|
|
Free Newsletters
|
|
|
|
|
|
On the road to the virtual desktop Click ‘n’ run. It seems like such a simple concept. Surf up to a Web page, select the desired application from a list, and click. Voila! Microsoft Word appears on your desktop. Or Excel, or Adobe Photoshop… you name it. Herd behavior demonstrated at Demo "Whatever happened to working alone?”  September 24, 3:00 a.m. PDT Credit Suisse plans virtualization a massive scale With 20,000 servers to manage, financial services powerhouse Credit Suisse had a long list of reasons to consider server virtualization: reducing the number of physical servers to manage, cutting power needs, improving software provisioning time, and deferring expensive datacenter buildouts. But it also needed a clear set of guidelines to determine when to virtualize, plus a clear set of procedures for managing a virtualization initiative. September 24, 3:00 a.m. PDT Trust key to Internet security A few of my previous columns discussed my vision of creating a more secure Internet. It involved replacing the Internet's default anonymity with pervasive authentication, from the hardware initialization, through the OS and all applications, the user, and ending with a verifiable network stream. It is my strong belief that without a complete overhaul of default authentication, malicious hacking is going to continue indefinitely. September 14, 3:00 a.m. PDT Sweden's OOXML vote declared invalid The Swedish Standards Institute has declared its recent vote in favor of Microsoft's Office Open XML format invalid. It means that Sweden will probably abstain from an important upcoming international vote on whether to make the format a standard. August 31, 9:47 a.m. PDT Ex-ECMA chief expects Open XML approval by March With ISO's Sept. 2 voting deadline looming, the recently retired secretary general of ECMA International defended Microsoft's Office Open XML document format against fierce technical criticism. August 28, 1:42 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 EMC strikes first partnership with Indian outsourcer EMC Corp. will train more than 1,000 Wipro Ltd. staff in the use of its storage technologies as part of an alliance announced by the companies on Wednesday. June 13, 4:09 a.m. PDT Talend: Data integration for the masses! There's no question about it: Business intelligence is the holy grail of most CIOs and IT managers alike. After all, the idea behind BI is great: Pull data from all the nooks and crannies on your enterprise network into one system where it can be cleansed, correlated, and presented to executives for analysis via easy-to-use dashboards. May 14, 3:00 a.m. PDT Startups class of '06: Where are they now? In 2006, InfoWorld uncovered 15 startups that emerged after the nuclear winter that followed the dot-com bust with cool, useful technologies. Well, another year has brought a new crop of startup darlings, such as the companies we're profiling each day in May for our Month of Enterprise Startups (MOES) feature. But MOES got us thinking about last year's startups. In the year that has followed, how have these innovators fared? May 7, 3:00 a.m. PDT Can G.ho.st scare Microsoft? Somehow, the fact that startup G.ho.st has its headquarters in Jerusalem is fitting. After all, it wasn't far from the ancient city that the biblical hero David squared off against Goliath. And, in a sense, that is the tiny company and its G.ho.st (Global Hosted Operating System), is intent on doing with the giant of the operating system business: Microsoft. May 6, 3:00 a.m. PDT Huddle: MySpace for the enterprise crowd Why not infuse the organic simplicity of MySpace-like social networking into the enterprise knowledge management world? That was the question Andy McLoughlin and Alastair Mitchell posed to one another a year ago. Their answer was huddle.net, a burgeoning Web-based project collaboration solution. May 2, 3:00 a.m. PDT Innovation, startups hot again in the enterprise Five years ago enterprise startups hit the skids, stung by a perfect storm of commoditization, vendor consolidation, and the IT spending downturn. In the intervening years, however, the skies have cleared and, to paraphrase Ronald Regan, "It's morning again for enterprise startups." May 1, 7:00 a.m. PDT 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 Tech tops the pop charts Remember the adrenaline rush when you first saw MTV in 1981? When they played “She Blinded Me With Science” in ’83? Well, if you want a fresh, geeky, thought-provoking video experience that gets your heart pumping, check out “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us,” one of the top-viewed videos on YouTube. It’ll appeal to the coder in you, as well as the futurist. March 15, 3:00 a.m. PST 12 crackpot tech ideas that could transform the enterprise Technologies that push the envelope of the plausible capture our curiosity almost as quickly as the would-be crackpots who dare to concoct them become targets of our derision. February 19, 3:00 a.m. PST No Valentines between Open XML, OpenDocument It may be Valentine's Day but there are no love letters being exchanged between duelling electronic document formats, ODF (OpenDocument Format) and Open XML. Instead, Microsoft, the backer of Open XML, took a public swing at ODF supporter IBM. February 14, 11:08 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 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 2006 Year in Reviews: Storage In EMC’s march on the enterprise NAS market, two big feet fell this year in the form of the company’s Rainfinity (global file system) and Infoscape (file classification) releases, which we took for early spins in EMC’s labs. The year also brought a smooth rev of Windows Storage Server, a swell mid-range SAN from Compellent, and a slick tape library from Spectra Logic. December 18, 3:00 a.m. PST Good ideas take time Two years ago, I publicly floated the concept that IT should start thinking more like entrepreneurs. What a disaster! I was speaking at a meeting of CTOs, and I mentioned that I’d heard of a few IT departments that were focusing, at least in part, on creating saleable new products and services for their companies. I asked the group what they thought of the idea. December 4, 3:00 a.m. PST Oracle tackles identity governance There’s a common nightmare haunting CISOs (computer information security officers) that features a glance at the morning paper, and 72-point banner headlines with the name of their employer and the words “LOST” and “CUSTOMER DATA.” December 4, 3:00 a.m. PST FedEx Kinko's and our connected future As the big name CIO keynoting at this year’s Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Rob Carter of Federal Express could have been forgiven for doing a deep dive on how his 7,000-person IT team is using AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), mashups, Web video, LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl/PHP/Python), and other checkbox items from the cool-tools list. But Carter took things in a different direction: talking philosophically about how the Internet’s impact is accelerating changes in the way the world interacts and in the way IT works. November 20, 3:00 a.m. PST XQuery and the power of learning by example If you set out to explore XQuery, the XML query language, you’ll soon encounter a collection of examples, or use-cases, that show how XQuery can query and transform XML data. These scenarios are elaborated in a W3C document that presents a sample data set — about books, authors, prices, and reviews — and enumerates a set of queries against that data. For each query, there’s a description (“List names of users who have placed multiple bids of at least $100 each”), a solution written in XQuery code, and an expected XML output. November 15, 3:00 a.m. PST Web apps, just give me the data If you search the Web for “fortune500.xml,?you’ll find an ordered list of the Fortune 500 companies. It’s just what you’d want if you were writing a custom portfolio application. But it didn’t exist until last week when Doug Purdy, a Microsoft program manager, created it while writing his own personal portfolio application. Because he also blogged the list, you can use it, too. November 8, 3:00 a.m. PST Rebooting HTML for the Semantic Web "Making standards is hard work," writes Tim Berners-Lee in a recent blog post. And he should know. The creator of the World Wide Web, Berners-Lee is responsible for developing and popularizing some of the most significant open standards in computing history. November 6, 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 Credit card industry set to shake up high tech For those who know how to read between the lines, the announcement this week by Payment Processing Inc. [PPI] of training courses to meet VISA compliance guidelines for application developers, service providers and merchants, is the first sign of a developing storm that could have repercussions across the entire high-tech industry. October 13, 4:00 p.m. PDT Microsoft beats SOA drum with ESB guidelines Heralding the most viable, "real-world" approach to building SOAs (service-oriented architectures), Microsoft has unveiled new guidelines for partners to create an enterprise service bus (ESB). October 4, 12:39 p.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 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 XML for business reporting gains momentum Two years ago I wrote an unflattering report on XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language), an emerging standard that aims to improve the speed, accuracy, and transparency of business and financial reporting. I applauded its goals, as we all should in the wake of Enron and other scandals, but worried about the complexity of the 151-page XBRL specification, its aggressive use of esoteric features of XML, and its reliance on accounting “taxonomies” defined by committees. August 16, 3:00 a.m. PDT Inside IBM DB2 Viper The viper has struck. 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 Ten major vendors team up on SML Ten major IT vendors including Microsoft Corp. and IBM Corp. on Monday released a draft of a new specification, the service modeling language (SML), which they claim will make it easier for customers to manage their heterogenous systems. July 31, 11:59 a.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 Amazon's pragmatic approach to metered infrastructure In March, Amazon.com introduced S3 (Simple Storage Service ), a metered storage service for arbitrary blobs of data. Recently, Amazon’s adventure in metered Web services continued with the announcement that its SQS (Simple Queue Service), which had been in beta since well before the surprise announcement of S3, has now joined S3 as a commercial offering. July 19, 3:00 a.m. PDT 'Baby steps' best approach to virtualization The best way for corporations to embrace virtualization is by adopting the technology gradually, taking "baby steps" until the concept is well understood internally, according to a systems engineer at a leading U.S. insurance company. June 6, 1:48 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 OpenAJAX forges ahead Members of the OpenAjax initiative, formed in February to promote the AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) Web scripting technique, have generally agreed on a definition of AJAX that concurs with Wikipedia's description. May 22, 5:00 p.m. PDT The evolution of office document standards In high tech it has always been the same. What to an outsider may seem like an inconsequential piece of new technology, to an insider is visionary. This is the case with the recent ISO preliminary vote approving the OpenDocument format as a specification, not to mention the excitement surrounding the fact that the OpenDocument Foundation has completed a plug-in for Microsoft Office that allows Office applications to create ODF documents natively. May 16, 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 IBM DB2 "Viper" revs XML engine Code-named "Viper" and due for release in early summer, will be more worthy of its “Universal Database” tagline than previous versions. Not only does Viper contain an extensive list of enhancements that cover everything from security and development to storage and administration, but topping the list is a newly integrated XML storage engine that Big Blue says will put Microsoft and Oracle to shame. May 1, 3:00 a.m. PDT SPML 2.0 ratified as OASIS Standard In a move that could open the door to more user account provisioning in the enterprise, the OASIS consortium approved the SPML (Service Provisioning Markup Language) version 2.0 specification as an official OASIS standard on Tuesday. April 11, 1:36 p.m. PDT Reinventing the intranet In an interview long ago, Marc Andreessen told me about the moment he knew Netscape’s business plan would succeed. That plan, as you may recall, was modeled on Gillette’s: give away razors (browsers and mail/news clients) and sell blades (enterprise servers). For Andreessen, the magical moment came when, shortly after the word “intranet” was coined, he heard it echoing all around him in a restaurant. April 5, 3:00 a.m. PDT Sun signals a new day for open source Tim Bray, co-creator of XML and director of web technologies at Sun Microsystems, talks to InfoWorld Senior Editor Neil McAllister about Sun’s efforts to open its code. April 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT OpenDocument standardization effort just got harder As of last week, there's a new participant in the process of standardizing the OpenDocument office file format: Say hello to Microsoft. April 3, 3:00 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 Web 2.0 offers fertile ground for SAAS Despite hype and venture capital money, the ASP (application service provider) model of the late 1990s failed in spectacular -- and very public -- fashion. But industry leaders and analysts who gathered this week at the Software as a Service Summit in Napa, California, said that current market conditions give the new generation of ASPs, which the industry now calls software-as-a-service (SAAS) providers, a far better chance at success. March 3, 12:32 p.m. PST Vendors form new OpenDocument alliance A group of more than 35 U.S. and international IT vendors, organizations, academic institutions and industry bodies is due to announce the formation of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) Alliance Friday. March 3, 4:29 a.m. PST Getting smart about languages and libraries The ever-quotable Sean McGrath penned another of his trademark aphorisms this week: “The library IS the language.” By “library” he means the great edifices of reusable code that are, in their modern form, delivered as the core Java and .Net class libraries. Mastering them is a challenge that can take years, McGrath wrote. Mastering programming languages, he suggested, is comparatively trivial. February 22, 3:00 a.m. PST Speeding retrieval with in-memory data management My first real Java application, back in 1997, was a servlet-based group scheduler. It wasn’t quite the smash hit that Hanson’s “MMMBop” was that summer, but as some of you may recall, it had its charms. February 15, 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 Communications panel studies lessons of Katrina An independent panel to study the effects of Hurricane Katrina on communications networks, convened by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC), met for the first time Monday. January 30, 2:10 p.m. PST Family-friendly enterprise calendaring When Ray Ozzie posted an announcement to his Weblog about Microsoft’s proposed SSE (Simple Share Extensions) for RSS and OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language), I was delighted. On the technical front, it’s great to see the synchronization DNA of Groove and Lotus Notes finding its way, at last, onto the Web. But on the social front, it was a milestone, too. January 18, 3:00 a.m. PST SQL Server bulks up To call SQL Server 2000 a 90-pound weakling because it lacks certain high-end features is a bit like calling Hercules a wimp because he never ran a marathon. Not every strongman can perform every feat, and not every company needs every heavyweight feature. Many enterprises, large and small, have been running their businesses on SQL Server for years. January 16, 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 IT will give up control of the network As we look at all the changes taking place on the Internet during the past several years, I think we can boil it down to two simple observations. First, the volume of traffic is increasing exponentially: E-mail, IM, and RSS all mean more connections. Second, each connection is moving a great deal more data, including multimedia, voice, and video. January 10, 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 IBM adds muscle to Open Document Format It may seem to have started in Massachusetts, but the ideal behind the industrywide clamoring for open document formats isn't just an isolated government crusade. A full-scale rebellion against Microsoft's proprietary document formats may be in the making. December 12, 3:00 a.m. PST Update: IBM to support Open Document standard The love for open formats for electronic documents pouring out of the government ranks of Massachusetts is encouraging, but where are the products to help make the Open Document dream a reality? December 5, 3:06 p.m. PST Firefox 1.5 browser debuts Last week, the Mozilla Corporation unveiled the first major update to its popular Firefox Web browser. Version 1.5 offers improved support for Web standards, including JavaScript 1.6 compatibility and the ability to render SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) images. The new version also brings speed and UI enhancements, including a redesigned Options panel; enhanced pop-up blocking and RSS feed integration; the ability to change the ordering of browser tabs via drag and drop; and accessibility features for the sight- and mobility-impaired. December 5, 3:00 a.m. PST IBM Workplace to support Open Document standard All this love for open format coming from the government ranks of Massachusetts is nice, but where are the products to help make this Open Document dream a reality? IBM is now stepping to the plate with an Open Document Format-based offering to join Sun Microsystems' StarOffice and OpenOffice.org. December 4, 6:00 p.m. PST 2005 survey spots trends in software development Software developers are often important augurs of IT technologies’ direction and rate of adoption. Managers who responded to trends among developers would have been the first to detect the growth of Linux and the open source movement, the emergence of Java as a significant platform for server-based computing, and the arrival of integration technologies such as XML and Web services. November 30, 12:30 p.m. PST Sun urges Massachusetts to reject Open XML Sun Microsystems Inc. Monday urged a Massachusetts state official to rethink an opinion that Microsoft Corp.'s Open XML (Extensible Markup Language) meets the state's parameters for an acceptable open document format just because it has been submitted as an open standard. November 28, 4:52 p.m. PST No. 7: The woe of the WAN Think you need to reclaim WAN bandwidth? You can easily spend a bundle on traffic-shaping appliances or caching engines in an attempt to rein in WAN bandwidth utilization. But what if it’s not the pipe? November 28, 3:00 a.m. PST The two-way data web Two years ago, I gave the keynote address on the opening day of XML 2003. The next day, Adam Bosworth delivered a weirdly complementary keynote, in which he began to lay out an idea he’s been developing ever since, first at BEA and now at Google. The idea, in a nutshell, is that the truly scalable databases of the future will be more like the Web than like Oracle, DB2, or SQL Server. November 23, 3:00 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 Product previews McAfee tailors anti-spyware to fit business needs Spyware has become a formidable security threat to large companies and small businesses alike. Addressing the different needs of large and small organizations, McAfee this week released two new anti-spyware offerings, one tailored for large enterprises and one for small businesses. Both offerings leverage technology called On-Access Scanning to spot and eliminate spyware, adware, and keylogging programs before they can install on systems. McAfee AntiSpyware Enterprise, a stand-alone anti-spyware product, will be available in early December. McAfee Managed VirusScan plus AntiSpyware, aimed at small businesses, is a subscription-based service that is available now. AntiSpyware Enterprise and Managed VirusScan plus AntiSpyware, McAfee November 14, 3:00 a.m. PST Beyond office document formats Let’s cut to the chase in the Massachusetts/Microsoft brouhaha over office document formats. One possible outcome: Microsoft Office gains support for the OASIS OpenDocument format, either from Microsoft or from the open source community. Another outcome: Microsoft tweaks its Office XML licensing to conform to the definition of openness that governments are rightly insisting on. November 9, 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 SQL Server 2005 piles it on Microsoft's first major release of SQL Server in many years includes such sweeping improvements that it's sometimes hard to see the old SQL Server underneath. Not a single area of the database remains untouched, and many portions have been rewritten from the ground up. Wherever you look -- performance, programmability, security, monitoring, tuning, diagnostics, BI, or system integration -- you'll find significant new features and greater capability. 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 Managing metadata When we talk and write about IT issues, we use certain words to mean many different things: "Platform," "architecture," and "integration" are among the worst offenders. But the most overloaded term in the IT lexicon may well be "metadata." October 20, 3:00 a.m. PDT AJAX at a glance AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) isn't a new technology. Rather, it's a method of using several existing technologies -- including CSS, JavaScript, XHTML, XML, and XSLT -- to develop Web applications that look and act like desktop software. Jesse James Garrett, director of user experience strategy and a founding partner of Adaptive Path, coined the term in a paper he published on the Adaptive Path Web site in February. October 17, 3:00 a.m. PDT What about BizTalk? I said I wouldn’t but I did. I missed the first episode of Alias and now I’m hosed. Sydney’s pregnant and she’s pissed. The boyfriend is still around, but he’s someone else now? And this isn’t making her cranky? October 6, 3:00 a.m. PDT Microsoft driving toward .Net unity Specialized programming languages and their supporting environments have always been tightly coupled: SQL and the database; business rules and the rules engine. It's tempting to wish for an überlanguage or one syntax to rule them all, but what really matters is a common environment. At its 2005 Professional Developers Conference, Microsoft showed that it's finally putting all of its eggs into the .Net basket. September 21, 4:00 a.m. PDT Reinventing the office suite The controversy over office document formats heated up again this month when Microsoft and Massachusetts tangled over the state’s firm intention to standardize on the OpenOffice.org XML format. Personally, I think everyone’s barking up the wrong tree. Office suites haven’t felt like the center of the computing universe for a very long time. The network’s where the action is. September 14, 4:00 a.m. PDT Surprise! Microsoft's WinFS beta arrives The surprise beta release of Microsoft's WinFS file system on Monday has attracted intense scrutiny. WinFS was one of the three pillars of Microsoft's next-generation version of Windows announced two years ago, then code-named Longhorn and now morphed and downsized into Vista. All three pillars -- WinFS, the Avalon GUI, and the Indigo Web-services protocol stack -- have been detached from any specific forthcoming release of Windows and will be offered as separate technologies. Microsoft developers were happy to discover that the WinFS beta really does install on Windows XP and includes an array of supporting development tools. August 31, 3:30 p.m. PDT OASIS drafts blueprints for SOA SOA presents a paradox: Turning applications into platform-agnostic services is a great way to reduce redundancy and accelerate integration, but where can you turn for architectural guidance that avoids the vendor lock-in SOA is supposed to prevent in the first place? August 15, 12:00 p.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 Software AG acquires rich client development tools Software AG has agreed to acquire Web application tools developer Casabac Technologies GmbH in a move to expand its portfolio of business integration products, Software AG said Thursday in a statement. August 12, 5:07 a.m. PDT Open source identity A complete identity management solution comprises a number of components. As such, it would be difficult for any single open source project to offer a plug-and-play identity management system. There are, however, a number of projects that offer components of such a system, particularly in the area of federation and SSO (single sign-on). August 8, 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 Farewell, CTO Connection If you haven’t checked out this week’s columns yet, let me be the one to break the bad news: Chad Dickerson is hanging up his InfoWorld CTO spurs and heading off to Yahoo, where he’ll be toiling away in the brave new world of search. August 8, 5:00 a.m. PDT Startups vie to make Linux more attractive with bundled offerings Integrating open source applications is a task daunting enough to lead some companies toward proprietary products. To that end, several startups this week revealed plans to offer prebuilt, certified solutions so customers have fewer integration migraines. August 3, 6:00 a.m. PDT XQuery blankets the enterprise thanks to major collaboration Back in 1998 there was no consensus that anyone would need a full-fledged XML query language. Today, XQuery is being implemented by all the major relational databases, by middleware vendors, in content management systems, and by open source projects. It’s even becoming part of the SQL standard. “You’ve got to consider that success for a language,” says Jonathan Robie, one of the prime movers in the development of XQuery. August 1, 5:00 a.m. PDT Memory Firewall monitors apps at run time When it comes to foiling hackers, Saman Amarasinghe views the world in stark terms. 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 XML's quirky namespaces Last month, Microsoft announced that the forthcoming Office 12 will save to XML by default and that earlier versions will be retrofitted to work with XML. This week Apple released its podcast-aware version of iTunes and defined an extension to RSS 2.0 for use with its online music store. Over the next year or so, these initiatives will create millions of new users of XML. They'll also expose thousands of developers to a feature of XML that's caused more than its fair share of headaches: namespaces. July 13, 5:00 a.m. PDT Making sense of storage management Storage spawns where it’s needed, from sensibly architected SANs serving transaction-intensive systems to storage appliances bought impulsively to fill a departmental need. That leaves IT to manage many islands of storage strewn across the enterprise at a time when the need for centralized storage management has never been greater. Compliance requirements, multimedia-rich applications, and a proliferation of databases are pushing IT departments to increase the size and complexity of storage networks across the enterprise. July 11, 5:00 a.m. PDT > Data management > Standards |
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||
