Latest News from SOA World Magazine

Yahoo Open Sources Traffic Server Code

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:00:00 EST

It says Traffic Server enables the session management, authentication, configuration management, load balancing and routing of an entire cloud computing stack. It’s supposed to offer fast, reliable and scalable access to cached online content and speed responses to requests for stored web objects, such as files, news articles or images, reducing bandwidth usage and costs.

What FINRA Doesn’t Want You to Know About Social Media

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:15:00 EST

Topic A at the recent Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association Annual Meeting (SIFMA) was what to do about the fastest-growing communications phenomenon since the invention of the Internet: the explosion in social networking. Whenever compliance and communications come together there is sure to be a tussle and this meeting was no different. Chairman and CEO Rick Ketchum cited the current policy as “currently constructed, these sites would not permit you to easily supervise these communications. For that reason, most firms prohibit their employees from using these sites for their business.”

ADP UK Employment Screening Through BackCheck

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 03:00:00 EST

ADP, the leading global supplier of payroll and human resources (HR) services, has today announced a strategic partnership with BackCheck, a division of Checkwell - one of the world's leading providers of employment screening services. The partnership will enable ADP UK to offer its clients an integrated employment screening service through BackCheck's platform.

Likewise Simplifies Upgrade Path for Open Source Authentication Software

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:00:00 EST

Likewise announced that it is offering three starter packs that combine its Likewise Enterprise software with support and training services. The starter packs are designed to help customers move from its open source software to Likewise Enterprise. Likewise Enterprise makes it easy for IT managers to authenticate users, control access to applications and data, centrally manage settings with group policies and create reports for regulatory audits. Likewise Enterprise is also the only solution to provide 100 percent native support for Apple’s Workgroup Manager application.

Google Open Sources its JavaScript Tools

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:00:00 EST

Google Thursday open sourced its Closure JavaScript tools – a compiler, a cross-browser, server-agnostic library and a bunch of precompiled templates – in the name of making web apps easier to build. Recall that Gmail, Google Docs and Google Maps are JavaScript-intensive applications. Well, Google says the Closure widgetry is a key part of the JavaScript infrastructure behind its web apps. And the more web apps, the more of a headache for Microsoft and its ilk.

Vordel Appoints Spike Reply as Partner

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:00:00 EST

Vordel’s products provide governance, acceleration, integration, and security for SOA and Cloud Computing. Spike Reply has established a SOA Center of Excellence division to assist its Customers exploit the opportunities presented by adopting a SOA-based approach to their business processes. Built on a bedrock of products from leading vendors, Spike Reply is delivering on its goal of enabling its customers build agile enterprises responsive to increasingly competitive and arduous trading conditions.

Version 3 of SCHEMA ST4 With Significantly Expanded Features

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:00:00 EST

The new version of SCHEMA ST4 features several highlights, among them the possibility for unified presentation of technical documentation, a new product information management (PIM) module, and more flexibility for the layout of text and graphical elements. In addition, this XML-based editing and content management system now offers extended reporting functionality, allowing users to uncover hidden potential for content reuse. The fully automated conversion of graphics is another option that has been added to the extended features of the new SCHEMA ST4. The software now supports the new EPUB format for the easy display of documentation on mobile devices. SCHEMA GmbH is presenting the new version of SCHEMA ST4 at the tekom annual conference, November 4-6 2009 in Wiesbaden (hall 1, booth 114).

New York Sues Intel for Antitrust

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:45:00 EST

New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against Intel Wednesday charging it with engaging in a “worldwide, systematic campaign of illegal conduct – revealed in e-mails – to maintain its monopoly power and prices on its microprocessors.” The colorful suit accuses Intel of using “bribery and coercion to maintain a stranglehold on the market.”

MassTLC and MassNetComms Combine

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 14:30:00 EST

The combined organization, which will be known as the Mass Technology Leadership Council (MassTLC), will bring some of the world’s top global technology brands – including AT&T, Cisco, Comcast, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Verizon – under one tent with some of the region’s fastest growing mid-sized companies and high impact, growth oriented entrepreneurs. Together, the membership represents the entire technology landscape from infrastructure to application and is responsible some of the most remarkable innovations taking place in the Commonwealth.

Savvis Selects The Vitality Group to Help Improve Employee Health

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:15:00 EST

The Vitality Group announced that Savvis, Inc. has selected its incentive-based wellness program to motivate and support Savvis associates as they take ownership of their personal health. Savvis, one of the largest IP network and hosting providers in the world employs more than 2,200 employees. The Vitality program will be made available to its U.S. employees.

Public vs. Private Cloud Debate is Real

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 12:45:00 EST

The zebra in this analogy is the private cloud, where corporate IT departments feel safe controlling everything internally, and not risking exposure to the perceived tigers "out there" in the public cloud arena. But Tejada stated that in the end, large-scale IT initiatives always concern themselves with "access, security, and scalability. You always have to deal with those issues."

HiT Software to Deliver Change Data Capture

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 07:33:00 EST

HiT Software has announced a new partnership with Netezza, a leading data warehouse appliance provider, where HiT will develop and certify new functionality in its DBM data replication product to provide heterogeneous change data capture from source databases such as Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL and IBM DB2 to Netezza® appliances. This capability will give Netezza data warehouse users assurance that they can quickly, easily and affordably populate their Netezza systems with corporate data from nearly any source, and maintain ongoing updates to Netezza through change data capture, which significantly reduces effort, stress and time on the source database systems.

Cisco, EMC, VMware & Intel Form Acadia JV

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 19:15:00 EST

Cisco and EMC Tuesday kicked off a cloud-chasing joint venture called Acadia that includes VMware and Intel as minority investors. Presumably they took the name from the ancient Greeks who used the word to mean a refuge or idyllic place and not the uprooted and deported North American Acadia captured in Longfellow's magnificent tear-jerker "Evangeline," although Cisco's new enemies IBM and HP may try to persuade users that it is.

Understanding Facility Clusters

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 12:45:00 EST

Now that we have determined the best geographic location for our data center, it is time to evaluate local facility options. The business concept of industry clustering is valid in the data center industry. In most locations supporting carrier hotels and Internet Exchange Points your will normally see a large number of data centers within a very close proximity, offering a variety of options, and a maze of confusing pitches from aggressive sales people.

25 Years of PC Week

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 07:08:00 EST

The scene is a deserted office park in Los Angeles after hours. I am driving around, trying to find the spot that my IT manager friend left an envelope for me. Inside the envelope is a disc with a secret IBM software program that is about to give me one heck of a scoop for [...]

Christmas (Pasko) Approaches in the Philippines; But First, Undas!

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 03:10:00 EST

It's already Christmas season in the Philippines by early October. But there's the matter of the Day of the Dead on November 1, the third most important holiday here after Christmas and Holy Week.

Pixamba.com Beta Opens to the Public

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 12:45:00 EDT

I am very excited to show you up some initial results of our hard work for quite a long time. Pixamba.com opens it doors for the contributors and image buyers. You are warmly welcome to join us and start selling your photos and illustrations with Pixamba. We offer high resolution stock images at very affordable prices and we are here, online and offline for any question or suggestion you may have.

Service Activator & Transaction

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 15:00:00 EDT

We process about 300 messages / second in our application. The Service Activator pattern has been very helpful to fork off and distribute processing of messages. We fork off messages to a JMS queue for processing. In some cases, the forked off messages need to run inside the same transaction of the caller and JMS helps us achieve this.

Fiorano Wins ‘Best SOA Tool’ – 2008 SOA World Readers’ Choice Awards

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:00:00 EDT

Fiorano Software has announced that readers of SOA World Magazine, a leading SYS-CON Media publication, awarded Fiorano "Best SOA Tool" – defeating IBM, Oracle, and Sun – in the SOA World Magazine’s 2008 Annual Readers'Choice Awards. SOA World readers also recognized Fiorano as a finalist in the "Best SOA Platform," "Best Integration Tool," and "Best SOA or XML Site" categories.

Amartya Sen: The Idea of Justice

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:30:00 EDT

His latest book, The Idea of Justice, is a serious re-examination of the foundations of justice from a global perspective. He speaks of the two definitions of justice in Sanskrit - niti (institutional justice) and nyaya (realized justice) - and how we are too often misled by the utopian vision of ideal justice, only to allow societal injustice all around us in our everyday lives. For Sen, justice must alleviate suffering.

IT Managers Share Their Cloud Experiences

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 09:30:00 EDT

The common best-practices associated with managed cloud service utilization are hard to find, since the early-adopters rarely share their insights. Of course, for all the other people that are still assessing the potential benefits, that guidance is truly invaluable.

Therefore, it's very helpful that Forrester Research was able to interview more than 60 organizations that are currently leveraging Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud-based solutions within their business environment.

Forrester defines public IaaS cloud computing as the delivery of compute (virtualized servers, storage, and networking) on-demand as a shared service. Based on their findings, they say that the evolving usage characteristics fall primarily into three emerging practices.

Test and Development in the Cloud
The most common practice they found among enterprise users of IaaS cloud platforms was to build and validate new apps. Cloud platforms provide relief for in-house test and development teams who face resource constraints. Moving these actions to the cloud relieves a significant IT burden, but only for apps that are suited to the cloud -- those that can fit within the confines of a virtual server.

Deploying Web Applications
The majority of applications deployed on public cloud infrastructures are Web-based apps. Early users of IaaS clouds have found the greatest benefits with Web apps that are short-term oriented and/or unpredictable or volatile traffic patterns. These types of apps can best take advantage of the pay-per-use element of cloud infrastructures to right-size the cost of deployment to the behaviors of the apps.

High-Performance Computing
Another good fit with IaaS cloud platforms is high-performance computing. These often massively parallel programs can be scaled-out to effectively tackle very large problems, and the constraints of HPC are usually the size of compute grid that can be deployed. Enterprises are constantly having to trade off grid size and cost against speed of getting the result. Apparently, IaaS clouds provide relief to this tension.

Next Wave of Manage Cloud Service Apps
According to Forrester, given the above mentioned IaaS best practices, the next wave of practices that infrastructure and operations professionals should focus on are as follows:

Leveraging cloud management applications and services.
Cloud bursting -- to maximize scaling within the cloud.
Integrating cloud services with data center services.
Leveraging cloud-scale services.

The Beginner's Guide to Cloud Adoption
So, where should you start? Forrester suggests, make sure you have supportive executives who will view your use of cloud computing as empowering for the business -- not as a threat to infrastructure and operations. Then, start experimenting with the common applications listed.

Clearly, IT and network out-tasking has a place in most organizations. Forrester says that their key findings show that cloud, while truly compelling, shouldn't be viewed as a replacement for the data center. It is, however, a viable alternative approach to consider.

EuroCloud Launches

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:30:00 EDT

Congratulations to Pierre-Jose Billotte for the successful launch of EuroCloud ! Established as a pan European network, EuroCloud are communities that represent a knowledgeable network of companies engaged local and European activities related to SaaS and cloud computing. The network is organized in two tiers with a national level (France, Spain, England, Belgium, etc.) and a European level. The national level focuses on local topics while the European level addresses European topics,under the EuroCloud brand (or another if appropriate in a national setting). Only companies who have an interest in Cloud Computing and participate in the Cloud ecosystem can be members of the network. EuroCloud goals include:

The Future of Mobile and Route Sales Applications for Smart Phones, Part 2

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:15:00 EDT

In this second article in the series I want to focus on the use of business intelligence and business analytics as it relates to mobile applications. If you are driving a vehicle and/or using a Smart Phone, you do not want to be doing a lot of research and analytics on your small screen while driving. There should be a workflow already created in your central database application that you can simply activate through a request on your mobile device. This could be a series of queries, filters and reports that can all be activated and analyzed by the business analytics software in the central office. The resulting report of this analysis is your instructions and action steps as a sales person or route driver.

How Technology is Changing Small Town America

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:45:00 EDT

There was an interesting article by Bill Kauffman in the Wall Street Journal today (October 20, 2009) in the Bookshelf section called Where Home Is, The Heart Isn't. It talks about the book Hollowing Out the Middle by husband and wife sociologists Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas that describes a trend where young people of intellect and ambition leave the middle of America for the coastlines. This migration has devastating effects on the middle of America according to the authors. The sharpest insight in the book according to Kauffman is that "small towns play an unwitting role in their own decline" by promoting the idea that fulfilling one's dream means one must leave home for the big city lights along the shores.

Five Stocks You Can’t Turn Your Back on Yet

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 13:41:00 EDT

The economy may well be in recovery mode, but it isn’t taking all stocks along for the ride. Earnings results are going to remain erratic simply because we’re still shaking of a recession. For a few companies though, the problems may be bigger than mere lingering economic weakness. U.S. Steel Corp. (X) [...]

Virtualizing Resources in Production Database Systems

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 13:15:00 EDT

Many firms have achieved great results implementing traditional server virtualization. However, in larger business-critical production database systems, this is less common. Yet, aren't these exactly the systems from which businesses would benefit most if resources could be virtualized and allocated dynamically. During this session, Peter Thawley will cover technical details behind virtualization techniques utilized in Enterprise database systems which go beyond server virtualization.

Dynamic SOA and BPM

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 12:00:00 EDT

After several years of companies industry-wide combining Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Business Process Management (BPM), the results are mixed. Some companies have had substantial benefits moving to SOA, while others have had average results. All these companies used the appropriate technologies, such as Web Services and Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) for processes, so the outcome should, in theory, be more predictable. It is now a good time for companies to extract the best practices and learn from others' experiences. This article is an introduction to Dynamic SOA and BPM, a book which provides an exhaustive exploration of the best practices for delivering dynamic business processes and business services in order to quickly absorb market condition changes...

Enterprise Cloud Computing Gets Real

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 17:30:00 EDT

Cloud computing has emerged as a compelling alternative to running all applications within a traditional corporate data center and has the potential to transform enterprise computing. However, there are significant hurdles to widespread enterprise adoption, including data security, application re-architecture, poor integration with the data center and lock-in to cloud providers. Ellen Rubin will review how the CloudSwitch software appliance helps enterprises surmount these obstacles and delivers the power of cloud computing seamlessly and securely.

Cloud & SaaS Proponents: Know Your Enemies!

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 13:30:00 EDT

Cloud Computing & SaaS are two very strong "disruptive" innovations which will change the IT landscape forever. Many CIOs and IT professionals think this is a threat to their careers and their power. Louis Naugès will further explain in his session why 90% of existing IT vendors have a lot to lose: software editors, servers vendors, large consulting organizations.

How the CIO Becomes a Hero Again

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 12:45:00 EDT

Cloud Computing is having major impacts to the way in which IT is delivered from the data center to its many clients. For the CIO, this can be perceived as a threat to the way in which they manage data center capabilities. As Elaine Lennox will discuss during her session, in reality, Cloud Computing offers a huge opportunity to the CIO who now has the capability to offer more responsive, scalable, and available IT services.

Bottomline Introduces Advanced Capabilities for Web 2.0 and SOA

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 03:00:00 EDT

Bottomline Technologies has expanded support for Web 2.0 and service oriented architecture (SOA) within its WebSeries Global Cash Management platform. Designed to capitalize on the benefits of SOA and Web 2.0, WebSeries provides banks and financial institutions with the flexibility required to take greater ownership of the end user experience. By leveraging Bottomline’s SOA-enabled building blocks, banks can construct a highly-interactive user experience utilizing state-of-the-art AJAX controls. At the same time, banks with existing front-end user interfaces can significantly enhance the user experience by ‘calling’ Bottomline’s Web services to support business rules, transaction processing and information queries. Through either approach, banks can continue to dictate the specific elements of functionality for client-facing solutions.

Live Demo of Yahoo! Query Language at Cloud Computing Expo

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:30:00 EDT

What every developer wants is access and the ability to shape any data across the Internet through one simple language, with out need to learn different APIs. Yahoo! Query Language (YQL) provides just that and its effectiveness will be demonstrated live at SYS-CON's 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, being held November 2-4 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

Management Development or How to Make a Soufflé

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 11:11:00 EDT

The Four Pillars of Successful Management Development

Pillar 3: Structure

You are choosing a management development programme for yourself or others in your organisation. Of all the factors you take into consideration – the cost,

Cloud Computing Isn't a Substitute For Due Diligence

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 09:30:00 EDT

Well, everyone knew it wouldn’t be long before cloud computing got thrown under the proverbial bus after the latest Sidekick failure. Observers point at this specific failure, as they have with Gmail, Amazon, and other cloud provider outages in the past, as a broader problem. Some like to use these service outages as an opportunity to initiate a full-fledged attack on the idea of cloud computing. However, can we really just blame cloud computing and move on? Of course not!

The Next Frontier in the Cloud: Legacy Apps

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 09:00:00 EDT

Although cloud computing momentum continues to build and scarcely a day goes by without a new cloud announcement or study, there’s been little real enterprise adoption and almost no meaningful case studies. In part, that’s because early cloud providers and vendors were focused on developers and technology start-ups when they designed their offerings, and larger, more established organizations were rarely on their radar screen. While start-ups can easily embrace new technologies and architectures, enterprises have far more constraints and have been largely limited to “tire kicking” the cloud with small applications that aren’t particularly meaningful for the business.

Jill Tummler Singer of the CIA Speaks on "Cloud Safety" : +1

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 08:00:00 EDT

I think language is a big issue here. I've always found it interesting that in German, the words for "security" and "certainty" (sicherheit, literally "sureness") are the same. In French, the words for "safety" and "security" are also the same (sûreté, again literally "sureness"). So, in those languages, "security" has a broad definition, incorporating senses of dependability, management, and safety. I can see how the French and German words fit with the broad information security concepts of business continuity, "management" (access management, identity management), and "safety" that users (and their data) will be protected. But the English language word "security" lets us down.

Jaspersoft to Support Web-Based Charity Programs

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 07:01:00 EDT

Jaspersoft's open source BI software enables a level of customization not available from traditional vendors, which played a significant role in Virgin Money Giving's decision to deploy Jaspersoft. Additionally, the organization wanted reporting to be an integral part of the online portal and web service. Jaspersoft is easily embedded into any environment and in this implementation, allows multiple charities to use the Virgin Money Giving service while accessing only their own data.

Industry’s Smallest High-Speed Data Logger

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 15:00:00 EDT

The stand-alone logger supports all of the leading automotive protocols including CAN (Controller Area Network) to acquire OBD and Enhanced Diagnostic data. In addition, it supports the J1939 heavy duty protocol. The DAWN Mini Logger works well for a wide range of applications including fleet monitoring, R&D, duty cycle measurements, and service. The user has the option to connect a PC to the Mini Logger for real-time data analysis and display. Computer interface options include USB, Bluetooth and a cellular modem.

Are Services Nouns or Verbs?

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 12:45:00 EDT

Should Services be nouns or verbs? It's possible to design Services either way, as Entity Services, which predictably represent business entities, or as Task Services, that represent specific actions that implement some step in a process, in other words, verbs. Which approach is better?

SOA World Magazine "Readers' Choice Awards" Voting Is Now Open

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 12:00:00 EDT

SYS-CON's SOA World Magazine announced today that the 2009 voting in its annual SOA World Magazine Readers' Choice Awards is now open. Voting will end October 23, 2009, and winners will be announced the week of November 2-4, 2009, at the "SOA in the Cloud" track at the 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo. To vote for your favorite SOA products and services today - don't put it off, voting takes just a few seconds.

My Prediction of Cloud & SOA in 2005

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 07:00:00 EDT

Okay, maybe it's petty and I'm just tooting my own horn, but I found this old article I wrote for Upstream CIO's October issue (written in July '05). In rereading this article today, I surprised myself how aware I was of the forthcoming Cloud & SOA convergence. The popularity of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is gaining ground [...]

Dell to Shutter Last American Plant

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 17:00:00 EDT

Dell will close its four-year-old 750,000-square-foot North Carolina desktop PC plant by January to help it trim $4 billion from its annual nut. The closure of its last factory in North America will cost 905 jobs. It still has to dicker with state and local governments over the $240 million incentive pact it got to put the plant in Winston-Salem. It is expected to repay the city $15.56 million.

Agile Adoption – Crossing the Chasm

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 12:15:00 EDT

Everybody acknowledges that IT has to plays a key role in any new service or product design. Therefore, IT needs to align with business and be flexible to changing business needs. It is a question of how to be agile rather than should we be agile. Then, why is there such a gulf between the people who evangelize agile processes and those who look at them with great suspicion? Any application is built to satisfy a business goal. The process has two major steps where the step one is to define the application behavior which will help in meeting the business goal and the step two is to translate the application behavior to a working application. The definition of the application behavior is the requirement specification and it is the link between business and IT. In the waterfall methodology, development starts after the requirement is frozen. It is assumed that if business users can unambiguously and comprehensively specify the application behavior, IT can build the application satisfying the stated behavior. All the management practices based on waterfall methodology is build around this assumption. Times have changed and many of the IT applications are an integral part of the product or service offering. Significant part of the users are external to the organization. The focus has shifted from following the best practices to having innovative offering. If all these points are added up, it becomes clear that requirements will change. This has led to the realization that we need agile processes which works when requirements are constantly changing rather than spending time and energy on freezing requirement. As a result agile processes were born. The key principle behind any agile processes is to have a mechanism where the users can try out the application as it is being built and give feedback so that: - Gap in understanding is reduced - Sub-optimal solution can be improved - Application can be realigned to any change in business goal

The Role of the Business Analyst in an SOA World

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 12:00:00 EDT

Those of us that are part of SOA-related projects where traditional business analysts (BA) are involved often find ourselves frustrated by the incongruence between the analyst’s approach to requirements gathering and the SOA design. The problem arises because SOA models functionality of a business across multiple boundaries, whereas the business analyst wants to focus on [...]

eMeter Demonstrates Scalable Smart Grid Management Capability

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 12:00:00 EDT

Performed at IBM’s Innovation Center for Business Partners in San Mateo, California, testing was done with a full multi-tenancy configuration, the most complex large-scale extended enterprise scenario. In multi-tenancy configurations, a single system serves the requirements of multiple utilities or individual regions of a very large utility. These utility organizations are becoming increasingly common as the Smart Grid takes shape. For example, American Electric Power (AEP,) is serving Kansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia, through multiple operating companies, or Canada’s IESO which provides centralized metering services for more than 80 distribution companies within Ontario Province. eMeter is at the forefront of enabling this industry trend supporting customers in North America, Europe and the Asia Pacific region. This testing validates eMeter’s ability to support billing based on interval meter data as these large-scale Smart Grid deployments continue to grow.

Stock in Focus: Dragon Capital

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 08:35:00 EDT

Dragon Capital Group announced that its subsidiary Shanghai Zhaoli Technology Company, Limited ("Shanghai Zhaoli") has received Distribution Rights from Fuji Xerox Co., Ltd. for their line of printers, and printer consumable products. Dragon Capital Group is a holding company of emerging high-tech companies in China.

Timecruiser Chosen as Campus-Wide eLearning Solution

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 07:15:00 EDT

Timecruiser Computing Corporation, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) partner to the higher education community, today announced that The College of Westchester (CW) has selected Timecruiser's Solution Suite -- CampusCruiser(TM) and CourseCruiser(TM) LMS -- as its campus-wide academic portal and Learning Management System. Timecruiser's Solutions were chosen from a number of competitors for their attractive cost benefit ratio and level of support and flexibility.

Partnership to Eliminate Passwords in the Cloud

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 13:15:00 EDT

Through this partnership, Astadia will help its clients resolve SaaS Single Sign-On and other Internet Identity Security related issues. “Improving cloud application performance and value requires administrators to address process, directory, technology, and security issues,” said Mike Lingo, Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of Astadia. “Ping Identity’s SSO solutions for SaaS will help our clients improve user adoption, reduce administrative costs and accelerate longer term SaaS strategies.”

BI Gets Better with Managed Web Data Services

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 13:15:00 EDT

The more relevant and useful content that enters into BI tools, the more powerful the BI outcomes -- especially as we look outside the enterprise for fast shifting trends and business opportunities. That's what web data services can bring. As the recession forces the need to identify and evaluate new revenue sources, businesses need to capture such web data services for business intelligence (BI) to work better and fuller. In Part 1 of our web data series we discussed how external data has grown in both volume and importance across internal Internet, social networks, portals, and applications in recent years.

Enterprise 2.0: The Phrase, the Concept, the Time Scale

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 17:30:00 EDT

Terrific post by Euan Semple (responding to a post by Stowe Boyd) about why he does not love the phrase "Enterprise 2.0": "...it's too narrow, too corporate and too managerial!" The name will work itself out, as names do. I have problems with entire "2.0" meme — I like that it ...