The top speech technology vendors gathered in San Francisco for SpeechTEK West, the biannual industry conclave (February 21-23). The industry was out in force for the show, with virtually all of the top vendors making announcements.
Although the XML market has so far been focused mostly on data management and Web services, XML also works well for content management. With the right tools, it's a natural for tracking information created by humans, including the contents of product manuals, technical material, Web sites, and program documentation.
The next 18 months will be a make-or-break period for vendors in the speech technology market, say the authors of a new report. For speech to become an effective enabling technology, one that enterprises take seriously, vendors must do more than simply automate touchtone activities, the report argues. They must deliver higher-order business benefits instead of incremental improvements, and they must develop a horizontal technology layer, an abstraction layer that allows the simple interfacing of speech with enterprise IT infrastructure.
One of the more intriguing pieces of news to come out of this week's EclipseCon 2005 conference is the Eclipse Foundation's announcement that it has completed its first-ever roadmap. The roadmap document, which the foundation plans to revise annually, is intended to provide visibility to the open-source community around Eclipse and the Eclipse ecosystem, explains Eclipse Foundation Executive Director Mike Milinkovich.
Computer security guru Gary McGraw is famous for pushing developers to take responsibility for building secure software. The operations side can only do so much with buggy applications and flawed systems, he has said. It's up to "the guys who build stuff for a living" to stop thinking about security as a feature, and to begin seeing it as an emergent property of a whole system.
Nexaweb Technologies Inc., Cambridge, Mass., has won systems integrator SoftCon AG's benchmark test for its Siemens AG Web-based application project. Siemens engaged SoftCon to plan and implement a very large and complex, Web-based application for its worldwide sales and engineering staff.
Processes don't get much more hands-on than the work carried out in a specialized branch of the clinical laboratory services industry known as anatomic pathology. In most AP labs, the procedures for processing the hundreds of bits of skin, gallbladder, breast lumps, and other tissue specimens that flow into the facilities every day are carried out by specially trained technologists. Each specimen must be described, sectioned, dehydrated, and embedded into small blocks of paraffin that are sliced for slides. As they are traditionally carried out, manually, these procedures are both time-consuming and vulnerable to human error.
A February report from IDC gives a bullish outlook for IT spending in both the U.S. and worldwide, a welcome indicator that companies are apparently ready to spend on IT investments.
"There is a lot of money walking around the show floor," noted open-source evangelist Bruce Perens, describing how Linux has turned into a commercial marketplace. Citing surveys showing that 53 percent of CIOs expect open source to dominate their IT environments by 2007, Novell chairman and CEO Jack Messman claimed that Linux is ready for the enterprise today.
To regulate or not to regulate; that was the question for a panel of IT industry notables at last week's RSA security conference in San Francisco. In an on-stage debate that sparked some heated exchanges, the panel--which included former White House cybersecurity czar Richard Clarke, Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) president Harris Miller, TechNet president Rick White, and IT security expert and author Bruce Schneier--took on the issue of software liability and whether there should be more government regulation of the private sector, including the technology industry.
Parasoft Corp., the Monrovia, Calif., provider of solutions that automatically prevent software errors, announced the availability of Jtest 6.0 at LinuxWorld in Boston last week.
Microsoft and Nokia, archrivals in the enterprise mobility applications space, announced two agreements at the 3GSM World Congress in Cannes, France this week that will make it easier for wireless app developers to synch Nokia's handhelds with Microsoft's Exchange Server 2003 and for consumers to download and play music using Microsoft's Media Player.
Software development shops using Seapine Software's Surround SCM for software change management can now seamlessly integrate a Java-based IDE from JetBrains Inc.
The 14th annual RSA 2005 Security Conference and Expo, under way this week in San Francisco, saw an upstart and an old rival announce products and initiatives aimed at taking market share from the event's namesake.
Companies that used manual tracking techniques in 2004 to meet initial Sarbanes-Oxley compliance deadlines are now ripe for considering tools to automate compliance tracking, according to analysts and industry watchers.
Bill Gates, Microsoft chairman and chief software architect, made two big announcements during his conference-opening keynote at this week's RSA security conference in San Francisco. He told attendees that his company was on track to deliver the first version of "the ultimate mail virus protection" for Windows users by the end of this year. He also revealed that Microsoft will be releasing a new version of the Internet Explorer browser with strong, built-in security features.
On paper, the Capability Maturity Model Index seems about as different from XP and other agile programming disciplines as it can be. This is true to some degree in practice, too, because CMMI and agile adherents typically approach software development from decidedly different viewpoints. At the same time, experts say, they are complementary to a surprising degree, and there's very little, if any, irreconcilability, between the two prominent paradigms.
Borland Software initiated the next phase of its software delivery optimization strategy last week with the release of Borland Core Software Delivery Platform. Formerly code-named "Project Themis," the Core SDP provides what Borland is describing as an application lifecycle management environment with integrated tools optimized for job function and cross-role interaction.
Because the importance of identity has been elevated across the board, Liberty Alliance, a global consortium for open federated identity standards and identity-based Web services, has released ID-WSF 2.0, the second version of its Web services framework specifications.
Microsoft gave attendees at last week's VSLive conference in San Francisco a closer look at its new Web services-oriented "Indigo" communications infrastructure. During his conference keynote, Microsoft SVP Eric Rudder described Indigo as "a natural extension to the .Net Framework," which will enable developers to build more secure, reliable, and interoperable applications.