InfoWorld.com articles from April 2004

InfoWorld.com archives from April 2004

Interview: IBM-Candle deal helps On Demand; Deal improves systems management.
April 1, 2004... Byline: Ed Scannell With its acquisition on Thursday of its long-time business partner, Candle Corp., IBM believes it is taking an important step in moving its collection of On Demand strategies forward. Company officials believe Candle's...

Outsourcing can bring on security migraines; Sending your work overseas may save money, but it can pose a significant security threat.
April 2, 2004... Byline: Wayne Rash If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, you probably know about the outsourced medical records hubbub at the University of California San Francisco's hospital. If you don't, here's the gist. In a story that ran last...

Stretching out to the fabric; LeftHand partners with Crossroads to offer multiprotocol, SANs.
April 2, 2004... Byline: Mario Apicella One of my recent columns, "Storage for your health," triggered quite a few responses from both readers and vendors. Not surprisingly, most agreed that centralizing patient health records was a good idea. I was...

Microsoft eyes RFID opportunities; Company forms group to study requirements.
April 5, 2004... Byline: Paul Krill Emphasizing ambitions in RFID (radio frequency identification), Microsoft on Monday will announce formation of the Microsoft RFID Council, a multi-vendor group that will study requirements for Microsoft's software to...

HP introduces FATA disk; New hybrid disk arrives.
April 6, 2004... Byline: Scott Tyler Shafer Serial ATA, the alternative disk technology to Fibre Channel, just got its own alternative. Working with disk manufacturer Seagate, Hewlett Packard this week announced a new disk drive which possesses similar...

PLM solution to offer best practice model; Formation targets food and beverage industry.
April 6, 2004... Byline: Ephraim Schwartz Leveraging knowledge of new product development from its customer database that includes Coca-Cola, Cadbury Schweppes, Campbell's Soup, and Rich Products,Formation Systems, a product life cycle management ISV,...

Web development tool gets Linux boost; Innoopract updates Linux plug-in.
April 6, 2004... Byline: Paul Krill Innoopract on Tuesday will ship a version of its W4T (Worldwide Web Windowing Toolkit) Eclipse Plug-In development tool that adds Linux as a development platform. Previously, the product only supported development on...

Microsoft: Open source not cheaper; Executive touts company's Shared Source program.
April 6, 2004... Byline: Paul Krill By selling software through the traditional commercial model, Microsoft has been seen in some circles as the odd man out when it comes to the popular open source movement. But the company argues that it has a place in...

Java to gain multitasking improvements; Virtual machine to be fitted with application sharing.
April 6, 2004... Byline: Paul Krill SAN JOSE, CALIF. -- Sun Microsystems is working on improvements to the Java programming language to enable application multi-tasking within the JVM (Java virtual machine), a Sun official said at the ClusterWorld...

Microsoft kicks off ISV road show; Show to highlight Longhorn, Yukon.
April 6, 2004... Byline: Ed Scannell Microsoft will lug out the marketing drum for its next generation of products later this month when it kicks off its Worldwide ISV Road Show that will travel to 11 cities in nine countries. The Road Show, which...

Softek emerges from Fujitsu; Buyout frees company from hardware roots.
April 6, 2004... Byline: Scott Tyler Shafer A management-led buyout has freed Softek from Fujitsu. Incorporated as Softek Storage Solutions, the former subsidiary of Japan-based Fujitsu will continue to sell its SRM (storage resource management)...

Update: The mainframe also rises; While IBM unveils lower cost zSeries mainframe, Sun debuts its Mainframe Migration Program.
April 7, 2004... Byline: Ed Scannell IBM celebrated the 40th anniversary of its first mainframe on Wednesday with the unveiling of a lower cost version of its flagship e-Server zSeries z990 mainframe that it will target at mid-size companies. Not...

Oracle awaiting grid database upgrades; Spur expected in June.
April 7, 2004... Byline: Paul Krill San Jose, Calif. - Oracle anticipates a spur in upgrades to its grid-enabled Oracle Database 10g this June, when the first patch set will be released for the new system, an Oracle official said Wednesday. Interviewed...

IBM, Sun roll out new storage gear; Vendors cater to customer demand for more functionality, flexibility at a lower price.
April 7, 2004... Byline: Scott Tyler Shafer Further evidence that customers are king in the storage world can be found this week at Storage Networking World in Phoenix. Led by IBM and Sun Microsystems, storage vendors this week are introducing...

Windows, Linux thin client launched; Neoware unveils appliance that runs both Linux and Windows desktops.
April 7, 2004... Byline: Ephraim Schwartz As industry talk swirls around Linux desktops versus Windows desktops, Neoware, a leading provider of thin clients, unveiled this week a $199 appliance that runs both. The Capio One uses Citrix ICA, Microsoft...

Market for grid compute cycles is questionable, expert says; Globus Alliance's Ian Foster questions what the requirements would be.
April 8, 2004... Byline: Paul Krill SAN JOSE, CALIF. -- The emergence of a market for compute cycles generated by grids is a possibility, but questions remain about its viability, according to an expert on grid computing who spoke at the ClusterWorld...

Microsoft, Micro Focus team up for mainframe migration alliance; Program taps Wintel architecture to reduce costs, but is not scalable enough for all mainframe environments.
April 8, 2004... Byline: Tom Sullivan In a week fraught with mainframe-related news, Microsoft and Micro Focus are the latest companies to join the ruckus. Microsoft and Micro Focus teamed up on Thursday to detail a program designed to help customers...

IBM to unveil next version of WebSphere Commerce; Starter Stores to simplify management complexity.
April 8, 2004... Byline: Ephraim Schwartz and Ed Scannell At the end of April WebSphere Commerce, IBM will formally announce Version 5.6, an upgrade to its e-commerce platform that will include a new feature called Starter Stores. Starter Stores is a...

Java, BPELJ hailed; J2EE 1.4 boosters to gather.
April 9, 2004... Byline: Paul Krill Java is getting promotional boosts in the form of a gathering of vendors touting the latest Java specification and a whitepaper pertaining to BPELJ (Business Process Execution Language for Java), which links Java and Web...

FCC to rule on billion-dollar spectrum giveaway; Interference with public safety communications spurs battle.
April 9, 2004... Byline: Ephraim Schwartz A battle royal over spectrum is heating up once more in the cellular industry with Nextel Communications on one side and Verizon Wireless taking a leadership position representing most of the other wireless...

VoIP developments worth talking about; Some surprises emerged from the recent Voice on the Net show, including Microsoft advances.
April 9, 2004... Byline: Oliver Rist Lately, the trade-show scene has been improving. And by that I don't mean more people are showing up; I mean attending companies are actually making interesting announcements. After bamboozling my poor senior editor...

Liability time bomb; You haven't heard about big data-security lawsuits so far, but it's just a matter of time.
April 9, 2004... Byline: Wayne Rash "Accountability breeds caution," explains Washington attorney Andrew Greenwald. Greenwald, who specializes in professional negligence, liability, and personal injury cases in Washington and Maryland, says it's only a...

Banking on flexibility; New Brocade switches bridge entry-level and corporate SANs.
April 9, 2004... Byline: Mario Apicella Did you enjoy Storage Networking World Spring? I did. At times it was exhausting, but I definitely got a lot out of the conference. I probably shook more hands than a politician at a fund-raising dinner, but I also...

McDonald's offers low carbs and high bandwidth; IT managers worry about security.
April 13, 2004... Byline: Ephraim Schwartz No one can accuse McDonald's of not staying abreast of the latest trends. Just recently they began offering a revised menu to keep up with the current low carb diet craze in the United States. Now the world's...

OASIS backs reusable content spec for docs; Darwin Information Typing Architecture committee formed.
April 14, 2004... Byline: Paul Krill OASIS this week said it has formed a technical committee to advance Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA), an XML-based document creation and management standard for authoring reusable content in documents. ...

MySQL readies preview of clustered database; Mission-critical apps eyed for open source product.
April 14, 2004... Byline: Paul Krill Looking to boost its presence in enterprise applications, MySQL on Wednesday will make the clustered version of its open source database available in a preview version, with the production version set for release in the...

Oracle touts grids, SOAs with developer tool; JDeveloper 10g ships.
April 14, 2004... Byline: Paul Krill Oracle on Wednesday will ship Oracle JDeveloper 10g, which is a version of its Java and Web services development environment that the company says features grid enablement and support for SOAs (service-oriented...

Compuware takes on Java, .Net with Uniface; Tools vendor boosts SOAs through upgrade.
April 15, 2004... Byline: Paul Krill Bucking the established Java and .Net application camps, Compuware on Monday will roll out Uniface 8.4, an upgrade to the company's alternative development platform that features enhancements for Web services and SOAs...

Microsoft opens up Visio schemas; A goal is to enable more dynamic interaction with Visio diagrams.
April 15, 2004... Byline: Ed Scannell Microsoft on Thursday announced it has released documentation that allows corporate and third-party developers to take full advantage of the XML-based schemas, called DatadiagramML, in its Office Visio diagramming tool....

Embarcadero boosts data life cycle management tools; Code analysis, SQL Server, and MySQL support highlighted.
April 16, 2004... Byline: Paul Krill Data life cycle management vendor Embarcadero Technologies is planning a variety of products to boost functionality of popular enterprise databases, company officials said this week. Code Analyst, which will be an...

Hold the phone on your skepticism about Microsoft and VoIP; Combine SIP with Exchange and Active Directory integration, and Live Communications Server 2003 looks to be a winner.
April 16, 2004... Byline: Oliver Rist Oh frabjous day! A new hot button. I hardly expected the reader feedback I'd get writing about VoIP, but considering I was writing about it in a column devoted to Windows management in the enterprise, I suppose I should...

Security report's good start; National Cyber Security task force recommendations are great, but they don't go quite far enough.
April 16, 2004... Byline: Wayne Rash When the National Cyber Security Summit (NCSS) Corporate Governance task force released its much anticipated report a few days ago, it focused on five recommendations. The recommendations were very good, and every...

SNW in a nutshell? Busy show schedule yields results.
April 16, 2004... Byline: Mario Apicella I'm not sure it's possible to summarize the Storage Networking World show in a single column and still be accurate, but I'll try. Unless you spent all your time there golfing, you probably feel like I did at the...

NetBeans 3.6 IDE released; Open source platform's look and feel boosted.
April 19, 2004... Byline: Paul Krill NetBeansIDE 3.6, a major revision to the open source platform, is now available, adding improved windowing and debugging and backing for J2EE 1.4. The platform is intended to enable development of applications on...

Symbol launches ruggedized Windows devices; Units can tumble 2,000 times at 1 meter.
April 19, 2004... Byline: Ephraim Schwartz Promising that you can drop its newest model handheld from six feet without damage, use it in the rain, and have it tumble 2,000 times from a height of 1 meter, Symbol Technologies on Monday unveiled two...

Interview: The changing politics of grid; Platform Computing's Ian Baird notes possible emergence of markets for compute cycles.
April 21, 2004... Byline: Paul Krill Grid computing is a noteworthy topic, particularly this week, with formation of the Enterprise Grid Alliance by Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, and others. Platform Computing has been providing software to...

IBM delivers SOA enablers; New services help build business processes.
April 21, 2004... Byline: Ed Scannell IBM on Wednesday rolled out a series of software and services intended to help corporate users more efficiently create and deploy SOAs (service-oriented architectures) on their existing infrastructures. ...

Wi-Fi, wide area switching arrives; Broadbeam offers one of the first commercial solutions.
April 21, 2004... Byline: Ephraim Schwartz After two years of promises from the wireless industry, Broadbeam appears to be the first player to deliver seamless switching between wide area and wireless local area (Wi-Fi) networks. Dubbed...

E-marketplaces make a comeback; Quadrem doubles profits.
April 23, 2004... Byline: Ephraim Schwartz Quadrem, a global marketplace for industrial MRO (Maintenance, Repair, and Operations) products for the mining and metal industry, announced this week that it expects a 100 percent increase in revenues and a...

JetBrains storms into easy-to-use Java tools fray; Fabrique platform detailed.
April 23, 2004... Byline: Paul Krill Looking to make inroads in the market for easy-to-use Java tools, JetBrains this week launched an Early Access Program for JetBrains Fabrique, a RAD framework for building custom Web and enterprise applications. The...

Compuware, Segue smooth out apps management; Vantage 9.1, SilkCentral readied.
April 23, 2004... Byline: Paul Krill Compuware and Segue Software next week are bolstering their application management wares, with Compuware finding ways to boost performance without increasing a user's equipment expenses and Segue managing application...

Barking up the right monitor; The executives chose wisely in selecting the flat-screen SyncMaster monitors from Samsung.
April 23, 2004... Byline: Oliver Rist Occasionally, we all must bow and scrape before the might of the Silk Suits on High. The guys who know little of any practical value, yet somehow manage to be the ones in charge of signing all the checks. Most of...

TCP catastrophe? New router vulnerability could be a crisis -- but you can take steps to avert it.
April 23, 2004... Byline: Wayne Rash Last week's announcement hit the security community like a love tap from a sumo wrestler. Nearly every router on the Internet, even those only distantly connected, was vulnerable to a potential exploit that could shut...

Parting words on SNW; Did I mention there's good news out of Storage Networking World?
April 23, 2004... Byline: Mario Apicella I know, I know. You're wondering how I could possibly write another column on Storage Networking World. But I just can't keep all this good stuff to myself. And it is all good stuff, because this SNW took place...

J2EE 1.5 previewed; Ease of development to be highlighted.
April 26, 2004... Byline: Paul Krill SAN FRANCISCO -- Ease of development will be a core focus of J2EE 1.5, the follow-up to the much-heralded J2EE 1.4, a Sun Microsystems official said on Monday. J2EE 1.5 is due to be discussed at the JavaOne...

JBoss ponders open source ESB; Rules, workflow engines also candidates for open source.
April 26, 2004... Byline: Paul Krill SAN FRANCISCO - JBoss may offer an ESB under an open source format, with third-party software vendors able to offer ancillary products to boost the functionality of the ESB, JBoss CEO and Founder Mark Fleury said on...

Citrix looks to make access strategic; Execs outline plans, products to create 'access infrastructure'.
April 27, 2004... Byline: Tom Sullivan NEW YORK -- Under what CEO Mark Templeton called "a new Citrix," the company detailed plans and products Tuesday to transform access into a strategic forethought, rather than a mere afterthought. To that end,...

Sonic to bolster ESB; New 5.5 helps 'pervasive integration'.
April 28, 2004... Byline: Ed Scannell Sonic Software next month plans to deliver a new version of its Enterprise Software Bus (ESB) that is intended to significantly increase the availability and reliability of a range of different services interoperating...

IBM unveils virtualization technology; One server gets the strength of 10.
April 28, 2004... Byline: Ed Scannell IBM's Systems and Technology Group has introduced its Virtualization Engine, which allows a Unix-based system to be partitioned just like a mainframe, enabling it to run as many as 10 servers per processor. Three...

Software AG readies ESB play; Web services are key to plan.
April 29, 2004... Byline: Paul Krill Software AG plans to join the ESB (enterprise service bus) fray next month with the introduction of software to manage distributed Web services in the enterprise. The company's Service Integrator product will be a...

Eliminating threats on the network; Sygate's CEO discusses security solutions for large enterprises.
April 29, 2004... Byline: Wayne Rash Sygate is a company that specializes in endpoint security solutions for large enterprises. John De Santis, Sygate's president and CEO, recently met with InfoWorld Senior Analyst Wayne Rash to discuss the issue of...

Venetica, IBM bridge unstructured and structured content; Companies link VeniceBridge with DB2 Information Integrator.
April 29, 2004... Byline: Cathleen Moore IBM and Venetica this week announced a partnership designed to help customers more easily access and work with both unstructured and structured information through a single SQL-based query. The partnership...

JBoss's Fleury: The 'benevolent dictator' is good for Java; Open source hailed, but not for programming language.
April 30, 2004... Byline: Paul Krill JBoss is best-known as the provider of the JBoss open source application server, and it has also been known for having disagreements with Sun about licensing of Java test suites. But those disagreements were resolved in...

Open Text unveils fruit of acquisitions; Livelink Web Content Management Server gains flexibility.
April 30, 2004... Byline: Cathleen Moore Enterprise content management vendor Open Text this week launched its first product created from integrating technology from two acquisitions the company made earlier this year. The Livelink Web Content...

ESB market heats up; Sonic Software's CTO discusses the implications of Microsoft's Indigo technology.
April 30, 2004... Byline: Ed Scannell Once a lone voice in the wilderness extolling the virtues of Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) technology, Sonic Software now finds itself with lots of company. The idea of ESBs is to offer a standards-based integration...

Microsoft will deliver better security any day now; Windows XP SP2 promises a host of safety technologies to gird workstations.
April 30, 2004... Byline: Oliver Rist It's the Wild West out there. On our last trip to the ANCL (Advanced Network Computing Laboratory) at the University of Hawaii's Manoa campus, in between beach-ogling and getting our notebooks ripped off, we left a...

Clearing up the Euro-security picture; EU expansion will ease some security complexities.
April 30, 2004... Byline: Wayne Rash About the time you read this, the European Union will have grown by an additional 10 nations, eight of which were once part of the Soviet Union. It's a time of great change for Europe, obviously, but also for the rest of...

A MAID for your archives; New cabinet challenges traditional approach to data protection.
April 30, 2004... Byline: Mario Apicella Although it rhymes with RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks), MAID (massive array of inactive disks) is a completely new approach to storing data. It's an approach that is carving out its own niche among...