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SMB technology: Replacing in-house software with applications in the cloud In the near future, there's only one way to go for SMBs when it comes to purchasing business software -- and that's out of house. Whether it's full-on SaaS (software as a service), where users access all facets of the application through a browser, or a hosted product (including hosted Exchange, where only the server component is off-site and users employ a standard desktop client such as Outlook), either model is simply too cost-effective for SMBs to ignore. Processors: Dividing chips into many virtual cores The current approach taken by x86 CPUs -- to stuff as many processor cores and as much cache memory as will fit on one chip -- will prove impossible to scale beyond a certain point. And adding more, big, hot processor cores may not be the best fit for server roles that call for managing large workloads over long periods of time.  August 20, 3:00 a.m. PDT The simple way to increase site usability IDG News Service recently had a chance to talk to site usability expert and consultant Steve Krug about best practices and major mistakes in Web design. Here is an edited transcript of the chat with Krug, who runs a one-man consulting firm called Advanced Common Sense in Boston, has a Web site called Sensible.com, and wrote a book titled Don't Make Me Think! A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. June 19, 11:20 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 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 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 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 Google unveils enterprise applications search with big-name backing Consumer search darling Google shared the stage with a gaggle of prominent enterprise application vendors Wednesday to announce Google OneBox for Enterprise, a new feature that will enable the company's Google Search Appliances to do real-time searches on business applications. April 18, 8:20 p.m. PDT 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 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 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 IT's seven dirty words Remember the George Carlin routine “The Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television”? (No, I’m not going to print them here; if you’re really curious, Google ’em.) I got to thinking the other day that IT has its own set of dirty words. Try saying any one of these in polite IT company, and someone will hand you a bar of soap to wash your mouth out. My filthy seven: August 15, 5:00 a.m. PDT That Aha! moment You gotta love Greg Raleigh’s attitude. The man who invented the technology behind the forthcoming 802.11n Wi-Fi standard insists that solving problems is easy. The real challenge, he says, is “deciding what problems are interesting to solve.” August 1, 5:00 a.m. PDT Sonic’s ESB takes new approach to fail-over If the SOA movement had an official flag, on that flag would be a diagram of an ESB (enterprise service bus) — an open and distributed integration platform that provides interfaces to a wide variety of systems and applications and ensures reliable messaging among them. And if you dotted the flag with the logos of leading SOA vendors, Sonic Software’s would surely have to stand out from the rest. August 1, 5:00 a.m. PDT Enterprise service buses hit the road See correction at end of article July 22, 5:00 a.m. PDT Starwood nears end of SOA revamp Every major enterprise applications vendor has hopped on the SOA (services-oriented architecture) bandwagon and extolled the virtues of using standards-compliant software to expose business processes as Web services, reducing the pain of integrating heterogeneous systems. But for customers, implementing an SOA environment in their own data centers can be a complex and lengthy process. One chief technology officer nearing the end of a five-year SOA project says the results, though a long time coming, are worth it. July 20, 10:40 a.m. PDT SOAPtest 4.0 targets Web services Whereas most of us surf the “visible” HTTP exchanges between browser and Web server, Web services are transporting an increasing load of otherwise invisible traffic. With the help of SOAP, Web service clients and servers carry on unseen conversations, similar to messages traveling over a subfrequency. June 20, 5:00 a.m. PDT Exclusive: e-Test 8.0 earns very good marks With the latest release of e-Test Suite, Empirix continues its tradition of providing Web site developers with point-and-click simplicity that makes creating and executing test scripts a breeze. However, the new version only partially addresses one of my major gripes about the 7.0 incarnation: the lack of an integrated scripting language to allow for true customization and extensibility of the test scripts. April 25, 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 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 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 Stress test your Web applications Developers working on Web applications face the same challenges other developers do in ensuring app functionality and usability. But the nature of the Web means that the number of users on a given Web site may vary by several orders of magnitude, which should make load testing a priority. November 8, 3:00 p.m. PST 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 WebSideStory files for $57.5 million IPO Web site analytics company WebSideStory Inc. added its name Thursday to the growing list of tech companies planning to go public, filing registration papers to raise up to $57.5 million through an IPO (initial public offering). May 27, 12:25 p.m. PDT Empirix boosts .Net Web apps testing Empirix on Monday at the TechEd conference in San Diego is launching e-Test suite 7.0, which focuses on testing of Web applications from the .Net platform. May 24, 3:00 p.m. PDT Feds jump online integration hurdles Can services-oriented architectures help government agencies provide better self-service? In the race to provide online government self-service, integration is one of the biggest roadblocks. Most governments are heavily invested in custom legacy applications. Linking Web-based self-service applications to those systems is difficult for any organization, but for government agencies, the problem is compounded. May 14, 3:00 p.m. PDT Miami’s self-service push is ‘never-ending’ There’s no huge secret behind one of the most innovative government self-service portals, miamidade.gov. “A lot of analysis and homework,” says Miami-Dade County Senior Web Developer and County Webmaster Assia Alexandrova, referring to the ongoing effort to bring county services online in an integrated, easy-to-use fashion. “It’s still not enough,” she says. “It’s never-ending.” May 14, 3:00 p.m. PDT SOAPscope scrubs up Web services In the world of Web services, SOAP’s human-readable interactions are easy to create and debug. But to take advantage of that, you must first find a tool capable of capturing network traffic and another capable of analyzing it. May 14, 3:00 p.m. PDT W3C signs off on Web scripting specs The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has completed work on a set of technical specifications that define how scripting programs interact with Web pages. The development marks an important step toward interoperability on the Web and is a sign of its growing maturity, one industry analyst said. April 7, 4:46 p.m. PDT TPC prepares Web server benchmark revision Benchmarks guide purchasing decisions for many IT customers while also instigating arguments among vendors and industry observers. However, they remain an important tool in the corporate IT world for comparing system performance from vendor to vendor, and one of the most influential benchmarking organizations in the industry is preparing to update its specifications to reflect current usage models. April 7, 8:39 a.m. PDT SPI Dynamics untangles Web app security with remote assessment tool With the increased use of Web applications, businesses have had to peel back a layer in their perimeter defenses and give public network traffic access to internal applications. The result is a rise in network security problems, and an increase in the need to audit and thoroughly check publicly facing code for potential security vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, security expertise is in short supply. July 18, 3:00 p.m. PDT > Web services |
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