisor, we were not able to do so on JRules. As noted in the review's supplementary performance chart online, we thus reported one of two benchmark results provided by ILOG. We believed this number accurately reflected JRules' performance. Since that time, ILOG has asserted that the performance number we reported was based on a first-generation RETE algorithm and not the current algorithm which the product now uses. We plan to perform further testing of our own to better assess the performance capabilities of ILOG JRules and will provide those results when they are available. July 17, 3:00 a.m. PDT What the heck is Windows Live, anyway? As late as early June, I noticed that folks attending Microsoft’s TechEd trade show seemed to avoid the Windows Live booth because they simply don’t know what the service really was. And there are many who think they know what it is and dismiss it because it can’t have any relevance today. Or can it? July 13, 3:00 a.m. PDT Exclusive: Corticon plays by different rules Dr. Mark Allen of Corticon caused quite a ruckus several years ago when he published a paper called “Rete is Wrong,” which took all of the rule-based engines based on the Rete (pronounced Ree-tee) algorithm to task for inefficiencies and poor construction. Allen explained that, in contrast to the Rete engines in market-leading BRMS (Business Rules Management Systems) such as ILOG’s JRules and Fair Isaac’s Blaze Advisor, Corticon had a DETI (Design-Time Inferencing, pronounced Dee-Tee) engine. July 7, 3:00 a.m. PDT SoftGrid opens a stream toward application manageability Virtualization is all the rage these days. Chances are good that if you're not pursuing some sort of application or server virtualization strategy today, you probably will be in the near future; the potential cost savings are that compelling. June 29, 3:00 a.m. PDT Time is right to bargain with Microsoft I think it’s a wonderful thing that Bill Gates is retiring so that he can devote himself to his foundation. If he puts half the effort into doing good works that he put into building Microsoft, the world will benefit. However, that doesn’t mean your company has to continue funding his efforts by overpaying for Microsoft license agreements. June 27, 3:00 a.m. PDT Microsoft weighs strong app IDs for Windows future Microsoft has plans to introduce stronger security for third-party applications that run on future versions of Windows, including "Vienna," the planned successor to Windows Vista. June 19, 3:00 a.m. PDT CSC wins US DOJ case-management contract The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has awarded Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) a US$42 million contract for a new case-management system, the DOJ announced Thursday. June 1, 10:05 a.m. PDT Hack Tales: Keeping thin clients synced from coast to coast I once consulted for a medical-records company that was rolling out thin clients to nearly 50 offices around the United States. The goal was to build a large Citrix MetaFrame farm over WAN links to the main datacenter, which was located outside Boston, providing a Windows desktop for every user without dealing with hardware problems at each site. May 29, 3:00 a.m. PDT Hack Tales: E-mail archiving the home-brew way Compliance is a painful reality for many IT administrators. Among the growing list of tasks, e-mail archiving is becoming a major requirement. Not only are various government audits interested in e-mail archiving data, but legal actions have begun to call on this information with increasing frequency. The demand for e-mail archive retrieval has become so great, in fact, that corporate e-mail hosting services -- Microsoft’s new Exchange Hosted Services, for example -- have begun adding high-availability archiving to their service menus. May 29, 3:00 a.m. PDT Easing app deployment with an open source sandbox I’ve just returned from a day at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Va., where I participated in the annual Faculty Academy on Instructional Technologies. I greatly enjoyed the opportunity to give a keynote talk on 21st century literacy, and to discuss Web 2.0 with a panel of like-minded thinkers. May 24, 3:00 a.m. PDT Akimbi virtualizes the application test bench In the average datacenter, a lot of IT resources are spent on preproduction application testing. Servers, networks, databases, and applications must all be deployed, followed by a series of installs and uninstalls for various versions of the application environment being put through its paces. The more homegrown applications you create, the more staff hours you burn on this repetitive but crucial work. “It’s all quite churny,” says James Phillips, CEO of Akimbi. May 15, 3:00 a.m. PDT Product previews Sun Solaris 10 to integrate ZFS and PostgreSQL Sun announced a June release of the solaris 10 operating system that will incorporate ZFS 1.0, Sun’s new 128-bit file system, and the open source PostgreSQL database. ZFS automatically detects and corrects data corruption and eliminates the need for a volume manager. PostgreSQL will help leverage Solaris’ predictive self-healing, OS containers, and DTrace (dynamic tracing) technologies. Solaris 10, Sun Microsystems May 15, 3:00 a.m. PDT High-availability Exchange made easy The obvious solution for bringing HA (high availability) to your Exchange server is to use Microsoft’s own Exchange clustering features. Although Exchange’s clustering is reliable and robust, this isn’t an easy configuration to set up. It’s also usually costly, not only in terms of additional hardware and software licenses, but also because it requires a skilled Exchange administrator. May 12, 3:00 a.m. PDT A casting call for my screencasting experiment I’d like to invite some of you to join me in a journalistic experiment. As you know if you’ve been following my work through the years, I preach what I practice. My analytical perspectives flow from my own hands-on work. However, my experience is necessarily limited to certain styles: Web programming, lightweight integration, semistructured data, collaboration. May 10, 3:00 a.m. PDT Update: Microsoft settles antitrust suit in California Microsoft Corp. Tuesday reached a tentative US$70 million deal to settle a California class-action antitrust lawsuit, according to a statement by the law firm representing the plaintiffs in the suit. May 2, 4:45 p.m. PDT Mercury hones in on change management A new product from mercury Interactive may provide IT managers with a big picture of systems changes and help them understand the impact of changes in an enterprise. May 1, 3:00 a.m. PDT CA reports disappointing preliminary Q4 results CA Inc. reported disappointing preliminary results for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2006 Tuesday, blaming both a change in its accounting model in relation to recognizing revenue from acquisitions and a slow sales bookings start to the quarter. April 25, 1:24 p.m. PDT Are your software services compliant? In case you haven’t noticed, just about every part of the IT infrastructure must comply with some regulation or other. April 25, 3:00 a.m. PDT Fujitsu to push for higher profile, profits in North America Fujitsu, the third largest IT infrastructure service provider in the world, is unveiling this week a slew of IT partnerships and products that company executives expect will raise the company’s profile and profits in North America. April 21, 12:28 p.m. PDT BMC buys apps management vendor for $150 million BMC Software has offered $150 million in cash for Identify Software, an Israeli vendor of application problem-resolution software, and plans to build a transaction-management business division around the acquisition. March 27, 9:42 a.m. PST User-centric identity brings federation close to home Federation doesn’t have to be a behind-the-scenes interaction between big companies. Lately, an idea called “user-centric identity” has gained traction. It revolves around a few core principles, most notably the idea that users should be allowed to choose which identity credentials to present in response to an authentication or attribute request. March 24, 3:00 a.m. PST Start plotting your Vista migration map Office 2003 to Office 2007. Windows XP Pro to Windows Vista x-of-6. It's all looming on the horizon, and even though that horizon moved to early 2007 as of this week, it's still going to spawn headaches if you don't make adequate preparations. To avoid ruining your Fall, you're best off planning your user-migration process now rather than in, say, November. March 23, 3:00 a.m. PST Software as a service: The next big thing In a now legendary 1995 memo, Bill Gates raised the alarm that Microsoft was woefully unprepared for what he termed the “Internet Tidal Wave.” Fast forward 10 years to last October, and Gates blasts out another high-priority e-mail, this time warning of a coming “services wave” of applications available instantly over the Internet. “The next sea change is upon us,” he writes. March 20, 3:00 a.m. PST McAfee vows to help after faulty software release Executives at McAfee are promising to help enterprise customers manage the difficulties that arose March 10 after faulty software prompted users to delete Microsoft Excel files, among others. The defective software is no longer posted, so users can now safely download the latest anti-virus definitions for McAfee’s VirusScan product, officials said. March 20, 3:00 a.m. PST Modern strategies for managing Microsoft Exchange Let’s face it: administering a Microsoft-based network inevitably means dealing with Exchange Server. Microsoft continues to lead the messaging market in new-account sales “by a significant margin,” according to Erica Rugullies, principal analyst at Forrester Research. That’s amazing success when you consider that today, with e-mail already a staple of every corporate network, leading the market isn’t about finding new customers so much as it is about taking them away from someone else. March 16, 3:00 a.m. PST Tackling Exchange management from all angles See correction at end of review March 16, 3:00 a.m. PST SAP extends virtualization to Microsoft platforms SAP announced a move to extend the adaptive computing capabilities of its NetWeaver integration platform to Microsoft environments, among other product enhancements, on the opening day of the Cebit trade show. March 9, 4:18 a.m. PST Filling the void left by baby-boomer techies The big exodus is getting closer and closer. The baby boomers are about to retire in droves. Every day 10,000 baby boomers turn 50. In the next 10 years, 43 percent of the workforce will be eligible for retirement, while the next two generations are about 15 percent smaller. February 28, 3:00 a.m. PST HP integrates Peregrine software into OpenView Hewlett-Packard said Monday it has integrated software from acquisition Peregrine Systems into its own line of asset management software. February 27, 4:22 a.m. PST Update: Oracle adds Microsoft support to Enterprise Manager Oracle Corp. has released several plug-ins that extend its database and applications management tools to cover a wide range of Microsoft Corp. products, including its SQL Server database, Oracle announced Wednesday. February 22, 1:24 p.m. PST Rogue IT may be a blessing in disguise “Rogue IT,” or hidden technology spending outside the IT organization, is a problem long known to large-enterprise CIOs. But by definition it’s been hard to quantify, so when an item came across my desk claiming that 93 percent of corporate users had deployed software not sanctioned by IT, I was hopeful for some real data. February 17, 3:00 a.m. PST Inside MCI’s decision to build or to buy IT applications In the past year, MCI had to make a decision about whether to buy or build a system to track third-party services inventory. The following series of questions illustrates how the company arrived at a decision to buy the application. February 13, 3:00 a.m. PST Symantec acquires datacenter management software Symantec Tuesday announced plans to acquire Relicore, a provider of datacenter management software, as part of a bid to round out its offerings for datacenter customers. February 8, 4:17 a.m. PST Microsoft to introduce licensing tool in Canada, Europe Microsoft's tool for helping customers make sense of its complicated product licensing is expected to make its debut outside the U.S. with several new features on Tuesday, according to the software company. January 31, 1:17 p.m. PST Update: Microsoft has record Q2, misses revenue estimates Microsoft Corp. on Thursday reported the highest quarterly revenue in company history for its fiscal 2006 second quarter on the strength of its Windows OS and a series of highly anticipated product releases. Still, the company fell slightly shy of analysts' revenue expectations. January 26, 5:00 p.m. PST CA shuffles exec ranks, passes CTO job to Barrenechea CA Inc. is shuffling its executive ranks, naming technology strategist Mark Barrenechea as its new chief technology officer (CTO). January 25, 9:59 a.m. PST Software as a service: Pay as you build, but at what cost? See correction below January 24, 3:00 a.m. PST Wall Street Beat: Earnings bring mixed results Earnings season blew in with a vengeance this week, with disappointing fourth-quarter results from industry bellwethers Intel Corp. and IBM Corp. offset by better-than-expected reports from other vendors. January 19, 4:20 p.m. PST LogLogic integrates log management with EMC Smarts LogLogic has integrated its appliance-based log management software with EMC's Smarts real-time network management technology, the company announced Thursday. Customers using both vendors' technologies will be able to access 100 percent of the log data from the majority of their devices and software via Smarts. January 19, 8:39 a.m. PST BMC, XOsoft agreement likely to lead to future deals Enterprise management software vendor BMC Software signed its first alliance with XOsoft, an application availability company, Tuesday. Executives at both companies positioned the deal as an initial tie-up in what they expect will prove to be an important relationship. January 18, 7:34 a.m. PST Centeris releases Likewise Management Suite 1.0 Startup Centeris plans to officially release version 1.0 of its Likewise Management Suite software Tuesday. The company emerged from stealth mode in October with a public beta of Likewise that manages Linux servers in a Microsoft Windows network. January 17, 6:17 a.m. PST CA buys IT support software maker Control-F1 CA Inc. said Wednesday that it has acquired Control-F1 Corp., an IT-support automation software maker based in Calgary, Alberta. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. January 11, 9:01 a.m. PST The tolerance continuum I distinctly remember the first time I heard the term AJAX. I was having dinner with a friend who mentioned, in passing, that he’d been interviewed on that topic. “AJAX?” I asked. “Asynchronous JavaScript and XML,” he replied. January 11, 3:00 a.m. PST Update: CA to acquire Wily for $375 million cash CA has agreed to buy application management software vendor Wily Technology for $375 million in cash, the companies announced Thursday. January 5, 8:54 a.m. PST Wikipedia, competition, and the future By the time you read this column, Wikipedia will be celebrating its fifth anniversary. It’s been a wilder ride than anybody could have imagined, and it’s gotten even more so lately. In a widely cited incident, John Seigenthaler, Sr., a prominent journalist, publisher, and political figure, reacted with justifiable horror when he learned that his bio entry in Wikipedia falsely implicated him in the assassination of Robert Kennedy. January 4, 3:00 a.m. PST Do-it-yourself software services? If you’re a regular reader of my column, you know that I’ve been looking closely at the pluses and minuses of the SaaS (software as a service) model recently. SaaS solutions let you easily deploy standard functionality across a wide spectrum of users cheaply, as opposed to best-of-breed, on-premises applications, which cost more but offer product and competitive differentiation. December 13, 3:00 a.m. PST Microsoft tightening security defaults in IE 7 Microsoft has detailed several changes in the way its upcoming Internet Explorer (IE) 7 browser will classify Web sites for security, aiming to reduce the likelihood that users will fall victim to malicious code. December 12, 5:03 a.m. PST Palamida teams up with CollabNet, lists IP ingredients Software compliance and license management company Palamida on Wednesday unveiled a partnership with CollabNet and launched an initiative to encourage software vendors to list the third-party intellectual property contained in their products under the banner "IP Ingredients." December 7, 8:34 a.m. PST Software as a service moves beyond the sales force There’s no denying that SaaS (software as a service) and Salesforce.com have together reshaped the CRM segment of enterprise software. I’ve written about the pluses and minuses of SaaS before. This time I thought I would look at some other software categories where SaaS will have a major impact, including PLM (product lifecycle management) and project/portfolio management. November 29, 3:00 a.m. PST Is it time to scrap your Big Iron? See correction at end of article November 17, 3:00 a.m. PST The true value of software as a service With respect to Johnny Carson and Carnac the Magnificent, the answer is “yes and no.” The question: Is SaaS (software as a service) an overhyped idea that is not much good for anything beyond application delivery? November 15, 3:00 a.m. PST Commission looks to push e-health record adoption A federal commission charged with devising a strategy to make health care information more broadly accessible to providers and consumers wants the U.S. government to develop a nationwide patient authentication standard to enable the secure exchange of electronic health information. The Commission on Systemic Interoperability, established through the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003, also called for financial incentives for health care providers and the elimination of regulations that could slow the adoption of interoperable electronic health records (EHR). In total, the commission's report, which was released to the Senate and House of Representatives last week, spells out 14 recommendations that focus on three major areas: adoption issues, interoperability of health care data and secure connectivity between networks. The report highlights the challenges involved in implementing a connected system of instantly accessible health records, said Robert Seliger, chair of the Healthcare Information Management Systems Society's (HIMSS) steering committee on Integration and Interoperability. "In the last several years, there's been quite a movement in the health care industry to make patient information more easily available" to providers and to patients themselves, Seliger said. But security and privacy concerns, cost issues and a relative lack of interoperability standards in the health care IT sector have proved to be major stumbling blocks, said Seliger, who is the CEO of Sentillion Inc., an Andover, Mass.-based vendor of identity management technologies. The commission's recommendations are designed to overcome such issues, said commission Chairman Scott Wallace, who is also president of the National Alliance for Health Information Technology. Currently, for instance, there's no way of reliably linking patients to their data -- making it a challenge to build a connected health system, he said. Creating a patient authentication standard would enable better identification of patients and their data in whatever connected system is ultimately put in place, he said. The authentication standard, he said, could be similar to Social Security numbers. A patchwork of state privacy laws now in place also poses a challenge, Wallace said. That's why the commission called for a federal privacy standard based on the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). "On the adoption side, we focused on the need for financial incentives" for health care providers, Wallace said. "In the IT context, we want providers to make these investments, but the benefits don't go only to the providers." In fact, since consumers and insurance companies are more likely to benefit from a connected health system than providers are, "there's no great incentive for the adoption of IT [to enable EHR] in health care" by smaller and midsize providers, he said. The commission has also recommended product certification, interoperable data standards and standard product identifiers and vocabulary as a way of ensuring that health care data is accessible whenever and wherever needed. "Everyone has their own standards in health care, so compliance means nothing" until there are more standards for interoperability, Wallace said. The Commission on Systemic Interoperability, whose charter ended yesterday, is not the only group that has been asked to come up with recommendations on how to make health records digital and interoperable while also ensuring privacy and security of those records. In September, Secretary of the Health and Human Services Mike Leavitt announced the creation of the American Health Information Community. The 17-member group has up to five years to come up with its own recommendations for the Health and Human Services department. November 4, 3:22 a.m. PST Identity management in action Think you’re ready to deploy IDM (identity management) in your organization? John Aisien, vice president of marketing at IDM vendor Thor Technologies, won’t kid you about the realities. October 7, 3:00 a.m. PDT > Applications |
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