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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. Introducing the 2007 InfoWorld Bossies Not too long ago, open source meant starving developers; scant documentation; an ugly, outdated Web site; and software that lived in perpetual beta. Now open source software is becoming big business. “Now hiring” is a common sight on project home pages, and .org and SourceForge sites that used to point straight to source code archives are redirected to .com URLs that celebrate the commercial success of what started out as collaborations among unpaid coders of like mind.  September 10, 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 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 IBM Information Server Blade does data integration For years IBM has doggedly pursued the massive problem of pulling data strewn across the enterprise into an integrated, harmonious whole. At LinuxWorld on Monday, the company introduced IBM Information Server Blade, an appliance-like bundle intended to make the Herculean task of enterprise data integration faster and easier. August 6, 4:50 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 2007 InfoWorld CTO 25: Stephan Murer Back in the late '90s, the Private Banking IT division of financial services giant Credit Suisse was at a crossroads. Some felt that the organization’s IT infrastructure was beyond repair and would have to be replaced wholesale. Others maintained that everything was fine and could keep going indefinitely. June 7, 3:00 a.m. PDT 2007 InfoWorld CTO 25: John Alber In recent years, corporate lawyers long accustomed to charging an hourly rate have found themselves facing client demands for discounts, shared risk deals (where fees are based on results), and flat rates. “Clients now treat law firms as they do other suppliers: They make us respond to RFPs, apply rate pressure, and make us compete,” says John Alber, technology partner (the legal industry’s term for a CTO) at the global law firm Bryan Cave. June 6, 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 WebMethods to vault Software AG into top 3 SOA players Software AG hopes its planned acquisition of webMethods will catapult it to a leadership position among vendors of SOA (service-oriented architecture) development products as well as help accelerate its ambition to become a €1 billion ($1.3 billion) entity by 2011. April 5, 8:55 a.m. PDT Software AG to buy webMethods for $546 million Software AG has agreed to buy SOA vendor webMethods for $546 million in cash, the companies announced Thursday. April 5, 5:41 a.m. PDT Microsoft ups Dynamics' industry focus Microsoft wants to make its Dynamics business applications more immediately relevant to customers in five vertical markets -- manufacturing, distribution, retail, services and the public sector. March 12, 11:10 a.m. PST Upgrade disasters made easy I’m the technical administrator at a large medical group in Canada. Among other things, I’m responsible for the LAN, the WAN, all the desktops, laptops, peripherals, and a medical-records application that’s at the core of our group’s operations. Over the last couple of years, we’ve been struggling to make that app perform more reliably. At the same time, our infrastructure has been growing fast, and sluggish performance from our overloaded servers had become a problem. January 30, 3:00 a.m. PST Cast Iron puts application integration in a box Enterprise application integration can quickly take on nightmarish proportions: multiple applications requiring complex workflows, data that must change form from one app to another, and massive management snarls. Consequently, most EAI solutions are themselves fairly large and complicated. January 26, 3:00 a.m. PST Agile scripting: Bigger bang for app-dev bucks Enterprises will spend too much this year creating monolithic apps — the sort of server-side efforts that involve formal requirements and tie up dozens (or hundreds) of architects, coders, and testers. Most would be better off using scripting languages, Web services, and SOA to weave together browser-based apps that leverage existing assets. January 8, 3:00 a.m. PST Applications: SaaS breaks down the walls The one major exception to business as usual in the enterprise software arena for 2006 was SaaS (software as a service), which under the de facto leadership of Salesforce.com demonstrated that a hosted service can offer the kinds of capabilities once reserved for the giants of the enterprise software industry. January 1, 3:00 a.m. PST Requiem for the packaged app In a little more than a decade, BEA Systems built itself into a top middleware player and one of the leading lights in SOA. That’s a good thing. Revenues at BEA are soaring (up 19 percent in the latest quarter) and the company’s stock price rose around 50 percent in the last year. But playing in a hot space such as SOA is a classic instance of having the tiger by its tail. As CEO Alfred Chuang told InfoWorld Executive Editor at Large Eric Knorr in a recent interview, the company still needs to move aggressively to avoid being left high and dry by rapid shifts in the technology landscape. December 4, 3:00 a.m. PST Good ideas take time Two years ago, I publicly floated the concept that IT should start thinking more like entrepreneurs. What a disaster! I was speaking at a meeting of CTOs, and I mentioned that I’d heard of a few IT departments that were focusing, at least in part, on creating saleable new products and services for their companies. I asked the group what they thought of the idea. December 4, 3:00 a.m. PST Oracle tackles identity governance There’s a common nightmare haunting CISOs (computer information security officers) that features a glance at the morning paper, and 72-point banner headlines with the name of their employer and the words “LOST” and “CUSTOMER DATA.” December 4, 3:00 a.m. PST 2006 InfoWorld 100 Awards: Government Allegheny County Department of Human Services www.county.allegheny.pa.us/dhs Distributed Database of Human Service Programs Project Lead: Marc Cherna, Director Project Description: System aggregates multiple source data into a distributed database on a peer-to-peer network, co-hosted by each major stakeholder, and delivers the combined data through Web and SOAP interfaces. November 13, 3:00 a.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 SAP invests in another NetWeaver partner SAP has made an undisclosed investment in a Visiprise, a company that develops integration software for manufacturing companies that use SAP's NetWeaver platform. November 8, 4:20 a.m. PST BizTalk 2006 deftly connects enterprise apps Suppose you’re the new CIO at an enterprise-scale company that has “islands of automation” for accounts receivable, accounts payable, inventory control, sales, support, and HR, and your goal is to integrate all business processes. October 12, 3:00 a.m. PDT EMC, Microsoft sing Duet Can three people sing a duet? According to Microsoft, the answer is a resounding "yes." 3:00 a.m. PDT WebEx offers SOA-based integration platform WebEx, a provider of on-demand Web conferencing and interactive online products, launched the WebEx Connect platform last Monday, following SaaScon, a software-as-a-service conference. Powered by the MediaTone Network, a composite collaboration and application platform, the WebEx Connect platform will allow users to integrate data from more than one application to create a collaborative workspace custom designed for their workflow or business process. Using open protocols and WebEx connector APIs, developers can adapt on-demand, desktop and enterprise applications to the platform or create new composite applications. October 2, 3:00 a.m. PDT Motorola hatching big plans for Symbol Motorola’s Greg Brown was channeling Winston Churchill last week when he announced his company’s plans to take on the BlackBerry market with wireless devices for all manner of enterprise jobs. 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 Beware the programming guru Ten years ago I took a job with a large, privately owned plastics manufacturer. The firm’s president had decided to update the proprietary systems that had been running the business for more than a decade with more efficient versions. The company had experienced rapid growth, and the old systems were creaking under the load. September 5, 3:00 a.m. PDT The case for altruism The first timeI heard about Wikipedia, I thought, This has no shot. Why would highly qualified people devote their energies to an encyclopedia they couldn’t make a dime on? September 4, 3:00 a.m. PDT Salesforce adds Google Adword Integration Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff used a dinner presentation to Boston-area customers, analysts and members of the press Monday evening to announce a new search marketing service that will allow companies to manage Google AdWords marketing campaigns directly from Salesforce's CRM software. August 21, 10:30 p.m. PDT Government: Unlocking data, locking down access The federal government is often seen as a laggard in IT, a bloated bureaucracy that runs well behind the innovations of private industry. But look closely and you’ll find programs that are truly groundbreaking. August 21, 3:00 a.m. PDT Does “built to last” apply to IT? Over the weekend, I bought an amazing antique chair: a fancy wooden office swivel chair in practically mint condition, including all its original cast-iron hardware. Although probably made between 1900 and 1915 (the patent date is 1897), it’s remarkably modern, with fully adjustable height, tilt, and back support, like the best Aeron chairs of today (well, its wooden surfaces are a tad stiffer). With any luck, it will last another 100 years and be just as functional. August 11, 3:00 a.m. PDT IT laughs at itself A British TV show has taken the best and worst of IT administrator stereotypes and packed them into a clever, side-splitting comedy. August 9, 4:16 p.m. PDT Microsoft, Nortel team up on unified communications We live in a world of redundancies. Take the telephone (please!). Most of us probably have one sitting right there on our desk, next to our computer. It’s used for talking to people. But do we really need a separate device? “No” is the short answer from a growing number of tech heavyweights pushing “unified communications” technology that combines and integrates voice, video conferencing, e-mail and IM on a single IP network. The technology is still in its infancy, with companies lining up to be the “Microsoft of unified communications” -- including Microsoft itself. July 24, 3:00 a.m. PDT SAP to ramp up attack on Oracle Business software vendor SAP plans to intensify its efforts to win over users of rival applications from Oracle Corp., an SAP executive said Thursday. July 21, 10:53 a.m. PDT Appian puts polish into BPM I look at four key elements when gauging the potential ROI and success of a BPM package: adaptability to existing platforms and applications, process insight and activity monitoring, usability, and the strength of the rules engine. On all counts, Appian Enterprise 5.1 fills the bill with its full-featured, people-centric, process-management suite. July 21, 3:00 a.m. PDT Microsoft's Vista, Office delays complicate partner plans Partner pricing deals, cash incentives key for success in new markets July 17, 3:00 a.m. PDT Broaden your options: Don’t fear native code I have prepared an account of the history of .Net and Java that’s intended to balance more fanciful post-mortem accounts (of .Net and Java, not of me). It reads thus: Sun created Java to cash in on the success of Visual Basic and to convince development managers that C++ coders are all slobbering toddlers playing with nail guns. Sun did grant C++ dispensation for “performance-sensitive applications,” a category that covered most of Sun’s software catalog. Microsoft created .Net to keep Java from gaining traction and to put that cross-platform nonsense to rest once and for all. One OS, one run-time, many languages was the best way to go. C#, the Microsoft alternative to Java with the honesty to use “C” in its name, still kept the pencils and paper clips away from the inmates, except, of course, for those developers working on performance-sensitive applications, a category that covered most of Microsoft’s software catalog. July 12, 3:00 a.m. PDT Microsoft announces Office Line of Business service “People-Ready” is the latest slo-gan Microsoft is trotting out to describe its business vision. Like its predecessors (remember Win 95’s “Where do you want to go today?”), the catchy phrase, which CEO Steve Ballmer unveiled in March, is supposed to help us conceptualize Microsoft’s vast arsenal of software products and, presumably, make us feel good about using them. June 19, 3:00 a.m. PDT InfoWorld CTO 25: Tim Stanley As senior vice president and CIO of Harrah’s Entertainment, Tim Stanley’s game of choice is “operational CRM,” a combination of technologies the company deployed in 2005 to bring CRM closer to real time. Based on up-to-the minute customer info, employees now ply patrons with special rewards and other benefits, a tactic that has boosted Harrah’s revenue by 10 percent. June 5, 3:00 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: Virtualization helps swing an Exchange upgrade A while ago I was asked to help a customer upgrade an aged Exchange 2000 installation to new hardware and Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 Standard Edition. My customer secured the new server loaded up with SBS 2003; my job was to integrate it into the existing AD (Active Directory) forest and move all the users’ e-mail into the new Exchange system. May 29, 3:00 a.m. PDT Send us your hacks Do you have a hack you’re particularly proud of? (And by hack I mean an ingenious fix-it job that may not follow established procedures but gets the task done.) I ask because this week’s cover story, “Heroic Hacks and Inspired Work-arounds” (page 26), relates six seat-of-the-pants hacks that saved the day when a company was in a pickle. These enterprising enterprise rescues, from the case files of three InfoWorld contributing editors, are all variations on a theme — how to solve a problem using smarts, a certain twisted logic, and the tools at hand. May 29, 3:00 a.m. PDT Tales of heroic hacks and inspired work-arounds What does it mean to be a hacker? The mainstream media has long used the term as a kind of pejorative, calling to mind images of pale, skinny misanthropes launching denial-of-service attacks from their parents’ basements. Real hackers know better. 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 Jitterbit shakes up application integration Integrating applications usually involves at least one of three costly approaches: hand-coded software, complex EAI platforms, or design and deployment of an SOA. May 15, 3:00 a.m. PDT Upstart startups Startups aren’t typical fodder for InfoWorld stories. For that matter, we don’t devote all that much ink to tech companies in general, preferring to focus on technologies, products, and strategies that help IT do what it needs to do. May 15, 3:00 a.m. PDT Zimbra's Web-based platform takes aim at conventional e-mail Managing a high-volume e-mail system using traditional tools can be a demanding and costly task. That’s why Zimbra wants to rewrite the book on enterprise messaging. “It’s a clean-slate view of the world,” says CEO Satish Dharmaraj. May 15, 3:00 a.m. PDT Microsoft, SAP sing praises of Duet Microsoft and SAP made good last week on a long-standing promise with "Duet," an integration of Microsoft's ubiquitous Office productivity suite and SAP's software. May 8, 3:00 a.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 Google unveils new search appliance Google shored up its enterprise-search portfolio on Wednesday, announcing Google OneBox for Enterprise, a new feature for doing real-time searches on business-application data. April 24, 3:00 a.m. PDT SAP: U.S. the growth driver SAP AG was able to increase sales in the U.S. for the 14th consecutive quarter of double-digit growth as the world's largest maker of business software continued to sell more products to existing customers and nibble away at the customer base of rival Oracle Corp. April 20, 10:44 a.m. PDT Windows Boots on a Mac On April 4, a date chosen because April Fools' Day fell on a Saturday, Apple released a freely downloadable beta utility called Boot Camp. Boot Camp has one astonishing, if not bizarre, purpose: To give Intel-based Macs the capability of booting and running Windows XP. It doesn’t surprise me that Windows runs on Macs; that was inevitable, and when Boot Camp was released open sourcers were within two or three device drivers of achieving that goal without Apple’s help. Indeed, the stouthearted crew at onmac.net set up a cash kitty to reward those who solved the problem of Macs’ inability to boot Windows. April 12, 3:00 a.m. PDT Coping with the compliance headache More and more, business is being driven through regulation. Multiple regulations, from Sarbanes-Oxley to HIPAA and beyond, will have a big impact on cost but will do nothing for the revenue side. The question becomes how to minimize the impact on business operations. April 11, 3:00 a.m. PDT JBoss, LogicBlaze introduce open source middleware Last week saw the debut of two new open source products from JBoss and LogicBlaze, each aimed at the enterprise middleware market. April 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT Orbitz gets up and running fast with open source When Orbitz launched its online travel site in June 2001, it had two well-entrenched competitors: Travelocity and Expedia. Orbitz's goal was to offer something better, quickly. April 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT MIT makes heterogeneous IT systems work The IT staff at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has to be prepared to work with just about anything. It manages a delicate balancing act, promoting core IT standards for security and networking while still giving each department the freedom to choose its own technology platforms and applications. April 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT The move to open source is good for BZ Results Fast-moving technology that works is what BZ Results wants in its IT tools. That’s why CTO Rob Lackey’s policy is to make sure there is at least one open source bid for each project. “Commercial software can’t compete with the open source development effort,” Lackey says. He cites the frequent, fast security updates available for Apache servers as an example of how the open source community delivers faster than traditional providers. April 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT Office delay won't affect Mendocino, SAP says Delivery of Mendocino, the joint integration product from Microsoft and SAP, won't be affected by the delay in Microsoft's next Office productivity suite, an SAP spokeswoman said Tuesday. March 28, 5:07 a.m. PST Microsoft hands BizTalk Server 2006 to manufacturers Microsoft Corp. Monday released a new version of its BizTalk Server integration software to manufacturing. March 27, 11:41 a.m. PST Product previews Sonic Software revs enterprise service bus Sonic Software today announced Sonic ESB 7.0, an upgrade to the company’s SOA platform. It brings the Sonic Workbench to the Eclipse IDE; incorporates support for advanced Web services standards WS-Reliable Messaging, WS-Security, WS-Addressing, and WS-Policy; and introduces a lighter-weight approach to high availability through a new mode in the Continuous Availability Architecture, which the company says provides highly reliable and available brokered communications without the latency of persistent messaging. Sonic ESB 7.0 will be available in April. Sonic ESB 7.0, Sonic Software March 27, 3:00 a.m. PST The hidden challenges of federated identity For years, companies have kept stores of identity information about employees, customers, and partners. These databases and directories are critical components of a company’s identity infrastructure. But as businesses push to create new products and increase productivity, they have discovered that they often must cooperate to provide the services their customers and employees demand. March 24, 3:00 a.m. PST Scaling a federated identity infrastructure Different kinds of organizations approach the problem of scaling a federated identity implementation in different ways. When you’re federating with one or two partners, hammering out the legal arrangements and assigning risk and liability is done one partner at a time. Even if technology standards provide universal system interoperability, the lawyers are likely to approach each agreement as a one-off task. Let’s call this model “peer-to-peer federation.” March 24, 3:00 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 Who’s Bullish on SaaS? All you have to do is glance at this week’s cover to realize that InfoWorld is bullish on SaaS (software as a service). After all, we reserve “The Next Big Thing” label for, well, really big things, and we think that hosted enterprise software, centrally delivered and deployed via a browser, has sufficient juice to qualify. March 20, 3:00 a.m. PST EclipseCon reflects IDE’s rise as plug-in platform of choice EclipseCon kicks off this week in Santa Clara, Calif., marking the second annual convocation of Eclipse partners and vendors, who will gather to learn about and celebrate alliances, new products, and new directions. March 20, 3:00 a.m. PST Top SAP executives oppose workers' council The heads of SAP AG's management and supervisory boards have voiced their reservations about the establishment of a workers' council, following similar remarks made over the past two weeks by cofounder Dietmar Hopp. March 14, 5:09 a.m. PST SAP plans new version of All-in-One in 2006 German business software company SAP plans to release a new version of its All-in-One software targeting midsize companies in the second half of 2006. March 9, 4:34 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 JBoss buys German services partner Objectone JBoss, a long-rumored acquisition candidate, has purchased a German service partner to establish stronger footing in one of Europe's fastest growing markets for open-source software, the company said Thursday. February 24, 4:13 a.m. PST Can Google gain a foothold in the enterprise? Google's got its eyes on your corporate data, and if its ability to parlay its whip-smart Web search technology into a vast empire of consumer services is any indication, you may be Googling enterprise apps and data sooner than you think. February 17, 4:15 p.m. PST The browser as orchestrator It’s been a busy week for my LibraryLookup project, which first launched in December 2002. In its original and still most widely deployed incarnation, LibraryLookup is a JavaScript bookmarklet that connects an Amazon book page to the corresponding record in a library catalog. The success of this technique got me thinking about themes I’ve pursued ever since: the dynamics of user-driven innovation, the protean flexibility of RESTful (Representational State Transfer) Web applications, and the dynamics of lightweight service orchestration. February 8, 3:00 a.m. PST Oracle officially renames G-Log software Oracle Corp. has formally rechristened the transportation management software it acquired through the purchase of Global Logistics Technologies Inc. (G-Log), the enterprise database and applications vendor announced Tuesday. February 7, 12:07 p.m. PST iWay steps gently into ESB iWay software is the Belkin of application adapters, those pieces of software that hook enterprise apps to middleware from the likes of BEA, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Sonic, and Sun. As of today, iWay is joining the ranks of all those companies (Microsoft excepted) and announcing and shipping its own ESB, iWay Service Manager. February 6, 3:00 a.m. PST How to get rewarded for incompetence Several years ago I found myself working at a manufacturing company where, after years of neglect, the apps that ran the Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable departments were in desperate need of replacement. The IT director selected two managers, Steve and Bob, to head twin redesign projects. I won’t tell you which of them was me. January 31, 3:00 a.m. PST SAP steps into the software-as-a-service arena It’s as momentous as when the Union Pacific met the Central Pacific and the final, golden, spike was driven at Promontory Summit, Utah, completing the transcontinental railroad -- not that in high tech anyone would notice an event as significant. I can’t even predict for you all the innovations that will be generated from the recent developments, but I will give you my thoughts. January 31, 3:00 a.m. PST Communications panel studies lessons of Katrina An independent panel to study the effects of Hurricane Katrina on communications networks, convened by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC), met for the first time Monday. January 30, 2:10 p.m. PST Microsoft merges enterprise IM and Exchange groups Microsoft Corp. is merging its Exchange and Real-Time Collaboration (RTC) groups into a new unit called the Unified Communications Group, the company announced Monday. The change is aimed at aligning development work on Microsoft's e-mail platform with that done around other communications systems like instant messaging, Web conferencing and phone/VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol). January 30, 1:06 p.m. PST SAP through the browser SAP will take a major step into the world of SaaS (software as a service) this week, when it is expected to launch its CRM OnDemand offering. January 30, 3:00 a.m. PST Allchin willing to delay Windows Vista for quality Microsoft Corp. has finished development on Windows Vista and expects to ship the product by the end of the year, around the same time venerated Windows development leader Jim Allchin said he will retire from the company. But Allchin said Friday he is willing to put off both of those events if Windows Vista doesn't reach a standard of quality with which he is comfortable. January 27, 3:45 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 Microsoft adds new features to Windows Live Microsoft Corp. this week introduced enhancements to its Windows Live portal (http://live.com), the entry point for users to access its Web-based services. January 26, 3:14 p.m. PST Software as a service: Pay as you build, but at what cost? See correction below January 24, 3:00 a.m. PST Health care IT demands surgical precision Confession time: last month I took the easy way out in my column, “Doctors Turn to PDAs”. Instead of giving a balanced recital of the many obstacles to adoption of IT in health care, I made it sound like I was just pegging the blame on doctors and their big egos. January 20, 3:00 a.m. PST NetSuite unveils integration program NetSuite on Thursday detailed a new effort to let third parties tap its data model as a platform on which to build applications distributed as SaaS (software as a service). January 12, 6:00 a.m. PST CES tech news and gossip -- from Google to Stevie Wonder Attending the 2006 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is like spending the week with 130,000 former college roommates. It's great on the first day, reliving old times and laughing about mutual acquaintances. But by the weekend, you start remembering all the times they stiffed you for beer, and the time they promised to get you a job at their company but gave it to the pretty girl down the hall. January 11, 11:15 a.m. PST SQL Server could make 'better together' ring true From the viewpoint of skeptics, SQL Server 2005 and Microsoft’s whole “better together” campaign are clever levers for strong-armed upgrades and whole-catalog purchases. It’s clear that Microsoft is targeting Unix competitors with an enterprise portfolio focused on integration and out-of-the-box functionality. Better together. Sounds a lot like “lock yourself in, you’ll love it.” January 11, 3:00 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 High-performance computing: Supercharging the enterprise Merlin Securities, a new prime brokerage providing trading, financing, portfolio analysis, and reporting for multibillion-dollar hedge funds, needed a competitive edge. Its larger rivals, such as Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, and UBS, had the advantage of expensive mainframes that could consolidate and analyze millions of trades each day and return reports via batch processing the next morning that measured performance on a monthly basis. So Merlin outclassed its competitors by returning trade performance information in near real time with performance measured on a daily basis and performance attribution on multiple levels, including in comparison to other securities in a market sector, numerous benchmarks, and other traders in the firm. What’s more, it did it using an inexpensive compute cluster made up of four dual-processor Dell PowerEdge 2850 servers. January 9, 3:00 a.m. PST A channel play for SaaS in 2006 Microsoft’s competitors are ridiculing what they claim is Redmond’s half-hearted entry into the world of SaaS (software as a service) with CRM 3.0. In numerous conversations I’ve been told, “It shouldn’t even be called SaaS. They’re not even hosting it. They are just reselling their solution to VARs.” January 3, 3:00 a.m. PST Middleware finds its mojo again Few areas of technology underwent greater advances in 2005 than middleware. And 2006 looks as if it'll be no different. Between new architectures, maturing standards, and innovative technologies, the dream of integration within and without the enterprise is becoming a reality. Even better, it does not require the rip-and-replace approach of the past. January 2, 3:00 a.m. PST Tech reviews for the holidays Even IT takes a holiday now and then. Same goes for the InfoWorld staff, which chills out by taking a one-week break following the publication of this, our 51st and final issue of the year. December 19, 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 Doctors turn to PDAs I don't usually watch ER-type TV shows, but I've lately been intrigued by the latest ABC hit, Grey's Anatomy. If you've seen it, then you know that the whole staff of Seattle Grace Hospital is young, has lots of sex, and hardly ever sleeps. But have you noticed that they don't spend much time at computers either? December 9, 3:00 a.m. PST SAP readies Mendocino for user testing SAP and Microsoft are about to release to 40 early-adopter customers the first version of their jointly developed integration product, code-named Mendocino. December 6, 4:20 a.m. PST The coming software revolution If Marc Benioff, CEO and founder of Salesforce.com, is the biggest spokesperson for SaaS (software as a service), then Greg Gianforte, CEO and founder of SaaS CRM competitor RightNow Technologies, is in the avant-garde of that software revolution, adding open source to the war on packaged apps. The difference between the two may offer us a peek into the future of IT infrastructures. December 6, 3:00 a.m. PST Cape Clear set to release new ESB software Cape Clear Software Inc. is about to release a new edition of its ESB (enterprise service bus) software, adding new security and scalability features to its SOA (services-oriented architecture) platform software. November 30, 10:21 a.m. PST No. 12: Reining in mirroring and replication Slowdowns often plague enterprises that use mirroring or replication for high availability or disaster recovery between locations. If you have many locations or many database tables -- or a lot of transactions or journaling that needs to stay in sync between multiple locations -- watch out, because the performance loss can be dramatic. November 28, 3:00 a.m. PST IBM's master plan for data What's the ugliest problem in IT? Many would say it's the contradictory or incomplete data strewn around the enterprise in various databases and formats. Reconciling and normalizing all that data is hard, tedious work. November 21, 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 > Application development > Applications > Networking > Web services |
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