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Now that Google Wave is a real service , IT organizations are going to need to take a step back to review their collaboration strategies. The issue that many IT organizations will face is similar to... More >
Most citizens of this country labor under the delusion that their government has at the very least a basic grasp of how to use information technology. After all, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) se... More >
Whether it’s the worst of times or best of times, IT organizations always seem to be under duress. Today, they don’t have enough people on hand to support the business because of layoffs. When the ec... More >
One of the realities of enterprise IT today is that just about every application is being deployed over wide area networks that very few people inside or outside of IT understand. Right now, wide are... More >
With Google, Microsoft, IBM, Zoho.com and any number of other services making it easier to store documents in the cloud, you can’t help but wonder how the way we think about managing documents is goi... More >
Right now about 85 percent of all legitimate Web sites are compromised by malware in some form or another. Yet when it comes to making these sites and the applications more secure, we do almost nothi... More >
One of the issues that divides IT organizations and the people they serve is to what degree end users should be able to personalize their desktop computing environment. Obviously, IT organizations wa... More >
The idea that a content management system could be a service that you access over the Web is not all that new. After all, just look at all the people using WordPress to share their every thought, or ... More >
Although cloud computing, in its current form, is only a couple of years old with fairly limited adoption, it’s already becoming a commodity. Every hosting company in the planet has already jumped in... More >
The proliferation of smartphones across the IT landscape threatens to create a mobile morass within the enterprise that IT organizations will spend years digging themselves out from under unless they... More >
Now that the social media service Twitter is theoretically valued at $1 billion, you can’t help but wonder what kind of business will Twitter become now that it is about to raise $100 million . Beyo... More >
For the past 30 years or more we have been collectively committed to automating business processes. And while we can all point to tremendous successes, you can’t help but wonder if all the paper in t... More >
On the face of it, the high-level draft of a standard for a new Smart Grid power distribution system is a noble effort to make the entire country more energy-efficient. Its key goals include cuttin... More >
The folks behind the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) have created an alliance with Accenture, SAP and Microsoft to create a new system for distributing reports containing data that outlines how m... More >
The biggest issue with IT today is that the entire way we think about IT is as a series of loosely coupled technologies that somehow can be magically managed in isolation from each other. Any time an... More >
When you look at all the various tools most IT organizations use to manage their PC environment, you can’t help but wonder how things got to be such a sorry state. Every time you turn around, there a... More >
This may come as a shock to some IT people, but end users are sharing sensitive corporate information over public cloud services such as Google Docs. A recent survey conducted by International Data... More >
It’s become pretty clear with the advent of new high-definition video conferencing systems such as TelePresence from Cisco, they way we interact with each other over the Web is going through a majo... More >
At first glance, the HITECH Act that goes into effect today looks like a formidable piece of legislation. Companies in violation of the HITECH Act can incur millions of dollars in fines should they... More >
There’s an old saw about there never being a cop around when you need one. Like most clichés, this one is unfair to our local police departments, but the fact of the matter is that there are only so ... More >
It seems like an inordinate amount of time is spent assessing potential risks these days rather than working on things that add actual value to the business. One of the reasons for this is that a lot... More >
With Dell’s move to acquire Perot System for $3.9 billion, the IT industry as a whole has arrived at a seminal moment. What's been slowly happening over the past several years is that the companies... More >
Given all the focus on cost savings over the last two years or more, it’s a wonder that there hasn’t been more focus put on application acceleration appliances. While these appliances have been adopt... More >
When you take a step back from all things related to Microsoft software, the lasting impression one can’t help but take away is the complexity of it all. Between caring for the Windows operating syst... More >
When it comes to regulations specifically and security in general, we make calculated bets every day. There’s really no way to comply with every regulation on the planet, and the cost of attempting i... More >
While the concept that everyone should have access to the same amount of bandwidth on the Internet represents an attractive utopian ideal, there is a huge gap between what sounds good in theory and w... More >
There’s an adage about how fast bad news travels that’s as old as time immemorial. Unfortunately, bad news on the Web -- true or not -- travels around the globe in an instant. Most companies seem who... More >
Today marks the official 50th birthday of one of the original development environments that started it all, which might make for a good time to consider where COBOL and mainframes are headed for th... More >
There are two distinct camps emerging within the ranks of IT when it comes to managing virtual machines and the physical servers they run on. The first camp is dominated by all the folks that jumped ... More >
In the war for database supremacy, it seems like IBM and Oracle have been locked in a titanic struggle since the dawn of time. Oracle has generally gotten the better of IBM in terms of market share, ... More >
In the entire realm of IT, the one task that gets the least amount of attention is backup and recovery. But when there is a crisis, the one thing that everybody in the organization suddenly focuses o... More >
Most companies today have a bifurcated approach toward how they interact with their customers. The first set of touch points involves sales people who create the initial relationship and manage the t... More >
There are a lot of these conversations these days about best practices in the land of IT, but the simple fact is that a lot of IT processes are becoming increasingly automated. Whether the economy is... More >
On the face of it, the announcement of a new version of Oracle’s existing data warehouse server would not be worthy of all the hoopla it is getting. But when Oracle has been kicked around for month... More >
In theory, IT is supposed to increase productivity. To attain that goal we have invested billions of dollars, especially in PC applications that are supposed to make people more productive. But the o... More >
Earlier this month we discussed the theoretical desire for tearing down many of the software applications that not only hinder our productivity, but also consume an inordinate amount of money to ma... More >
As long as anybody can remember, there was always a compromise that needed to be made between business and consumer-class PCs. The corporate PC was usually stripped of everything but the bare essenti... More >
One of the biggest challenges any PC manufacturer faces is how to really differentiate their offerings from a host of other roughly similar systems. For the most part, PC manufacturers have stuck to ... More >
One of the great hidden costs of corporate computing is all the complexity associated with managing every system, network and application that spans the entire enterprise. The end result is a morass ... More >
We all know that the business wants IT to reflect the state of the business in as close to real-time as possible. We also know that accomplishing that means a lot of investments in custom programming... More >
One of the more disappointing aspects of business intelligence applications is how few people actually use them. Within large organizations, the preponderance of business intelligence systems get use... More >
As we remember the tragic events that took place on this day eight years ago, now would seem like an appropriate time to consider the state-of-technology that is currently available to emergency firs... More >
When it comes to the whole subject of business intelligence, there is a lot of rolling of the eyes going on in both the IT department and the business units they serve. That doesn’t mean hope doesn’t... More >
The annual study of CIOs conducted by IBM is being released today with the usual amount of fanfare. As you might expect, business intelligence and virtualization rank as the two highest priorities ... More >
One of the biggest security issues of our time is how adept cyber criminals have become at attaching malevolent bits of code inside our applications. This situation was bad enough when the malevolent... More >
For better are worse, it’s going to become a lot easier to set up private networks for sharing files. According to Hewlett-Packard security researchers, one of the downstream effects of transforming ... More >
Making the case of a wholesale upgrade of an operating system is never easy in the best of times, never mind the worst of times. Despite all the promises that Windows 7 can run on existing systems, t... More >
One of the long-standing goals of an IT organization has been to establish and maintain a single standard environment for client systems. Some organizations tried to do that by establishing some inst... More >
Partially in response to the latest manifestation of patent litigation that is now threatening to derail sales of Microsoft Word , the Deputy General Counsel for Microsoft is calling for the creatio... More >
As we approach Labor Day, it seems appropriate to take a look at the state of labor relations between IT and the rest of the business. Clearly, the issue that gets most of the attention these days is... More >
When it comes to defending the value of the internal IT organization, far too many IT leaders don’t stand a real chance. In a recent survey of more than 200 senior IT executives sponsored by Hewlet... More >
There are any number of reasons why an IT organization might invest in a new server. In an up economy, the primary reason is usually increased application workloads. In a down economy, it’s usually b... More >
There’s a lot of gnashing and grinding of teeth over cloud computing these days. Depending on whom you talk to, it’s either the second coming of enterprise computing or a potential security threat to... More >
For the last two years everybody has been obsessed with the cost of IT and getting more utilization out of their servers. As a result, there hasn’t been much of a focus on performance. But even thoug... More >
If it can be measured, it will soon be. When you peel back a lot of the hype behind things like IBM’s Smarter Planet campaign specifically, and business intelligence and analytics in general, what ... More >
This may not be a practical idea for most companies, but as we continue to look at the increased complexity of enterprise software you have to wonder if the time to start over has finally come. We al... More >
A lot of business and IT people still tend to think of anything related to the term Web 2.0 as being a consumer phenomenon. But over the last few years a wide variety of Web 2.0 technologies have wor... More >
One of the fundamental problems with enterprise software today is that all the data and information we need to work with resides in any number of silos that are difficult to integrate. Although Cisco... More >
Back in the early 1980s when I had the privilege of running the news department for a publication called Digital Review that covered all the happenings in and around Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC), th... More >
There’s a new war on for control over the desktop that is as bitter as anything we’ve seen since the days when Microsoft battled IBM over the merits of Windows versus OS/2. It’s way too early to say ... More >
Cutting-edge business applications and productivity uses, along with expert commentary, for today's smart phones.
New business consolidation breakthroughs for better server optimization, resulting in more storage and computing capacity.
Service-Oriented Architecture is the catalyst that allows today’s companies to respond to business demands faster and more effectively than ever.
Application delivery and performance tools for Web applications to insure high availability and productivity.
