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Introducing the 2007 InfoWorld Bossies Not too long ago, open source meant starving developers; scant documentation; an ugly, outdated Web site; and software that lived in perpetual beta. Now open source software is becoming big business. “Now hiring” is a common sight on project home pages, and .org and SourceForge sites that used to point straight to source code archives are redirected to .com URLs that celebrate the commercial success of what started out as collaborations among unpaid coders of like mind. 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 WS-I adding to blueprints for Web services usage Blueprints for implementing interoperable and secure Web services are being amended by the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) to incorporate the latest SOAP technology and reliable message transmission, representatives of organization said on Thursday. June 28, 2:19 p.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 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 Data management holds back Web 2.0 in enterprise The biggest dangers to extending Web 2.0 capabilities to the enterprise are information overload and lack of information accountability, experts attending and speaking at Microsoft's IT Pro Town Hall Event in Redmond said on Wednesday. April 18, 1:50 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 Update: Web services security document published The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) announced on Tuesday publication of its WS-I Basic Security Profile 1.0, serving as a guide to enable secure, interoperable Web services. April 3, 8:30 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 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 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 HP looks to shed strategic partners Hewlett-Packard Co. continues to simplify its operations to cut costs and streamline its interactions with customers, and plans to reduce its number of partners, Hewlett-Packard Co.'s top executive said Tuesday. October 24, 3:58 p.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 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 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 Salesforce adds Google Adword Integration Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff used a dinner presentation to Boston-area customers, analysts and members of the press Monday evening to announce a new search marketing service that will allow companies to manage Google AdWords marketing campaigns directly from Salesforce's CRM software. August 21, 10:30 p.m. PDT Lessons from the verticals Every industry presents unique challenges, where IT must marshal more than the usual chunk of resources to solve extreme headaches. That may mean walking out to the edge of grid computing to garner greater compute performance, or it may involve management challenges such as accommodating a mobile workforce or connecting hundreds of far-flung offices. The greater the problem to overcome, the greater the potential to learn from successful solutions. August 21, 3:00 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 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 Microsoft to link with Live for single sign-on Microsoft aims to sync its Active Directory with its Live Web-based services to give users single sign on for applications and services both inside a company network and on the Web. June 21, 12:35 p.m. PDT InfoWorld CTO 25: Andrew Nash During his 10-year stint at RSA security, Andrew Nash worked hard developing identity and access management technologies, wrote a book on PKI (Public Key Infrastructure), and co-authored several security standards. But one day, in the middle of an RSA presentation, he realized he was “bored to tears” and decided to focus on fresh security challenges better suited to an emerging Web services world. June 5, 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 Jitterbit shakes up application integration Integrating applications usually involves at least one of three costly approaches: hand-coded software, complex EAI platforms, or design and deployment of an SOA. 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 In Brief: Sun announces C/C++ support for NetBeans IDE Sun Microsystems has announced a preview version of the NetBeans C/C++ Development Pack, which allows developers to edit, compile, and build C and C++ applications on multiple platforms, including Solaris, Linux, and Windows. March 21, 7:58 a.m. PST 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 Complexity stifles Web services SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Although deployments are occurring, a morass of complexity and a long, head-spinning list of proposed standards continue to hobble Web services technology, according to participants at an SDForum interoperability event on Tuesday. January 31, 4:25 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 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 Microsoft, IBM, SAP discontinue UDDI registry effort Article Body: December 16, 2:30 p.m. PST Product Previews HP OpenView Offers New Vantage Point Hewlett-Packard early next year will roll out several enhanced OpenView management products, including a new tool for creating dashboard views of IT and business services. The HP OpenView Dashboard 1.0 lets users create personalized views into applications and services. The dashboard shows the real-time health of a service with information based on events, performance, anti-virus, and security attacks. HP OpenView Business Process Insight 2.0 monitors and reports on business process health and predefined business process metrics. HP OpenView Service Desk 5.0, available now, gains a new reporting tool and a Webstart tool for quick deployment. The OpenView Dashboard 1.0 and OpenView Business Process Insight 2.0 will be available in the first quarter of 2006. HP OpenView, Hewlett-Packard hp.com December 12, 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 SOA customer turns vendor Last month, SOA Software -- formerly Digital Evolution -- proudly announced that financial giant Merrill Lynch was a customer. Today, the tables were turned when SOA Software revealed that it is purchasing technology from Merrill Lynch -- in the form of SOLA (Service-Oriented Legacy Architecture), an interface to CICS apps that runs on IBM mainframes and provides access to legacy data and business logic via standard Web services protocols. December 5, 3:00 a.m. PST Cape Clear set to release new ESB software Cape Clear Software Inc. is about to release a new edition of its ESB (enterprise service bus) software, adding new security and scalability features to its SOA (services-oriented architecture) platform software. November 30, 10:21 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 Microsoft making RSS a two-way street Microsoft Corp. is extending the popular RSS 2.0 Web syndication format to make it "multidirectional," allowing it to be used for synchronizing information such as contacts and calendar entries across different applications, the company said. November 23, 7:34 a.m. PST webMethods adds rules engine to integration suite Offering flexibility in business rules implementation, webMethods this week is announcing plans to include an embedded rules engine in it its Fabric business integration software suite. November 16, 2:35 p.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 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 Toolkits for user innovation Technology trends obey certain predictable laws, among them that every action produces an equal and opposite reaction. So the recent backlash directed at AJAX and other "Web 2.0" technologies was no surprise. November 2, 3:00 a.m. PST BMC links batch systems to Web services, Java Seeking to enable multilayered transactional applications, BMC Software is introducing an addition to its Control-M product family that links batch-management systems to processes executed via Web services, messaging, and Java applications. October 31, 2:15 p.m. PST Identity management in action Think you’re ready to deploy IDM (identity management) in your organization? John Aisien, vice president of marketing at IDM vendor Thor Technologies, won’t kid you about the realities. October 7, 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 Web services registry aids both IT and business interests As the Sprint Business Services (SBS) IT group rationalized its existing Web services and figured out what services were still needed, it became clear that something else was needed: a registry for Web services. In a large company, having an SOA in and of itself doesn’t prevent various IT groups from duplicating others’ efforts, nor does it prevent customers from asking IT to develop services that already exist. A shared services registry, however, can do that. September 12, 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 Rackable iSCSI system stacks up Meeting growing storage requirements is no longer just a matter of accommodating a few more files. Thanks to legislation that mandates the archiving of e-mail and customer records and to the increased use of multimedia and VoIP apps, storage needs can double or triple in a very short time. August 1, 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 Web services chugging along Web services has had its ups and downs since its rise to prominence early in the decade. July 22, 6:00 a.m. PDT Enterprise service buses hit the road See correction at end of article July 22, 5:00 a.m. PDT A bus by many different names The definition of the ESB (enterprise service bus) is often in the eye of the beholder, especially when the beholder is a major vendor with a product line to protect. While the vendors in our roundup were busy working out packaged solutions, the big boys were outside buzzing with promises and revised road maps. 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 solidifies software launch plans Microsoft Tuesday dribbled out more details of the planned Nov. 7 launch of Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006 at its TechEd 2005 Europe conference in Amsterdam. July 5, 11:31 a.m. PDT Iona advances on ESB Iona Technologies’ ESB (enterprise service bus), Artix, acts as a communication bridge within SOA infrastructures, weaving together enterprise information systems, mainframe applications, nonsimilar protocols, and various payloads and providing a means for resiliency, data transformation, security, and dynamic discovery. The new edition, Artix 3.0 Advanced, takes the pluggable architecture a step further, adding a J2EE service connector and direct communication with application servers such as JBoss, BEA WebLogic, and IBM WebSphere. May 30, 5:00 a.m. PDT SOA styles Infoworld’s first SOA Executive Forum rolled out in San Jose, Calif. two weeks ago. This week we held the second installment in New York. At both events it was my privilege to engage some of the industry’s brightest minds in a series of conversations about SOA, and I’d like to thank everyone who participated. May 25, 5:00 a.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 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 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 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 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 Whatever happened to yesterday's hot technologies? Remember push technology? Or virtual reality for the Web? Or Microsoft Bob? Some ideas are probably better left consigned to history. And yet the roadside of the information superhighway is littered with ideas that sounded promising but never quite made it to revolution status before dropping off IT’s radar. February 25, 3:00 p.m. PST Building on the Services Bus With the release of Cape Clear 6.0, Cape Clear Software rounds out its offering in the ESB (enterprise service bus) arena -- the emerging class of middleware steering EAI toward more flexible and affordable service-oriented approaches -- with the addition of a process orchestration engine. Using BPEL (business process execution language) to describe processes and interactions, the orchestration engine gives companies the capability to weave multiple services into workflows with partners. February 25, 3:00 p.m. PST Service-oriented architecture Once, during a tour of a modern auto factory, Eric Newcomer was startled to come upon an aging VAX -- the original minicomputer -- controlling some machinery. January 21, 3:00 p.m. PST The best products of 2004 Hardware and Software Platforms December 30, 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 Microsoft, Sun to talk about cooperation Microsoft and Sun Microsystems on December 1 will deliver a joint update on their collaborations pursuant to an April 2004 technology-sharing agreement to boost interoperability between the two vendors’ products, according to a Microsoft representative on Wednesday. November 24, 1:10 p.m. PST Avnet broadens partner channel In facing up to costly inefficiencies in its supply chain, Avnet, among the larger distributors of electronic components and embedded systems, saw both a challenge and an opportunity. November 12, 3:00 p.m. PST FedEx Kinko’s delivers remote printing Late last year, FedEx bought the Kinko’s chain of copy centers, heating up competition with archrival UPS. But there was more to the merger than renaming the corner copy shop FedEx Kinko’s. Thanks to this dynamic duo’s File, Print FedEx Kinko’s (FPFK) project, users can now print directly from their Windows desktops to the FedEx Kinko’s location down the block, or for that matter, to any of FedEx Kinko’s 1,100 locations. November 12, 3:00 p.m. PST Ivory keys in mainframe apps to Web services GT Software next week will formally unveil its platform for outfitting mainframe applications with Web services functionality and linking legacy data into SOAs (service-oriented architectures). September 27, 10:10 a.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 LiveServer creates real-time Web Integrating enterprise applications is a job that is never complete and it usually requires gobs of time and money. Recognizing the former and addressing the latter, KnowNow takes a simple, lightweight approach to application integration with LiveServer 3.0. 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 Dreams of service-oriented b-to-b integration A project I’m working on here at InfoWorld reminds me of the packaging of a brand of bagged ice back in my native North Carolina. The name of that ice company escapes me, but my memory of the packaging is crystal clear: “Never touched by human hands!” Back then, I immediately pictured the competition’s ice factories, filled with workers loading filthy ice into bags, water dripping on the floor, their thoughtless handling of the ice exceeded only by the general squalor of their surroundings. September 3, 3:00 p.m. PDT Oracle and IBM move BPEL to the BPI forefront See correction at end of review August 27, 3:00 p.m. PDT IT Myth 6: IT doesn't scale At one time or another, nearly every kind of information technology has been judged and found wanting. The failures are often summed up in that most damning of epithets: “It doesn’t scale.” The reason, of course, is that at one time or another, for one reason or another, every kind of information technology has failed to scale. August 13, 3:00 p.m. PDT IBM adds to business process modeling tool IBM is looking to improve business process modeling in its WebSphere Business Integration Modeler tool by backing an emerging Web services standard and building its product around the Eclipse development tool framework. August 10, 2:50 p.m. PDT Update: WS-Addressing specification submitted to W3C BEA Systems Inc., IBM Corp., Microsoft Corp., SAP AG and Sun Microsystems Inc. have submitted the WS-Addressing Web services specification to the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) for consideration as a standard, the companies said Tuesday. August 10, 11:10 a.m. PDT > Web services |
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