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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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 Web apps, just give me the data If you search the Web for “fortune500.xml,?you’ll find an ordered list of the Fortune 500 companies. It’s just what you’d want if you were writing a custom portfolio application. But it didn’t exist until last week when Doug Purdy, a Microsoft program manager, created it while writing his own personal portfolio application. Because he also blogged the list, you can use it, too. November 8, 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 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 Salesforce taps AppExchange startup for AdWord integration Kraig Swensrud and three friends who started Kieden are partying like it’s 1999 — for real. August 28, 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 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 Accessing the web of databases I've just posted the fourth installment in my new series of Friday podcasts. It’s an interview with Kingsley Idehen, CEO of OpenLink Software. OpenLink’s flagship product is a universal database and application server, Virtuoso, which I last wrote about in 2003. May 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT 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 Vendors unite to promote AJAX tool development A group of top industry vendors plans to announce on Wednesday a new community initiative aimed at popularizing AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and Extensible Markup Language), the nickname given to a collection of software development tools and standards that help Web applications mimic the speed and smoothness of desktop programs. February 1, 5:37 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 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 Governing SOA SOA (service-oriented architecture) promises enterprises endless advantages: increased code reuse, reduced integration expense, better security, and -- the big payoff -- greater business agility. Whether you achieve those benefits, however, probably has more to do with your policies and procedures than the quality of your code. January 19, 3:00 a.m. PST Microsoft adapts Python language for .Net Microsoft has released a version of the Python programming language for its .Net development platform. January 5, 4:10 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 Siebel sees components Ever since the web services trend gathered steam, enterprise application vendors, beginning with SAP, have promised to componentize their sprawling ERP, CRM, and SCM (supply chain management) offerings into services that can be deployed individually on app servers -- potentially increasing deployment flexibility and reducing the hassle of big-bang upgrades. Last week, Siebel Systems took a stride in that direction by shipping a version of its Siebel Component Assembly product for deployment on BEA WebLogic Server 9.0. December 19, 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 Exclusive: Systinet reins in Web service registries At the outset, I should admit a bias: I’m a UDDI skeptic. Still, I’m willing to believe that maybe I just haven’t dug deeply enough into UDDI to see its real value. So, I was naturally eager to review the latest version of Systinet’s Web services registry. 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 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 The spiral staircase of SOA Back in the 1980s, object-oriented programming was a state of mind, not the state of the art. Sure, there were OO languages, tools, and frameworks -- such as Lisp and Smalltalk -- but mainstream developers didn’t use them. Mainstream developers worked mostly in C. September 28, 4:00 a.m. PDT Sprint rationalizes its infrastructure with SOA As far back as four years ago, Sprint’s IT staff was already headed toward SOA (service-oriented architecture). They just didn’t know it yet. September 12, 4:00 a.m. PDT IT's seven dirty words Remember the George Carlin routine “The Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television”? (No, I’m not going to print them here; if you’re really curious, Google ’em.) I got to thinking the other day that IT has its own set of dirty words. Try saying any one of these in polite IT company, and someone will hand you a bar of soap to wash your mouth out. My filthy seven: August 15, 5:00 a.m. PDT Open source enterprise service bus With Java application servers rapidly becoming a commodity item, it's no surprise that we're now beginning to see open source implementations of other elements of the enterprise middleware stack. In particular, a number of surprisingly mature ESB (enterprise service bus) implementations have been announced in recent months. August 8, 5:00 a.m. PDT Open source business process management A full-featured business process management suite might not be the first thing you'd expect to see coming from the open source community, and yet that's exactly what a number of projects are working to deliver. With the rise of SOAs, the need for a business-process engine to manage and orchestrate disparate services and EJBs has never been greater -- even for sites that otherwise rely on open source technologies. August 8, 5:00 a.m. PDT That Aha! moment You gotta love Greg Raleigh’s attitude. The man who invented the technology behind the forthcoming 802.11n Wi-Fi standard insists that solving problems is easy. The real challenge, he says, is “deciding what problems are interesting to solve.” August 1, 5:00 a.m. PDT Sonic’s ESB takes new approach to fail-over If the SOA movement had an official flag, on that flag would be a diagram of an ESB (enterprise service bus) — an open and distributed integration platform that provides interfaces to a wide variety of systems and applications and ensures reliable messaging among them. And if you dotted the flag with the logos of leading SOA vendors, Sonic Software’s would surely have to stand out from the rest. August 1, 5:00 a.m. PDT Enterprise service buses hit the road See correction at end of article July 22, 5:00 a.m. PDT Starwood nears end of SOA revamp Every major enterprise applications vendor has hopped on the SOA (services-oriented architecture) bandwagon and extolled the virtues of using standards-compliant software to expose business processes as Web services, reducing the pain of integrating heterogeneous systems. But for customers, implementing an SOA environment in their own data centers can be a complex and lengthy process. One chief technology officer nearing the end of a five-year SOA project says the results, though a long time coming, are worth it. July 20, 10:40 a.m. PDT Ipedo brings 'dual-core' to EII Ipdeo on Monday launched XIP 4.0 (Extensible Information Platform) and described it as a "dual-core" EII offering that works with both SQL and the emerging XQuery querying languages. May 16, 6:00 a.m. PDT Services at your service Most companies looking seriously at SOA do so in hopes of making a mishmash of existing hardware and software play together more smoothly. As Eric Pulier, executive chairman of SOA Software, puts it: “They have the AS/400, the mainframe, the J2EE server, and the hamster on a treadmill that can’t be replaced because everyone who wrote it is either dead or cranky.” April 25, 5:00 a.m. PDT Service-oriented architectures To understand and apply the principles of SOA, you’d think we would have to agree first on what we mean by a “service.” To a surprising degree, we haven’t, but this is hardly the first time a powerful idea has been tricky to nail down. Definitions of “objects’ and “components” -- the ideas that powered earlier phases of software’s evolution -- were just as elusive. March 11, 3:00 p.m. PST Patrick Grady's calculated debut How did Patrick Grady manage to build his service when others have failed? How did he draw in big-name customers? In addition to his forceful personality, 10 years in high-tech venture capital gave him extraordinary access. In the early development phase, for example, senior technologists from Ariba, BEA, BellSouth, CommerceOne, Genesys Labs, Palm, and Sun got together once a week to advise him on architecture. That lends some credibility to Grady’s claim that his platform will become “the global de facto standard for how you describe and discover and deliver and transact for services.” February 28, 6:00 a.m. PST Google Maps pushes the envelope The instant Google Maps appeared, a lot of us knew right away that we’d never use MapQuest again. Google’s mapping and direction-finding service is a stunning improvement. February 18, 3:00 p.m. PST Automation is like riding a bike One of my new year’s resolutions was to automate a bunch of routine tasks that have been sucking up too much time and effort. Examples this time around included: moving online banking transactions into QuickBooks, synchronizing my online calendar with my cell phone, and visualizing blog subscription data. After crossing these chores off my list, I paused to reflect — as I always do after an automation binge — on the nature of software automation. It always boils down to three central themes: services, applications, and glue. February 4, 3:00 p.m. PST On-demand apps demand a richer browser Can the browser meet the demands of on-demand? On-demand apps are by definition Web apps. That won’t come as a shock to enterprises because most of the latest internally deployed enterprise apps — besides a few client/server holdouts — already rely on the browser to deliver user experience. November 26, 3:00 p.m. PST Content networks deliver on-demand apps Once limited to Web content and images, content delivery network providers are shifting focus to tackle the on-demand delivery of distributed applications. To that end, Akamai Technologies this week plans to introduce four J2EE-based Web applications that enterprises can deploy quickly without purchasing any hardware or fixed assets. Meanwhile, Speedera Networks next week will launch its FlexComputing service for distributed application hosting and delivery. October 18, 6:00 a.m. PDT What do developers want? The watchword of IT today is to make the most of what you've got. Developers are no exception, according to the results of this year's InfoWorld Programming Survey. We asked people who build enterprise applications to tell us how they did business in today's economy, and the response was resounding: Stick with the competencies you have and increase your investment in those tools and technologies that have proven their value to your organization. September 24, 3:00 p.m. PDT IM upstarts vie for interoperability Although Microsoft and IBM offer IM products for the enterprise, smaller challengers are staking out valuable territory with a commitment to interoperability. This week both Antepo and Jabber will unveil new IM offerings that bolster standards support and security. September 24, 3:00 p.m. PDT Football as a Web service Every Sunday, I get a bunch of guys together to watch football. Drawing upon my sharp technical skills, to set up these get-togethers, I used a service-oriented approach. September 24, 3:00 p.m. PDT What about performance? The five challenges highlighted in this article reflect trade-offs intrinsic to the distributed, loosely coupled nature of Web services-based SOAs. But skeptics frequently cite another issue -- performance -- as a particular weakness of the model. This criticism generally has two parts: the distributed nature of SOAs and the overhead of Web services protocols. September 10, 3:00 p.m. PDT The five missing pieces of SOA The high concept of SOA (service-oriented architecture) continues to enthrall IT. Yet SOA’s promise of universal application integration is vague at best, confounding anyone who takes a closer look. Such scrutiny reveals major gaps -- in reliability, security, orchestration, legacy support, and semantics. September 10, 3:00 p.m. PDT Trilog eases Domino to Java transition Trilog Group this week rolled out an integrated J2EE development framework designed to let IBM Lotus Notes developers use their existing skills for J2EE development projects. August 27, 4:56 p.m. PDT Liberty Alliance preps technology demo The Liberty Alliance trade group announced several new members Monday, including Oracle Corp. and Sharp Laboratories of America Inc. The 3-year-old organization now boasts more than 150 members, with some of the IT industry's top vendors signing on for full participation in recent months, including Intel Corp. and Computer Associates International Inc. July 19, 12:12 p.m. PDT Shaping forms for an XML-based future Crediting one person for the work of a group is always fraught with peril. But in the case of the XForms specification, Micah Dubinko's name comes to the fore. May 21, 3:00 p.m. PDT Feds jump online integration hurdles Can services-oriented architectures help government agencies provide better self-service? In the race to provide online government self-service, integration is one of the biggest roadblocks. Most governments are heavily invested in custom legacy applications. Linking Web-based self-service applications to those systems is difficult for any organization, but for government agencies, the problem is compounded. May 14, 3:00 p.m. PDT Miami’s self-service push is ‘never-ending’ There’s no huge secret behind one of the most innovative government self-service portals, miamidade.gov. “A lot of analysis and homework,” says Miami-Dade County Senior Web Developer and County Webmaster Assia Alexandrova, referring to the ongoing effort to bring county services online in an integrated, easy-to-use fashion. “It’s still not enough,” she says. “It’s never-ending.” May 14, 3:00 p.m. PDT SOAPscope scrubs up Web services In the world of Web services, SOAP’s human-readable interactions are easy to create and debug. But to take advantage of that, you must first find a tool capable of capturing network traffic and another capable of analyzing it. May 14, 3:00 p.m. PDT > Web services |
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