IBM's decision this past week to sell a majority stake in its personal computer business to Lenovo Group, a vendor based in China, for $1.75 billion in cash, stock, and debt assumption, is probably as much about getting into new markets as it is about getting out of the PC business.
If its manufacturers can guarantee uninterrupted service, Linux could gain traction in the enterprise as a messaging platform within the next two years, according to a recent survey.
Businesses seen adopting the techniques and development practices of the open source community. Corporate IT and R&D organizations face many of the same distributed development challenges already overcome by the open source community, says Colin Bodell, senior vice president of product development at VA Software.
Speaking last week in San Francisco, Tony Redmond, vice president and chief technology officer of HP Services, said his company was offering the new security suite because cyber attacks "are becoming more complex, more malignant, more persistent, and more pervasive."
Oracle Corporation kicks off its OpenWorld San Francisco business and technology conference on Sunday. The focus of the five-day event (Dec. 5-9) will be Oracle's ongoing grid computing strategy, launched earlier this year with the release of the Oracle 10g product line.
The open-source stack got a little higher this past week with the launch of a new Java platform for rapid application deployment. Called JOE, and developed by El Segundo, Calif.-based Gluecode, the new offering is built on core open-source technologies from the Apache Software Foundation, including the Pluto portal framework, the Geronimo J2EE application server, the Derby database (formerly Cloudscape), and the Agila business process management (BPM) engine.
If computers are so smart, why can't they fix themselves? Every IT pro has asked that question at least once. Cadir Lee began obsessing about it back in 1997. Before "self healing" became an industry buzz phrase, Lee and his partner, Scott Dale, were pioneering the category, which has evolved into what we think of today as "support automation."
Three IT industry heavyweights, Fujitsu Limited, Hitachi, and NEC Corp., are releasing Reliable Messaging for Grid Services (RM4GS), an open-source implementation of the Web Services Reliability (WS-Reliability) standard.
Warnings abound about spaghetti code, especially in legacy COBOL programs, but Michael Herr, senior director of IT at Germany’s Deutsche Post, says watch out for "spaghetti infrastructure."
Aiming to get more developers outside the company involved in the process of refining the Java platform, Sun Microsystems last week posted an early-release of version 6.0 of its Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE), code-named "Mustang."
Zach Cox is a software engineer at Charles River Analytics, Inc. Cambridge, Mass.-based development shop that for the past 20 years has built intelligence and decision support applications for military, government and commercial business use. Most recently it developed software NASA scientists used for planning treks for the Mars Rover. Cox is the chief developer of BNET Builder, an IDE designed to make it easy to build Bayesian networks for making predictions and diagnoses based on available information.
As enterprise trends go, few are as likely to keep the network security guys up at night as the growth of telecommuting. According to a study release this fall by the International Telework Association & Council, the number of employees who performed any kind of work from home grew from 41.3 million in 2003 to 44.4 million in 2004.
ObjectWeb, the open-source infrastructure consortium, announced this week that it has added eXo Platform SARL to its roster. The privately held French company provides support and services for the eXo Platform, an open-source enterprise portal, which will now be hosted by ObjectWeb.
Sun Microsystems launched the much-anticipated new version of its Solaris operating system this week, and announced an overhauled pricing model designed to compete with Linux.
The big brains on the Java team at Sun Microsystems have what Graham Hamilton, Sun's VP and Fellow for Java Platform and Architecture, calls "a secret obsession." "The Java developer base is large, and we're happy about that, but we want to grow that base even more," he says. "To do that, we believe that we have to simplify development to make it easier for all developers to write large, rich applications."
Oracle Corp. is poised to make what a company executive calls a “big push” in the business intelligence market in an effort to get customers to take advantage of as much functionality as BI tools have to offer.
Novell unveiled the latest version of its Linux OS last week. Built on technology the Waltham, Mass-based software maker picked up with its recent acquisition of SuSE, Novell Linux Desktop 9 is aimed squarely at enterprise users.
Geographically distributed software development projects are fast becoming the norm, and managing far flung dev teams is shaping up to become one of the biggest challenges faced by enterprise IT today. Conference calls, email, and instant messaging are basic to the process, but the increasing complexity of the software being developed is stirring up demand for what industry icon Grady Booch has described as "new development environments that support interactions between geographically disparate stake holders."
Supercomputing isn't just for science any more--it's not even just for supercomputers. So-called high-performance technical computing (HPTC) is spreading beyond traditional academic and governmental environments, and emerging as a serious option for enterprise IT.
Requirements are the foundation of every software development project. Good, bad, or ugly, everything gets built on them. Karl E. Wiegers believes that developers can put a little rebar in that foundation by recognizing a set of nearly universal requirements principals he calls "cosmic truths."