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From big iron to white boxes, Nationwide goes virtualFrom big iron to white boxes, Nationwide goes virtual While many IT shops see virtualization as a question of adopting EMC's VMware on servers running Windows or Linux, Nationwide Insurance has adopted the technology for both x86-based and mainframe-hosted servers. After all, notes Buzz Woeckener, the company's zLinux/Unix server manager, virtualization was invented for mainframes. On the road to the virtual desktop Click ‘n’ run. It seems like such a simple concept. Surf up to a Web page, select the desired application from a list, and click. Voila! Microsoft Word appears on your desktop. Or Excel, or Adobe Photoshop… you name it.  September 24, 3:00 a.m. PDT Herd behavior demonstrated at Demo "Whatever happened to working alone?” September 24, 3:00 a.m. PDT Credit Suisse plans virtualization a massive scale With 20,000 servers to manage, financial services powerhouse Credit Suisse had a long list of reasons to consider server virtualization: reducing the number of physical servers to manage, cutting power needs, improving software provisioning time, and deferring expensive datacenter buildouts. But it also needed a clear set of guidelines to determine when to virtualize, plus a clear set of procedures for managing a virtualization initiative. September 24, 3:00 a.m. PDT Best of open source in platforms and middleware Open source cut its teeth on operating systems, earned its street cred on Linux and Apache, and never looked back, continuing ever since to extend the kingdom to databases, middleware, and newfangled platforms such as hypervisors for server virtualization. Our Bossies in platforms and middleware recognize a few old faces, and some fairly new ones. September 10, 3:00 a.m. PDT 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the 2007 InfoWorld Bossies Not too long ago, open source meant starving developers; scant documentation; an ugly, outdated Web site; and software that lived in perpetual beta.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 Cooler weather brings hotter news Finally, the long, languid, slow news days of summer are behind us. New products are rolling out, people are heading to a myriad of conferences (including, I hope, our own Virtualization Executive Forum, two weeks away), companies are making announcements, and Steve Jobs is handing out refund checks. Yes, it’s a great time to be a tech journalist. September 10, 3:00 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 JBoss adds Google Gadgets to portal software JBoss is introducing an upgrade to its open source portal software on Monday that features integration with Google Gadgets. July 2, 6:00 a.m. PDT A developer's-eye view of Leopard, part IV With its transitions from Mac OS to OS X, PowerPC to Intel, and Panther to Tiger under its belt, Apple is all about moving on. Now it’s the developers’ turn to move on. If you haven’t done it yet, it’s time to bid farewell to C and Carbon, and to embrace Objective-C and Cocoa for your GUI applications. It’s time to count on Universal Binaries, not Rosetta (Apple’s PowerPC translator for Intel Macs), to get your software out to the whole Mac market, which will soon be dominated by 64-bit Intel Macs. If you haven’t yet broken the habits of jamming new icons into the menu bar and turning every convenience utility into a CPU-sapping background process with its own always-on-top window, you should get to know Dashcode. If your application terminates because it can’t locate a critical file, learn the ways of Time Machine. And if, when you think of Web applications, your mind automatically zeroes in on Java, you might look at Ruby on Rails as a far simpler, much lighter-weight open source alternative that’s remarkably well appointed. June 22, 3:00 a.m. PDT Talend applies SaaS to data integration Talend, an open source data integration software maker, unveiled a new service-based software product Monday, Talend On Demand, a service (SaaS) version of the company's Talend Open Studio product. June 18, 12:05 a.m. PDT Silver Peak Systems: Transforming WANs into LANs You wouldn't accuse any segment of the high-tech sector of orthodoxy. But even by tech industry standards, the market for WAN acceleration is a wild ride. Just ask Silver Peak Systems' founder and CTO, David Hughes, who says that in the WAN space, sometimes "no" means "yes," late is better than early, and you have to add to subtract. May 18, 3:01 a.m. PDT Bungee Labs: App dev as a service One of the oft told cautionary tales of capitalism is the one about the California Gold Rush. You know -- how just a handful of the hundreds of thousands of hopefuls who streamed into the state actually discovered gold, but many thousands of others got rich supplying them with housing, materials and the like. Think "Levi-Strauss & Co." and you get the picture. May 13, 3:00 a.m. PDT Startups class of '06: Where are they now? In 2006, InfoWorld uncovered 15 startups that emerged after the nuclear winter that followed the dot-com bust with cool, useful technologies. Well, another year has brought a new crop of startup darlings, such as the companies we're profiling each day in May for our Month of Enterprise Startups (MOES) feature. But MOES got us thinking about last year's startups. In the year that has followed, how have these innovators fared? May 7, 3:00 a.m. PDT OASIS advances SOA standards OASIS, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards , said on Wednesday that it was launching a new effort to simplify the development of standards-based SOA applications, according to an OASIS statement. April 11, 9:57 a.m. PDT Closing a chapter of open source By now you will have heard the news: InfoWorld has closed down its print edition and moved to a Web-only model. Over the coming weeks and months, InfoWorld will continue to evolve to take better advantage of the online medium. You can expect many changes -- some subtle, others less so. For example, this will be the last edition of Open Enterprise. April 9, 3:00 a.m. PDT GlassFish app server to swim in the enterprise Sun Microsystems' open source GlassFish application server is to be fitted with enterprise-level capabilities and interoperability with Microsoft technologies. March 18, 9:00 p.m. PST Are you an open source user or joiner? In my previous column, I touched on the issue of what constitutes an open-source vendor. Ask Andy Astor that question, and his answer is a shrug. "Honestly," he says, "who cares?" To Astor, there are really two broad categories of companies with respect to their relationship to open-source code. Some are users. Others are joiners. March 12, 3:00 a.m. PST Key Indian IT services organization moving to Linux The Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu Ltd. (ELCOT), a government-owned organization that delivers IT services to the southern India state of Tamil Nadu, has decided that its projects will be deployed on open-source software, including Linux. January 3, 9:01 a.m. PST Open Source: Key projects turn pro Throughout 2006, Linux and open source continued their march toward the mainstream of enterprise software. Perhaps no one event exemplified this trend more than Red Hat’s acquisition of JBoss in April. With JBoss’s Java technologies under its wing, Red Hat is no longer merely a Linux vendor; it’s become an open source powerhouse, able to offer its customers a complete application software stack. January 1, 3:00 a.m. PST 2006 Year in Reviews: Platforms Novell’s Suse Linux 10 was the landmark operating system launch of the year, giving us a bigger and badder Linux server and a startlingly smooth Linux desktop. We also got good looks at Microsoft Vista and Windows Longhorn betas, and at BEA’s venerable WebLogic 9.1. December 18, 3:00 a.m. PST Seven predictions for 2007 Calling your shot. That’s the phrase in baseball when a batter points his or her bat to a section of the park, then proceeds to hit a home run to that very spot. Babe Ruth is rumored to have done it once in the 1932 World Series. But even that feat is in doubt. Suffice it to say that calling your shot in a fluky game such as baseball, with its rotating spheres and cylindrical bats, is almost impossible. December 18, 3:00 a.m. PST FedEx Kinko's and our connected future As the big name CIO keynoting at this year’s Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Rob Carter of Federal Express could have been forgiven for doing a deep dive on how his 7,000-person IT team is using AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), mashups, Web video, LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl/PHP/Python), and other checkbox items from the cool-tools list. But Carter took things in a different direction: talking philosophically about how the Internet’s impact is accelerating changes in the way the world interacts and in the way IT works. November 20, 3:00 a.m. PST Major vendors put open source into turmoil Major software vendors are shaking up the open-source market. Microsoft Corp.'s deal with Novell Inc. and Oracle Corp.'s move to support Red Hat Linux have sent IT investors scurrying to figure out what it all means. November 16, 12:57 p.m. PST Oracle to push Red Hat from support chair While it wasn't quite the Linux announcement that had been expected, Oracle Corp.'s latest move will definitely see the company butt heads with the leading distributor of the open-source operating system Red Hat Inc. October 25, 2:36 p.m. PDT NetBeans IDE upgrade readied for SOA Focusing on open source efforts, Sun Microsystems officials this week provided informational updates on the NetBeans IDE and GlassFish application server, noting that NetBeans will have an SOA bent and be extended for other languages besides Java. October 20, 1:45 p.m. PDT OpenAjax to focus on security, complexity Sometimes it’s all in the packaging. Take McDonald’s “Happy Meals,” for example. You’ve got a burger, fries, and a drink. But wrap it in kid-friendly packaging, add a cheap plastic toy, and voilà! You’ve got a whole new product line. In the application development world, much the same thing has happened in recent months, as a grab bag of Web development technologies such as JavaScript, XML, and some tried-and-true presentation technologies such as HTML and CSS were rebranded AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). October 16, 3:00 a.m. PDT TippingPoint Releases Anti-phishing Tool There’s a kind of “tyranny of good intentions” that often springs up around IT security problems. 3:00 a.m. PDT BEA hits out at open source You could hear Rob Levy's teeth chattering all the way from Bangalore. The CTO of BEA Systems must be scared out of his wits. How else to explain the mishmash of half-truths and misleading facts he told the IDG News Service during a tour of BEA's India-based R&D facility two weeks ago? 3:00 a.m. PDT BEA CTO: Open-source projects out of sync with users The open-source community doesn't always deliver software that customers want, according to Rob Levy, executive vice president and chief technology officer of BEA Systems Inc. September 28, 11:48 a.m. PDT Graphic eye for the open source guy There's no shortage of open source programmers out there. According to a recent study of 5,000 developers by the research firm IDC, fully 71 percent said they used open source software, and half reported that use of open source was increasing within their organizations. September 25, 3:00 a.m. PDT Surveying open-source AJAX toolkits If you want to add AJAX to the magic collection of buzzwords supported by your Web site (and who can resist the siren call of the latest buzzword?), then you have two major options: purchase a proprietary package or experiment with open source libraries. July 31, 3:00 a.m. PDT IBM does Notes for Linux IBM released a version of the Lotus Notes collaboration software that runs on the Linux operating system, part of an IBM plan to lower the barriers to enterprise adoption of desktop Linux, a company executive said. July 10, 3:00 a.m. PDT Execs debate the 'open source effect' MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- The open source software paradigm has changed the software market, but open source itself is becoming so established that it will be boring in five years, panelists said at an industry event held at the Computer History Museum on Wednesday evening. June 22, 5:20 a.m. PDT Open-source ERP vendor Compiere gets $6 million funding Compiere has secured its first external funding to the tune of US$6 million and is planning to relocate its headquarters, the open-source midmarket business applications company said Tuesday. June 20, 11:02 a.m. PDT Why Apple snubs its open source geeks Apple extended the courtesy of meeting with me one day after my column on the closing of the OS X x86 kernel source code was published online. To sum up Apple’s objections, they felt I had given a year-old story a fresh coat of paint and sensationalized it for an audience that wasn’t affected by it. Yet no story is more timely, or more broadly relevant, than this one. June 14, 3:00 a.m. PDT Open source education Graham Glass wrote a blog entry this week that touched on two of my favorite themes: open source and education. In the middle of a project based on the red-hot Ruby on Rails platform, he took time out to explain how he found, and worked around, a Rails limitation. Digging down to the roots of the problem took six hours of investigation. Crafting the work-around took just six lines of code. June 7, 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 ActiveGrid speeds Web application development “It’s really hard to build an HTML application that talks to one database, yet IT developers have a huge backlog of requested applications that talk to multiple databases,” says Peter Yared, CEO of ActiveGrid. His company aims to solve that problem, in part by doing away with the traditional three-tiered model of Web application development. May 15, 3:00 a.m. PDT JBoss to join key Web services standards groups Seeking standards compliance, open source middleware vendor JBoss on Monday will announce its participation in OASIS, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Web Services Interoperability Organizaton (WS-I). May 8, 3:00 a.m. PDT New CEO could sharpen Sun's focus Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy’s decision last week to step aside after two decades at the helm of the legendary Silicon Valley company could throw open the doors to rapid change at the company, as new CEO Jonathan Schwartz focuses Sun’s resources on technologies that may pull it out of its prolonged slump. May 1, 3:00 a.m. PDT Users: Oracle Linux would be optimal Oracle Corp. customers are intrigued by recent musings from Larry Ellison, the company's chief executive officer, suggesting Oracle might offer its own Linux distribution. Users would welcome the tighter integration a complete Oracle software stack of operating system, database, middleware and applications could provide, they said in interviews this week. April 21, 10:35 a.m. PDT Oracle: Open source brings new customers Oracle is not only looking to buy open-source technology, but sees the software as opening a route to potential future Oracle users. April 19, 11:35 a.m. PDT Open source goes big time with Red Hat-JBoss Deal Red Hat’s surprise announcement that it’s acquiring JBoss could upend accepted wisdom about both the size and function of open source software companies. Still, some customers are taking a wait-and-see attitude toward the deal. April 17, 3:00 a.m. PDT French could outlaw open source DRM, peer-to-peer On May 4, the French Senate will debate a copyright bill that is widely expected to have a chilling effect on the development and distribution of open-source software for digital rights management (DRM) or P-to-P (peer-to-peer) file sharing. That's because the bill's provisions include a penalty of up to three years in prison and a fine of €300,000 (US$363,171) for publishing, distributing or promoting software in France that is "manifestly intended" for the unauthorized distribution of copyright works. April 14, 9:55 a.m. PDT JBoss enhances middleware line JBoss on Monday will bolster its open source middleware stack with the release of a JBoss-branded version of a formerly commercial transaction server. The company will also unveil a new business process management software and a rules engine. April 3, 9:00 a.m. PDT Christian Science Monitor seeks closer technology relationships The Christian Science Monitor for the past nine years has been saddled with an inflexible content management system that makes it difficult to modify the newspaper’s Web site or deliver content to new devices, such as smartphones. That tool is emblematic of what Curt Edge sees as a larger issue at the First Church of Christ, Scientist, which publishes the Monitor in newspaper and online editions. 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 OSDL to finance open-source software developers The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) Wednesday provided a new opportunity for developers working with open-source technologies to receive funding for their projects. March 29, 11:13 a.m. PST Apache chairman: Days numbered for commercial software SANTA CLARA, CALIF. -- The days of selling software through the traditional commercial model are numbered, as open source is becoming the paradigm of choice, said Greg Stein, chairman of the Apache Software Foundation, at the EclipseCon 2006 conference on Wednesday. March 22, 11:30 a.m. PST US DHS funds security for open source The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has awarded a US$1.24 million three-year grant to Stanford University and software vendors Coverity Inc. and Symantec Corp. The grant will fund daily security audits and analysis of more than 40 open-source projects including Apache, Linux, Mozilla, MySQL and PostgreSQL. January 11, 8:50 a.m. PST CIO who brought OpenOffice to Massachusetts resigns The state government official who had been moving Massachusetts away from Microsoft Corp.'s digital document formats has resigned. Peter Quinn, Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts will quit his position, effective Jan. 9, according to an internal memo obtained by the IDG News Service. December 28, 4:45 a.m. PST Forrester index finds US tech sector healthy for now The U.S. technology industry has recovered from a recession of 2001 and 2002 and is about as healthy as it's been in three years, according to a new tech sector economic index released Monday. December 12, 9:49 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 JBoss buys former HP middleware JBoss Inc. has added to its Java middleware stack by acquiring transaction processing software from Arjuna Technologies Ltd. and Hewlett-Packard Co., JBoss announced Monday. December 5, 3:35 a.m. PST Putting AJAX to work It's easy to see why AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) has captured the imaginations of so many Web developers. For the first time, browser-based UIs are rich and full-featured enough to do away with so-called thick-client desktop applications. October 17, 3:00 a.m. PDT Microsoft sharpens product focus with reorganization At the advanced corporate age of 30, Microsoft felt it was losing its competitive spirit under layers of bureaucratic fat. So last week the world's largest software maker ripped up its organizational chart, consolidated six unwieldy divisions into three, and appointed presidents with unprecedented leeway to run them. September 26, 4:00 a.m. PDT IBM, Red Hat to galvanize Linux in emerging markets IBM and Red Hat unwrapped a joint worldwide initiative to try to speed up the development and adoption of Linux-based applications Friday. The companies are placing particular emphasis on emerging markets, like China, India, Russia, and South Korea, according to a Big Blue executive. The deal is very similar to one IBM struck with Red Hat's main Linux competitor, Novell, back in March. September 16, 6:12 a.m. PDT Saturday declared 'Software Freedom Day' Advocates of free and open-source software have designated Saturday as Software Freedom Day and are planning events around the world to educate the public about the benefits and availability of open-source software. September 9, 8:20 a.m. PDT Chinese developers should take global open-source role BEIJING -- Chinese developers of open-source software should play a more prominent role in the development of Linux and other open-source software, senior industry executives said at a conference here on Wednesday. August 16, 11:51 p.m. PDT Novell to open Linux R&D center in Beijing by year end Novell Inc. is to open a Linux research and development center in Beijing by the end of this year, according to a company spokesman. The center will focus on three main areas: Linux on the desktop, international and localization issues and high-performance computing Linux including carrier-grade Linux, he said. August 16, 8:07 p.m. PDT Novell, CS2C to develop Linux products for China Novell Inc. and China Standard Software Company Ltd. (CS2C) have decided to build on their partnership formed earlier this year and cooperate in developing Linux-based server and desktop offerings aimed at the Chinese market. August 16, 6:08 a.m. PDT Becker on Linux, clustering, grid More work needs to be done on Linux at the operating system level, grids will have limited appeal, and there will be a mass movement to embrace clustering software among organizations large and small. These were some of the conclusions and predictions of Don Becker, cofounder of the Beowulf clustering project and a significant contributor to the Linux kernel, as he attended the LinuxWorld show in San Francisco this week August 11, 10:44 a.m. PDT German startup to offer Linux server line German IT company Pyramid Computer GmbH is transferring its open-source server technology to a new company, Collax GmbH, the companies said Thursday. August 11, 7:55 a.m. PDT USB server offers Linux to go SAN FRANCISCO -- A small Utah-based company has developed a portable Linux server that can be plugged into the USB (Universal Serial Bus) port of a Windows PCs. August 10, 7:13 p.m. PDT OSDL announces Patent Commons project The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), a global group dedicated to promoting Linux, on Tuesday announced a new initiative, called Patent Commons, to collect the software licenses and patents pledged to the open source community into a central repository to make them easier to access by developers, and encourage more patent holders to pledge their intellectual property to the cause. August 9, 7:06 p.m. PDT > Application development > Application servers > Platforms > Application servers |
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