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AJAX alliance recognizes mashups The OpenAjax Alliance, formed to boost interoperability in the AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) realm, has put forth an aggressive roadmap that recognizes the growing trend toward mashups. Microsoft to integrate Windows Live tools into Visual Studio Microsoft is planning to add the ability to develop Windows Live applications to its Visual Studio toolkit as a way to build more of a developer base for its online services platform. September 17, 2:39 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 Make mashups secure With the advent of mashups, innovative developers all over the enterprise are seeking new ways to leverage the value of corporate information through the use of external Web applications, APIs, or services. Although the thought of this adventure has sent many corporate security specialists running behind their firewalls, mashups are here to stay. Indeed, they have strategic value for many enterprises, so you’d better figure out how to live with them. August 6, 3:00 a.m. PDT ILOG JRules 6.5 brings rules to SOA ILOG JRules Version 6.5 is primarily a refinement of the architecture and features first introduced in Version 6.0. With the 6.x line, ILOG adopted the basic architecture seen across the BRMS (Business Rules Management System) industry. As such, JRules combines a rule engine deployed and managed as a stand-alone module (Rule Execution Server); a rule repository for sharing, versioning, and reporting on rules (Rule Team Server); and a set of authoring tools for both business users and technical staff to interact with the repository (Rule Studio). August 2, 3:00 a.m. PDT Microsoft releases rich media app betas This week Microsoft is quietly delivering a flurry of updates to its developer community, including the release candidate version of Silverlight, the new rich media competitor to Adobe's Flash Player. Also available for download will be a Silverlight plug-in for Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 -- another huge hunk of bits Microsoft is making available for download this week. None of this would be complete without Beta 2 of the 3.5 version of the .Net Framework itself, also ready for downloading. July 26, 3:02 p.m. PDT IBM pledges access to its IP for standards IBM is making it easier to utilize its patented intellectual property to implement nearly 200 standards in SOA, Web services, security, and other spaces. July 11, 11:35 a.m. PDT Ballmer gives his take on software-plus-services plan Microsoft's top executive outlined the company's plan to transition from a traditional software company to offering software plus services for the first time on Tuesday, giving some roadmap details for how the strategy will play out in the next year. July 10, 3:04 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 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 Microsoft funds new open-source digital ID projects As part of its plan to promote identity management across multiple platforms, Microsoft is funding several new projects to develop open-source versions of its digital-identity technology for information cards. May 23, 10:43 a.m. PDT Three open source Web service testing tools get high marks Thanks to the IT world's ongoing love affair with Web services and the appearance of more and more Web-service construction tools, Web services are becoming easy to create -- and oh so easy to botch. May 11, 3:00 a.m. PDT How to get bought by Google (or IBM, or Oracle) May is a month of rebirth and new beginnings. It's a time when flowers are blooming, trees are flowering, and young bucks lock horns in battle over the privilege of choosing a mate. Those kinds of biological imperatives are a bit masked in the super-refined atmosphere of Silicon Valley, but it's safe to say that betrothal is on the minds of many a young company these days. They're complex emotions, to be sure, but they find their truest expression in a question that flits across the mind of many a traveler on Route 101 or, if articulated, is done so only in whispers: "How do we get bought by Google?" April 30, 3:00 a.m. PDT CEO: Amazon Services losing money, but hopeful Amazon.com's Web services business isn't profitable, but it's growing very rapidly and the company expects it to make money eventually, Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos said Monday. April 17, 7:39 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 BT prepares online service for SMBs BT Group is testing an online service to help small and medium-size businesses build an online presence with nifty features such as blogs, podcasts, and click-to-call capabilities. April 4, 6:21 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 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 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 Tabblo’s approach to rich Internet apps If you want a peek into the future of RIAs (rich Internet applications), take a look at Tabblo (tabblo.com). The model that Tabblo has set into motion for photographers -- both amateur and professional -- will soon be adopted by enterprise IT to empower its user base. January 16, 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 Agile scripting: Bigger bang for app-dev bucks Enterprises will spend too much this year creating monolithic apps — the sort of server-side efforts that involve formal requirements and tie up dozens (or hundreds) of architects, coders, and testers. Most would be better off using scripting languages, Web services, and SOA to weave together browser-based apps that leverage existing assets. January 8, 3:00 a.m. PST Software Development: Simplicity tops the agenda Software development continued to move toward simplicity in 2006. Most evident was the widespread adoption of SOA (services-oriented architecture), which has become the technology of choice for integrating systems of all kinds -- in-house between departments, across stovepipe applications, and in B2B and B2C commerce. January 1, 3:00 a.m. PST Tibco gets on the enterprise service bus For years after the emergence of the ESB (enterprise service bus), IBM and Tibco refused to acknowledge the market space. In frequently reiterated statements, both companies took the position that their messaging products provided the same capabilities without having to use the ESB moniker. December 8, 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 SOA Software connects mainframes to SOA Tough business conditions often give rise to ingenious solutions. That was the case at Merrill Lynch several years ago when the economic boom went bust: An urgent desire to reduce IT overhead spurred a Web services initiative that has saved the company an estimated $44 million in three years. November 13, 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 Cast your vote for IT's future Dear reader: Ask not what IT can do for you, ask what you can do for IT. With the crucial midterm congressional elections just a couple of weeks away (not to mention a bevy of state and local contests), it’s time to issue my first annual From the Analysts political endorsements. October 20, 3:00 a.m. PDT 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 The case for altruism The first timeI heard about Wikipedia, I thought, This has no shot. Why would highly qualified people devote their energies to an encyclopedia they couldn’t make a dime on? September 4, 3:00 a.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 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 AJAX e-mail and more A unique amalgam of Linux mail server and open source development platform, the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) combines truly integrated e-mail, calendaring, and contacts with a mashup-friendly AJAX client and easy extensibility using Zimlets, which are XML/Web services widgets for initiating content lookups or actions (such as a VoIP phone call) from within messages. Version 4.0 of the suite, announced today, takes collaboration up a notch to document creation and sharing. August 14, 3:00 a.m. PDT Does “built to last” apply to IT? Over the weekend, I bought an amazing antique chair: a fancy wooden office swivel chair in practically mint condition, including all its original cast-iron hardware. Although probably made between 1900 and 1915 (the patent date is 1897), it’s remarkably modern, with fully adjustable height, tilt, and back support, like the best Aeron chairs of today (well, its wooden surfaces are a tad stiffer). With any luck, it will last another 100 years and be just as functional. August 11, 3:00 a.m. PDT Racing to market with SOA Oded Noy had faced challenges before — when he co-founded an application management startup, for instance, or when he participated in war game simulations for the Israeli Air Force. But this was unique: Create a scalable platform that would transform the online car shopping and financing experience for consumers — in six months. August 9, 12:40 p.m. PDT Enterprise mashups They’re all the rage in the Web 2.0 crowd: mashup services that typically combine maps with all sorts of data from a variety of Web sources. In the past year, we’ve seen a host of much-discussed sites pop up, from Zillow.com for real-estate value estimation, to AuctionMapper, which presents eBay search results on maps to help locate the nearest sellers. July 28, 9:31 a.m. PDT Sprint wrangles mashups Mashups are seductive, thanks to their whizzy interfaces and lightweight development requirements. To creative developers, they constitute an open invitation to mix and match data and services in unexpected ways. But if you don’t think them through from an enterprise perspective, “mashups are no more than Happy Meal toys,” says Edmund Vazquez, manager of Web services integration and SOA implementation at Sprint Nextel. July 28, 9:31 a.m. PDT The rise of open infrastructure When entrepreneurs pitch their software-as-a-service ideas to me, I always ask how they plan to compete with what I call the galactic clusters -- Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. These giants have set a high bar for Internet-scale operations, and they’re relentlessly pushing it higher. July 26, 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 Broaden your options: Don’t fear native code I have prepared an account of the history of .Net and Java that’s intended to balance more fanciful post-mortem accounts (of .Net and Java, not of me). It reads thus: Sun created Java to cash in on the success of Visual Basic and to convince development managers that C++ coders are all slobbering toddlers playing with nail guns. Sun did grant C++ dispensation for “performance-sensitive applications,” a category that covered most of Sun’s software catalog. Microsoft created .Net to keep Java from gaining traction and to put that cross-platform nonsense to rest once and for all. One OS, one run-time, many languages was the best way to go. C#, the Microsoft alternative to Java with the honesty to use “C” in its name, still kept the pencils and paper clips away from the inmates, except, of course, for those developers working on performance-sensitive applications, a category that covered most of Microsoft’s software catalog. July 12, 3:00 a.m. PDT Microsoft rebrands WinFX as .Net Framework 3.0 Microsoft has re-branded its WinFX technologies as .Net Framework 3.0 to clarify the naming convention for its developer framework, company representatives said on Friday. June 9, 3:15 p.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 Whirlpool whirls into Web services Whirlpool is whirling into Web services with the help of SAP. May 23, 6:25 a.m. PDT SAP's ESA strategy is on track Convincing users to abandon software they know and trust for technology that still seems like a vision to some of them is no easy task. May 18, 6:02 a.m. PDT SAP to launch $125M fund for NetWeaver To accelerate development of applications running on its NetWeaver integration platform, SAP AG has launched a $125 million venture fund to invest in software development companies. May 17, 12:38 p.m. PDT ActiveGrid speeds Web application development “It’s really hard to build an HTML application that talks to one database, yet IT developers have a huge backlog of requested applications that talk to multiple databases,” says Peter Yared, CEO of ActiveGrid. His company aims to solve that problem, in part by doing away with the traditional three-tiered model of Web application development. May 15, 3:00 a.m. PDT 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 VMware alliance will promote virtual desktops See correction below April 24, 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 Mercury focusing on SOA with software quality package Mercury Interactive on Monday is taking the wraps off an upgraded version of its Mercury Quality Center software quality testing platform, which is geared toward SOA and Web services. April 3, 5:15 a.m. PDT Microsoft builds bridges with Live Clipboard At Microsoft’s PDC (Professional Developers Conference) a decade ago, the company took the first steps toward a union of Windows and the Web. Adam Bosworth showed off the technologies we now call AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). J Allard demonstrated Active Server Pages. Håkon Lie talked about a proposed standard called CSS. And the tools division rolled out a suite of components that would make Internet protocols available to Win32 programmers and Office scripters. March 15, 3:00 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 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 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 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 WSIS - Net governance: Will anything change? Let's call it a clash of cultures: engineers who know the Internet inside out on the one side and government policy makers grappling to understand it on the other. November 23, 8:04 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 Microsoft hails security focus in Web services package Microsoft on Monday is releasing an upgrade to its free WSE (Web Services Enhancements) package for Windows developers, focusing on security. November 3, 11:41 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 Microsoft offers Web services development pack beta Microsoft this week began offering a beta release of its Web Services Enhancements 3.0 pack for .Net, which is focused on security. August 26, 5:15 p.m. PDT Apache kick-starts open source Web services Go beyond a few basic protocols, and confusion still reigns in the wild world of Web services and SOA. Not just the towering, complex stack of Web services specs, but also fundamental questions about how those specs should work together and how Web services should be deployed and managed. August 22, 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 WebEx to buy Intranets.com for $45 million NEW YORK - WebEx Communications Inc. said Monday it has agreed to buy collaboration software developer Intranets.com Inc. for $45 million in cash. The deal allows WebEx to take out a rival that had aggressively chased the smaller end of WebEx's core market, Web conferencing services. August 1, 2:43 p.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 Microsoft: Indigo patents would not affect interoperability Microsoft said its willingness to file patents on its planned Indigo Web-services technology will not affect the software’s ability to interoperate with other vendors’ software. July 5, 4:38 p.m. PDT Oracle to offer JDeveloper tool for free Oracle at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco next week will announce intentions to offer its JDeveloper 10g Java developer tool for free. June 22, 1:15 p.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 Microsoft previews Web services pack Microsoft reports it has had approximately 15,000 downloads of an early version of its WSE (Web Services Enhancements) 3.0 package, which features turnkey security profiles and interoperability with the company’s upcoming Indigo Web services deployment technology. June 16, 3:00 p.m. PDT Cisco, Intel embrace SAP's services platform BOSTON -- Several big-name companies, including Adobe Systems, Cisco Systems, and Intel, have agreed to embrace SAP's new service-oriented architecture (SOA) platform, the German business applications vendor is expected to announce Wednesday at its Sapphire user event in Boston. The deals follow separate agreements reached last month with IBM, Macromedia, and Microsoft. May 18, 4:48 a.m. PDT Systinet upgrades Web services tool Systinet Developer, which is Systinet's free tool for building Java-based Web services, will add governance capabilities by supporting the WS-I (Web Services Interoperability Organization) Basic Profile. May 6, 4:20 p.m. PDT Web services standards efforts controlled, says Bosworth SANTA CLARA, Calif. – Former BEA Systems executive Adam Bosworth on Thursday criticized what he called the control of Web services standards development by companies such as IBM and Microsoft, who collaborated with BEA on these standards during Bosworth’s tenure. April 21, 2:30 p.m. PDT InfoWorld CTO 25: Dan Foody “A lot of people are afraid of change, but I like it because it’s a new challenge all the time,” says Dan Foody, CTO of Actional. Good thing. Three years ago Foody saw the need to dramatically change the direction of his company, which at the time developed point-to-point EAI adapters to connect big enterprise applications from players such as PeopleSoft and Siebel. Foody realized that approach wouldn’t scale -- and that Web services would change how people tied systems together. With that insight, he helped refocus the company on systems management rather than integration and on customer business challenges. “Not a single one of the products we sell today has any relation to what we sold three years ago,” Foody says, referring to Actional’s current SOA Command and Control Platform. “My contribution was how to fundamentally change what the company’s DNA was.” April 11, 5:00 a.m. PDT InfoWorld CTO 25: Brent Carlson Back in 2000, when software reuse was widely dismissed as a nice but impractical idea, Brent Carlson had the vision to co-found a company devoted to the concept. LogicLibrary and its product Logidex help enterprises identify and understand the software development assets they already have. This means locating and making sense of thousands of applications, components, database tables, design patterns, application frameworks, and other dispersed application-development building blocks so that the right ones can be leveraged effectively. Logidex also provides tools for governing the production and consumption of those assets and delivering them to the developer inside an integrated development. “There are a lot of challenges to getting governance right,” Carlson says. “You can’t define one model and expect every enterprise to adapt. Every organization has different rules and good reasons for those rules.” April 11, 5:00 a.m. PDT Blame Visual Studio .Net I dreamed that Microsoft put me in charge of development for its 64-bit enterprise server applications, the Exchange and SQL Server, and so on, all of which travel collectively as Windows Server System. I was asked to find out why some elements of WSS won’t run on 64-bit Windows, even though Opteron and 64-bit Xeon run 32-bit apps unmodified. “That doesn’t make sense,” I said to myself as I sized up my expansive corner office. March 23, 6:00 a.m. PST 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 > Application development > Web services |
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