The software industry is obsessed with commoditization, has been since the crash. Commodities pose a fundamental threat to the long-term profitability and revenue growth of traditional software vendors. It’s something to be feared, a fate worse than death—or at least equal to it.
It’s April 12, and do you know where your Windows XP systems stand? The mechanism to temporarily disable delivery of Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) expires today. Microsoft allowed temporary disablement through Windows Update and automatic updates for a period of eight months, starting August 16, 2004, to give customers more time for validation and testing of the update. But now, time’s up.
If one of your considerations in planning a .NET or J2EE project is finding developers with the right skill set, your location may be a factor.
Application Development Trends is launching three new blogs this month! Two of the three blogs--AppSide and Enterprise Insider--will be written by Java programming experts.
Microsoft hopes to lure more developers into the .NET camp with a free Java to .NET Framework Migration Workshop. The workshop features online, self-paced training designed to introduce Java developers to .NET development concepts based on using their Java skills as a frame of reference.
Sun Microsystems this week named the advisory board that will steer its nascent OpenSolaris developer community toward self-governance.
Sun Microsystems’ president and COO Jonathan Schwartz kicked off the second annual Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) in San Francisco on April 5 with a keynote that painted Sun as a fierce friend of the free and open-source software (FOSS) movement.
Moving data from one system to another is easy; making it usable outside the application that created it is anything but. This is not a new problem, and yet a surprising number of enterprise integration projects underestimate the difficulty of making data fully compatible with the requirements of other applications or systems.
Just a month after announcing a series of upgrades to its PowerCenter data integration product, Informatica Corp. has teamed up with an outside company to augment its platform.
The proliferation of sophisticated information technologies in the healthcare industry is all but universal today. Hospitals, clinics, labs--virtually all medical facilities--are highly computerized, generating mountains of electronic medical records.
Leading Web design and development tools such as Macromedia Dreamweaver can make Web site development much faster and easier but often leave lots to be desired when developers want to actually write new code.
Traditionally, data warehouses have had a one-way relationship with the transaction systems that supply the raw data. However, with the advent of SOA, the data warehouse and the transaction systems can be looped, each feeding the other. This is key for effective business intelligence and business analytics. In his report," Service Oriented Architecture Assimilates Data Warehousing," Lou Agosta, an analyst at Forrester Research, describes the feedback loop.
Until recently, most IT managers have focused on deploying service-oriented architectures on transaction systems and production apps, but now, some managers are exploring how to apply SOAs to the data warehouse and activities like business intelligence and business analytics.
Siebel Systems upped the ante in the increasingly competitive hosted customer relationship management (CRM) market with the launch of yet another new version of its CRM OnDemand software. This is the San Mateo, CA-based company's seventh new release of the product in just over a year-which should leave no doubt that Siebel is serious about hosted CRM, says Bruce Cleveland, Siebel's SVP and OnDemand/SMB general manager.
Oracle's acquisition of identity management vendor Oblix expands the company's ID management capabilities beyond its own products. Oracle has been offering ID and access management solutions for more than two years, but the Redwood Shores, CA-based company's much publicized acquisition of PeopleSoft created a need for an ID solution that could yield an enlarged, heterogeneous product set.
Java developers are getting a chance to test drive some new features proposed for the next major release of Sun Microsystems' Java Studio Creator visual development environment, code-named Thresher Shark. The preview features are not yet fully supported, says Dan Roberts, manager of Sun's developer tools marketing group, but are offered to give developers a chance to try them out and provide feedback.
If you didn't know it already, IBM Corp.'s billion dollar-plus acquisition of ETL specialist Ascential Software Corp. confirmed it: data integration is a big business. Consultancy META Group, for example, says that ETL revenues will grow at a 10 to 20 percent clip over the next three to five years, and market watcher Forrester Research puts 2004 ETL revenues at close to $1 billion.
The implosion is over, the future is here, now what are vendors going to do about it? That was the question asked of 900 attendees, mostly vendors, at this year's recent IDC Directions 2005 Conference in Boston.
Will 2005 be the year requirements management (RM) comes of age, goes mainstream, and stops being an underutilized and unloved niche function of the software development process? Telelogic, maker of the venerable DOORS RM product line, thinks so.
Old-style, monolithic business process models that emphasize tight controls and stability are quickly giving way to new distributed models that depend on openness, flexibility, and constant change. And IT architectures must evolve in several specific ways to support those changes.