web-services
News
Google Moves to Get Around ‘Google’s Pet’ IssueGoogle has reportedly figured out a way to sort of avoid looking like it’s playing favorites if the Chinese ever decide to let it take over Motorola Mobility. With Jelly Bean, the next version of Android, the Wall Street Journal says it’s changed its strategy. Rather than work with just one Android pet on so-called “lead devices” before releasing the software to other OEMs, it’s going to work with as many as five vendors that will get early access to the code and also get to send their developers to the Googleplex to work shoulder-to-shoulder with Google and Google’s other pets.
webservices journal | 18-May-2012 21:18
Best Buy Chairman to Step Down After Probe
Best Buy founder and its largest shareholder Richard Schulze, 71, will be stepping down as chairman June 21 after a board investigation found he didn’t disclose CEO Brian Dunn’s “extremely close personal relationship” with a 29-year-old female employee to the board’s audit committee. Instead, based on an informant’s written testimony and ignoring possible liabilities to the company, he confronted Dunn who denied it. Dunn and the woman maintained to investigators that their relationship wasn’t “romantic or otherwise improper” – although he called her 33 times, sent 149 text messages and 42 pictures or video messages during two trips abroad last year and she wasn’t discrete among co-workers about favors he did for her like soliciting a vendor for a ticket to a concert in Vegas and helping her pay for the trip.
webservices journal | 18-May-2012 19:47
First Steps in Computer Forensics: Securing Your Network
No matter how secure your infrastructure is, sooner or later you will become a victim of a computer crime. Someone may point a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack at your services, may sniff your network, or may copy/delete confidential information. You may not even realize such a thing has happened. However, in an organized and secured network, you will be notified at the first signs of an attack. Now what? Your first normal reaction would be to stop the attack with whatever means possible. However, that may not be the best response. If you don’t possess the needed knowledge yourself, it might be a good idea to leave the crime scene as it is and let a computer forensics investigator deal with it. Let’s focus on the steps that the investigator would take. You may choose to take these steps alone but you will most likely not have all the necessary support tools and systems for that.
webservices journal | 18-May-2012 18:30
Threatened, BMC Adopts Poison Pill
BMC Software Monday adopted a defensive poison pill to ward off Elliott Associates and its sister firm Elliott International, which have acquired 5.5% of its stock and want BMC to form a special committee to chase a sale of the company. Elliott, you will remember, is the activist hedge fund that pushed Novell into the arms of Attachmate. BMC said Elliott’s proposal is not in the best interests of other shareholders. In a letter to the board Tuesday, Elliott Management said BMC’s future will be increasingly difficult as a standalone public company; it’s suffering from sluggish growth, underperformance on its business plan and substantial execution challenges – it’s changed its sales chief four times since 2010; it’s been written off as a “growth-impaired legacy asset” with a low stock price; it lacks revenue-scale compared to its major competitors, IBM, HP and even CA; it’s late to SaaS and the cloud; and it’s facing new rivals eager to carve up its territory
webservices journal | 18-May-2012 16:13
Facebook IPO Likely at $38 a Share: WSJ
Facebook decision makers and their bankers were reportedly closeted together shortly before the markets closed in New York Thursday trying to decide whether to price Facebook’s IPO at $38 or $39 a share, according to the Wall Street Journal, which evidently had a glass – in the way of a source – pressed to the conference room door. Although nothing is definite yet, evidently the $39 price might break the camel’s back. They reportedly tried it on investors and got told no. At $38 Facebook would be valued at a record $104 billion for an IPO and raise $18.4 billion. It would take $41 a share for the social networking site to best Visa’s record-setting IPO in 2008. Of course Visa had a proven business model. Facebook doesn’t.
webservices journal | 17-May-2012 22:10
Don’t Let Your Fixed Assets Sink Your Business
One of my professors used to always tell his students a story about a company that he performed a work study at and discovered an elderly gentleman, let's call him "Thomas Bean", who produced colorful graphs every month on the performance of a business-related resource or asset. I don't recall the specifics of the work, but I do remember that these graphs were meticulously produced every month, manually, and that they involved bar charts, pie charts and tables of data. The gentleman was relegated to some back office in the planning department. During the study, Mr. Bean was interviewed and he proudly demonstrated the workmanship and effort involved in producing his reporting deck. From here, the story becomes the classic stuff of urban legends like the million dollar Fisher Space Pen. Apparently, when asked what he did with the charts, Mr. Bean said that he took them down to the planning department and gave them to some named body there.
webservices journal | 17-May-2012 21:18
Improving the Productivity of Knowledge Workers
The term content classification is best understood in an enterprise information context, defined by the following concepts. Taxonomy is the hierarchical representation of topics of interest. For example, a basic taxonomy might consist of a class called "Transport," which might have subclasses "Air Transport" and "Land Transport." Then "Land Transport" might in turn have subclasses "Bus" and "Car." This hierarchy means that a "Car" is a type of "Land Transport," and is also a type of "Transport." Ontology defines the relationships between the topics of interest. Content classification is the process of analyzing a document and adding metadata 'tags' that describe that document that is sourced from a taxonomy or other form of controlled vocabulary.
webservices journal | 17-May-2012 21:02
HP Will Reportedly Lay Off 10%-15% of Workforce
An HP source told Business Insider that HP is going to make “massive” job cuts of 10%-15% of its workforce of 324,600 people. Bloomberg then picked up the tambourine and said the number is more like 8%, or 25,000 people. Factoring in attrition, early retirement and shifting jobs offshore, Business Insider reckons “HP’s total workforce numbers won’t reflect all of the cuts.” It thinks “we might also hear that HP is not going to rip the bandage off in one fell swoop, but will do one modest layoff in 2012, shift more work to offshore workers, and trim the workforce more over time.” It’s expecting to hear that HP Services is having “another abysmal quarter” and that “HP’s outsourcing units could be particularly hit hard with whatever layoffs come and many of their jobs moved offshore. We’re hearing that people with eight-10 years of experience – or are at the top of the salary charts – are the most vulnerable.”
webservices journal | 17-May-2012 20:53
API-Aware Traffic Management
As I mentioned in my last blog post, the promise of cost reduction is compelling many enterprises to move their workloads into the Cloud but many IT leaders are reluctant to do so, for fear of compromising the security and availability of their services. These concerns are well-founded but the benefits of Cloud are too great to ignore. To obtain these benefits, companies must adopt techniques that protect against the attendant risks, without compromise. Many people are familiar with Layer 7’s industry-leading security functionality, so it’s no surprise that I’d recommend using our Gateway technology to protect connections from on-premise infrastructure to off-premise Cloud services. The flexibility of deployment options we offer makes it possible to create a network of secure on- and off-premise endpoints to meet the most stringent requirements. This covers security but what about availability?
webservices journal | 17-May-2012 20:00
Network Topology Diagram
First of all, it's worth mentioning that the choice of network hardware and software used in a company depends on the network topology. But the topology, in turn, depends on the company's needs and requirements. Thus, the competent network topology increases the efficiency of all the organization and allows you not to distract your colleagues if one of the LAN components falls out. In addition, the intimate knowledge of the network topology allows the IT manager to evaluate its bottlenecks, and to plan further connections of the network devices and PCs better. Apart from everything else, the system administrator has to detect and recover any network failure as fast as possible. But if the company's network is complex and consists of dozens or hundreds PCs, servers, switches, printers, and other devices, it is not always possible to understand what the problem is and where to go to recover the failure. With the network diagram you always could view and try to understand where the defective device is, on which floor, in which office, etc.
webservices journal | 17-May-2012 18:53
Mind the Gap - Three Gaps to High Velocity Pipeline and How to Cross Them
When I used to go to London often and ride the Underground, the constant refrain seen was "Mind The Gap". Mind the Gap or you could suffer some unmentionable and clearly gruesome fate. As Online software service providers of all flavors try to create high velocity sales and marketing businesses, they would do well to mind these three gaps: The "It's Not Your Time" gap The "It's Not My Job" gap The "Window Shopping" gap 1) The "It's Not Your Time" gap 2) The "It's Not My Job" gap 3) The "Window Shopping" gap
webservices journal | 17-May-2012 18:45
API Testing and Monitoring
SmartBear Software has introduced API Complete, a first-of-its-kind solution that enables software developers, testers and IT operations staff to test and monitor the quality of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) and Web Services in an integrated and streamlined fashion. API Complete helps organizations improve the quality of the increasing number of APIs and Web Services used in Web applications and sites, and can replace the fragmented approach currently used by separate development and operations teams. According to Eric Knipp, Managing VP, Gartner Inc., "New applications will increasingly be constructed using agile practices and DevOps - joint initiatives between development and operations to streamline the rapid, continuous improvement of applications. Furthermore, an increased emphasis on analytics will enable more-focused investment in the areas of applications that really matter to improve user experience, productivity and, ultimately, profitability. Our recommendation is to treat a public Web API as a key component of your Web strategy, not as a bolt-on to an existing project and manage the API with the same care you would your enterprise Web presence." (Predicts 2012: Application Development, December 2, 2011)
webservices journal | 16-May-2012 21:23
UX – Monitor the Application or the Network?
Last week I flew into Las Vegas fully suited and booted in my big blue costume (no joke). I’d been invited to speak in a vendor debate on User eXperience (UX): Monitor the Application or the Network? NetScout represented the Network, AppDynamics (and me) represented the Application, and “Compuware dynaTrace Gomez” sat on the fence representing both. Moderating was Jim Frey from EMA, who did a great job introducing the subject, asking the questions and keeping the debate flowing.
webservices journal | 16-May-2012 20:13
Speech and Sound: The Next "Killer Paradigm Shift"..?
There was a time, not so very long ago, when IT directors and chief information officers dismissed the Internet as something of a passing fad. Somehow though, things took off pretty well with the whole web thing didn't they? Mobile telephony has also grown to a level of dominance that we could never have predicted when it first started appearing around 30 years ago. Then came the tablet... just another fad right? Well, the first few were, but then "Magic Steve" produced the tablet we all love and cherish didn't he? (OK yes - I know Android is doing well in this space too, you don't need to write in)... so what's coming next?
webservices journal | 16-May-2012 15:21
Quantifying Reputation Loss from a Breach
It’s really easy to quantify some of the costs associated with a security breach. Number of customers impacted times the cost of a first class stamp plus the cost of a sheet of paper plus the cost of ink divided by … you get the picture. Some of the costs are easier than others to calculate. Some of them are not, and others appear downright impossible. One of the “costs” often cited but rarely quantified is the cost to an organization’s reputation. How does one calculate that? Well, if folks sat down with the business people more often (the ones that live on the other side of the Meyer-Briggs Mountain) we’d find it’s not really as difficult to calculate as one might think. While IT folks analyze flows and packet traces, business folks analyze market trends and impacts – such as those arising from poor customer service.
webservices journal | 16-May-2012 13:41
GM to Pull Facebook Advertising: WSJ
Here we are less than three days before Facebook’s historic $100 billion IPO and General Motors or “people familiar with the matter” let slip to the Wall Street Journal that GM’s going to stop advertising on the social networking site because the paid ads are ineffective. The big American carmaker still reportedly intends to do marketing through Facebook but that’s not going to put any money in Facebook’s pocketbook. The paper says GM started having doubts earlier this year and met with Facebook managers, leaving the meetings “unconvinced advertising on the web site made sense.” GM reportedly spends about $10 million advertising on Facebook and another $30 million on its Facebook promotional content and managing its Facebook pages.
webservices journal | 15-May-2012 22:15
You Say You Want a Revolution...
Remember the heady dot.com days circa 1999? We thought we were reinventing business, forming a New Economy, revolutionizing the essential nature of commerce. In our dreams! By late 2001 the bubble had burst, and what we thought was a new paradigm for business—the World Wide Web—turned out to be little more than a new marketing channel. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not trying to disparage the power and importance of the Web. After all, the Web, and the Internet in general, have deeply affected so many aspects of business today. It’s hard to remember the time when you had to talk to a teller to use a bank or a stockbroker to trade stocks! But we were wrong that the Web was a revolution. It wasn’t a paradigm shift. Fundamentally, the rise of the Internet was more evolutionary than revolutionary.
webservices journal | 15-May-2012 16:36
Yahoo – The CEO Drama Continues
Four CEOs in five years! Yahoo was a symbol of innovation and success in its first few years of life. Founded by two Stanford Ph.D. students (Yang and Filo), Yahoo defined the Internet era of communities and sharing. It still has an enviable community using various services like email, finance, news, etc. It has lost much advertising dollars to Google. Terry Semel came from Hollywood and wanted to make it a media company. That did not work. Terry flew in every week on a private jet from LA to San Francisco and was driven in a limo to work every day. His compensation was way higher than many other CEOs at similar valley companies. Jerry Yang returned as CEO for the second time and botched up a lucrative offer from Microsoft. Yang was no Steve Jobs on his second return to the company he founded. He turned down the Microsoft offer to buy Yahoo at $47 per share (current share is $15.50). There was indeed an “identity” crisis at Yahoo.
webservices journal | 14-May-2012 21:50
What Is Collaboration Software? Back to the Basics
Overuse tends to a suck a phrase of meaning, and the same may be said of “collaboration”. As an executive, you’ve probably been inundated with articles on “collaboration software” and its business possibilities. But it seems to mean different things at different times. Sometimes it means email, other times document sharing with Google Drive, and still other times managing projects with Basecamp. And when the social network Google + was launched, you were told enterprise collaboration was forever changed.
webservices journal | 14-May-2012 21:24
Facebook Co-Founder Gives Up US Citizenship
Brazilian-born Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, 30, traded in his American citizenship last September to take up residence in Singapore, a move that will cut his taxes when Facebook IPOs on Friday. He is estimated to own about 4% or 5% of Facebook. The company was valued at $77 billion–$96 billion ahead of the IPO although, according to Bloomberg, its roadshow is producing less institutional demand for the stock than expected since Facebook said last week that advertising revenues weren’t keeping pace with user growth and may not reach its rosier forecasts. It’s supposed to go out at $28–$35 a share and sell 337.4 million shares, 180 million put up by Facebook itself. The rest of the shares are coming from CEO Mark Zuckerberg and selling shareholders like Accel Partners, Goldman Sachs and Digital Sky Technologies.
webservices journal | 14-May-2012 18:33
IT Investments Have Big Payoffs
Fascinating new findings from a recent survey uncovers what distinguishes leaders from laggards among businesses, and identify which IT approaches and solutions are driving the most powerful business results these days.
webservices journal | 14-May-2012 16:24
Thompson Told Yahoo Board He Has Cancer: WSJ
Departed Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson, 54, told the board before he resigned over the weekend that he was just diagnosed with thyroid cancer and was starting treatment, the Wall Street Journal said overnight. It isn’t clear exactly where this piece is supposed to fit in the puzzle but if it’s a sympathy bid it may not have worked. All Things Digital says Yahoo is claiming he’s gone for “cause” over ethics violations because of his phony computer science degree – which appeared in Yahoo’s regulatory filings – and won’t be getting much in the way of severance. Heidrick & Struggles apparently didn’t vet his resume when it placed him at eBay years ago but kept a copy of the resume he submitted back then and was able to shoot down his claim that the great headhunting firm had introduced the fabrication. It appears that was Thompson’s last possible defense.
webservices journal | 14-May-2012 15:59
Enterprise APIs and OAuth: Have it All
Enterprises often frustrate developers. Why do Enterprises always seem so behind when it comes to the very latest technology? In particular, a trend we are seeing is the continued struggle to marry Enterprise authentication with the burgeoning world of REST … Continue reading →
webservices journal | 14-May-2012 14:15
SDN, OpenFlow, and Infrastructure 2.0
Like cloud two or three years ago, SDN and OpenFlow is dominating the discussions. During a show that’s (in theory at least) dedicated to networking, this should be no surprise. Is it making networking sexy again? Yes, insomuch as we’re at least talking about networking again, which is about it considering that the network is an integral component of all the other technology and models that took the spotlight from it in the first place. Considering recent commentary on SDN* and OpenFlow, it seems folks are still divided on OpenFlow and SDN and are trying to figure out where it fits – or if it fits – in modern data center architectures.
webservices journal | 14-May-2012 13:07
The Net as Paradigm
Edward Burman recently sent me a very interesting email in response to my article about the 50th anniversary of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. So I bought his 2003 book Shift!: The Unfolding Internet – Hype, Hope and History (hint: If you buy it from Amazon, check the non-Amazon sellers listed there) which [...]
webservices journal | 13-May-2012 23:48
PTO Finds Key RPost Patent 100% Valid
A US Patent and Trademark Office re-examination has found a basic RPost proof-of-delivery patent valid. In a sweeping decision all 89 of its claims have been left standing against challenges of prior art. Patent holders dream of such things. It is understood to be a so-called “final final” decision covering items such as time-stamp authentication. No one except the PTO knows who made the claims of prior art but that unknown challenger reportedly dumped scads of documentation on the PTO for it to wade through and failed. It’s bad news for the slate of companies RPost is suing in federal courts in California, Texas and Virginia for infringing US Patent No 6,182,219 including Swiss Post, Canada Post, Adobe, Docusign, Zix, RightSignature and Farmers Insurance among others.
webservices journal | 11-May-2012 20:34
Dell’s Got the First 22nm Microservers
Dell has turned up with the very first cloud-directed microservers using Xeon processors built on Intel’s teeny-weeny 22nm process with sexy TriGate transistors. It will be amusing to see if AMD sends its recent SeaMicro microserver acquisition, which used to be tight with Intel, out to buy the same chips on the open market while it retools for some AMD dingus. AMD did say SeaMicro would continue its Xeon line. Intel is also warding off promised server competition from ARM. ARM server start-up Calxeda is supposed to be about a month away from beta testing its boxes.
webservices journal | 11-May-2012 19:24
Book Review: How Google Tests Software
As I read the beginning of this book I was thinking to myself that the story being told of a giant like Google seems just a little too good to be true, but I will trust what hey are saying about the atmosphere. Giant companies have never impressed me. They take on their own life and the individual is usually lost in the shuffle. When I was near the end of the book is when I found out James Whittaker quit Google. In his blog "Why I left Google" he describes what I had envisioned Google to be. It sounds like Google has made some bad decisions to compete with Facebook, just like Microsoft has made some horrible decisions to compete with Apple.
webservices journal | 11-May-2012 19:04
Who Cares About Multi-tenancy?
It is hard not to miss the noise that has been made about multi-tenant architecture. It has been cleverly woven into the definition of software-as-a-service (SaaS) by vendors that have a vested interest in positioning it that way. However, I think that customers deserve more than the tyranny of the multi-tenant SaaS providers.
webservices journal | 11-May-2012 09:12
Media Company Employs the Latest in Collaborative Commerce
Mediafly, a startup company, delivers cloud-based applications for content management and distribution on mobile devices for Fortune 500 companies. Mediafly is the leader in the presentation platform market. What that means is that we’re the company that helps bridge the gap between large Fortune 1000 companies, their internal systems, and primarily mobile applications, but also things like Internet-connected televisions, and so forth. Large companies create lots of video. It could be live broadcast, sales presentations, training videos, and TV and movie industry content. When they're trying to distribute that content to make it available on all of these emerging devices, particularly at that large scale, they need a provider like Mediafly. Think of all the TV and movie productions that are going on the studios. Those companies have thousands of video files that they're housing inside of their four walls. They're trying to expose that content to all of their executives and staff, everybody from the makeup artist that needs to watch the last three dailies to the CEO and the president.
webservices journal | 10-May-2012 18:35
Legacy Modernization
IT exists to support the business - and in best-of-class IT departments, this truism is embedded deeply into the departmental culture. Yet in so many cases, this self-evident truth gets lost in the mayhem of building, maintaining and supporting the myriad of complicated and brittle legacy application systems that have been put together over the years to support the enterprise's business. Legacy Application Modernization is a transformative initiative that has the potential to not only change the way IT supports the business, but to change the very nature and culture of IT.
webservices journal | 10-May-2012 16:21
Do Software Patents Stifle Innovation?
Of late patents around mobile technologies have been in the news. Four high profile news items are (1) Oracle suing Google for Java patent violation, (2) Apple and Samsung fighting each other in different parts of the world, Microsoft, Apple, Rim and others jointly buying Nortel patent library for $4.5 billion and (4) Google buys Motorola Mobile and gets 17,000 patents. This is only the tip of the iceberg. This diagram from Reuters shows the complex battlefield of mobile patent and significant portion of these patents are for software.
webservices journal | 10-May-2012 13:07
Smarter Computing and IT Consolidation with IBM's Enterprise Linux Server
Data centers today are stretched to the limits with fast-paced business demands. On top of that, integrating and managing IT infrastructures can pose major challenges. Organizations need a new solution that consolidates servers and workloads without breaking the bank—and Linux, together with IBM Enterprise Linux Server offers exactly that. In this informative webcast you’ll gain Jean's perspective on how you can overcome your IT challenges by optimizing workloads and lowering costs with an enterprise-wide Linux strategy, and gain “the flexibility of many and the efficiency of one.”
webservices journal | 09-May-2012 21:23
Modernization of IT: Solving a Legacy of Business Problems & Applications
I talk to a lot of CIOs. I met with one recently who oversees the IT operation of a $6 Billion yearly entertainment-related company with about 7,000 employees. This top-notch exec was all about transforming a huge investment in existing IT infrastructure into a new dynamic, extensible and agile platform that would propel the business forward - not hold it back. This guy is busy figuring out how to keep a Boeing 777 up in the air while simultaneously re-fitting aircraft to make it best-in-class. That's what IT should be all about.
webservices journal | 09-May-2012 19:32
Yahoo Pushed to Name New Interim CEO
Dissident shareholder Daniel Loeb, head of the Third Point hedge fund that uncovered Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson’s resume lie, sent the Yahoo board another letter Wednesday saying it was “farcical” for them to be spending more time deciding whether to fire him than it had deciding to hire him. He wants Thompson out and recommends that Yahoo CFO Tim Morse or global media head Ross Levinsohn replace him on an interim basis – unless they were privy to Thompson’s little deception – lest Yahoo “flounder under a discredited leader for an undefined period.” Loeb also wants his slate installed on the Yahoo board, one of whom would lead a search for a new CEO. Meanwhile, eBay CEO John Donahoe, Thompson’s former boss, lent Thompson some support but noted that eBay’s filing were always accurate even if its web site and PR material weren’t. He said, “Our legal filings were taken care of by our legal department.” So it would seem then that Yahoo legal department does shoddy work too.
webservices journal | 09-May-2012 19:10
Could a Technology Loop Be Causing Your Epic Mind Fail?
It is a fact of modern life: We all run the risk of getting too distracted by our IT, especially IT connected to our social media. Today, for example, my priority is finishing a White Paper for a favorite client, and I promise I will do that, but I just saw this really cool clip on YouTube from Portlandia and I had to share it with you. Then I promise I’m turning off all external comms and getting back to my writing. In the clip, the great modern social philosopher commentators Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein use a bit of humor to show the dangers of getting stuck in a technology loop. Watch it and be warned! And laugh! But then think of how better your life might be if you unplugged for a while.
webservices journal | 09-May-2012 14:38
Yahoo Board Member Quits over ResumeGate
Yahoo board member Patti Hart, who led the search committee that resulted in Yahoo hiring PayPal president Scott Thompson as its CEO, won’t stand for re-election at the next annual meeting, according to sources tapped by All Things Digital. Activist shareholder Third Point has been agitating for her to go and take Thompson with her since it discovered last week that both of them had faked their college degrees. It’s currently demanding transcriptions of all of Yahoo’s records concerning Thompson’s appointment although what it really wants is to get its slate of candidates on Yahoo’s misbegotten board. The blog says Third Point’s going to find it wasn’t much of a search. Thompson reportedly sent Yahoo board member and Intuit CEO Brad Smith a cold-call e-mail out-of-the-blue looking for the job.
webservices journal | 08-May-2012 20:34
Balancing Completion and Perfection in Agile/Scrum Projects
I occasionally get questions from clients who are using Agile and Scrum frameworks for software development. Techniques and tools aside, it is often questions about the fundamentals of collaboration that seem to be getting in the team’s way. Unlike most of the rest of the universe, the concept of a piece of software being “done” is always going to be the crossing of an imaginary line with invisible endpoints. Most project sponsors and product managers would think of bugs as simply features that don’t work, and form part of the value of the software they are acquiring. But I think it is possible to take one of several logical positions regarding “doneness” versus "bugginess."
webservices journal | 08-May-2012 18:46
Why Infrastructure Technology Is Challenging
One of the most challenging things about being an advocate for a broad horizontally applicable technology is that it does not solve a particular business problem. Instead, it solves about 100,000 business problems. That means that everyone is impacted by it, yet nobody is particularly interested in it. What's the solution? Perhaps it's to reframe the discussion around specific business or technology problems that people face - like Legacy Application Modernization, Quote to Cash automation, the Recruit to Retire process or Procure to Pay.
webservices journal | 07-May-2012 18:17
Yahoo Has Until Noon to Fire Its CEO - or Else
The Yahoo board has until high noon today (Monday) to fired CEO Scott Thompson for cause and to can his confederate in the now infamous “ResumeGate,” board member Patti Hart, or else. Yahoo’s biggest shareholder Third Point, which is also engaged in a proxy fight with the company over the composition of Yahoo’s board, delivered this ultimatum in a letter to that board Friday. It didn’t say what the “or else” would be merely that if it didn’t fire the pair of them Third Point “will consider it grounds for further action.” Third Point said blowing off “years of inaccurate SEC filings, web site biographies and, most likely, D&O questionnaires and curriculum vitae” as “inadvertent errors” – an expression it ascribes to Thompson – was the “height of arrogance” and “insulting to shareholders.”
webservices journal | 07-May-2012 17:33
Shadow IT is a Good Thing for IT Organizations
Shadow IT is a good thing for IT organizations…and here’s why… It is important to first understand what Shadow IT is and why it happens. Shadow IT is commonly referred to when non-IT organizations delve into the delivery of technology solutions…without IT’s involvement. It happens for a number of reasons. But the most common is [...]
webservices journal | 07-May-2012 08:15
Geostatistics and the 500-mile Email Problem
In the mid-1990s, a Statistics professor at UNC reported an IT problem: he couldn't send email more than 500 miles away. He'd had geostatisticians plot the sites where emails could be sent successfully and where they bounced, and found they described a circle a radius slightly over 500 miles. Some sites within the circle could sporadically receive email, but definitely none outside them. The solution to the problem, which involves old sendmail.cf formats and the speed of light, is well worth a read. David Smith
webservices journal | 06-May-2012 17:00
Book Review: Elemental Design Patterns
Elemental Design Patterns are the underlying core concepts of programming and software design that have remained described. This book is a book I wish I had 15 years ago to help me put the basics of programming into their proper context. Learning how to make use of patterns over the years would have been much simpler had I read this book first. I have listed the chapters of the book below along with the patterns in the catalog. Take a look at he names of the patterns and you can see how low level these patterns are.
webservices journal | 06-May-2012 15:00
An IT Forecast: Where Cloud, Mobile and Data Are Taking Us
A thorough piece on CNET by Gordon Haff looks at the interconnectivity of cloud computing, mobility and Big Data, and sees these three forces as instrumental in shaping the future of IT. “Through the lens of next-generation IT, think of cloud computing as being about trends in computer architectures, how applications are loaded onto those systems and made to do useful work, how servers communicate with each other and with the outside world, and how administrators manage and provide access," Haff writes. He says the trend also covers the infrastructure and plumbing that make it possible to effectively coordinate data centers full of systems increasingly working as a unified compute resource as opposed to islands of specialized capacity. Computing is constantly evolving. What makes today particularly interesting is that “we seem to be in the midst of convergent trends of a certain momentum and maturity to reinforce each other in significant ways. That's what is happening with cloud computing, mobility and Big Data,” Heff writes.
webservices journal | 05-May-2012 16:00
Judge Refuses to Decide Oracle-HP Case
As much as the trial judge in the case between HP and Oracle over Itanium would like them to settle, Reuters reported an Oracle lawyer saying it wouldn’t happen. No surprise there. The judge the other day refused to settle the matter himself by finding for one side or another. Probably a smart move considering it would only set off an appeal. His 20-page decision the other day not to decide suggests that Intel may ultimately be forced to divulge financial information about the Itanium it’s refused to turn over for discovery; and allows that Oracle may have a case given the “puffery” of HP’s public statements about Itanium’s roadmap extending until 2017 – Oracle claims it lost $120 million in service and support profits to HP’s “deceptive scheme” – and HP, which has apparently provided some secret sealed documents about Oracle private assurances to continue to support Itanium, may have a point about relying on such promises. HP claims damages of $4 billion in lost profits.
webservices journal | 04-May-2012 20:33
Deconstructing Agile
The business must specify its requirements in a fundamentally different way. Instead of thinking about what it wants the software to do, the business should specify how agile it expects the software to be. In other words, don’t ask for software that does A, B, C or whatever. Instead, tell your techies to build you something agile. We call this requirement the metarequirement of agility—a metarequirement because agility applies to other requirements: “build me something that responds to changing requirements” instead of “build me something that does A, B, and C.”
webservices journal | 04-May-2012 19:51