Developers who focus on the iSeries platform got a long-awaited boost last week when IBM announced that it is greatly expanding its support for ISVs, tool providers and partners who write applications for its iSeries midrange platform.
IBM again showed that it is nothing if not savvy when it comes to Linux with its recent Linuxworld announcement of Chiphopper. The program, also called the IBM eServer Application Server Advantage for Linux, is a package of support and testing tools to help ISVs port x86 Linux applications to IBM architecture.
Intel's out-going CEO Craig Barrett delivered the opening keynote at this week's Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco (March 1-3). Along with the standard trade-show technology touting, Barrett waxed philosophical on a range of issues, from the 40th anniversary of Moore's Law, to the state of the U.S. education system.
IBM has announced that it is investing $100 million over the next three years to expand Linux support and technology across its Workplace software portfolio. The announcement comes as a result of high double-digit growth in 2004 in the number of customers deploying IBM collaboration software on Linux, according to company officials.
There may indeed be situations in which it makes sense to rip out a fully-functioning C or C++ application and replace it with its J2EE equivalent. Given the option, however, most codejockeys would probably prefer to let sleeping applications lie, especially if the programs in question are based on fairly trouble-free code that mostly does what it's supposed to do.
Borland Software confirmed rumors this week that it would be upgrading its membership in the Eclipse Foundation. The Scotts Valley, CA-based toolmaker, which was one of the founding member companies of the organization, has signed on as a strategic developer and member of the board.
In many corporate environments, it helps to know your pointy-headed adversary. So the next time you're presented with an impossible project deadline, unreasonable project requirements, or still another level of bureaucratic indirection, you might want to use a little psychology.
The number of companies jumping on the Eclipse bandwagon has been growing at a furious pace since it gained official independence from IBM last year. Twenty-six companies joined the Eclipse Foundation in 2004, bumping that organization's roster to 82 members, including strategic developers, add-in providers, and associate members.
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.