|
|
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 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 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 OASIS approves BPEL 2.0 Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) 2.0 has been approved as an OASIS Standard, providing an officially ratified version of this specification for describing business process activities as Web services, OASIS said on Thursday morning. April 12, 8:10 a.m. PDT Google plans worldwide developer day Google hopes to woo more developers to its Web services software platform with a 27-hour-long "Developer Day" on May 31. April 11, 4:24 a.m. PDT Yahoo opens up Web mail APIs Yahoo is opening up its Web mail platform to external developers, so that they can create plug-ins, utilities and applications for the popular Yahoo Mail service. March 29, 4:46 a.m. PST 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 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 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 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 The top technology slot in the enterprise has changed. Once, forward-looking CTOs and CIOs scanned the horizon for new technologies that would improve the lot of IT. Today, as many of this year’s top 25 CTOs can tell you, technology leaders must also focus on understanding the business goals of the enterprise -- and then craft technology strategies to meet those objectives. June 5, 3:00 a.m. PDT Tech startups to watch Startups are back! or at least, startup fever is back. Scan the latest numbers from PricewaterhouseCoopers and you won’t find any hockey sticks -- the level of investment in enterprise-related technology startups has actually remained fairly flat, hovering between $1.5 and $2.3 billion per quarter from 2003 through 2005. May 15, 3:00 a.m. PDT Accessing the web of databases I've just posted the fourth installment in my new series of Friday podcasts. It’s an interview with Kingsley Idehen, CEO of OpenLink Software. OpenLink’s flagship product is a universal database and application server, Virtuoso, which I last wrote about in 2003. May 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT Product previews Sonic Software revs enterprise service bus Sonic Software today announced Sonic ESB 7.0, an upgrade to the company’s SOA platform. It brings the Sonic Workbench to the Eclipse IDE; incorporates support for advanced Web services standards WS-Reliable Messaging, WS-Security, WS-Addressing, and WS-Policy; and introduces a lighter-weight approach to high availability through a new mode in the Continuous Availability Architecture, which the company says provides highly reliable and available brokered communications without the latency of persistent messaging. Sonic ESB 7.0 will be available in April. Sonic ESB 7.0, Sonic Software March 27, 3:00 a.m. PST SOA planning: Sizing up business processes As SOA goes mainstream in the enterprise, its success may hinge on a crucial meeting of the minds -- a mashup of talent that can uncap a font of creative potential. March 13, 3:00 a.m. PST 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 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 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 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 Exclusive: Systinet reins in Web service registries At the outset, I should admit a bias: I’m a UDDI skeptic. Still, I’m willing to believe that maybe I just haven’t dug deeply enough into UDDI to see its real value. So, I was naturally eager to review the latest version of Systinet’s Web services registry. November 7, 3:00 a.m. PST British American Tobacco builds SOA one step at a time For British American Tobacco (BAT), SOA success came early. The challenge now lies in determining how quickly SOA should be scaled across the enterprise, and for which functions. November 7, 3:00 a.m. PST Making SOA work Implementing SOA (service-oriented architecture) is one of the most daunting projects that an enterprise IT organization can undertake. Service orientation represents a whole new way of thinking and doing, one that changes the way developers operate and interact with the business. November 7, 3:00 a.m. PST New processes for Thomson Prometric "The biggest challenge we've faced in creating an SOA has been identifying exactly what a service is," says Christopher Crowhurst, vice president and chief architect at Thomson Learning. "Understanding what the business is doing, converting that to a set of services, and working out how to expose those services in a granular, extensible way so that you're not constantly breaking consumers' interfaces -- we learned that many people just can't do it." November 7, 3:00 a.m. PST Effective description, discovery, and integration The Rodney Dangerfield of Web services standards is clearly Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration. UDDI don't get no respect. Its original conception -- a global e-marketplace for services -- looks, for now, like a dot-com-era fantasy. October 5, 4:00 a.m. PDT The spiral staircase of SOA Back in the 1980s, object-oriented programming was a state of mind, not the state of the art. Sure, there were OO languages, tools, and frameworks -- such as Lisp and Smalltalk -- but mainstream developers didn’t use them. Mainstream developers worked mostly in C. September 28, 4:00 a.m. PDT 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 Open source business process management A full-featured business process management suite might not be the first thing you'd expect to see coming from the open source community, and yet that's exactly what a number of projects are working to deliver. With the rise of SOAs, the need for a business-process engine to manage and orchestrate disparate services and EJBs has never been greater -- even for sites that otherwise rely on open source technologies. August 8, 5:00 a.m. PDT 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 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 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 Unity may come to Web services messaging specifications Multiple specifications for provisioning reliable messaging for Web services could be unified under OASIS, which now has jurisdiction over all three technologies. May 10, 1:10 p.m. PDT Exclusive: CoreSV brings management simplicity to Web services It starts simply enough. First someone builds a SOAP interface for an internal system; then the next upgrade to your financial package sports a Web services API. At some point you wake up and realize that all these services need to be managed. April 18, 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 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 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 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 Google Maps pushes the envelope The instant Google Maps appeared, a lot of us knew right away that we’d never use MapQuest again. Google’s mapping and direction-finding service is a stunning improvement. February 18, 3:00 p.m. PST 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 Cape Clear boosts business processes in ESB Cape Clear Software this week is upgrading its ESB with the release of Cape Clear 6, enabling development of business process workflows based on BPEL. December 10, 10:10 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 Product Previews Netegrity Strengthens Identity for Web Services Netegrity has released TransactionMinder 6.0, the latest edition of its policy-based identity access management system that extends Netegrity's secure single-sign on, delegated administration, and federated identity and session management capabilities to include Web services and SOAs (service-oriented architectures). The new version offers full support for the WS-Security 1.0 standard out of the box, including XML encryption within the WS-Security framework and support for WS-Security authentication based on SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) tokens. The product features a proxy mode, which lets TransactionMinder secure Web services running on application servers such as IBM WebSphere and BEA Weblogic. Additionally, XML agents can be deployed on Web servers such as Microsoft IIS or Apache. TransactionMinder is priced at $40,000 per CPU. TransactionMinder 6.0, Netegrity 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 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 IBM, Sun join with Microsoft on Web services event specification IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Computer Associates have jumped aboard in support of the WS-Eventing specification for subscribing to Web services-based events, joining original developers Microsoft, BEA Systems, and Tibco Software. August 31, 3:10 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 A developer's perspective on BPEL BPEL (business process execution language) is the XML-based language of Web services “orchestration” — that is, a means to connect multiple Web services to create end-to-end business processes. Recently, InfoWorld Test Center Lead Analyst Jon Udell interviewed BPEL expert Edwin Khodabakchian about the future of this language. Khodabakchian is CEO of Collaxa, a pure-play BPM startup whose BPM orchestration product has supported BPEL for more than a year. Collaxa was acquired by Oracle earlier this month, and its BPEL Server product is now marketed as Oracle BPEL Process Manager. Audio excerpts of the interview are available on Jon Udell’s Weblog. July 16, 3:00 p.m. PDT ASAP spec proposed for delayed Web services OASIS is working on standard technology to enable Web services to function in situations in which business process communications have a delayed response, as opposed to the quick responses normally associated with Web services, an OASIS official said this week. June 11, 10:50 a.m. PDT Sonic tacks on high availability to integration suite Focusing on availability of application services, Sonic Software on Tuesday announced it is shipping Sonic Business Integration Suite 5.5, which utilizes the company’s “Continuous Availability Architecture” in development of service-oriented architectures. June 8, 4:41 p.m. PDT BEA announces Liquid Computing Intense speculation about a secret BEA project code-named Sierra ended last week when CEO Alfred Chuang used the company's eWorld forum to give the initiative a real name: Liquid Computing. An amalgam of current and future BEA technologies centering on Web services and SOA (service-oriented architecture), Liquid Computing is basically BEA's answer to IBM's On Demand initiative. May 28, 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 BizTalk Server brings everybody into the process Microsoft’s BizTalk server introduced the concepts of business process automation, management, and orchestration to many IT organizations. With the release of BizTalk Server 2004, Microsoft delivers the benefits of leading-edge business process design, development, management, and monitoring technology, while remaining true to smart corporate practices that are timeless. April 23, 3:00 p.m. PDT > Web services |
|
|
||||||||||||||||||
