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Adobe eyes real-time collaboration with new services Adobe is preparing two hosted services that will allow developers to add real-time collaboration capabilities, including VoIP, to RIAs (rich Internet applications). The company demonstrated the services -- code-named Pacifica and CoCoMo -- at its Adobe MAX 2007 user conference in Chicago Tuesday. Last call: Oliver's parting shot Back in the saddle again…  September 5, 3:00 a.m. PDT IBM buys Web conferencing vendor WebDialogs IBM has acquired a Web conferencing service provider, it announced as part of a flurry of unified communications moves on Wednesday. August 22, 4:27 p.m. PDT SMB technology: Replacing in-house software with applications in the cloud In the near future, there's only one way to go for SMBs when it comes to purchasing business software -- and that's out of house. Whether it's full-on SaaS (software as a service), where users access all facets of the application through a browser, or a hosted product (including hosted Exchange, where only the server component is off-site and users employ a standard desktop client such as Outlook), either model is simply too cost-effective for SMBs to ignore. August 20, 3:00 a.m. PDT Processors: Dividing chips into many virtual cores The current approach taken by x86 CPUs -- to stuff as many processor cores and as much cache memory as will fit on one chip -- will prove impossible to scale beyond a certain point. And adding more, big, hot processor cores may not be the best fit for server roles that call for managing large workloads over long periods of time. August 20, 3:00 a.m. PDT The ABC's of RIA Rich Internet applications, or RIAs, comprise a spectrum of application types and technologies. The lightweight end of the spectrum is anchored by AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) or Web 2.0 applications, which add richness and responsiveness to standard Web sites with asynchronous JavaScript libraries: that's the "AJA" part of "AJAX." The "X" stands for "XML," but these days XML is not the only data format used by such libraries; it's also common to see asynchronous data exchange in JSON, HTML, and plain text formats. At this point, many people have stopped treating "AJAX" as a specific acronym and talk instead about the generic "Ajax" class of applications. August 6, 3:00 a.m. PDT Google vows to reduce Analytics tech problems Google has resolved the latest data outage to hit Google Analytics, and it promises to cut down on the frequency of technical problems affecting the Web site traffic-monitoring service. July 31, 4:00 p.m. PDT Microsoft mum on if Google Docs-killer planned The latest update to Microsoft's Works productivity software is expected to go on sale Wednesday amid renewed speculation that the long-standing, low-end counterpart to Microsoft Office is also being groomed to take on Google in the online office software market. July 31, 12:46 p.m. PDT Talent management swims downstream The big news around software as a service (SaaS) has always been the claim that it levels the competitive playing field, giving SMBs the same tools and ammunition that previously only a large enterprise could afford. June 18, 12:00 p.m. PDT eBay wants developers to take it outside As it battles competitors like Google and Amazon.com for the hearts and minds of application programmers, eBay this week will hold its biggest annual event for these computer professionals, its 2007 eBay Developers Conference, in Boston. June 11, 8:27 a.m. PDT Adobe, FedEx Kinko's pair up to ease document printing A Web services partnership will allow U.S. users of Adobe Systems software to send documents via the Internet to FedEx Kinko's centers for printing. June 6, 7:45 a.m. PDT Vendors seek unity on identity protocols Microsoft will participate in a meeting later this month with vendors and organizations that are backing several different identity management systems, an indication that cooperation between the software giant and its peers is improving. June 6, 5:10 a.m. PDT Garmin opens GPS data to Web site developers Garmin International has published some APIs for connecting to its GPS devices, making it easier for Web developers to write applications that use information about where consumers are located, the company announced Tuesday. May 29, 8:22 a.m. PDT Octopz grabs on to Web collaboration Nobody's sure exactly how it is that social networks like MySpace and Facebook are really going to make money for their corporate masters. But one thing people have figured out is that online social networks are great mediums for people to share ideas and collaborate. Now one startup, Octopz, is hoping to apply that logic to the topsy-turvy community of creative professionals. In the process, the company is making a splash in the ocean of Internet collaboration hopefuls. May 19, 3:05 a.m. PDT socialDragon: Advertisers get a piece of Average Joe At first, socialDragon looks like any other online social network site that brings together ordinary consumers who get a thrill out of putting their personal lives on display for friends, family, and strangers. Users upload vacation pictures, videos, or their thoughts about hobbies, politics and daily life. It's what happens after that makes socialDragon unique. May 12, 3:00 a.m. PDT Microsoft-Yahoo deal still worth doing When Sun Chairman and then-CEO Scott McNealy first heard about the HP/Compaq merger in 2001, he likened it to ‘two garbage trucks colliding with each other.’ Some analysts see the rumored Microsoft-Yahoo discussions in the same light: an act of desperation by two lumbering incumbents that are falling further behind Google each day. May 7, 9:50 a.m. PDT oDesk: job search meets the online exchange Back in the day, dot-com marketplaces -- virtual bazaars where buyers and sellers could shop, haggle, and conduct business -- were all the rage. (Remember eCattle.com, the online exchange for livestock?) Most of those environments went down with the bursting of the Internet bubble, but that doesn't mean the idea of online exchanges wasn't a good one --just that it needed time to mature. May 4, 3:00 a.m. PDT Innovation, startups hot again in the enterprise Five years ago enterprise startups hit the skids, stung by a perfect storm of commoditization, vendor consolidation, and the IT spending downturn. In the intervening years, however, the skies have cleared and, to paraphrase Ronald Regan, "It's morning again for enterprise startups." May 1, 7:00 a.m. PDT Google Website Optimizer boosts page effectiveness One Seattle company using a new site optimization service from Google, introduced in beta to select users in October and to all AdWords customers earlier this month, is already seeing improvements on its site. April 26, 12:45 p.m. PDT Web 2.0 Expo draws startups, superstars If anyone knows about the potential of what has been dubbed "Web 2.0" it's the folks over at O'Reilly Media. Heck, company founder Tim O'Reilly himself coined the phrase back in 2003 to describe the emergence of a new generation of Web-based business models in the wake of the dot-com collapse. And if this week's first-ever Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco is any measure, the Web 2.0 phenomenon is on track to exceed expectations. April 16, 4:00 a.m. PDT Google plans worldwide developer day Google hopes to woo more developers to its Web services software platform with a 27-hour-long "Developer Day" on May 31. April 11, 4:24 a.m. PDT Yahoo opens up Web mail APIs Yahoo is opening up its Web mail platform to external developers, so that they can create plug-ins, utilities and applications for the popular Yahoo Mail service. March 29, 4:46 a.m. PST Analysis: Salesforce AppSpace signals major shift in SaaS The days of dismissing SaaS as 'just another delivery system' are long over. In its Spring 07 rev announced earlier this week, Salesforce.com showed how there is an endless number of ways in which the SaaS company can reconfigure its core competency to serve new purposes. March 20, 10:30 a.m. PST Microsoft to offer 'MySpace' for apps users Microsoft introduced the first in a planned series of online communities for users of its Dynamics applications to provide forums where peers can exchange best practices. Centered around specific industries or job titles, the first community is aimed at finance professionals such as corporate controllers, finance managers and accountants. March 13, 7:52 a.m. PST Microsoft's Zocher talks up Expression When you own as much of the world’s operating system market as Microsoft does, even small changes to your platform become immensely complicated in practice. For evidence of that, just consider Microsoft Expression, a line of design tools for creating 3D visuals, animation, and video clips on both Windows and Web applications. Expression is all about giving application developers and Web designers tools to take advantage of new graphics capabilities in Windows Vista, such as WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation). But Expressions has raised as many questions as it has answered: Is it an application development tool or a Web design tool? Is it Microsoft’s answer to Adobe’s Flash? Eric Zocher, general manager of the Microsoft Expression product line, chatted with InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill to sort out Expression fact from fiction. February 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 Portal aids development of identity-based apps A new portal has been launched to help developers who are building applications using identity management technology. January 23, 9:04 a.m. PST The smart business of diversity Carly Fiorina served as CEO of Hewlett-Packard from 1999 to 2005, the first woman to run a Fortune 20 company. After she was ousted, along with a $21 million exit package, Fiorina did what a lot of us would do if we had millions of dollars in the bank and some time on our hands: She wrote a book. In Tough Choices, published in October, Fiorina talks about rising to the top of a male-dominated culture. Fiorina spoke with InfoWorld correspondent Carmen Nobel for our upcoming feature on the issues women face in IT. January 22, 3:00 a.m. PST Brightcove lands $59 million in VC Internet TV startup Brightcove announced Wednesday that it has raised more than $59 million in venture capital that it plans to use to expand and solidify its lead as a provider of Internet TV content. January 17, 10:46 a.m. PST Liberty Alliance, Microsoft discuss identity protocols The Liberty Alliance, a consortium working on policy and technology issues for identity management, is discussing with Microsoft how to reconcile their competing sets of protocols for secure Web transactions. January 10, 4:38 a.m. PST 2006: A year of IT highs and lows It happens every year: as the calendar gets ready to turn over, we get an itch to pause, to be quiet, to reflect. That’s probably why “year in review” stories are so popular at this time of year: they channel a seasonal compunction among editors and readers alike. December 11, 3:00 a.m. PST Rearden partners with American Express Despite today’s draconian efforts to cut company costs, one area typically remains out of control: off-purchase order spending. Rearden Commerce’s deal last week with American Express could change that. November 20, 3:00 a.m. PST Arizona Cardinals IT team has championship season It’s a pity that this year’s edition of the Arizona Cardinals is struggling so mightily in the field, because the organization’s IT team is putting together a championship season. Through a combination of teamwork, timing, and bold strategy, Technology Director Mark Feller transformed the brand-new Cardinal Stadium -- already a crown jewel of NFL venues -- into a high-tech wonderland. Working with IT solutions provider Insight and Cisco Systems, the Cardinals have succeeded in building out one of the world’s most sophisticated converged IP networks. November 13, 3:00 a.m. PST Office Live a smart move Microsoft was handing out press accounts to Office Live Premium about a week ago, so we're tinkering with it. We'll do the hands-on part somewhere else, but it's worth discussing Microsoft's strategy here. Bottom line: This is the best New Economy, Web 2.0 Internet move I've seen Microsoft make in a long time. November 9, 3:00 a.m. PST AOL to offer Web APIs for AIM AOL plans to give external developers a way to embed functionality from AIM into their Web sites, another step in AOL's efforts to encourage programmers to use its popular instant messaging service. October 19, 1:20 p.m. PDT Prepare for Internet Explorer 7 After one of the most widely tested beta products in Microsoft's history and trial downloads by millions of users, Internet Explorer 7 Version 1.0 is finally ready. The tentative release date is Oct. 18, followed by Windows Update and Automatic Updates availability on Nov. 2. October 13, 3:00 a.m. PDT YouTube acquisition, McAfee scandal point to tech trends Google Inc.'s acquisition of YouTube Inc. and a shakeup at security vendor McAfee Inc. are giving IT investors something to mull over as they brace for the wave of technology-vendor financial reports due next week. October 12, 2:27 p.m. PDT Coghead unveils beta of hosted Web platform Startup Coghead is opening up the beta version of its hosted Web development environment to technically savvy users in small to midsized businesses (SMBs) who are keen to create their own applications. October 11, 7:40 a.m. PDT Evolving Amazon's services into products The announcements from Amazon Web Services LLC just keep on coming. The latest news flash is FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon), which will make Amazon’s warehouse, its customer service, and its pick, pack, and ship machinery available to sellers. October 4, 3:00 a.m. PDT BEA's 360 vision still fuzzy BEA jumped ahead of the pack last week, announcing the industry’s first native SOA platform, SOA 360. But the company left enough unanswered questions about the new platform to prompt one analyst to say there’s still much explaining to do. 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 Office 2007 creeps toward release Microsoft Corp.'s Office 2007 suite is nearing the end of its long testing process. Microsoft on Thursday will offer a refresh of beta 2, the last external test release of the product before it is released to manufacturing, the company said. September 13, 1:15 p.m. PDT The end of VC? For anyone who doesn’t play close attention to developments in the SaaS (software as a service) space, the story of San Francisco startup Kieden might sound like a replay of one of those “spin straw into gold” tales from the height of the dot-com bubble. But Salesforce.com’s Aug. 21 announcement that it acquired six month-old Kieden and its technology for tracking Google AdWord campaigns was no act of drunken optimism. Kieden’s success, like that of Salesforce, is evidence of a new and powerful wave that’s just starting to break in the IT sector, as SaaS vendors create an environment in which countless smaller companies can quickly and effortlessly be born, grow, and thrive. Kieden founder Kraig Swensrud, now senior director of product marketing at Salesforce.com, spoke with InfoWorld Senior Editor Paul F. Roberts about SaaS, Web 2.0, agile development and how the rules are changing for startups of all stripes. September 4, 3:00 a.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 Google offers tools for small business These days it seems like every time Google slaps its logo on a technology, the earth trembles. The company makes no secret of its interest in developing a suite of office productivity tools. Still, the news Monday that Google is launching such a suite for small to midsize businesses will prompt hasty meetings in Redmond and elsewhere. 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 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 Amazon's pragmatic approach to metered infrastructure In March, Amazon.com introduced S3 (Simple Storage Service ), a metered storage service for arbitrary blobs of data. Recently, Amazon’s adventure in metered Web services continued with the announcement that its SQS (Simple Queue Service), which had been in beta since well before the surprise announcement of S3, has now joined S3 as a commercial offering. July 19, 3:00 a.m. PDT Salesforce introduces partner management Salesforce.com’s summer release is typically an opportunity to hype minor upgrades. But with Microsoft announcing its intention to release an on-demand CRM product last week, are you surprised that there’s more than usual in Salesforce’s latest update? July 17, 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 NetSuite's Retail Charge drives SaaS to Stores Hosted software may be making the leap from tech craze to commodity, as CompUSA and hosted application vendor NetSuite announced a deal last week to resell NetSuite's business applications suite in all 240 of CompUSA's U.S. stores. It's the first time a mass-market retailer has offered on-demand software. July 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT Microsoft Office 2007 beta not quite "live" Is it Microsoft Office in the browser at last? Ever since Microsoft launched Windows Live, Microsoft watchers have been speculating on when browser-based versions of Office applications would arrive, and what they’d look like. July 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT Open government meets IT One of the speakers at InfoWorld’s SOA Executive Forum in New York last fall was Dan Thomas, director of the DCStat program in Washingon’s Office of the CTO. Earlier this month, he alerted me to a remarkable development. Starting in mid-June, the District of Columbia would begin releasing operational data from a variety of city agencies to the Internet in several XML formats, including RSS and Atom. June 28, 3:00 a.m. PDT IBM hands over more WSDM code to open source IBM Corp. is contributing more code to the open-source community based on the WSDM (Web services distributed management) standard, the vendor said Wednesday. June 14, 9:49 a.m. PDT IBM releases SOA catalog with Web service resources IBM chose Paris as the venue on Tuesday to announce the SOA Business Catalog, a compendium of reusable templates, code, and best-practice business models for 15 different industries. June 13, 12:28 p.m. PDT Google gets Groove-y with Spreadsheet It’s not often that alpha releases of new software get written up in Tech Watch, let alone alpha versions of spreadsheet software, a category that reached its peak of innovation around the time Bill Clinton won his return trip to the Oval Office. June 12, 3:00 a.m. PDT Nsite 6.0 serves up small-scale CRM add-ons Effective sales management can be an overwhelming challenge to small businesses. Lacking IT savvy and budget to automate, many SMBs are still mired in an error-prone mix of manual e-mail, spreadsheets, and word processing applications. Add advanced partner and channel requirements to the equation and the dismal degree of control and visibility simply stymies efforts to compete. June 8, 3:00 a.m. PDT InfoWorld CTO 25 The top technology slot in the enterprise has changed. Once, forward-looking CTOs and CIOs scanned the horizon for new technologies that would improve the lot of IT. Today, as many of this year’s top 25 CTOs can tell you, technology leaders must also focus on understanding the business goals of the enterprise -- and then craft technology strategies to meet those objectives. June 5, 3:00 a.m. PDT InfoWorld CTO 25: Scott Metzger Scott Metzger, CTO of TrueCredit, calls his early days at the company a “trial by fire.” In typical startup fashion, “many promises were being made that couldn’t be kept. I showed up with a gun to my head on Day One.” June 5, 3:00 a.m. PDT Whirlpool whirls into Web services Whirlpool is whirling into Web services with the help of SAP. May 23, 6:25 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 Web services addressing specification is approved The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C ) on Wednesday announced approval of the WS-Addressing (Web Services Addressing) 1.0 specification as a formal W3C recommendation, giving it the organization's final level of endorsement. May 9, 11:08 a.m. PDT EBay eyes crossover with MeetUp EBay Inc. has invested US$2 million in social networking company Meetup Inc., according to a form 8-k eBay filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday. April 12, 10:45 a.m. PDT Business Objects to launch BI for SaaS Business intelligence vendor Business Objects is dipping its toe into the SaaS (software as a service) market with CrystalReports.com, a new version of Crystal Reports that the company says will appeal to SMBs. April 10, 3:00 a.m. PDT Web services pose growing security risk In their rush to implement Web services, some companies may be exposing themselves to new security risks that they may not fully understand, a security researcher said at the CanSecWest/core06 conference in Vancouver on Thursday. April 7, 4:06 a.m. PDT 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 What about those Salesforce.com outages? The first objection to SaaS, particularly among enterprise IT customers, is that reliability and availability are in someone else’s hands. So when Salesforce.com customers experienced significant service disruptions in December and January, it’s no surprise that its execs were reluctant to comment and that other SaaS companies downplayed the incidents. March 20, 3:00 a.m. PST Maximizing the business value of SOA SOA is a better way to do application integration, but a small SOA vision centered on integration misses the point of designing for greater business flexibility. The word “service” in SOA refers to business services, which capture business capabilities in digital form, making them available for reconfiguration and reconnection to meet a constantly changing landscape of business needs. March 13, 3:00 a.m. PST DoD puts SOA into action When it comes to modeling complex business processes, the folks at the U.S. Transportation Command (U.S. Transcom) have a lot of experience. As the central defense agency responsible for worldwide air, land, and sea transportation for the U.S. armed services, U.S. Transcom has been developing internal process architectures for more than a decade. March 13, 3:00 a.m. PST SOA planning: Sizing up business processes As SOA goes mainstream in the enterprise, its success may hinge on a crucial meeting of the minds -- a mashup of talent that can uncap a font of creative potential. March 13, 3:00 a.m. PST To build or to buy IT applications? It’s a question of Shakespearean proportions. Should you license a commercial enterprise application that will meet 75 percent of your needs, or would it be nobler to build your own application, one that will track as closely as possible to the task at hand? February 13, 3:00 a.m. PST ObjectWeb shapes up for the enterprise The ObjectWeb consortium is giving itself a makeover this year to make its open-source software more suitable for business use and to help it expand further outside Europe. February 7, 4:09 a.m. PST Silicon Valley group pushes for local wireless network The region that spawned the microprocessor and helped wire the world now wants to unwire itself with the help of local chip giant Intel Corp. January 30, 12:01 p.m. PST Google CEO on censoring: "We did an evil scale" It took Google Inc. more than a year to make the decision that offering a censored version of its search services in China would be a lesser evil than boycotting business in the country altogether, according to Google Inc. Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Eric Schmidt. January 27, 1:03 p.m. PST FirstGov.gov revamps search functionality Internet users looking for information at the U.S. government's Web portal will get more complete and relevant results using a new search engine unveiled Tuesday, according to officials with the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA). January 24, 11:54 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 Google News emerges from beta with new features Google Inc. has added new search-based features to its news site, which on Monday emerged from beta testing more than three years after its introduction, according to a company spokeswoman. January 23, 3:44 p.m. PST Reining in SOA Want to immerse yourself in tech minutiae? Ask a developer about his company’s SOA (service-oriented architecture) plans. After all, service-enabling application components and combining them to make new apps is a complex business. Yet according to Contributing Editor Phillip J. Windley, author of “Governing SOA”, the most critical piece of the SOA puzzle calls more on social than on technical expertise. January 23, 3:00 a.m. PST Microsoft hopes to MIX in with Web designers With a new conference slated for March, Microsoft Corp. will attempt to woo a developer segment that's traditionally been a hard sell -- creative types who build and design multimedia Web applications. January 20, 12:19 p.m. PST Oracle offers Fusion road map Oracle President Charles Phillips on Wednesday led off a two-and-a-half hour deep dive into the technology behind Fusion, hoping to put to rest continuing confusion over its project. January 19, 10:30 a.m. PST Understanding UDDI The following is a basic step-by-step guide of how companies use a Web services registry such as Infravio X-Registry for their SOA. January 19, 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 2006 Technology of the Year Awards: The winners' list See correction at end of article January 2, 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 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 SaaS broadens reach to product life cycle management Once the domain of only the largest manufacturers, Product Lifecycle Management [PLM] applications are now needed by even the smallest machine shop thanks to environmental compliance regulations. Companies in search of an easy-to-deploy, inexpensive solution for its suppliers are now turning to software as a service. December 5, 3:00 a.m. PST The two-way data web Two years ago, I gave the keynote address on the opening day of XML 2003. The next day, Adam Bosworth delivered a weirdly complementary keynote, in which he began to lay out an idea he’s been developing ever since, first at BEA and now at Google. The idea, in a nutshell, is that the truly scalable databases of the future will be more like the Web than like Oracle, DB2, or SQL Server. November 23, 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 When mainframes make sense Not everyone sees the mainframe as a relic of the past. In 1996, motor manufacturer Baldor Electric, beguiled by promises of lower costs and the desire to move to the SAP platform for all its CRM and ERP transactions, left the mainframe in favor of a Windows environment. According to Mark Shackelford, Baldor's IS director, the company was very unhappy with the results. November 17, 3:00 a.m. PST Toward swappable Web services Walt Johnson is an IT planner at California Independent System Operator (CalISO), the not-for-profit operator of the state’s wholesale power grid. I met him at InfoWorld’s SOA Executive Forum last week, where he described CalISO’s transition to service-oriented architecture. November 16, 3:00 a.m. PST Microsoft is stuck on the C: drive Bill Gates’ Nov. 1 announcement that Microsoft would soon be in the SaaS (software-as-a-service) business should be taken as a warning sign to the faithful: Something is rotten in Redmond. In the past, Gates has aimed his message at the consumer, both business and personal. He usually extols the virtues of whatever technology is being unveiled and explains to his audience how it will fundamentally change their lives (for the better, of course). This time he had nothing substantive to offer them. November 8, 3:00 a.m. PST Sabre's customer-driven SOA How does a technology-driven company with massive performance and scalability requirements -- and incredibly varied customer and supplier bases -- transition to SOA? For Sabre Holdings, the answer was a lot of in-house development and a complex interweaving of the old and new. November 7, 3:00 a.m. PST Verizon goes back to the workbench To overcome its SOA roadblocks, Verizon had to build an entire SOA operational infrastructure virtually from scratch -- and it has the patents to prove it. "As a technology, Web services are great, but today's standards don't have nearly enough operational infrastructure around them," says Shadman Zafar, Verizon's senior vice president of architecture and e-services. "You can end up with a plethora of Web services but no awareness of which of them are where and provide what function -- and most important -- which have the right kind of capacity and SLA to be usable by what and whom. The result is that SOA risks simply becoming a toy for the developer." November 7, 3:00 a.m. PST British American Tobacco builds SOA one step at a time For British American Tobacco (BAT), SOA success came early. The challenge now lies in determining how quickly SOA should be scaled across the enterprise, and for which functions. November 7, 3:00 a.m. PST Making SOA work Implementing SOA (service-oriented architecture) is one of the most daunting projects that an enterprise IT organization can undertake. Service orientation represents a whole new way of thinking and doing, one that changes the way developers operate and interact with the business. November 7, 3:00 a.m. PST New processes for Thomson Prometric "The biggest challenge we've faced in creating an SOA has been identifying exactly what a service is," says Christopher Crowhurst, vice president and chief architect at Thomson Learning. "Understanding what the business is doing, converting that to a set of services, and working out how to expose those services in a granular, extensible way so that you're not constantly breaking consumers' interfaces -- we learned that many people just can't do it." November 7, 3:00 a.m. PST OASIS committee to tackle Semantic Web services A prominent Web standards organization announced Tuesday the creation of a new committee to study how the idea of semantics and the Semantic Web can be applied to service-oriented systems. November 2, 9:05 a.m. PST The importance of interaction data The twin themes of this year's Accelerating Change conference were AI (artificial intelligence) and IA (intelligence amplification). On the AI track, people talked about making systems smarter. On the IA track, people talked about harnessing collective human intelligence. The tension between the two groups struck some sparks. October 12, 3:00 a.m. PDT Effective description, discovery, and integration The Rodney Dangerfield of Web services standards is clearly Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration. UDDI don't get no respect. Its original conception -- a global e-marketplace for services -- looks, for now, like a dot-com-era fantasy. October 5, 4:00 a.m. PDT Reinventing the office suite The controversy over office document formats heated up again this month when Microsoft and Massachusetts tangled over the state’s firm intention to standardize on the OpenOffice.org XML format. Personally, I think everyone’s barking up the wrong tree. Office suites haven’t felt like the center of the computing universe for a very long time. The network’s where the action is. September 14, 4:00 a.m. PDT > Web services |
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