|
|
Free Newsletters
|
|
|
|
|
|
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 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 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 Experts: Google AdWords needs policing Google could avoid future malware attacks carried out using advertisements posted on its Web sites if the company more thoroughly investigated customers of its AdWords system, according to security and legal experts. April 26, 1:02 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 2006 Technology of the Year Awards: The winners' list See correction at end of article January 2, 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 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 Product previews Juniper jumps into access control Juniper Networks announced the availability of its Enterprise Infranet Controller, an end-point security and network access control system built on the policy and control engine of its Secure Access SSL VPN products. The heart of the product is the Infranet Controller appliance, which pushes an on-demand host-checking Infranet Agent to each connecting client and makes access policy decisions based on user role and current state of the host system. Noncompliant end points, such as those lacking anti-virus or firewall software, can be steered to a remediation site or security zones on the network. The Infranet Agent, as well as any Juniper firewall updated with ScreenOS 5.3, can handle enforcement. Juniper Infranet Controller 4000 and 6000 appliances, Juniper Networks October 31, 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 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 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 SOAPtest 4.0 targets Web services Whereas most of us surf the “visible” HTTP exchanges between browser and Web server, Web services are transporting an increasing load of otherwise invisible traffic. With the help of SOAP, Web service clients and servers carry on unseen conversations, similar to messages traveling over a subfrequency. June 20, 5:00 a.m. PDT British Telecom dials into SOA Telecom providers are competing tooth and nail to provide consumer and business customers with the latest and greatest value-added services. This smorgasbord of offerings includes everything from ring-tone downloads to hosted messaging, accounting, and other business services. An SOA makes perfect sense in this have-it-your-way environment because it enables providers to cobble together new offerings with those of third parties and integrate them quickly with their internal, mainframe-based billing, provisioning, and other support systems. May 2, 5:00 a.m. PDT IBM sets out SOA tools IBM Global Services last week unveiled services to enable IT managers to plan, design, implement, and manage SOAs (service-oriented architectures). April 11, 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 Don't throw out the SOAP with the bathwater What goes around comes around. Three years ago, mine was one of the voices urging the Web services movement not to lose touch with the Web’s essential nature, as embodied in the architectural style known as REST (Representational State Transfer). Perverse devil’s advocate that I am, I’ll now switch sides and urge the REST movement not to dismiss Web services and SOA (service-oriented architecture). March 11, 3:00 p.m. PST Annotating the planet with Google Maps My previous column on Google Maps provoked an unusually strong response. First up was Wil Rivers, who pointed out that Telcontar’s Drill Down Server is the engine that does the heavy lifting on the back end. Next was a series of gripes about data quality and completeness. March 4, 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 SOA's killer app unveiled See correction at end of article February 28, 6:00 a.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 Macromedia introduces publishing tool for eBay Macromedia Inc. plans to announce Monday a special version of its Contribute Web publishing desktop application designed to automate and simplify the creation and modification of eBay Inc. eBay Stores. November 1, 5:15 a.m. PST 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 The process is the problem for developers Much like last year, the numbers in this year's survey showed developers continuing to take a conservative approach to adoption of new platforms, tools, and technologies. But more tellingly, respondents' answers to open-ended questions show that purchasing decisions are only half of the story. Survey participants say some of the most important problems lay not in the code, but in the inner workings of their development teams and processes. September 24, 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 Microsoft raises the curtain on Visual Studio 2005 In terms of stability and functionality, Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 is a marked improvement over the preview released in May. I found that Beta 1 resolved most of the interactive operational glitches I experienced in my earlier look at the product. August 13, 3:00 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 |
|
|
||||||||||||||||||
