Latest News from Innovations Software Technology

The Second Coming of Internet Explorer

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 05:00:00 EDT

What with the Ballot Screen circulating in Europe, its search interests to advance, and a new class of applications on the doorstep, Microsoft says it’s throwing more HTML5 support as well as a faster new rival-challenging JavaScript engine code named Chakra, support for hardware-accelerated 3D graphics and text and supposedly ground-breaking safety features into its next-generation web browser Internet Explorer 9 so it can get back in the game. Long criticized for not supporting web standards Microsoft now evidently wants HTLM5 – still not a standard, mind you – to get traction so that web applications and web sites only have to be programmed once and rivals like Chrome, Firefox and Opera have less of a reason for being.

A Message from Barry X Lynn, CEO 3Tera

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:30:00 EDT

We started 3Tera to radically ease the way IT deploys, maintains and scales – MANAGES - applications. Our AppLogic® cloud computing platform provides the foundation of our partners’ orchestration of cloud services for public and private clouds around the world. Today, we’re taking the next step in moving toward making cloud computing mainstream by joining CA. CA and 3Tera share a common vision for the future of cloud computing, and we are excited about the opportunities that this acquisition will create for our customers, partners and their cloud users. This is a historic moment in Cloud Computing. The significance of this acquisition is a heck of a lot more than just a land grab in a hot space. We are confident that as a team, CA and 3Tera, will extend our leadership of the cloud computing platform market.

IBM Claims to Take the PC Out of PC Servers

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 19:15:00 EST

IBM wants first in x86 server revenue, a slot HP currently occupies. IBM is third. So Blue has taken a whack at “rewriting the economics of industry standard computing” by redesigning the PC server to take the PC out of it and put the enterprise in it. It’s been three years engineering the latest generation of its so-called mainframe-borrowing X-Architecture. And ahead of Intel trotting out its high-end eight-core Nehalem EX Xeon chips later this month, IBM unveiled its Nehalem EX-based x86 servers at CeBit in Germany this week. They’re designated eX5 and are supposed to offer “dramatically more scalable, workload-tuned computing on the x86 platform.” Think of them as sort of a soup kitchen for poor memory-starved applications in virtual environments.

HP Is Cirious About Clouds

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 21:45:00 EST

HP Labs has opened an advanced research facility in Singapore, where it means to re-examine data center and application design principles to explore how future cloud computing needs will be met. The facility will support a number of cloud initiatives already underway at other HP Labs sites, collaborating closely with the Service Automation and Integration Lab (SAIL) in Silicon Valley and the Automated Infrastructure Lab (AIL) in England. Together, the three will work on Cirious, HP’s vision for creating an enterprise cloud software platform. Through applied and exploratory research, Singapore is supposed to work with customers, partners, HP business divisions and the academe to generate advances that drive Cirious research.

Intel Heads U.S. Relief Effort

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 05:15:00 EST

In a speech at the Brookings Institution Tuesday CEO Paul Otellini said that Intel is going to put $200 million in a new “Invest in American Technology Fund.” Twenty-four VCs have earmarked another $3.3 billion of not really new money for infusion into U.S. technology companies over the next two years targeting IT, green technology and biotechnology. It’s meant to boost American competitiveness and create jobs. Intel’s got commitments from Google, Microsoft, Dell, GE, Adobe, Yahoo, Autodesk, Accenture, Broadcom, Cisco and five other companies to create 10,500 new jobs this year and hire new college graduates.

Globalfoundries to Make 28nm ARM Chips in 2H

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 22:15:00 EST

Globalfoundries, the Abu Dhabi-backed build-to-order operation fashioned out of AMD’s spun-out factories and Chartered Semiconductor, will be making 28nm ARM SoCs for smartbooks, tablets and smartphones in the second half. It says its highly aggressive never-before-used 28nm process should produce a 40% performance increase, 30% power decrease and 100% increase in standby battery life over 40/45nm. There will be low-power doohickeys and high-performance doohickeys, both versions based on ARM’s Cortex-A9 chip and both using the high-K metal gates technology Intel pioneered.

NEC to Make Netezza-Based Appliances

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 19:45:00 EST

The Oracle-Sun combo is gonna feel a little more pushback from NEC, which is developing an NEC-branded Netezza-based data warehouse appliance out of the Oracle playbook. NEC and Netezza have been pals since 2006, with NEC selling Netezza-built widgets to Japanese firms. NEC will now sell its own Netezza-fitted blade-based devices worldwide starting in Japan and Asia-Pacific.

Silicon Valley’s in Trouble

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 07:30:00 EST

The recession may have driven Silicon Valley’s innovation engine straight off the cliff, according to an annual study by two local non-profits, Silicon Valley Network and Silicon Valley Community Foundation. Based on their just-released 76-page 2010 Silicon Valley Index they say the Valley is stalled and that it’s “hard to say is whether we’re stuck in neutral, which has happened before, or whether it’s time now for a complete overhaul.”

Google Sticks Its Big Toe in Ultra-Fast Home Internet Access

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 23:00:00 EST

In a move that calls AOL to mind, Google, having failed to snare wireless spectrum at auction from the FCC, is planning to build and test ultra high-speed fiber-optic broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the U.S. It says so in a company blog posted Wednesday by product managers Minny Ingersoll and James Kelly (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/).

The New Efficiency: Experience the Virtual Launch

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 05:00:00 EST

Right now, you can test drive the innovations at the heart of the new efficiency — free. Download free trials and demo the latest features. Windows 7 works the way you work, helping you reduce management costs, improve productivity, and manage risks through enhanced security and control. Windows Server 2008 R2 enables dynamic provisioning and management of virtual workloads, and combines with Windows 7 to make branch offices more cost-effective and remote workers more productive.

Panorama Software Celebrates 15 Years of BI Innovation

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 10:43:00 EST

As the IT industry enters 2010, Panorama Software is celebrating its fifteenth anniversary of excellence in the business intelligence community. From Panorama’s first generation OLAP product (acquired by Microsoft) through the sixth generation NovaView, the first BI solution to work in the cloud, to today’s complete hybrid solution, the company has represented a hotbed of innovation for the IT community.

Science Discovery: The Next Computing Landscape

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 08:45:00 EST

Computational science is the field of study concerned with constructing mathematical models and numerical techniques that represent scientific, social scientific or engineering problems and employing these models on computers, or clusters of computers, to analyze, explore or solve these models. Numerical simulation enables the study of complex phenomena that would be too expensive or dangerous to study by direct experimentation.

Europe Seeks HPC Edge

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 20:15:00 EST

Seems a tad hands-on for an outfit that’s supposed to objectively collect data, but IDC is leading a consortium of supercomputing experts from Teratec in France, Daresbury Laboratory in the UK and Leibniz-Rechenzentrum and Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany that’s gotten a contract from the European Commission to develop a strategic agenda for high performance computing (HPC) in Europe.

Primitive Is the New Advanced

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 12:30:00 EST

Mark Twain was credited with saying, "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead." People figured out long ago that a letter with fewer words, though more powerful, was more difficult to write. It seems technologists only now are beginning to learn that lesson.

Voltaire Relieves InfiniBand-to-Ethernet Pain

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 13:30:00 EST

Voltaire Tuesday whisked the covers off the first 40 Gb/s InfiniBand switch with an integrated low-latency hardware-based Ethernet gateway so traffic can move seamlessly to and from Ethernet-based networks. The compact 1U dingus is called the Grid Director 4036E and is meant to give the company a leg up in the great financial houses where a microsecond advantage in high-frequency trading can mean millions of dollars.

Roundarch Uses the Cloud and Adobe FLEX to Deliver Global Experiences

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 12:15:00 EST

Roundarch and Varian have announced the reopening of The Varian Experience, An Online Event. This online experience augments the traditional trade show experience by taking it to an entirely new level with a rich landscape of information, resources and solutions built upon an updated technology framework, and a cutting edge hosting solution.

Amazon Kindle Turns Software Platform Ahead of Apple Launch

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 12:15:00 EST

Amazon Thursday turned its Kindle e-reader into a software development platform. It means to release a limited beta Kindle Development Kit next month complete with sample code, APIs, tools, and documentation so ISVs can build so-called “active content” for the dingus. Which means it could turn more than just an e-book. More like maybe Apple’s unannounced, presumably competitive and reportedly multi-function “iSlate,” supposedly due to be unveiled Wednesday at a much higher price point than Kindle.

Business Innovation: Your 2010 Competitive Edge

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 18:30:00 EST

Learn how you can show ROI for business improvement investments and get a green light from executive sponsors for the targeted projects. Find out how companies like yours have rapidly been achieving success through exploiting new revenue opportunities earlier, outperforming the competition easier and incorporating acquisitions faster.

Affordable Replication for Both File and Block Storage

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 12:00:00 EST

Data is the lifeblood of any organization and, in the last decade, increasing emphasis has been placed on protecting that data so organizations can recover the information that they need in the time frame they need it. Replication is now rapidly emerging as a viable form of data protection even for midsize organizations because of its lower costs, faster recovery times and the level of protection that it provides. However the process of selecting the right replication solution for the different data types that organizations need to protect is anything but an intuitive exercise.

Global Association of Risk Professionals 11th Annual Risk Management Convention & Exhibition Set for February 8-10, 2010 at the Marriott Marquis, New York

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 08:57:17 EST

The Global Association of Risk Professionals (GARP: www.garp.org) announces its 11th Annual Risk Management Convention & Exhibition will be held February 8-10, 2010, at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York City. As the largest gathering of risk professionals in the world, this year's event will include panel discussions covering global regulatory reform, the new role of the CRO, executive pay regulations, and specialized tracks addressing risk convergence, enterprise governance, and quantitative risk and derivatives trading analysis.

Global Association of Risk Professionals 11th Annual Risk Management Convention & Exhibition Set for February 8-10, 2010 at the Marriott Marquis, New York

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 08:57:17 EST

Amazon Named ‘CloudBzz Innovator of the Year’

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 11:45:00 EST

2009 has certainly been a cloudy year. The sheer volume of real innovation somehow makes all of the hype worthwhile. While there were many companies doing interesting and innovative things in the cloud – Microsoft Windows Azure could be a strong 2010 contender – the decision on who wins for 2009 is no contest. Amazon gets the [...]

Html.JqGrid - Cleaning Up Your jqGrid Code

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 15:46:00 EST

I was recently working on a project where I had five or six different pages, each of which was going to have a full CRUD-enabled jqGrid complete with form editing, date pickers, fields that show up in the form and not on the grid, etc. The problem is after I got finished doing the first one I realized that there was a truckload of really redundant jqGrid code that I didn't want to have to re-type over and over again. Worse, the code is really fragile and if you misplace a comma, bracket, brace, or paren - the debugging of it will give you migraines.

Real Innovation Requires Changing Your Thinking

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 09:00:00 EST

One of my favorite quotes is that of Daniel Boorstin who observed, "The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." Boorstin, a renowned historian and former Librarian of Congress who wrote numerous books including, The Genius of American Politics, Democracy and Its Discontents, and The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson, was right.

Technology Adoption & the Age Myth

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 10:00:00 EST

As I evangelize around the upcoming surge in innovation driven by technology and globalism one topic that is often raised is the issue of how older people are unable or unwilling to adapt to the change brought on by technologies. Hence, the rapid states of change I predict are unlikely because of this "age" phenomenon.

Another Visual WebGui-Enabled Business Tool

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 14:00:00 EST

Visual WebGui, a platform for developing business and industry tools, announced a new application with the launch of E-grou’s 5.0. Visual WebGui has increasingly become the choice tool for developers creating corporate and management solutions for businesses of all sizes. Its latest success was confirmed by E-grou, an online document management and workflow collaboration service. Since 5.0, E-grou has been providing a secure and configurable vault specific to individual user´s access rights. It enables control of document life cycle information, control of document versions, management of mail and email records, and participation in ad-hoc and structured workflows.

HP Unveils Converged Infrastructure Solutions for Microsoft Environments

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 14:15:00 EST

HP today announced new integrations of the recently introduced HP Converged Infrastructure architecture for Microsoft applications, enabling customers to simplify the management of their computing environments while increasing efficiency. The proliferation of IT sprawl has created technology silos in data centers with maintenance and operations consuming approximately 70 percent of an organization’s technology budget.

The Emergence of the Universal Appliance

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 11:30:00 EST

In 1956, Malcolm McLean invented a shipping system that revolutionized cargo shipping forever, namely the container. The shipping container provides a standard, universal packing solution that can be used for transporting whatever you need to ship. Containers can be transported on trucks, trains or on ships, because they are of standard size. Containers are an example of a universal solution - one that revolutionized the shipping industry. Can the emergence of the standard PC server platform as a universal computing platform herald the proliferation of even more innovative dedicated network appliances in IP networks?

4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo Starts Today

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 08:10:00 EST

A round-up of the wide range of important issues and timely topics due to be discussed by over 130 industry experts at SYS-CON's 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, opening today at the Santa Clara Convention Center, November 2-4, 2009. From Building Scalable and Extensible RIAs in the Cloud to Yahoo! Cloud @ Internet Scale.

Start-up Makes Office Share

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:45:00 EDT

DocVerse, a start-up set up by a couple of old Microsoft hands two years ago, has begun commercializing its downloadable plug-in said to turn Microsoft’s Word, PowerPoint and Excel into full-fledged web-based collaboration tools. The widgetry, some of it still in development when the first piece went to beta in February, is supposed to make any .doc, .ppt, or .xls file into a secure web document that can be shared and edited by multiple users anytime, anywhere, online or off.

CEO Claims Green IT Benefits Must Make it the Norm, Not a Trend

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 12:31:00 EDT

Navot Peled, CEO of Gizmox, challenged the “Green IT trend” with the announcement this week that its product, Visual WebGui, has been successfully providing energy and environmental benefits to enterprises, with its solutions that dually cut costs for hardware and software.

Judge Saves Microsoft $388m

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 15:00:00 EDT

A Rhode Island district court judge Tuesday struck down a jury verdict ordering Microsoft to pay an obscure Australian developer by the name of Ric Richardson $388 million, reportedly the fifth-largest patent infringement award in history. In a relatively rare and painstaking post-trial judgment as a matter of law (JMOL), Judge William Smith found Microsoft’s patented Production Activation (PA) system, its scheme for defeating illegal copying of Windows and Office, did not infringe on a patent held by Richardson’s companies Uniloc Singapore Private Ltd and California-based Uniloc USA Inc.

Salesforce.com & Wave - Customer Service on Crack

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 08:00:00 EDT

Cloud computing is offering advanced ways for businesses to apply the most cutting edge technologies to support their key business processes - rapidly and affordably. Now there is another interesting example as the video below shows.

Google's Wave is a new and interesting seminal Cloud technology. Wave was invented by brothers Jens Rasmussen and Lars Rasmussen at Google that builds on the concepts of AJAX combined with fresh look at Operation Transformation. The solution is so ground breaking the ways in which this technology may transform web based communication is unclear. It will be up to the community of developers working within and without the enterprise to realize the evident potential of Wave.

From a technical perspective, Wave has the ability to interact with other cloud platforms, like the Force.com platform. Watch the video demo below which features a fictitious Mobile Services Company named Booyah and see how powerful this new technology is and what it can do for customer service.

Yahoo! to Present at 4th International Cloud Computing Expo

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 13:15:00 EDT

SYS-CON Events announced today that Eric Baldeschwieler, VP Hadoop Software Development at Yahoo!, will be presenting at SYS-CON’s 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, CA, this coming November 2 – 4, 2009. His session is entitled “Hadoop @ Yahoo - Internet Scale Data Processing.” Yahoo! is running the largest Hadoop clusters in the world – 25K+ servers, analyzing billions of Web pages, multiple petabytes of storage and billions of records per day.

Game-Changing Innovations and the Evolving SOA Appliance

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 11:30:00 EDT

"Virtualizing hardware appliances is pretty tough, it's pretty much impossible," says Intel’s Blake Dournaee in this informative and forward-looking webinar currently screening on SYS-CON.TV. Co-presenting with Oracle’s Vikas Jain, the webinar discusses three game-changing innovations. So if you want to learn about new B2B security threats like "XML bombs" - and about what's different about Cloud Computing when it comes to service mediation - make sure to view this video today.

Can Companies With Less, Do More? Ballmer Thinks Yes

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 10:00:00 EDT

"For years, we've talked about how information technology enables companies to do more with less," writes Microsoft supremo Steve Ballmer in his latest "Executive Email" to Microsoft customers and analysts. "But during this economic reset," Ballmer continues, "IT provides business leaders with the answer to a slightly different question: read more

Amazon’s VPC Opens the Door for Innovation and Enterprise Cloud Adoption

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 14:30:00 EDT

The recent announcement from Amazon of the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) represents the next big advance in the evolution chain for cloud computing. Enterprises can now integrate their IT infrastructure with Amazon's vast computing and storage resources, using a VPN connection from their data center to their own virtual private cloud which then looks like part of their internal network.

Until the release of VPC, companies were left to build applications and utilize the cloud as a separate and somewhat siloed portion of their computing environment. In addition to the VPN connection, VPC allows cloud users to control their IP addressing within the Amazon cloud (previously IT addresses were assigned randomly). This may sound trivial, but it solves some tricky problems that made it hard to integrate cloud and internal resources.

Prior to VPC, every time you started a server in Amazon, you would get a new, randomly assigned IP address for that server. This created a lot of issues with how typical applications operate, e.g.: how do you communicate the address of this new server? How do you run authentication/certificate processes with a changing address? How do you deal with identity when IP addresses change at every start? Add to this the fact that cloud servers were separate from internal servers, so internal services that you normally take advantage of (DNS, LDAP, etc.) were not available without a lot of work. VPC provides a way to connect cloud resources to your data center and start to smooth over the differences.

Okay, how does this work? A standard edge networking device in your data center is configured to connect with Amazon's VPC. You can create your own sub-nets within Amazon, and when you launch a server you assign it to one of them. You specify the IP address range for your servers, and VPC performs the "security dance" to build the VPN between the edge device and your private network in Amazon's cloud. All you have to do is update your routing tables so that processes in the data center can reach applications in the cloud and you're off to the races.

By allowing customers to integrate their data center networks with Amazon's cloud, VPC takes the first step in bringing the cloud and the enterprise data center together. While one large hurdle has been removed, there's still work to be done, as indicated in RightScale's blog. As enterprises review the VPC offering, there are things they need to consider as they determine how to deploy and use it.

Networking: VPC provides a layer-3 connection between the data center and the cloud, which means that traffic is based on IP address routing. You'll have some work to do to figure out things like managing addressing in the cloud, and the implication of MAC addresses changing on every server start. In contrast, the holy grail of this integration is based on the Ethernet level (layer-2), where everything "just works" -- allowing seamless migration of applications between the data center and the cloud (and back). Some applications require layer-2 connectivity (for broadcasting for example), which means they would probably need to remain in your data center.

Security: As the name indicates, VPC doesn't provide truly private infrastructure, but a virtually private infrastructure -- servers deployed into your virtual private cloud are allocated from the same shared resources that Amazon uses for all its customers. Thus, you still have to think about possible additional security measures in the cloud, both for networking (VPC doesn't allow for encryption between servers), as well as how to protect data in shared storage.

Management: Developers will have to deal with the "assembly required" aspect of mapping applications to Amazon's infrastructure. There's no simple way to move existing servers to the cloud, which means you'll have to determine how to provision and configure cloud resources, and how much custom work might be needed to interface with Amazon APIs. Deployment is complicated by Amazon specifics -- how to launch an instance, attach storage resources, reset applications to use the proper storage path, etc. You'll also have to address the fact that base servers run on "ephemeral storage", meaning that server outages cause the loss of all data/updates. (There are many blog posts on this topic; this one is typical.)

Flexibility and choice: Finally, while VPC solves some major headaches for companies that are committed to AWS, it is not applicable for those who want the flexibility of multi-cloud offerings. This is important because users have no control of a cloud provider's infrastructure. When a provider decides to upgrade or change anything, users must go along for the ride.

So to sum up, Amazon's VPC represents an exciting step forward along the road to making the cloud truly enterprise-ready. Cloud computing has come a long way over the last two years, and in many ways Amazon has been setting the pace. Their new offering lays the foundation for the next set of solutions for enterprise adoption from other companies in the cloud computing ecosystem. At CloudSwitch, we're excited to take advantage of the ongoing improvements by Amazon to their infrastructure, and working hard to eliminate complexity and make cloud computing simple, seamless and more cost-effective than ever.

SGI Fields a Personal Supercomputer

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 14:00:00 EDT

The recently reconstituted SGI Monday wheeled out the Octane III, its first personal supercomputer, basically a high-performance deskside cluster for office environments that supports distributed technical computing applications. Your typical workstation has only eight cores and a moderate amount of memory. The Octane III, on the other hand, can be stuffed with 80 cores and nearly 1TB of memory.

Rising of Open ERP and Its Founder Fabien Pinckaers

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 13:15:00 EDT

Fabien Pinckaers has also developed several large scale projects, such as Auction- in-Europe.com, which become the leader in the art market in Belgium. He is also the founder of the LUG (Linux User Group) of Louvain-la- Neuve, and of several free projects like OpenReport, OpenStuff and Tiny Report. Educated as a civil engineer (polytechnic), he has won several IT prizes in Europe such as Wired and l'Inscene. A fierce defender of free software in the enterprise, he is in constant demand as a conference speaker and he is the author of numerous articles dealing with free software in the management of the enterprise. He is the author of the book "Open ERP - Pour une gestion d'entreprise efficace et intégrée" at Eyrolles.

CEO of Asankya to Speak on Cloud Acceleration at 1st Annual GovIT Expo

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 16:00:00 EDT

SYS-CON Events announced today that Scott Ryan, CEO of Asankya, will be presenting at the upcoming GovIT Expo(www.GovITExpo.com)this coming October 6th in Washington, DC. The session will be entitled “The Growth of Government Clouds.” Now that the Obama administration has pegged cloud computing as the next evolution in government technology, it's important to understand the entire scope of the cloud computing

Injecting Intelligence into PDFs with XMP (Part 1)

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 12:00:00 EDT

Unlike the workflows that previously surrounded printed content, today’s workflows contain more changing variables, especially when it comes to documentation. Documents are created, repurposed, archived, retrieved, and even merged into others. In short – they encompass change. As a result, keeping an eye on change is an essential part of document management.

Secure Managed File Transfer (MFT) Goes Online

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 06:15:00 EDT

GoAnywhere Services securely allows trading partners (e.g. customers, employees, vendors, etc.) to connect with your organization for exchanging files. This innovative solution eliminates the need for departmental stand-alone tools and methods that were traditionally required for sharing data. It also removes the risk of using unsecure email to exchange information – greatly reducing data privacy concerns.

Asian Innovation - Economic Echelons

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 07:30:00 EDT

There are five countries that stand above the rest in Asia: China, India, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. China and India are the twin colossi of growth right now. Japan and Korea are the finished products, having produced their own economic miracles (Japan after WWII until the 70s and Korea from the 70s until today. Korea's Incheon Bridge, pictured left, is but one little example).

The Four Dimensions of Application Performance Monitoring

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 16:45:00 EDT

Gartner analyst Will Cappelli talks about how applications have become central to enterprise IT operations, and how complex architectures have led to significant challenges in monitoring and managing the performance of applications. As enterprise application architectures become more modular, distributed, volatile, and interdependent, applications have become much more difficult to manage, and the need to proactively monitor and manage applications proactively has become stronger.

Software’s Next Frontier: Grand Central Dispatch

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 11:15:00 EDT

Have you heard of Grand Central Dispatch? If you’re a Mac addict, then you might know that it’s Apple’s new easy-to-use tool for parallelizing code. If you’re not a Mac addict, then the first thing you should know is that GCD is one of the most exciting innovations in software development in years. The second [...]

Rating: 0.0/5 (0 votes cast)

The Cloud is a Radical and Transformational Change

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 07:15:00 EDT

The cloud isn’t just about surface concepts like “storing all your data on S3” or “spinning up servers on GoGrid”; those things are just the beginning. What it is REALLY about is what each of those things in turn will enable! By making it easy to perform rote systems tasks, an entire order of magnitude is removed from the complexity of software application development, freeing up those resources to drive automation further into an organization.

Convio Opens Executive Center and New Office in DC

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 07:01:24 EDT

Convio, a company that is passionate about helping nonprofit organizations use software and services to fulfill their missions, today announced the opening of its new DC office and nonprofit executive center. In addition to housing Convio’s DC-based team members, the new facility was designed to serve as a hub for meetings, training sessions, meet-ups and other networking opportunities which help nonprofit professionals in the DC area share ideas, insight and innovation, as well as build relationships.

How To Use Cloud Computing and Virtualization to Create Virtual Data Centers

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 06:45:00 EDT

Many IT organizations have inadequate governance processes to control the provisioning of virtual servers, resulting in problems including virtual server sprawl. Some IT organizations are building private or internal cloud environments to capture the benefits of cloud computing, yet they lack management tools to provide visibility into usage and costs. Successful IT service management, including the use of a Service Catalog, is critical to realizing the benefits of virtualization.

Cloud CEOs, CTOs & SVPs to Speak at 4th International Cloud Computing Expo

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 05:15:00 EDT

What do the following industry executives have in common: the CTOs of Citrix, EMC and Sybase, the Founders of ParaScale and CloudSwitch, the CEOs of Zetta and Kaavo, the Chief Security Architect at Sun, the President of Hubspan and the Chairman of NComputing? The answer is that, along with another 100 or so experienced and industry-savvy speakers, they are all members of the distinguished Speaker Faculty at the upcoming 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, which is co-located with the 7th International Virtualization Conference & Expo at the Santa Clara Convention Center, November 2-4, 2009.

IBM Unveils Industry’s First Public Desktop Cloud

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 18:00:00 EDT

At VMworld on Monday IBM announced what it called the industry’s first public desktop cloud. It will be available in the Americas and Europe starting in October. IBM describes it as its biggest cloud computing endorsement to date enabling anywhere/anytime access for everything from distance learning to business computing.