Latest News from SOA World Magazine

API Testing and Monitoring

Wed, 16 May 2012 15:23:19 EDT

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)

You Say You Want a Revolution...

Wed, 16 May 2012 11:00:00 EDT

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.

Speech and Sound: The Next "Killer Paradigm Shift"..?

Wed, 16 May 2012 09:21:00 EDT

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?

Enterprise APIs and OAuth: Have it All

Wed, 16 May 2012 07:00:00 EDT

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 →

Thompson Told Yahoo Board He Has Cancer: WSJ

Tue, 15 May 2012 07:45:00 EDT

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.

Yahoo – The CEO Drama Continues

Mon, 14 May 2012 15:50:00 EDT

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.

PTO Finds Key RPost Patent 100% Valid

Mon, 14 May 2012 07:45:00 EDT

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.

Dell’s Got the First 22nm Microservers

Mon, 14 May 2012 07:15:00 EDT

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.

SDN, OpenFlow, and Infrastructure 2.0

Mon, 14 May 2012 07:07:00 EDT

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.

Book Review: How Google Tests Software

Fri, 11 May 2012 13:04:39 EDT

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.

Legacy Modernization

Fri, 11 May 2012 09:45:00 EDT

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.

Who Cares About Multi-tenancy?

Fri, 11 May 2012 03:12:00 EDT

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.

Media Company Employs the Latest in Collaborative Commerce

Thu, 10 May 2012 12:35:00 EDT

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.

Modernization of IT: Solving a Legacy of Business Problems & Applications

Thu, 10 May 2012 09:30:00 EDT

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.

Yahoo Pushed to Name New Interim CEO

Thu, 10 May 2012 09:00:00 EDT

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.

Shadow IT is a Good Thing for IT Organizations

Thu, 10 May 2012 05:00:00 EDT

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 [...]

Why Infrastructure Technology Is Challenging

Wed, 09 May 2012 13:00:00 EDT

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.

Balancing Completion and Perfection in Agile/Scrum Projects

Wed, 09 May 2012 10:00:00 EDT

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."

Could a Technology Loop Be Causing Your Epic Mind Fail?

Wed, 09 May 2012 08:38:00 EDT

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.

Yahoo Board Member Quits over ResumeGate

Wed, 09 May 2012 08:15:00 EDT

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.

With the Patent Battle, Has Apple Marked Samsung as Its Equal?

Tue, 08 May 2012 12:00:00 EDT

Has Apple, by filing so many patent / IPR violation suits against Samsung in so many countries, marked Samsung as its equal? For those of you who read Harry Potter, here is the parallel. Remember the prophecy? … “…The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches…Born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies…and the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal, but he will have power the Dark Lord knows not…and either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives…the one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord will be born as the seventh month dies…” …and what Dumbledore tells Harry that “Voldemort singled you out as the person who would be most dangerous to him — and in doing so, he made you the person who would be most dangerous to him!”

Yahoo Has Until Noon to Fire Its CEO - or Else

Mon, 07 May 2012 11:33:00 EDT

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.”

Online Collaboration Improves Procurement

Mon, 07 May 2012 10:45:00 EDT

Cox Enterprises, through the Ariba Network, manages multiple ERP systems for an improved eProcurement strategy. We'll learn how Cox, through the Ariba Network, manages multiple ERP systems for an improved eProcurement strategy, and has moved toward more efficient indirect spend efforts to improve ongoing operations and drive future growth across more than 50,000 employees. We have six separate ERP systems spanning major subsidiaries, including Cox Communications, Manheim, Cox Media Group, and AutoTrader.com. Cox is a very interesting company in that our business units are very diverse and very unique. Across four divisions and our holding company we have those six ERP systems.

Judge Refuses to Decide Oracle-HP Case

Mon, 07 May 2012 08:15:00 EDT

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.

Google Wins the Battle of the Interior Department

Mon, 07 May 2012 06:00:00 EDT

The US Department of the Interior has moved its e-mail business to Google, which sued when the agency gave Microsoft a five-year $59.3 million cloud-based e-mail contract in 2010 claiming the department’s research was “stale” and Microsoft’s security wasn’t certified for government use. It’s going with Google Apps for Government and Gmail instead. It will cover upwards of 90,000 seats. The agency’s been reconsidering its original decision since late last year. The deal is worth $34.9 million over seven years to Google and its reseller Onix Networking. Microsoft said it “will engage with our partners and DOI to review and understand the reasons for this decision.”

Geostatistics and the 500-mile Email Problem

Sun, 06 May 2012 11:00:00 EDT

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

Deconstructing Agile

Sat, 05 May 2012 14:00:00 EDT

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.”

BPM Without Barriers

Sat, 05 May 2012 10:00:00 EDT

Business processes manage the operational flow of business and when optimized achieve cost containment and flexibility as they need to be efficient and able to adapt to changing business conditions. The art of planning and implementing process management requires all the best cross-functional project management skills one can provide and tools that facilitate the task. Yet when trying to improve the management of processes, the business is often constrained by tool limitations that impose additional artificial barriers that impede success. These barriers result from design considerations and limitations of the capabilities, performance, and scalability. This article details these barriers to BPM and what is required to minimize or eliminate them. Process management has long been inspired by the latest available technology. Recall that Henry Ford was able to streamline the auto assembly process, which increased the efficiency of workers dramatically and brought the cost of the car down so that more people could buy cars. The technology inspiration for improving this process was the meat-processing conveyor. Regardless of whether the technology improvement has been mechanical or computer driven, process management has consistently leveraged it for increased benefit. The recent introduction of social networking and cloud technology will similarly deliver benefits to improved processes. Given the never-ending technology evolution, why then do product barriers to achieving success with BPM exist?

Activist Shareholder Finds Yahoo CEO Fudged His Resume

Fri, 04 May 2012 09:15:00 EDT

Ah, it seems that Yahoo’s new master Scott Thompson fudged his resume and claimed that his bachelors’ degree from Stonehill College was in accounting and computer science when it was really only in accounting. The college didn’t even offer a computer science degree when he was there. Yahoo has confirmed the “inadvertent error” which was made in the filings it sent to the SEC. According to All Things Digital, the “error” goes back 10 years to eBay where he became president of PayPal and could become a real problem for Yahoo. Third Point, the major Yahoo investor that has started a proxy fight to seat its own people on Yahoo’s board, is circulating the letter it wrote Thursday to the Yahoo board saying the padded credentials undermine Thompson’s credibility as a technology expert and reflect poorly on his character. It says, “Now more than ever Yahoo! investors need a trustworthy CEO.”

Oracle Wants At Least $777 Million from SAP in Retrial

Fri, 04 May 2012 08:00:00 EDT

Oracle wants at least $776.7 million in damages from SAP when the pair returns to court July 18 to retry Oracle’s copyright infringement case against its German rival and SAP’s now defunct third-party maintenance subsidiary TomorrowNow. A jury last year awarded Oracle a record $1.3 billion. The judge thought the award was way too fabulous and knocked it down 80% to a mere $272 million, saying it wasn’t supported by the evidence. Oracle refused to take the money, which is how it got a new trial. It wants that $1.3 billion back and told the judge it has a right to pursue what it claims are actual damages based on the “fair market value of the rights infringed.” It’s asked to be allowed to present evidence of what a hypothetical license would have been worth had it been willing to give TomorrowNow a license to the massive amount of IP it illegally downloaded off of Oracle’s servers. Oracle used that trick the last time through and it paid off.

The Spectrum of Hardware for the Cloud

Fri, 04 May 2012 03:45:00 EDT

IBM Slurps Up Tealeaf

Thu, 03 May 2012 13:16:00 EDT

IBM is going to buy Tealeaf Technology for its tealeaf-reading software, which lets marketing types analyze online buying data, spot trends in real-time and see if promotions work or not. They call the stuff Customer Experience Management (CEM) software. It’ll replay all the details of a customer’s visit to a web site to find site errors or issues and understand the impact that transaction failures have on business processes. It works across online and mobile devices. Terms were not disclosed.

Measuring Best Practices with Comprehensible Metrics

Thu, 03 May 2012 06:00:00 EDT

Best Practices are defined as a method or technique that has consistently shown results superior to those achieved with other means, and that is used as a benchmark. What this means is that they have actually been proven. Proven? How do you prove that one method or technique is objectively better than another?

Carlyle Cuts its IPO Price

Thu, 03 May 2012 03:00:00 EDT

The big and presumably still powerful Carlyle Group, the private equity house that used to collect famous former politicians like dandelions and where ex-IBM CEO Lou Gerstner went after he retired, cut its IPO price Wednesday evening to $22 a pop. The Wall Street Journal said Carlyle spent weeks contending its $23-$25 range was “conservatively priced.” Evidently it’s looking for a good first day out. Guess we’ll see. Carlyle has $147 billion under management. It should raise around $671 million although private equity as a class is down. Its Nasdaq symbol will be CG.

What Is Consumerization of IT?

Wed, 02 May 2012 10:00:00 EDT

If you are unfamiliar with the term “Consumerization of IT” or CoIT then you may think that it means “IT has become a consumer product”. But that is not interpretation which is generally accepted. Traditionally, adoption of Information Technology used to start with defense & government followed by the business enterprise. Those technologies used to be sold in low volume and high cost. Only over a period of time cost used to come down making it affordable for the individual consumer to adopt such technologies.

Book Excerpt: Introduction to Design Patterns

Tue, 01 May 2012 13:28:00 EDT

Design patterns are one of the most successful advances in software engineering, by any measure. The history of design patterns is a strange one though, and somewhere along the way, much of their original utility and elegance has been forgotten, misplaced, or simply miscommunicated. This book can fill in some possible gaps for those who have experience with design patterns and can provide students new to the literature a better way of consuming it bite by bite. When it comes down to it, the design patterns literature as it stands is a collection of rather large nuggets of information of varying degrees of digestibility. This text is a foundation that provides a practitioner familiar with design patterns a methodology for placing those nuggets into a larger system of understanding and provides the student new to design patterns an approach for learning them from basic principles and in smaller pieces that make sense individually. The Elemental Design Patterns are truly elemental in that they form a foundation for design patterns as a discipline.

Utilities and M2M: Four Challenges En Route to Smart Grid

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 15:50:00 EDT

As utilities shift to smart meters and more customer-oriented systems under new government-mandated Smart Grid initiatives, they will quickly face the need to handle billions of real-time energy utilization transactions. In this new energy arena, the high volume, low-cost model of M2M is the optimal solution to support energy utilities’ communications infrastructure needs. Indeed, the proliferation of SIMs in new meters to enable remote reads is alone driving massive amounts of M2M transactions. That said, M2M and Smart Grid are a natural fit – but tough choices still remain for utilities.

The 'All of the Above' Approach to Improving Application Performance

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 08:15:00 EDT

You probably recall years ago the old “Tastes Great vs Less Filling” advertisements. The ones that always concluded in the end that the beer in question was not one or the other, but both. Whenever there are two ostensibly competing technologies attempting to solve the same problem, we run into the same old style argument. This time, in the SPDY versus Web Acceleration debate, we’re inevitably going to arrive at the conclusion it’s both less filling and tastes great. In general, what may appear on the surface to be competing technologies are actually complementary. Testing by Carnegie Mellon supports this conclusion, showing marked improvements in web application performance when both SPDY and Web Acceleration techniques are used together.

Great Solutions for Big Problems…

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 08:30:00 EDT

Managed Services Providers face a variety of challenges. They struggle trying to sell an intangible and invisible service. Quoting Harry Beckwith, author of the book “Selling the Invisible”: ‘You can’t see them – so how do you sell them? That’s the problem with services.’ However some services can be transformed into something tangible, PR services can be touched and sensed in the publications for instance, telephone services are sensed when making a call; but the IT managed services are never sensed, these services just are there. The computer works, the antivirus is updated, the printer prints, they are supposed to do so, isn’t it? It is their purpose. But behind all this normally expected performance are the IT Managed Services, intangible and invisible to users, but a key activity for the devices’ deploy and performance.

IBM Rips Out Its Siebel Seats

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 08:00:00 EDT

IBM is ripping out a reported 67,000 internal Siebel seats that it’s been paying Oracle for – the same Oracle that competes with IBM at the top of its voice – and replacing them with SugarCRM. It’s to say the least a boost for SugarCRM, which is doubtlessly thinking IPO at some point, because not only is IBM reselling SugarCRM, it’s eating the dog food – a great reference as well as a way into the enterprise. Sugar’s chief attraction is reportedly the fact that unlike, say, Salesforce.com, Sugar is agnostic about clouds. You can use its cloud or anybody’s cloud like, say, IBM’s SmartCloud Enterprise. And it’s not as cumbersome, restrictive and expensive as, ahem, older solutions. SugarCRM claims to be the third-biggest CRM vendor out there with 10 million downloads to its credit, over a million active users, some 7,000 organizations using it and 30,000 registered developers.

First of Ivy Bridge Bows

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 08:15:00 EDT

Monday morning in San Francisco Intel wheeled out Ivy Bridge, its first cutting-edge 22nm 3-D tri-gate transistor widgets, which are also its third-generation Core processors. They were originally supposed to ship in volume the end of last year and again a few weeks ago. These first quad-core Core i5 and i7 chips are meant for desktops and conventional laptops targeting gaming, video editing and content. In a couple of months Intel will have dual-cores for Ultrabooks that compete with Apple’s ultra-thin, power-efficient MacBook Air. Server chips are also on the way.

The Importance of the Well-Designed API

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 05:15:00 EDT

We have worked with many APIs here at Layer 7. And over time we’ve seen it all, ranging from the good to the bad. We even see the downright ugly. Now a good API is a beautiful thing; it encourages innovation, abstracts appropriately, and is designed with enough forethought that nobody needs to change it down the road. Resiliency is a good quality in an API. APIs are a little like cockroaches in that they will likely outlive the human race.

Knoa Software Launches EPM 7.0 for Oracle Siebel CRM

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 16:01:00 EDT

Knoa Software, a provider of end-user experience and performance management software, on Tuesday announced the availability of Knoa Experience and Performance Manager (EPM) 7.0 for Oracle(R) Siebel(R) CRM. This latest platform offers Oracle Siebel CRM users detailed reports and metrics that help identify, prioritize and take action on end-user experience and performance issues impacting adoption and effectiveness. With Knoa EPM 7.0 for Oracle Siebel CRM, there is immediate data available to the support teams on potential errors, both system and user, that can be leveraged to assist in resolving issues. The impact is substantial and immediate. Both the quantity and length of phone calls to resolve the user issues can be reduced, often by 10 to 20 percent or more, with profound positive financial impact, improvement in productivity and increases in user satisfaction.

Preparing for TOGAF Certification

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 15:15:00 EDT

If you are preparing for TOGAF certification here are links to pages containing free sample practice questions. TOGAF 9 Foundation Level Certification – Question set 1 TOGAF 9 Foundation Level Certification – Question set 2 TOGAF 9 Certified Level Certification – Question on topics not available on the study guide TOGAF 9 Certification Multiple Choice Questions by Chris Eaton iQuiz – Quick Quiz System

Facebook Buys $550M Worth of AOL Patents Off Microsoft

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 08:45:00 EDT

Facebook and Microsoft said Monday on Facebook’s web site that Facebook is buying the lion’s share of the 925 US patents and patent applications that Microsoft just bought from AOL for $1.06 billion. Facebook – and Microsoft has an investment in Facebook – is buying 650 of patents off of Microsoft for $550 million cash. A quick turnover for Microsoft considering its deal with AOL hasn’t closed yet and the whole megillah needs regulatory approval. In fact, Microsoft’s general counsel Brad Smith remarked in a prepared statement that “Today’s agreement with Facebook enables us to recoup over half of our costs while achieving our goals from the AOL auction. As we said earlier this month, we had submitted the winning AOL bid in order to obtain a durable license to the full AOL portfolio and ownership of certain patents that complement our existing portfolio.”

Agile Testing Challenges - Web Services Testing Issues

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 07:30:00 EDT

Now that Agile development is mainstream and each day more teams are migrating from Waterfall to Agile development, it's important to understand how this methodology shift impacts testing teams. This blog is the first in a series of blogs where I will break down the common challenges that Agile testing teams face and talk about how to solve them. For those that aren't familiar with the differences between Agile and Waterfall development, here is a quick refresher:

Client Case Study: When Business Tools Break

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 09:15:00 EDT

I got a call a few weeks ago from a NYC-based foreign language school that was looking for a software makeover. They were using Google Spreadsheets to manage their student, class, and payment information, and for the previous year were happy as can be. After all, Google Spreadsheets offers some awesome collaborative capabilities: simultaneous spreadsheet [...]

Form(ing) Standards - Recycling Old Stuff Can Be Incredibly Painful

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 08:00:00 EDT

I am on my favorite soapbox - "standards" - standards around form filling. Generally speaking, no discussion of standards could be complete without an assessment of the state of play of the not so humble Adobe Portable Document Format or as most of us know it, PDF. I debated the merits of the PDF back in the late 1990s (an astonishing 14 years ago) and with the passage of time, a few things have changed but in some respects they are the same. The reason this topic is quite focal for me at the moment, is the fact that I continue to see customers and prospects take a hard line in wanting to retain their existing PDF documents and at the same time, make them more technically relevant to the continuing trend of trying to eliminate paper forms and improve back office efficiency by avoiding the need for people to laboriously transcribe data from electronic forms into application screens of key record keeping systems like SAP ERP. This is an area where Winshuttle has made some significant in-roads in helping customers eliminate transcription from Excel and InfoPath into back office ERP systems through an integration layer built around the Microsoft product suite.

Twenty-Thousand Men Pregnant Because of Bad Data

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 06:30:00 EDT

Millions or even billions have been spent caring for tens of thousands of pregnant men in the U.K. For UK’s chronically underfunded National Health System, a few hundred million or a few billion is a very big deal. Especially given how easily this problem could have been prevented with properly designed applications, integration software, and diagnosis codes. Using manual data or application integration techniques; poorly designed codes that are easy to mis-enter; badly written applications that don't check for basic things like "If you're a guy, you're probably not pregnant" - all a recipe for expensive disaster. And all common place. Bad Data and Sick Applications. And simply unacceptable.

The Data Explosion

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 08:00:00 EDT

Data explosion is one of the biggest issues facing IT today. The amount of data that organizations store has grown exponentially in the last 10 years. According to Gartner research director April Adams, data capacity on average in enterprises grows at 40 percent to 60 percent year over year. Data is the lifeblood of any business, and companies of all sizes are struggling with the increasing amount of data stored on their networks. Because storage capacity has increased and costs have declined, many IT administrators have become more lax about what they allow their users to store on the corporate network and for how long. While the ability to store increasing amounts of data empowers organizations, it also presents them with the challenge of managing all of that information. As network storage grows, users are also adding an additional layer of complexity as they become increasingly dependent on ubiquitous access: they want to be able to access their data from wherever they are and from a variety of devices, including smartphones, tablets and laptops.