InfoWorld articles from August 2005

InfoWorld archives from August 2005

Xythos doctors doc management - Xythos Enterprise Document Management Suite 5.0 delivers capability without complexity.
August 1, 2005... Some technologies sit by the wayside because they take too much training and effort to use. EDM (enterprise document management) -- which often intimidates users with complex workflows and intricate interfaces -- is a perfect example. Xythos...

Microsoft delivers glimpse of Vista - Beta 1 packed full of security features.
August 1, 2005... After four years of talking the talk, Microsoft last week gave the outside world its first official look at Longhorn, recently renamed Windows Vista, by shipping Beta 1. The first release - which will go initially to 10,000 developers and...

CA Acquires E-mail Security Vendor.(Computer Associates International Inc.)(Qurb)(Brief Article)
August 1, 2005... Computer Associates acquired Qurb, a privately held provider of e-mail security software. The acquisition extends CA's security solutions portfolio with Qurb's technology for blocking spam and protecting against phishing attacks, e-mail fraud,...

Novell Eyes DHS Compliance.(Brief Article)
August 1, 2005... Novell announced a product that enables federal agencies to comply with the requirements of HSPD-12 (Homeland Security Presidential Directive- 12), which requires a standard identification card for federal employees and contractors to access...

Cisco to Acquire Sheer Networks.(Brief Article)
August 1, 2005... Cisco Systems agreed to buy Sheer Networks, which makes software designed to help service providers and large enterprises manage complex networks. The company's Sheer DNA (Dynamic Network Abstraction) creates a real-time, virtual representation...

OpTier takes holistic approach to performance - Amir Alon, Yori Lavi, and Israel Mazin.
August 1, 2005... When Amir Alon, Yori Lavi, and Israel Mazin decided to form a startup in 2002, they went to some Fortune 1000 corporations and asked what kept their IT pros awake at night. The answer: measuring and maintaining performance as their IT...

Memory Firewall monitors apps at run time - Saman Amarasinghe, Derek Bruening, and Vladimir Kiriansky.(Determina)
August 1, 2005... When it comes to foiling hackers, Saman Amarasinghe views the world in stark terms. "There is a black-and-white line," says Amarasinghe, an associate professor at Massachussets Institute of Technology and CTO of Determina, maker of a...

Zetera: Storage at the speed of light - Bill Babbitt, Bill Frank, and Tom Ludwig.(Zetera Network Storage from Zetera)
August 1, 2005... Once you've been on the teams that invented the drive controller standards used by billions of machines, it's a tough achievement to top. So when Bill Babbitt, Bill Frank, and Tom Ludwig of Zetera created a new network storage paradigm, they...

Sonic's ESB takes new approach to fail-over - Bill Cullen.
August 1, 2005... If the SOA movement had an official flag, on that flag would be a diagram of an ESB (enterprise service bus) - an open and distributed integration platform that provides interfaces to a wide variety of systems and applications and ensures...

BladeLogic brings order to datacenter chaos - Vijay Manwani.
August 1, 2005... Back in 2001, around the time the dot-com bubble burst, Vijay Manwani was well aware of the hype surrounding utility computing, but he saw greater potential elsewhere. "While everyone wanted to do everything with the magic touch of a...

Event stream processing advances Web services and RFID - Mark Palmer.(Progress Software Corp.)
August 1, 2005... In the late 1980s mark palmer helped build a trading system for Bankers Trust in London. Back then, the finance industry was driving event- stream processing, the technology that absorbs high-volume and rapid- fire flows of event data and then...

I link, Airgo I am - Greg Raleigh.(Airgo Networks Inc.)
August 1, 2005... Greg Raleigh didn't do much to earn his way into this year's circle of top innovators. He merely turned the fundamentals of radio science on their heads. In 1996, the founder and CEO of Airgo Networks invented MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple...

Cure for the common code gives apps more flexibility - Alasdair Rawsthorne.
August 1, 2005... Alasdair Rawsthorne may have started out slowly, but he's making up for lost time. He experienced his "aha!" moment in the early 90s. A computer science professor at the University of Manchester in England, Rawsthorne was spending his...

XQuery blankets the enterprise thanks to major collaboration - Jonathan Robie.
August 1, 2005... Back in 1998 there was no consensus that anyone would need a full- fledged XML query language. Today, XQuery is being implemented by all the major relational databases, by middleware vendors, in content management systems, and by open source...

DTrace and Predictive Self-Healing herald Sun's future - Bryan Cantrill, Stephen Hahn, Adam Leventhal, Cynthia McGuire, Andy Rudoff, and Michael Shapiro.(Editorial)
August 1, 2005... "When I first came to Sun Microsystems in 1996, I came because I wanted to do OS development," says Solaris developer Bryan Cantrill, adding that at that time most other OS vendors had already given up the race to Microsoft. "There was only one...

JotSpot: Something Wiki this way comes - Graham Spencer and Joe Kraus.
August 1, 2005... As co-founders of Excite.com, Graham Spencer and Joe Kraus had learned a thing or two about transformative technologies. But that's not what they had in mind when they started JotSpot, the first application Wiki. "When we left Excite in...

AMD's road map boasts superb cartographer - Fred Weber.(Advanced Micro Devices Inc.)
August 1, 2005... The path that brought 64-bit x86 computing to the mainstream was cut by a man you may have never heard of. Fred Weber, CTO of AMD, is a visionary in the most practical sense. His vision is AMD's road map for CPUs, and in laying out that map,...

InfoWorld Innovators 2005.
August 1, 2005... If it's true that fortune favors the bold, then the recipients of InfoWorld's Innovator 2005 awards have earned an opportune place in the annals of IT invention. Happily, this year's selection process yielded a flotilla of riches. By...

EMC, IBM extend storage strategies - EMC focuses on high-end arrays while Big Blue tackles virtualization software.
August 1, 2005... EMC and IBM pushed ahead their respective storage strategies last week, with EMC releasing a high-end storage array system and IBM extending virtualization technology. EMC unveiled a juiced-up system with capability to store up to one petabyte...

Innovators to Watch in 2006 - Dan Farmer, Scott Gidley, Ken Hardwick, Paul Judge, and Andre Yee.(Editorial)
August 1, 2005... More often than not, innovation is fueled by real-world needs. Security, compliance, and the need to leverage data more efficiently are just a few of the daily challenges facing IT. From wireless roaming to SOAs to keeping the feds happy, the...

FAST prepping desktop search, platform upgrade - FAST ESP 5.0 is due for release by end of the year.(Brief Article)
August 1, 2005... FAST (Fast Search & Transfer) plans to launch its entry into the hot desktop search market and deliver an update to its Fast ESP (Enterprise Search Platform) by the end of the year. FAST is working on a server-based desktop search product,...

SpikeSource serves made-to-order Linux - Developers assemble stacks by choosing applications, components.(Brief Article)
August 1, 2005... SpikeSource announced an enhanced version of its flagship SpikeSource Core Stack this week, which will now include preconfigured made-to-order installations. With the new version, developers choose from prebuilt stacks of open source...

EDITOR'S LETTER: That Aha! moment - Innovation starts with a great idea, and then the hard work begins.
August 1, 2005... You gotta love Greg Raleigh's attitude. The man who invented MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) -- the technology behind the 802.11n Wi-Fi standard -- insists that solving problems is easy. The real challenge, he says, is "deciding what...

OPEN ENTERPRISE: Open source spin - Sometimes, what looks like open source is really just a sales tactic.(Editorial)
August 1, 2005... I call it the "give 'em enough rope" approach to open source: a commercial software vendor releases some portion of its software portfolio under an open license. Hurrah! Cheers all around. Look closer, however, and the truth emerges. By...

NOTES FROM THE FIELD: Longhorn gets a name, Dell's got game - Farewell to the original hardware geek.
August 1, 2005... I've been in a subdued mood since the death of James "Scotty" Doohan. His passing means the original Star Trek crew will never reunite for that one last mission: Star Trek: Journey to the Edge of Incontinence. I was so looking forward to it....

AHEAD OF THE CURVE: Apple's power-user grab - The Intel Mac won't neglect the power user as are manufacturers of x86 client systems.
August 1, 2005... When Apple made its announcement about the Mac's steady march to Intel, I flashed on the Great Wall of Client Conformity at last year's Intel Developer Conference. Intel displayed its reference desktop motherboards ringed by third-party...

STRATEGIC DEVELOPER: Greasemonkey in crisis - A hole in a Firefox plug-in proves that no one, not even open source partisans, have all the answers.
August 1, 2005... Aaron Boodman hopes that he will never live through a July 18 worse than this past one. Boodman is a co-developer of the popular Greasemonkey extension for Firefox which, on that day, was found to have a severe security flaw that could enable a...

CTO CONNECTION: The last few inches - A dab of manual labor is enough to sink the most sophisticated multipart Internet transaction.(chief technical officer)(Column)
August 1, 2005... Dear fellow CTOs: the Internet is broken and someone needs to fix it. And the only people who I trust to do it are you, my comrades in high-end IT problem solving. Here's a personal example that illustrates the level of disfunction I'm...

REALITY CHECK: Expanding Legacy Apps - All it takes is the right tools to extend the life span -- and leverage the business value of -- legacy apps.
August 1, 2005... A trend dubbed "legacy evolution" offers hope if you work at one of the estimated 10,000 major organizations still using a hierarchical or flat file database running Cobol applications. Or, for that matter, if your company continues to run a...

CTO CONNECTION: Focusing on innovation - The best reason to farm out nonstrategic IT chores is to free up time for stuff that matters.(chief technical officer)
August 1, 2005... The headline for my previous column was "A Last Word on Outsourcing" -- a not-so-subtle hint from my editor to let the subject rest! -- but the mail keeps pouring in. Much of it deals with the core issues of self- identity in IT. To cut to...

Product previews.
August 1, 2005... Symbol brings wireless devices together with the network, Stellent adds to content management suite, iCode unveils apps for SMBs, and Vontu helps fight data loss By InfoWorld staff Symbol bridges network and wireless devices ...

64-bit Windows anti-virus not yet mainstream - Security vendors may be holding off support.
August 1, 2005... Companies looking to become early adopters of Microsoft's Windows x64 Edition OSes encountered a reason to postpone the decision: They may find their favorite anti-virus software no longer works on their new desktops. Microsoft maintains...

Brightidea opens channels for innovation - Well-designed idea management service helps users collaborate on big ideas.(Product/Service Evaluation)
August 1, 2005... To be successful these days companies must constantly produce innovative products and services. Brilliant people are, of course, essential to forging groundbreaking solutions. As important, however, are the means to disseminate fresh ideas...

Sharp primes black-and-white MFP for the office - The AR-M355N is fast and versatile -- but its price tag may give pause.(multifunction printers)(Product/Service Evaluation)
August 1, 2005... Sharp is one among a raft of vendors seeking to replace traditional printers with MFPs (multifunction printers). To that end, the company has sweetened its black-and-white AR-M355N Digital Imager by including a bundle of software for sending...

Plug-n-click network access management - StillSecure, Vernier Networks keep close eye on policy compliance.(Product/Service Evaluation)
August 1, 2005... In an increasingly crowded field, StillSecure Safe Access 3.0 and Vernier Networks EdgeWall Express 7000 NAM (Network Access Management) devices distinguish themselves by offering customers additional access- control protection with minimal...

Rackable iSCSI system stacks up - S3118-iSCSI box makes for a smooth and simple SAN or a Windows or Linux storage server.(Product/Service Evaluation)
August 1, 2005... Meeting growing storage requirements is no longer just a matter of accommodating a few more files. Thanks to legislation that mandates the archiving of e-mail and customer records and to the increased use of multimedia and VoIP apps, storage...

Open source directory - LDAP servers move closer to becoming commodity items.
August 8, 2005... With more and more companies investigating capabilities such as identity management, SSO (single sign-on), and automated provisioning, directory services are fast becoming a vital component of network infrastructures. So far, however, no open...

EMC boosts midrange Clariion - Latest iteration brings storage capacity and reliability improvements.
August 8, 2005... EMC last week announced four new Clariion Disk Library midrange disk- based backup-and-recovery systems with twice the capacity and performance of current systems. The company is also adding new reliability and information protection features...

Microsoft to enhance Exchange.
August 8, 2005... Microsoft plans to add speech-enabling technology to a future version of its Exchange Server as part of its unified messaging strategy, a move that could potentially compete with its third-party ISV partners. The addition of speech technology...

Oracle eyes Indian software company.( i-flex Solutions)(Brief Article)
August 8, 2005... Oracle said it will buy a majority stake in Indian banking software vendor i-flex Solutions, the latest in a string of acquisitions to strengthen the U.S. company's applications business. The deal is Oracle's latest move to expand beyond...

Penguin adds 64-bit BladeRunners.(Brief Article)
August 8, 2005... Linux hardware and clustering company Penguin Computing is releasing two new blade servers in its BladeRunner family. The BladeRunner 4130 and 4140 will be based on 64-bit chips from Intel and AMD, respectively. The 4130 is based on Intel's...

Easing Linux enterprise integration - Novell, startups offer prebuilt wares to reduce configuration worries.
August 8, 2005... On the eve of this week's LinuxWorld Conference and Expo, several companies offered prebuilt open source solutions designed to ease integration migraines. From small startups to large vendors such as Novell, companies are building momentum...

IBM to buy customer data-hub maker DWL - Addition of data-integration software maker expected to boost IBM's information management middleware.
August 8, 2005... IBM said last week it plans to acquire DWL, a customer-data-integration software maker, to strengthen its information management middleware portfolio. The company's DWL Customer software is a Java-based customer- data hub that pulls together...

Mozilla creates profit arm - Company builds unit to support moneymaking.
August 8, 2005... The Mozilla Foundation, which distributes the open source Firefox Web browser, last week created a corporate subsidiary to support its moneymaking activities and to help widen the use of its products. Although the goals of the subsidiary,...

Alien to ship next-generation RFID readers - The company will also partner with IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle to support their supply-chain solutions.(Brief Article)
August 8, 2005... Alien Technology announced last week a multiprotocol Gen 2 RFID reader, the ALR-9800, which improves read performance and speed over earlier models. Using an Intel XScale processor, the reader will be Java- and .Net-enabled for embedding "first...

Macromedia marks release of Studio 8 - Company wraps Contribute, FlashPaper into suite along with Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Flash.(Brief Article)
August 8, 2005... Macromedia on Monday takes the wraps off Studio 8. The new suite includes enhancements to Dreamweaver and Fireworks, and now houses Contribute and FlashPaper, as well. Studio 8 includes an upgraded Flash 8 development tool with new video...

EDITOR'S LETTER: Farewell, CTO Connection - New column, Off the Record, will dish the dirt on what goes down in IT.
August 8, 2005... If you haven't checked out this week's columns yet, let me be the one to break the bad news: Chad Dickerson is hanging up his InfoWorld CTO spurs and heading off to Yahoo, where he'll be toiling away in the brave new world of search. ...

SECURITY ADVISER: Cisco's black eye at Black Hat - Michael Lynn's Cisco/ISS-flaw presentation and its backlash doses out some reality.
August 8, 2005... There I was, running late to the Black Hat conference because of the weather, riding the long escalator to the third floor of Caesar's Palace in Vegas when I heard someone at the top of the stairs yell to someone behind me on the escalator. ...

NOTES FROM THE FIELD: Cisco gets routed, more Vista names outed - Columnist's Star Trek gaffe fails to bring down Internet.(Column)
August 8, 2005... Thanks to the dozens of readers who noted that my previous column was lacking in the Trek department. James "Scotty" Doohan was the second crew member to enter the final frontier; DeForest "Bones" Kelley died six years ago. Actually, I was...

AHEAD OF THE CURVE: Beware of the IT fixer - IT's volunteers in the field do more harm than good if they circumvent company policy.
August 8, 2005... The IT Samaritan is a helper in the field, someone who stands a foot taller, knowledge-wise, than most of those around him. The helper is that spare set of semi-savvy eyes you're glad to have around when users and customers run into lingo...

STRATEGIC DEVELOPER: Software's common DNA - Different species of application may have more in common than you think.
August 8, 2005... Here are five species of application that seem, at first glance, to have little in common: mainframe "green screen," Win32/VB, Java/Swing, Web browser, and .Net WinForms. An enterprise application portfolio is likely to include members of each...

CTO CONNECTION: Exiting in good faith - It's time for this CTO to move on. But before I go, I'm doing my best to ensure a healthy IT department.(Column)
August 8, 2005... Over the past four years, I've spent a lot of my time advising CTOs on how to manage their careers both in this column and on my Weblog. In my very first column, I outlined what I think it means to be a CTO, and since then I've walked you...

REALITY CHECK: Taking the supply chain to new heights - The arrival of universal, always-on communications could spell a new era for supply chain.
August 8, 2005... If 2005 is to be remembered for anything, it may be as the year the last gap in always-on, always-connected communications was closed. This in turn will be a great opportunity to solve the problem of supply-chain visibility. Until now, two of...

Open source identity - Free tools can give developers a head start on advanced security infrastructure.
August 8, 2005... A complete identity management solution comprises a number of components. As such, it would be difficult for any single open source project to offer a plug-and-play identity management system. There are, however, a number of projects that offer...

Backbase widgets work wonders - Mature AJAX toolkit rewards learners of BXML with highly interactive Web clients.
August 8, 2005... One fertile area of programming today is the AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) toolkit. The buzzword may only be a few months old, but everyone seems to instinctively know that a nice library or toolkit will make it much easier to build...

3PAR for the high-performance storage course - Easy-to-manage InServ Storage Servers lead the pack.
August 8, 2005... Most storage systems are either appliances -- easy to set up but limited in capacity and performance -- or large, high-performance systems that take a week's training to configure and run. 3PARdata is aiming for the middle with its InServ S400...

Like Google for log files - Splunk brings enterprise search techniques to log file analysis.
August 8, 2005... As much as one system log file can tell you, correlating data from multiple logs can tell you a lot more -- whether you're troubleshooting a Web application, looking for network bottlenecks, or chasing down a network security incident. A new...

A buyer's guide to open source - Open source provides low-cost, community-supported alternatives to commercial enterprise apps.(Buyers Guide)
August 8, 2005... Build or buy? It's a question that vexes every enterprise IT manager. On the one hand, developing applications from scratch can be a difficult endeavor, one fraught with the possibility of failure. On the other hand, high price tags and the...

Open source business intelligence - Low-cost alternatives to costly reporting tools will arrive soon.
August 8, 2005... Customers and ISVs face steep fees when licensing existing BI software, so it's only logical that work on BI within the open source community is heating up. First out of the gate was the Eclipse Foundation, which has made BI one of its seven...

Open source business process management - Orchestrating SOA is a heady task, but new projects are stepping up to the plate.(Service Oriented Architecture)(Apache Software Foundation)
August 8, 2005... A full-featured business process management suite might not be the first thing you'd expect to see coming from the open source community, and yet that's exactly what a number of projects are working to deliver. With the rise of SOAs, the need...

Open source CRM - Manage sales and customer relationships without spending a fortune on software.(Customer relationship management)
August 8, 2005... The open source community can't provide a drop-in replacement for expensive, high-end CRM applications from the likes of Salesforce.com or Siebel just yet. Still, you might be surprised at the level of sophistication some of the available...

Open source content management - The hardest part of choosing a CMS solution is narrowing down the choices.
August 8, 2005... With the Web becoming the backbone for most enterprise communications, you'll find there's no shortage of Web CMSes (content management systems) available, including a wide range of open source options. Naturally, there's far more at stake than...

Open source ERP - The features of free ERP packages vary widely, but some gems can be found.
August 8, 2005... The goal of ERP isn't simply to provide a unified application interface for every aspect of a company's business process -- it also tries to include the inherent data-mining capabilities that go along with it. But while JD Edwards, Oracle, SAP,...

Open source enterprise service bus - Middleware options proliferate, but jumping ship from commercial vendors may be premature.
August 8, 2005... With Java application servers rapidly becoming a commodity item, it's no surprise that we're now beginning to see open source implementations of other elements of the enterprise middleware stack. In particular, a number of surprisingly mature...

Product Previews.(ActiveGrid Inc.)(ViewCentral Inc.)(product introduction)
August 8, 2005... ActiveGrid turns on LAMP for enterprises; ScanSoft boosts accuracy, performance; ViewCentral issues Version 5.0; and Sterling creates composite applications for retail By InfoWorld staff ActiveGrid powers up enterprise LAMP Open...

Open source licensing offers many choices - Before you use that code, make sure you understand its terms.
August 8, 2005... At last count, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) recognized nearly 60 different open source licenses. If you just want to install and use a packaged application, the license under which it was released shouldn't matter much. But it's...

Open source point of sale - Free commerce terminals lend flexibility to businesses of all sizes.
August 8, 2005... Another term for a POS (point of sale) application is "cash register." Although a cash register may seem to have a finite set of functional requirements, from an enterprise standpoint this category involves a surprising number of variables,...

Open source portals - Competition in the open source Java portal space heats up.
August 8, 2005... Standards support is an important criterion for most corporate development projects. In the area of enterprise portal servers, that means a J2EE-compliant engine that supports standards such as portlets (JSR 168) and WSRP (Web Services for...

Open source RFID - Free tag and EPC data management software is in its infancy, but looks promising.
August 8, 2005... If there's one area of the IT industry that's gotten as much buzz as open source itself during the past year, it's RFID. So far, however, it's been a big-ticket item, with its strongest backing coming from megaretailers such as Wal-Mart....

Open source VoIP/Telephony - Options abound for PBX applications and interactive voice response.
August 8, 2005... One of the first open source VoIP projects -- and one of the earliest VoIP PBXes, period -- is Digium-sponsored Asterisk. A highly mature platform licensed under the GPL, Asterisk supports almost everything that even larger enterprises would...

Exclusive: Siebel's hosted CRM doesn't rise to the top - Although impressive, nicely priced OnDemand Release 8 falls short on heavyweight features.(Product/Service Evaluation)
August 8, 2005... A longtime leader in on-premises applications, Siebel Systems has been fighting an uphill battle in the hosted CRM space against powerhouses like Salesforce.com and hot service-centric evangelists like RightNow Technologies. With the latest...

TippingPoint leans into network threats - TippingPoint 400 IPS is a mixed bag of easy management, strong defenses, and spotty detection.
August 8, 2005... IDS/IPS products have come a long way in a short time, as vendors have been fast to incorporate new detection techniques and bolster defenses to an ever-widening range of threats. TippingPoint is one vendor that has blazed the trail to...

AppDetective sleuths out vulnerabilities - Powerful solution does security audits and a whole lot more.(AppDetective 5.0)
August 15, 2005... There's no such thing as a set-and-forget security configuration. You have to stay on top of your applications and databases to ensure that your policies are being enforced and that they're still valid in the face of new vulnerabilities. ...

News briefs.(Microsoft Corp.-product introduction)(Brief Article)
August 15, 2005... Microsoft Releases August Patches Microsoft issued patches for six flaws in Windows and Internet Explorer, some of which could allow an attacker to gain control of a computer system. The patches, which include a fix for a newly discovered...

EMC Taps Surveillance Application.(product introduction)(Brief Article)
August 15, 2005... EMC announced a package geared to manage and analyze surveillance data. The EMC Surveillance Analysis and Management Solution consists of hardware, software, and professional services. It also includes EMC storage arrays and content addressed...

IBM Upgrades WebSphere Software.(Brief Article)
August 15, 2005... IBM unveiled WebSphere Extended Deployment Version 6.0, which extends the capabilities of WebSphere Application Server and the WebSphere platform, and combines capabilities of autonomic and grid computing. The product is designed to support...

Neon Systems offers mainframe ESB - Company tackles integration issues.(Brief Article)
August 15, 2005... Looking to tackle the problem of data integration in scenarios involving mainframes, Neon Systems last week shipped what it calls the industry's first ESB (enterprise service bus) for big-iron boxes. The company's Shadow RTE (Real-Time...

Stars align for open source - LinuxWorld showcases partnerships and community wares.
August 15, 2005... The LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco last week featured strategic partnerships among key companies and the release of proprietary commercial code to the community. On the partnership front, leading open source database provider...

EDITOR'S LETTER: IT's seven dirty words - Seemingly innocent phrases that simply won't cut it in polite IT society.
August 15, 2005... Remember the George Carlin routine "The Seven Words You Can't Say on Television"? (No, I'm not going to print them here; if you're really curious, Google 'em.) I got to thinking the other day that IT has its own set of dirty words. Try saying...

OPEN ENTERPRISE: Red flag flying over LinuxWorld Expo - China stakes its claim to become the next IT outsourcing superpower, with an emphasis on open source.
August 15, 2005... It may have been the worst conference presentation I've ever seen. Behind it, however, was one of the most compelling trends in the IT industry today. In a conference room tucked away on the second floor of San Francisco's Moscone West...

NOTES FROM THE FIELD: Cisco shoots itself in foot, APC makes servers kaput - No more Star Trek jokes here, cap'n.
August 15, 2005... It seems my less-than-reverent salute to the passing of Commander Montgomery Scott (aka James Doohan) hit a nerve. Outraged Trekkies rushed to scold me for my insensitivity. So no more jokes about the kilt-wearing wizard of the warp drive....

STRATEGIC DEVELOPER: The summer of PKI love - Dartmouth College's PKI Deployment Summit showed public key infrastructure moving forward.(Public key encryption)
August 15, 2005... The annual PKI Deployment Summit at Dartmouth College is becoming a summer tradition. Universities differ from other large enterprises in ways that make them bellwethers for IT's future. University user populations are transient, platform...

AHEAD OF THE CURVE: What's a monopoly to do? You can build your business into one -- just don't cross the line trying to keep it.(cases)
August 15, 2005... During a discussion with a source close to the AMD v. Intel antitrust lawsuit, I heard something that really grabbed my attention. AMD, he said, isn't suing Intel because Intel is a monopoly; it's suing Intel for abusing its monopoly powers to...

CTO CONNECTION: Passing the baton - This is my last column, but you'll get even more real stories from the column that replaces mine.(Column)
August 15, 2005... Back in the summer of 2001, just a few weeks into my job at InfoWorld, I attended our CTO Forum event. When dinner rolled around, I sat at a random table. Two men already seated introduced themselves: Tim Bray, co-inventor of XML, and Dan...