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.
EMC's announcement last week of a huge new release of its Documentum enterprise content management family illustrates the allure of helping companies with growing content and work process management challenges.
Meeting compliance requirements is of utmost importance for WestJet, a Canadian low-fare airline. To stay in business, the company must comply with the Canadian Multilateral Instrument 52-109/111 financial governance requirements.
If you're not nervous about identity management and security in your organization, you're just not paying attention. Recent ID heists at ChoicePoint and Bank of America lit a veritable bonfire under Congressional behinds, and lawmakers are set to put the onus for safeguarding customer info squarely on the shoulders of the enterprise.
Few phenomena have changed enterprise computing quite like the recent explosive growth of wireless networks and the subsequent proliferation of mobile devices. Mobile networks now cover 80 percent of the world's population, according to analysts at Forrester Research, which means that more than five billion people are within range of a cellular network. Connected PDAs and a remarkably capable generation of smart phones have linked untethered workers to the company network like never before.
Web services are supposed to work together to make life easier. Yet they only work well together if they're designed properly. WebLayers in Cambridge, Mass., has introduced an enterprise software tool to aid in effective governance of XML, Web services and SOA to ensure interoperability.
We tend to think of data as either structured (the roughly 20 percent that fits neatly into the cells of a relational database) or unstructured (the audio, video, e-mail, and Word files that are usually referred to as content, and which constitute the remaining 80 percent). But thanks to the Extensible Markup Language (XML), there's a third category emerging: semi-structured data.
IBM's announcement on Monday that it plans to buy Ascential Software Corp. for $1.1 billion in cash emphasizes the rapidly growing importance of the enterprise data integration market. Along with consulting services, Ascential offers products for enterprise meta-data management and integration, useful for building data warehouses and complex business intelligence systems.
Enterprises are increasingly turning to service oriented architectures (SOAs), both to exploit SOA's potential for eliminating redundancies and accelerating project delivery though the consolidation and reuse of Web services, and as a means of streamlining business processes among departments and organizations.
IBM has introduced a new spam-fighting tool that analyzes the domain identity of an e-mail message to help block spam. The approach uses a challenge/response method, but sends the challenge only if e-mail appears to be spoofed.
Has the traditional integrated development environment gone the way of the dinosaur? The company that invented the IDE seems to think so...sort of.
Compuware Corp. has enhanced its QACenter automated functional and performance testing suites in both the enterprise and performance editions. The enterprise edition now includes TestPartner 5.3, the most recent version of Compuware's functional testing software. The performance edition features enhancements to Compuware's load testing application in QALoad 5.2.
Although the enterprise service bus, or ESB, has only really become a product category recently, the term is getting plenty of mention lately. With the convergence of ubiquitous Web services and an IT focus on reuse and cost cutting, it's a good time for vendors with ESB products.
Software tools to simplify and accelerate Web application development continue to evolve. Along those lines, ClearNova is shipping a revised version of its rapid application development software platform, ThinkCAP 6.0, that helps non-J2EE developers build and maintain Web applications.
JBoss Inc. launched its first annual user conference in Atlanta, March 1-2, by unveiling two initiatives designed to promote its “professional open-source” strategy and expand the JBoss ecosystem.