InfoWorld articles from December 2006

InfoWorld archives from December 2006

EDITOR'S LETTER: Good ideas take time - IT has to do more than just keeping the lights on.(Brief article)
December 4, 2006... Two years ago,I publicly floated the concept that IT should start thinking more like entrepreneurs. What a disaster! I was speaking at a meeting of CTOs, and I mentioned that I'd heard of a few IT departments that were focusing, at least in...

SECURITY ADVISER: Virtual concerns - The promise -- and threat -- of virtualization looms on the horizon; will you be ready for its security challenges?
December 4, 2006... Call it the Year of Virtualization. I can't read a magazine or walk down a corporate hallway without encountering conversations about VMware, Microsoft's Virtual Server, Xen, hypervisor, or some other virtual machine technology. ...

NOTES FROM THE FIELD: Microsoft and Novell go kablooey, Second Life gets gooey - Sometimes even $440 million can't buy you happiness.(Tiger Direct's rebate programs)
December 4, 2006... Britney and K-Fed. J. Lo and P. Diddy. Microsoft and Novell. The marriage made in Open Source Hell may yet dissolve in public bickering over who left those dirty Linux patents on the bathroom floor. Microsoft believes its $440 million buys it...

FROM THE ANALYSTS: Wanted: megatrend technology innovators - Needs of developing economies demand not only vision, but a rethinking of long- held assumptions.
December 4, 2006... From where will the next disruptive innovations in IT come? And who's out there looking at the big picture, incubating the IT solutions we'll need 20, 30, or even 50 years from now? In our increasingly short-term-performance-oriented lives,...

STORAGE INSIDER: Data security means going beyond e-discovery - New legislation means companies must take a more proactive role monitoring their data.(Chronicle Solutions developed network management systems 'NetReplay')(Column)
December 4, 2006... This column hits the Web just one day before the new Federal Rules of Civil Procedures (FRCP) take effect. For more details on the impact of these rules, don't miss Ephraim Schwartz's recent analysis. In short, if you're going to court,...

ENTERPRISE WINDOWS: Vista's got goodies for on-the-go users - Redmond's thoughtfully added tools for gauging notebook health, syncing systems, and more.(Microsoft Windows Vista)
December 4, 2006... Even though it's covered with snow, the Microsoft campus is bustling in anticipation of launching Vista today. I'm still running the thing on this fantastic HP DV9000 notebook that Microsoft's PR firm sent me. (Would it be wrong to assume it's...

AHEAD OF THE CURVE: Microvell's big chill - Microsoft/Novell paves the way for the return of Advanced Server for Unix.
December 4, 2006... Microsoft has intentionally rendered unsafe all but one path to heterogeneity, that being the use of Novell's SLES (Suse Linux Enterprise Server) in networks with Windows. By immunizing Novell against future intellectual property actions,...

STRATEGIC DEVELOPER: We need a universal canvas that doesn't suck - We're still only in the early stages of building a common Internet collaboration platform.
December 4, 2006... Like many of you, probably, I tire-kicked Google Spreadsheets when it first arrived on the scene, then forgot all about it. A nice bit of AJAX hackery, I thought, but no serious competition for Excel. I was wrong, though, and here's an anecdote...

OFF THE RECORD: Winning IT contracts the military way - Giving the armed forces what it wants doesn't always win friends and advance your company.
December 4, 2006... By Anonymous To tell the following story, I must change a few names to keep out of trouble. So, instead of the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force, it will be Force Red, Force Blue, and Force Green -- but not necessarily in that order. OK,...

REALITY CHECK: Health care and IT - The future is rosy for both patient care and computer science.
December 4, 2006... There is an undercurrent of change taking place in health care that technology is helping to bring about. Many people believe that individuals must take personal responsibility for their own treatment and ultimately their own physical...

How to know when to keep great ideas in-house or launch a startup - Keeping innovation down on the farm makes sense much of the time, but it pays to know when a startup is a better idea.
December 4, 2006... At the height of the Internet bubble, the rationale for spinoffs was that Internet businesses needed to be independent and scrappy to succeed. Today, the pros and cons of spinoffs may be more linked to the specific circumstances of the...

IT as a revenue center - The entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well in corporate IT. Here's how three IT organizations are making money for their companies -- and loving it.(Security Benefit Group of Companies Inc)(Verizon Communications Inc.)(Vidus)(Company overview)
December 4, 2006... When the security benefit group's IT department hit the streets in 2004 to try selling a homegrown service to external customers, there was skepticism in the ranks. "I can't say anybody believed we would actually make a sale," CTO Brent...

PortAuthority tightens its data security net - Version 5.0 tracks data in motion, at rest, and in use.(systems and data security software)(Product/service evaluation)
December 4, 2006... I appreciate when a vendor succeeds at developing a very good application. But what I find more admirable is when a vendor recognizes the deficits in its solutions, makes no excuses, and quickly goes back to the drawing board to make that app...

Exclusive: Sun's new big iron bends the rules - Sun Fire x4600 M2 octo- Opteron server proves a triumph of capability and design.(Product/service evaluation)
December 4, 2006... Looking at Sun's brand-new sun Fire x4600 M2, most would figure it for a quad-socket system. After all, at 4U it matches the profile of the four-way HP ProLiant DL585 and Dell PowerEdge 6850. A quick peek under the hood tells a different tale,...

BlueLane provides patch management safety net - PatchPoint appliance protects servers by patching applications on the network wire.(Product/service evaluation)
December 4, 2006... Last week a client of mine applied the latest OS patches to its main Microsoft Windows Server 2003 server. It rebooted and kaboom! No workstations could connect to the server. After uninstalling all the patches, it began communicating again....

Requiem for the packaged app - BEA's Chuang: Empowered users are the future.(BEA Systems, Alfred Chuang)(Interview)
December 4, 2006... In a little more than a decade, BEA Systems built itself into a top middleware player and one of the leading lights in SOA. That's a good thing. Revenues at BEA are soaring (up 19 percent in the latest quarter) and the company's stock price...

Oracle tackles identity governance - Announces initiative to develop specs for sharing identity data across heterogeneous applications.(Brief article)
December 4, 2006... There's a common nightmare haunting CISOs (computer information security officers) that features a glance at the morning paper, and 72- point banner headlines with the name of their employer and the words "LOST" and "CUSTOMER DATA." ...

SOA Software launches Workbench governance solution - Integration with Service Manager closes enforcement loop.(Service oriented architecture)(Brief article)
December 4, 2006... Pure-play vendors of SOA governance solutions have been dropping like flies: Infravio was bought by webMethods, and Systinet by Mercury Interactive (which was then swallowed by HP). Yet SOA Software, one of the few remaining independents,...

Vista launch more whimper than bang for businesses - Microsoft still optimistic about deployments, adoption.(Microsoft Windows Vista)
December 4, 2006... Thursday was finally windows Vista launch day. But though banners were flying in downtown Manhattan on the big day, celebrating the launch of Vista, Office 2007 and Exchange 2007, CEO Steve Ballmer made it clear that the company is anxious to...

Tibco will use virtualization for SOA deployments - ActiveMatrix a bold fix for large-scale SOA deployments.
December 4, 2006... It's virtualization to the rescue again -- this time with large-scale SOA deployments. Tibco Software on Monday launched Tibco ActiveMatrix, a service virtualization platform to help enterprises deal with SOA as deployments grow larger....

SOA centers take apps apart to put them back together - IBM's SOA centers in India and China are driving nimble services.(service oriented architecture )
December 4, 2006... When you're as big a services company as IBM ($12 billion in third quarter 2006 alone), doing work for as many customers as Big Blue does, you start to notice some patterns in the work you do. Take insurance. IBM counts many insurance...

Webify is central to IBM's SOA Center Plans - Industry Specific Tools, Frameworks act as Foundation.(service oriented architecture )
December 4, 2006... As any developer can tell you, creating interoperability between SOA components and existing IT environments isn't trivial. It requires a lot of effort and coding. But IBM says it has the antidote for the IT headache: composite business...

OPEN ENTERPRISE: China aims to set a new office doc standard - XML- based formats like UOF could reduce Microsoft's document domination.(Uniform Office Format)
December 4, 2006... What office document formats will your organization support next year? The answer used to be simple: You'd standardize on Microsoft Office, just like everybody else. With ODF (OpenDocument Format) gaining momentum, however, it seems likely...

Fergenschmeir Ltd. goes virtual - The company and its officers are imaginary, but the datacenter, test scenario, and stalwart IT staff are real.
December 11, 2006... The proof-of-concept was hatched the day that Craig Windham, CFO of our legendary and fictitious enterprise Fergenschmeir Inc., called John Traylor, CFO of Fergenschmeir Ltd. (a wholly owned subsidiary) and not- so-politely asked about the...

Prepping IT resources for virtualization - VMware Capacity Planner paints a detailed picture of virtualized infrastructures.
December 11, 2006... One of the more difficult tasks when planning for a migration to a virtual datacenter is calculating the resources necessary to produce a stable and scalable result. PlateSpin's PowerRecon is a good example of a software tool to help determine...

VMware goes beyond the hypervisor - Maturing x86 virtualization technologies will remake the application stack.
December 11, 2006... Few IT technologies are evolving as fast as virtualization. In fact, even the major CPU manufacturers are pushing the envelope. Every new processor revision from Intel and AMD moves more virtualization code from the OS into microcode. Soon,...

VI3 Review Extra: VMware administrator's features - Improved VM snapshotting, useful cloning, and rich performance reports round out the VI3 management tools.(Product/service evaluation)
December 11, 2006... On top of the live virtual machine migration, automated load balancing, and high-availability capabilities explored in our main article, VMware Infrastructure 3 has a number of other features that will be important to IT. Here's a rundown: ...

Tibco gets on the enterprise service bus - Fast, well-designed BusinessWorks 5.3 marks Tibco's entry into the SOA enterprise.(service oriented architecture)(Product/service evaluation)
December 11, 2006... For years after the emergence of the ESB (enterprise service bus), IBM and Tibco refused to acknowledge the market space. In frequently reiterated statements, both companies took the position that their messaging products provided the same...

Authentication startup Bharosa is growing up fast - FFIEC and HIPAA are regulatory rocket fuel for this company.(Jon Fisher interviewed about Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council regulations for data security and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996)
December 11, 2006... The United Nations last week became the latest organization to warn computer users about the dangers of relying on just passwords to protect online bank accounts and e-commerce shopping carts, according to Reuters The warning from the UN's...

2006: A year of IT highs and lows - Bold moves, huge blunders defined year in tech.
December 11, 2006... By InfoWorld Staff It happens every year: as the calendar gets ready to turn over, we get an itch to pause, to be quiet, to reflect. That's probably why "year in review" stories are so popular at this time of year: they channel a seasonal...

OPEN ENTERPRISE: The mythical open source miracle - Community development isn't a quick fix for poorly designed software.(Editorial)
December 11, 2006... Joel Spolsky is one of our most celebrated pundits on the practice of software development, and he's full of terrific insight. In a recent blog post, he decries the fallacy of "Lego programming" -- the all-too- common assumption that...

EDITOR'S LETTER: What's in a name? Fanciful virtual company sets up Web shop for the holidays.(Editorial)(Brief article)
December 11, 2006... No matter how well versed you are in tech jargon, the second paragraph of Paul Venezia's "Deep Dive into VMware's Virtual Infrastructure" will send you scurrying to Wikipedia for clarification. The sentence in question: "[We subjected] the...

SECURITY ADVISER: Microsoft's new identity: secure OS vendor? The impressive security improvements in Vista make it a tough OS to hack.(Microsoft Windows Vista)(Editorial)
December 11, 2006... Microsoft Windows Vista has been released! Well, released to enterprise customers, at least. Consumer and foreign language versions will be released in January. In preparing my most recent book, Windows Vista Security: Securing Vista...

NOTES FROM THE FIELD: Vista driver muddle, Google service scuttled - Even billionaire whiz kids can fall and scrape their knees.(Brief article)(Column)
December 11, 2006... After Cringeman Bob R. downloaded the business version of Vista and installed it on his brand new Toshiba laptop, his Nvidia GeForce GPU would display only plain vanilla VGA. Turns out that while Microsoft's OS may be ready for OEMs and...

FROM THE ANALYSTS: Mining profits upstream and down - IT expands its reach to bring efficiency to the outermost ends of the supply chain.
December 11, 2006... If you work in IT for a big oil company, you know that your company (and probably your IT shop) is divided into two parts: upstream and downstream. Upstream is exploration and production of the oil. Downstream is the distribution through retail...

ENTERPRISE WINDOWS: No rush to Vista - Upgrading to Vista may be technically easy, but most business's PCs can't meet new OS's demands.(using windows Vista needs extra capabilities for the computer)(Editorial)
December 11, 2006... So last Thursday was Windows Vista Launch Day... finally. But while Microsoft had its banners flying, some folks I know were more on the ho-hum scale. My buddy Paul Lindo, an IT consultant, was wondering if "it might just be Windows XP with a...

STORAGE INSIDER: Simplified storage for small businesses - Vendors put SAS and direct connections in the limelight to catch the eyes of SMB customers.(Hewlett-Packard Co.'s StorageWorks MSA60 and LSI Logic Corp. introduced Simplicity for small business)
December 11, 2006... This was a rather busy week, no doubt because of the impending Storage Decisions conference. There's nothing like an industry event to fire up the marketing machines, but I was intrigued by the fact that many of the new products and...

AHEAD OF THE CURVE: AMD consolidates the desktop - AMD's Quad FX platform sets fire to the desktop and charts a cheap, simple course to eight cores.(Advanced Micro Devices Inc.)
December 11, 2006... AMD has coined a buzzword: megatasking. I'm still not positive what AMD means by it, but I'd use it to describe the work style of those on the verge of needing second desktops or workstations to accomplish their heavy mix of foreground...

STRATEGIC DEVELOPER: Data export, delivered - The Web's open architectural style and implicit APIs can help overcome data lock-in.(Column)
December 11, 2006... From time to time I get recruited to help someone export mail and contacts from one e-mail program and import the data into another. The fact that a civilian must recruit a geek to accomplish this seemingly mundane task speaks volumes about our...

REALITY CHECK: Easing the burden of SaaS - 2007 will see SaaS make its enterprise bid -- but beware the growing pains, IT.(software as a service)
December 11, 2006... Of all the issues IT will deal with in 2007, from maintaining regulatory compliance to building out SOAs, SaaS (software as a service) could quickly become the new focus of IT. In fact, forget about SaaS vendors' claims that the SaaS model...

OFF THE RECORD: Making an end run to VoIP - When your brand new VoIP phone system doesn't work, who you gonna call?(voice over ip)
December 11, 2006... By Anonymous Earlier this year, the company I work for decided to replace our aging phone system with a VoIP solution with all the bells and whistles. We looked at several systems before finally deciding on a vendor. Our in- house IT staff...

Exclusive: Virtual enlightenment through Xen - VirtualIron taps promising open source virtualization standard.(introduced Virtual Iron 3.1)(Editorial)
December 11, 2006... Xen has had a relatively rough road since it began as a research project at the University of Cambridge. Early releases of the open source virtualization package were quite buggy, yet highly touted by major players in the Linux field, which has...

Gift guide for gearheads - Wondering what to buy yourself, or the techno-gadget-lover who has everything?(Buyers guide)
December 11, 2006... The list of nifty devices for technophiles is endless, but you have to start somewhere. So, why not start in the halfway affordable range? These 20 coveted devices from the consumer realm can transport you to new dimensions in the world of...

Deep dive into VMware's virtual infrastructure - VI 3 swims through our server consolidation test, demonstrating some amazing capabilities and a few quirks.(VMware Infrastructure 3.0)
December 11, 2006... The selling points of x86 server virtualization are by now common knowledge. By moving systems off dedicated, underutilized servers, and using virtual machines to consolidate them on fewer boxes, you can reduce power, cooling, and space...

STORAGE INSIDER: The last word on unified storage - Dell and Microsoft stitch together file and volume serving on Windows.(Dell Inc. introduced PowerVault NX1950 and PowerVault MD3000 in partnership with Microsoft Corp.)
December 18, 2006... This year in storage seems to be ending exactly as it started -- very busily. And it's a pattern that will continue in 2007, no doubt about that. Some of the year-end buzz is around SAS-based storage devices. Early adopters such as HP, LSI...

ENTERPRISE WINDOWS: Windows Server 2003 patch proves painless - Although SP2 includes SP1 and more, installation is far less stress- inducing.(Editorial)
December 18, 2006... Microsoft guys can't drink. I went boozing with a couple of the Windows Server guys this weekend and we had to scoop one of them out of his pancakes at around 3:00 a.m. Before they lost the ability to talk, however, I got some useful...

OFF THE RECORD: How to (almost) get an IT job in France - I was on my way to France. My buddy was on his way to Vegas. Then we woke up.
December 18, 2006... By Anonymous I work for a small consulting company I'll call "FactorE." We specialize in designing computer control systems to monitor and regulate factory operations. Last year we signed a new client, a European metallurgical consortium...

2006 Year in Reviews - A compendium of every product review -- all 228 of them-- conducted by the InfoWorld Test Center in 2006.
December 18, 2006... By InfoWorld Test Center staff 2006 was a year of constant motion for IT, as regulatory imperatives and yearnings for business agility made balancing today's urgencies and tomorrow's priorities an arduous task. In the past twelve months,...

2006 Year in Reviews: Application Development - AJAX was the name of the game in app dev this year, but a clash of business rules titans made news, too.(Brief article)
December 18, 2006... By InfoWorld Test Center staff We gave the Web front end plenty of attention in 2006, with roundups of lean freebie AJAX tools including open-source offerings from Dojo, Open Rico and Prototype, and Zimbra ; rich enterprise AJAX IDEs from...

2006 Year in Reviews: Applications - From BPM tools to portals, 2007's application reviews reveal a focus on integration.(business process management)(Brief article)
December 18, 2006... By InfoWorld Test Center staff Our deep coverage of the enterprise service bus grew even deeper as we followed our 2005 blockbuster ESB comparison with tests of BEA, Microsoft, Oracle, Software AG, and Tibco Web services integration...

2006 Year in Reviews: Data Management - Whether it was e-mail, analytics, enterprise documents, or database records, these tools managed it all.(Brief article)
December 18, 2006... By InfoWorld Test Center staff Databases have had a busy couple of years: 2004 gave birth to Oracle 10g, and 2005 to SQL Server 2005. In 2006, it was IBM DB2's turn for a landmark release, with "Viper" trotting out a hybrid relational-XML...

2006 Year in Reviews: Hardware - Servers got more powerful and Apple's iMac rocked the desktop house in 2006.(Brief article)
December 18, 2006... By InfoWorld Test Center staff The year in hardware belonged to Sun, whose Opteron-based Sun Fire servers surged ahead of the competition. Stratus' fault-tolerant Windows server earned top marks and Dell's ninth-generation PowerEdge made a...

2006 Year in Reviews: Networking - Speeding up WANs was a hot topic, and a slew of switches shone in 2006.(Brief article)
December 18, 2006... By InfoWorld Test Center staff After most of the vendors declined our invitation to a WAN shootout last year, we settled for a series of standalone reviews of WAN accelerators this year. As usual, Riverbed's Steelhead shined -- so did...

2006 Year in Reviews: Platforms - Virtualization, Windows, and Suse Linux all came on strong in 2006.(Brief article)
December 18, 2006... By InfoWorld Test Center staff Novell's Suse Linux 10 was the landmark operating system launch of the year, giving us a bigger and badder Linux server and a startlingly smooth Linux desktop. We also got good looks at Microsoft Vista and...

2006 Year in Reviews: Security - Data protection and insider-threat management took security center stage in 2006.(Brief article)
December 18, 2006... By InfoWorld Test Center staff Given a sharp nudge from federal and state mandates, the security focus has shifted from intruders and malware to data protection and the insider threat -- and the likes of Vontu, Reconnex, Oakley Networks,...

2006 Year in Reviews: Storage - Storage saw a boost in 2006 with 4Gb injections, though SAS gained little ground.(Brief article)
December 18, 2006... By InfoWorld Test Center staff In EMC's march on the enterprise NAS market, two big feet fell this year in the form of the company's Rainfinity (global file system) and Infoscape (file classification) releases, which we took for early...

Financial firms hungry for more DHS Data - Private-public partnership still a work in progress.(Banking Industry Technology Secretariat's John Carlson interviewed)(Interview)
December 18, 2006... The Department of Homeland Security's Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) raised a few eyebrows in late November when it sent a warning out to U.S. banks and financial institutions about a possible cyber attack by Islamic militants. The...

EDITOR'S LETTER: Review of reviews - The Test Center struts its stuff, and we bid adieu to Jon Udell.(Brief article)
December 18, 2006... It's coming up on closing time for 2006. All around us, everyone is going into holiday mode. Not to be curmudgeonly contrarians, InfoWorld will be following suit, taking a one-week break before returning on Jan. 1 with our first print issue of...

OPEN ENTERPRISE: What does 2007 hold for open source? The ongoing collision of free software and commercial business promises an action- packed year.
December 18, 2006... I couldn't have an easier time playing fortune-teller this year. While some segments of the IT market might see the future as a wide-open plain, for the open source community, 2007 is shaping up to be a year for settling unfinished business....

SECURITY ADVISER: Backup Software: Bah, Humbug - Complex, insecure, and frustrating data backup solutions are sapping Roger's patience.(Editorial)
December 18, 2006... There is no better computer security defense than having a known, good, safe data backup, right? Then why is nearly all backup software so complex and buggy? Why do backup drives frequently fail? Why do backup tapes fail so often? I've...

NOTES FROM THE FIELD: The biggest rubes, boobs, and noobs of 2006 - Tirelessly seeking out new lows in high tech.(Patricia Dunn, Tom Perkins and Terry Semel awarded for their crimes)
December 18, 2006... It's that time again in Cringeville when we present The MOONies, honoring the most Morally Obtuse, Offensive, and Noxious behavior in high tech. This year's MOONie winners will receive a handsome statuette of Steve Ballmer bending over and...

FROM THE ANALYSTS: Videoconferencing: A call for action - One New Year's resolution that's past due: Focus on tackling videoconferencing interoperability.(Editorial)
December 18, 2006... When my oldest niece was 2 years old, she had -- as all kids do -- a favorite expression: "see 'em." If there were chicks incubating in a box at the farm, she wanted to "see 'em." If there were treats in the cupboard, she wanted to "see 'em."...