Advanced and pervasive virtualization and cloud computing trends are driving the need for a better, holistic approach to IT support and remediation. Virtualization isn’t just server-by-server, but really impacts the entire data center. You need to think about it more holistically, par...

The gold bubble has burst. The dollar is up, and the price of oil is down. All that nasty talk about replacing the dollar as the world's currency has abated for now. Good. Maybe we can get back to the basics of business. But there are some things rotten in America. Rose-Garden P...

The adoption of technology now seems to be moving at the volition of the savvy consumer, not the IT director. The past several years have ushered in a changing set of expectations from users as they engage with technology and services as both consumers and workers. The sense is that t...

HP is now pulling a 180 in ditching both the PC and Palm hardware business, and making an offer to buy Autonomy, one of the last major independent enterprise content management players, for roughly $11 billion. HP chose the occasion of its Q3 earnings call to drop the bomb. The compan...

Fast-moving trends across the enterprise are pointing to a deeper payoff from the well-managed embrace of hybrid computing models coupled with the secure delivery of applications. The new research describes how top level enterprise executives are reacting to these fast-moving trends...

A Reference Architecture (RA) provides a blueprint of a to-be-model with a well-defined scope, requirements it satisfies, and architectural decisions it realizes. By delivering best practices in a standardized, methodical way, an RA ensures consistency and quality across development an...

Deteriorating relations between Oracle and HP took a turn for the worse Monday when incoming HP chairman Ray Lane embroidered on the Mark Hurd legend by telling the New York Times in a letter to the editor that the ousted HP CEO, now president of Oracle, was a liar. That wasn’t a...

You’ve got to love a good story with drama about money, sex and revenge. As everyone in the tech industry knows, that’s exactly the kind of story playing out with Mark Hurd, the former CEO from HP. I for one expect this story to have a happy ending for Oracle and Mark, as well as for...

HP's acquisition of Fortify looks like a quick filler for a hole in HP's testing portfolio. However, it seems to me that the move is indicative of the changes in how enterprises are looking to manage their applications. Just as achieving business agility is more than rapidly developi...

The acquisition of Fortify Software by HP is not surprising, but has high market potential for HP as a platform-neutral vendor in the application lifecycle.

In some ways, the industry plays a little bit of ping-pong with the customer, which is a really bad place to be. We want to make it simple. We want to make it transparent to them. When a customer is thinking about a solution, they make a buying decision. The next step for them is to d...

In a stunning, largely unforeseen move, HP announced that it has shelled out $ 5.70 per share or roughly $1.2 billion to acquire Palm. Arguably a very aggressive and risky move considering that the fact that Palm's market share is about 5% in the U.S. and less than 2% globally. Symbian...

You may wonder whether it’s too early to make the call given the lack of interoperability standards, security concerns, and common definition of cloud computing. Well, the IPTV space shares many of the same similarities – emerging technology, emerging standards, emerging adoption, var...

Everyone wants to lower their capital expenditures and increase operational efficiency - it's a sign of the times. The economy of the past 12 - 18 months has forced all organizations to do more with less and become more efficient. While everyone can identify with the request to do more...

This podcast examines the best practices, risk mitigation tools, and requirements for conducting data center migrations properly. As new data center transformations pick up, so too should the early-and-often planning and thoughtful execution of the migration itself get proper attention...

This week, Amazon took a step with EC2 that many had long anticipated: They announced spot pricing for cloud compute instances. EC2 customers can now name their own price, and Amazon will bring compute instances up at variable discount prices according to these "bids". This complements...

We are standing on the threshold of a new transition in information technology and communications; a radical departure from current practice that promises to bring us new levels of efficiency at a vastly reduced cost. Cloud computing is full of potential, bursting with opportunity and ...

Henry David Thoreau once wrote: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation". Much the same can be said of the multitude of users struggling with open source reporting and analysis tools like Mondrian or Jaspersoft. The difference, of course, if that those folks happen to be prett...

It’s Thursday morning, you’re the CEO of a large, publicly traded company, and you just called your executives into the conference room for the exciting news. The board of directors has approved the acquisition of a key competitor, and you’re looking for a call-to-action to get everyon...

Disaster strikes. Your primary place of business is destroyed by a fire tomorrow, are you prepared to recover? According to the historical statistics, fires permanently close 44 percent of the businesses that are affected. Business continuity planning is the creation and validation of ...

It's my contention that we're only now entering the true data-driven decade. And all that data needs to run somewhere. And it's not going to be in MySQL, no matter who ends up owning it.

On Thursday, September 10th, 2009, I moderated a panel at the 1105 Group’s Enterprise Architecture Conference in Washington, DC entitled, “SOA Goes Mainstream – An Industry and Government Roadmap.” On the panel we had two Federal government agency representatives and two industry repr...

Yesterday a friend of mine was asking me what I've been doing lately in my spare time. When I mentioned that I'd been doing a lot of messing around with Windows Azure, he was naturally curious. After explaining what Azure is, he asked me what the difference was between Windows Azure, a...

Often, estimates are initially made with an incomplete understanding of requirements. Estimation is done at the beginning of the lifecycle before the requirements are defined and thus the problem understood. How can you accurately estimate unless you know what the problem we intend to ...

Cloud computing is becoming a ubiquitous concept. It has mass-market implications for the technology industry, and it is advancing at speeds rarely seen with any major technological evolution. As a business leader, do you know why cloud computing is important to you? What parts of y...

The debate has raged for some time now about the exact definition of a 5GL. One might argue that there also is still some debate going on about what exactly is a Platform as a Service PaaS. Throw together two semi-ambiguous industry-specific buzzwords and what do you get? Well, for ...

There is a common misconception that CMMI and Agile are polar opposites. One relies on institutionalization and documentation of processes and methodologies, while the other emphasizes interaction among workers and “working software over comprehensive documentation” (Agile Manifesto). ...

RightScale, Jaspersoft, Talend and Vertica have joined together to deliver a complete business intelligence solution in the cloud. Jaspersoft’s kicking in the compute-intensive BI software, Talend the open source data integration software, and Vertica the analytic database management s...

HP is reselling iTKO’s LISA Virtualize product, a suite of test, validation and virtualization solutions optimized for distributed, multi-tier applications that leverage SOA, BPM, cloud computing, integration suites and ESBs. How does LISA help HP’s Quality and Performance Management s...

Posted on YouTube, HP with its "HPEN Top Ten," clip has spoofed the satirists. Usually Top Ten lists apply to areas of politics or entertainment -- but, honestly, most of the IT departments I've visited have plenty of both.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) presents a challenge to software marketing people like none other in recent history. On the one hand, SOA has been the top enterprise software bandwagon to jump on for the last four years or so, but on the other hand, many vendors have struggled to t...

Loose coupling presents architectural challenges that are at the heart of planning and implementing the SOA infrastructure. Building the Service abstraction presents a simplified representation to the business but requires additional efforts under the covers to make that abstraction a ...

As part of my job, I help customers to select the appropriate software to either fulfill a need or as a component of a larger solution.  Fulfilling this role means comparing similar software offerings and selecting the best fit.  The challenge in this goal is to map the vendor offering...

See, HP is open sourcing widgetry very much like theirs, widgetry that it developed for itself over the last seven years at the cost of 'millions of dollars,' it says, and 60 man-years work that sorts out the various licenses that govern open source software - imagine, there are 1,700 ...