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Pundits on parade: What’s next in tech You’ve heard of Christmas in July, that classic advertising gimmick designed to lure shoppers into stores despite the oppressive heat and humidity. We’ll, we’ve got New Year’s in August, which invites you to stay indoors and read “The next big things in IT” -- 15 predictions about the future of technology. Your Web site’s secret weapon Kenexa, a global provider of talent-hiring and-retention services and software, had a serious customer-satisfaction problem.  March 19, 3:00 a.m. PST More IT war stories Off the Record, the real-world slice of life that graces the last page of InfoWorld, is one of our most popular columns. I know this from reader surveys and from all the e-mail I receive about it. As reader Roland Sickenberger put it recently, “It’s my favorite part of the magazine, kind of like a ‘Dilbert come to life’ thing.” March 5, 3:00 a.m. PST Women in technology: A call to action A quick scan of almost any IT department -- from the trenches to the corner office -- confirms it: Women who embrace technology as a lifelong career remain a rare breed. To be sure, opportunity for women in technology has advanced in the past few decades, as have education initiatives aimed at leveling the playing field, but for every woman rising to prominence or embarking on a profession in IT, there seems to be another opting out of her career in technology. January 29, 3:03 a.m. PST Back to school: Getting girls into IT Despite the success of various education initiatives in the past several years, there’s little doubt that the shortage of women in technology begins on the playground. As such, many industry leaders and experts believe the long-term solution to the gender imbalance in IT lies in women technologists going back to school -- way back, to high schools and even elementary schools to mentor young girls, who too often give up on math and science at an early age. January 29, 3:02 a.m. PST Activism provides competitive advantage for IT Encountering another woman working in technology was a rare event for me when I started out in IT many years ago. In the years since, women have made significant strides, sometimes against great odds, proving their mettle as both tech execs and engineers. January 29, 3:01 a.m. PST Gender crisis in IT You don’t need a degree in statistics to recognize that IT is a men’s club. Just walk the floor of any tech conference or, in all likelihood, your own office — XY chromosomes everywhere you look. January 29, 3:00 a.m. PST Packeteer iShared yields mixed WAN optimization results Poorly performing WAN links continue to be the bane of many network administrators. Wherever there is a WAN link, there will be performance degradation caused by latency and chatty protocols. Simply adding bandwidth is not the answer. Using appliance-based solutions on each end of the WAN circuit, however, can improve overall response time and throughput. January 26, 3:00 a.m. PST Technology of the Gods January is named after Janus, the two-faced Roman deity of beginnings and endings, who reportedly was able to look both forward and back. So for our Jan. 1 issue, we pay homage to the mythological immortal with our seventh annual Technology of the Year Awards, an analysis of where IT has been and where it’s going in 2007. January 1, 3:00 a.m. PST Review of reviews It’s coming up on closing time for 2006. All around us, everyone is going into holiday mode. Not to be curmudgeonly contrarians, InfoWorld will be following suit, taking a one-week break before returning on Jan. 1 with our first print issue of the year. (It’s really only a semi-hiatus; InfoWorld.com will continue to perk over the holidays with a slightly reduced slate of stories.) December 18, 3:00 a.m. PST Predicting user behavior still not an exact science A recent article in the Philadelphia Inquirer on the use of predictive analytics to determine which of Philadelphia’s parolees were likely to commit murder caught my attention. A broad definition of predictive analytics would be the process of matching statistics with historical data in order to predict future events, mainly human behavior. December 12, 3:00 a.m. PST Exclusive: WAN optimization, the Cisco WAE As the enterprise becomes more dispersed and applications continue to greedily gobble up precious WAN bandwidth, IT struggles to find ways to coax just a little more performance out of its existing circuits. All of the bandwidth in the world won’t reduce application response times as long as TCP and latency remain tightly bound together. In order to improve WAN performance, it takes digital sleight of hand to work a little WAN magic. November 10, 3:00 a.m. PST Redefining innovation Innovative ideas are a dime a dozen, according to Jim Andrew, senior partner at big-time consultancy BCG. In fact, at most companies, coming up with great concepts for a product, service, or process isn’t even an issue. But turning those ideas into money … ah, there’s the rub. October 30, 3:00 a.m. PST Riverbed Steelhead boosts WAN data flow IT always seems to be caught in the middle of the WAN-performance battle: On one hand, users never seem to be happy with an application’s performance; on the other, the bean counters won’t budget for bigger pipes. If more bandwidth isn’t the answer to end-users’ performance problems, then what is? October 19, 3:00 a.m. PDT Franchising the energy web I’m already so depressed about the sorry state of our planet’s energy systems that I’m afraid Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth would just send me over the edge. Oh, I’ll probably relent and go see the movie, but in my case the ex-Veep will be preaching to the choir. I don’t need to be convinced any more than I already am that we’re in for a rough ride. What I need, instead, are hopeful signs that we’ll be able to engineer our way out of the mess we’re in. June 21, 3:00 a.m. PDT Hack Tales: Network auditing on a shoestring What do you do when the auditors are breathing down your neck, wanting to see an exhaustive report on the Windows network security of a 2,000-user network across eight sites? That’s easy. Break out a text editor and start writing some Perl. May 29, 3:00 a.m. PDT Tech startups to watch Startups are back! or at least, startup fever is back. Scan the latest numbers from PricewaterhouseCoopers and you won’t find any hockey sticks -- the level of investment in enterprise-related technology startups has actually remained fairly flat, hovering between $1.5 and $2.3 billion per quarter from 2003 through 2005. May 15, 3:00 a.m. PDT Load balancers from F5 Networks and Zeus Technology tip the scales Load balancers used to be fairly simple, distributing user requests from the Internet to a group of servers instead of just one. Between the drive to differentiate themselves and the increasing sophistication of Web sites and enterprise intranets, current load balancers add a plethora of additional features, from SSL off-loading to Web application acceleration to content inspection and security filters that guard against hackers exploiting known vulnerabilities to gain control of Web servers or applications. May 1, 3:00 a.m. PDT Product previews NetSuite Flexes Process Automation, Woos Verticals Hosted applications vendor NetSuite announced NetSuite 11.0, its latest integrated CRM and back-office suite. The new version, due in May, extends AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) beyond the current real-time dashboards into functional areas, including reporting, scheduling, and document management. It also adds complex process customization via a new scripting language, SuiteScript, built on JavaScript. The company also launched vertical editions of NetSuite for wholesale/distribution, services, and software companies. NetSuite 11.0, NetSuite April 17, 3:00 a.m. PDT 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 Product Previews WebEx Opens Tap to Systems Management After handing it a wrench with the WebEx Support Center, software-as-a-service specialist WebEx is now offering an entire toolbox. Developed in partnership with Everdream, WebEx System Management Services will allow IT organizations to manage Windows desktop systems through a hosted Web application that integrates asset management, software distribution, patch management, virus protection, and automated online backup capabilities. System Management Services will be available Feb. 1 and cost from $5 to $15 per computer per month, depending on services. WebEx System Management Services, WebEx January 30, 3:00 a.m. PST Zeus lightens the load balancing Zeus Technology has been shipping a load balancing product for a number of years, originally available as software only, and now as an appliance. The Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager (ZXTM) 7000 with Version 4 of the ZXTM software shows a level of maturity that experienced administrators will find comforting. It offers an easy, wizard-based configuration for beginners, command-line access for advanced users, and a dedicated scripting language that allows extensive adaptation to changing conditions in traffic control or load balancing. The new software also adds Web content caching and an XML/SOAP API. January 23, 3:00 a.m. PST IT will give up control of the network As we look at all the changes taking place on the Internet during the past several years, I think we can boil it down to two simple observations. First, the volume of traffic is increasing exponentially: E-mail, IM, and RSS all mean more connections. Second, each connection is moving a great deal more data, including multimedia, voice, and video. January 10, 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 Top technologies of the year Welcome to our first issue of the year. For those of you who took a break, re-entry into the heady universe of work may be a bit discombobulating. Fortunately, last Saturday, the world’s ever-considerate timekeepers saw fit to give us an extra sliver of time -- a leap second-- to prep for the new year. And now, with the pop of the cork (or was that the buzz of a pager?), we’re ready to herald 2006, a potential banner year for the enterprise. January 2, 3:00 a.m. PST Hardware isn't enough IT buyers live in a golden age of commodity hardware. Processors, servers, networks, storage, you name it: Every segment of the IT stack keeps getting faster, cheaper, and more commoditized. No surprise, then, that IT managers often resort to a checkbook-waving strategy, throwing hardware at every IT problem, from a balky WAN to an application speed bump. November 28, 3:00 a.m. PST Moving toward mesh networks The dream of broadband connectivity that’s as ubiquitous as the air you breathe still is not reality, and perhaps it would be a cruel pun to tell you not to hold your breath. November 22, 3:00 a.m. PST Living in an all-Internet Protocol world Hossein Eslambolchi is a man of many titles. He is president of AT&T Global Networking Technology Services and AT&T Labs, as well as CIO and CTO of AT&T proper. When Hossein talks, I listen. And what he talks about in late August is the inevitable move to 100 percent IP networking. August 30, 4:00 a.m. PDT The dumb remote office Management, compliance, and security concerns have made consolidation all the rage in large organizations, which have increasingly moved their applications and data from globally dispersed servers to a few centralized, tightly secured data centers. With the trend toward intelligent networks, we may one day see remote offices with very little intelligence of their own. July 18, 5:00 a.m. PDT Building the intelligent network The days of the fat, dumb pipe, are over. Servers applications, and storage have been shouldering the intelligence and security burden for too long. It’s time for the network infrastructure itself to add some smarts. After all, when it comes to intelligence, the real beauty of the network is that it touches everything. July 18, 5:00 a.m. PDT Far-flung file serving WAFS (wide-area file sharing) appliances combine WAN optimization with file-caching in an effort to remove file servers from remote offices. Sometimes called wide-area file-server replacements, they also rely heavily on application-specific acceleration, especially CIFS and MAPI. May 30, 5:00 a.m. PDT Packeteer, Visual Networks aim for large networks The increased growth and speed of networks has engendered a new wave of products aimed at enhancing the delivery of data across the enterprise. March 21, 3:00 p.m. PST In Brief: Rogue Wave Software partners with Sun Rogue Wave Software and Sun Microsystems have formed an alliance intended to help enterprises quickly and easily migrate legacy applications to Sun's Solaris 10 OS. The agreement calls for Rogue Wave to port and certify its enterprise C++ development toolkits including SourcePro Core, SourcePro Net, SourcePro DB, SourcePro Analysis, and Rogue Wave LEIF on Solaris 10 for both Sparc- and AMD Opteron-based systems. These tools are particularly aimed at helping help developers in the financial services, telecommunications, and government sectors to migrate existing Windows apps and develop new applications on Solaris 10. December 23, 6:08 a.m. PST The top 20 IT mistakes to avoid We all like to think we learn from mistakes, whether our own or others’. So in theory, the more serious bloopers you know about, the less likely you are to be under the bright light of interrogation, explaining how you managed to screw up big-time. That’s why we put out an all-points bulletin to IT managers and vendors everywhere: For the good of humanity, tell us about the gotchas that have gotten you, so others can avoid them. November 19, 3:00 p.m. PST Product Previews Procera appliance defends against internal network attacks Companies deploy firewalls to protect against outside attacks, but according to Procera Networks, the majority of network threats come from the inside. Procera's answer is the OptimIP 2402 internal network protection appliance, a turnkey device that supports high-speed traffic monitoring, filtering, and analysis over an 8.8Gbps managed backplane. The appliance provides fine-grained access control down to the IP or MAC (media access control) address level, with policies defined on a per-application basis. In addition, it protects against network attacks including ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) poisoning, address spoofing, and distributed DoS attacks that might result from virus or worm infections. According to Procera, the device is compatible with existing network hardware and can be installed in an hour or less. Pricing starts at $3,495. OptimIP 2402 Procera Networks September 10, 3:00 p.m. PDT ClearSight sheds a new light on network data Many network administrators feel right at home with standard network analysis tools, which show network traffic flows as lists of packet headers with packet payloads viewable in hex or ASCII. Many other network admins, however, do not. In an effort to ease network and application troubleshooting, ClearSight Networks offers ClearSight Analyzer, a new approach to network analysis. June 11, 3:00 p.m. PDT F5 buys Magnifire for $29 million F5 Networks Inc. has bought MagniFire Websystems Inc., a New York-based maker of Web application firewall hardware, for $29 million in cash, F5 said Tuesday. June 1, 8:39 a.m. PDT Tools give applications the green light LAS VEGAS -- Network management is digging into the sweet spot of application performance optimization, as more enterprises move critical applications to the Internet. Here at NetWorld+Interop 2004, Internap, 8e6, and Pivia introduced technology designed to give applications priority within the network. May 13, 1:28 p.m. PDT Grids at forefront of cluster show ClusterWorld Conference & Expo might as well have been dubbed GridWorld, given the tenor of discussions at the San Jose, Calif., event last week. Keynote speeches from grid expert Ian Foster and Andrew Mendelsohn, senior vice president of database and server technologies at Oracle, capped the event by placing grid computing center stage. April 9, 3:00 p.m. PDT Riverbed's Steelhead swims through WAN bottlenecks IT managers are always being asked to do more with less. When it comes to WAN links, less is sometimes all you have to work with. The Steelhead 2000 WAN acceleration appliance from Riverbed Technology is part file cache, part proxy, and part TCP optimization, providing a unique and extremely effective way of reducing the time spent transferring files from one office to another. In addition, the Steelhead is easy to install, and it does not require any LAN/WAN re-engineering. But like other WAN acceleration appliances, a unit must be installed on each end of your WAN link. April 9, 3:00 p.m. PDT Permeo oversees application access Permeo’s Application Security Gateway gives enterprise managers the means to provide pinpoint control over how internal users access external networks and how remote users access the network. With Permeo ASG, you no longer have to worry about whether users are running auctions on eBay or visiting porn sites. It also means that your applications can’t be hijacked to send sensitive data to places it shouldn’t go. March 5, 3:00 p.m. PST > Networking |
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