Feed: Latest News from SOA WORLD MAGAZINE - AggScore: 55.6

Technology Adoption – Two Beliefs You Need to Undo

---

Here is further proof that “Consumerization of IT” (CoIT) is a reality. And, that has significantly altered the dynamics of technology adoption. Before I explain this shift, let us look at… How experts explain technology adoption cycle The accepted premise is that every new technology goes through the following phases: Hype: Search for next big thing leads to Hype around any new technology. Struggle: Adoption of these Bleeding Edge technologies depended on the Visionaries who had the vision, energy and money to make it work. Success: Mainstream adoption required convincing the Pragmatists who needed success stories and support system around the technology. Not all technologies made it to mainstream. All these are from the perspective of an enterprise. Consumers had very little role to play in this lifecycle. This underlying theme comes out in both the “Hype Cycle” model used by Gartner since 1995 and the “Technology Adoption Lifecycle” model popularized by Everett Rogers and Geoffrey Moore.

read more

Add Online Server Backup — Not Another Appliance

---

Each of the prospective SME IT customers that we talk to everyday has a unique environment, a unique set of data protection challenges, and operates within a unique business context. During these conversations, after we get past the initial questions about bandwidth (5-10Mbps at the least) and data size (1TB or more), the discussion moves toward finding the optimum way to do server backup in their unique context. This is usually when the topic of competitors' solutions comes up. Thanks to the history of server backup development there are a lot of legacy disk backup vendors that have responded to the cloud computing revolution by adding an extra feature or two that lets customers who buy a local disk backup appliance pay just a little more to send that data offsite to the vendor's data center.

read more

Stem Inc. to Transform the Economics of Power Consumption

---

Stem Inc empowers commercial business owners to be good energy citizens without requiring them to give up anything. Who are your competitors? Brian Thompson: We are not aware of any direct competitors. There are players in the cleantech space who are using data to print reports, display dashboards, or send alerts, and there are other firms with non-intelligent hardware aimed at a small area of the problem. But there is no one else using big data and small batteries to improve how businesses consume electricity while consistently reducing costs.

read more

Facebook Reportedly Wants to Buy Opera

---

Facebook was hitting new lows on its seventh trading day Tuesday after Reuters reported that it was in discussions to buy Oslo-based Opera Software ASA for what could turn out to be over a billion dollars because of competition from Google and others. The numbers heard could put the price up as high as $1.35 billion. Presumably Facebook wants the 17-year-old browser house and its mobile smarts for its rumored Android phone and its beleaguered mobile ad business. Facebook is having problems monetizing its site on mobile devices as more and more of its ocean of users go mobile. Opera already has a mobile ad business.

read more

IBM Bans Siri, iCloud, Dropbox

---

IBM’s approved smartphone is a BlackBerry because of its security. The company tolerates 80,000 staffers using their “bring your own” phones and tablets on its internal networks. But before they can, according to what CIO Jeanette Horan told MIT’s Technology Review the other day, IBM’s IT department configures any dingus “so that its memory can be erased remotely if it is lost or stolen. The IT crew also disables public file-transfer programs like Apple’s iCloud; instead, employees use an IBM-hosted version called MyMobileHub. IBM even turns off Siri, the voice-activated personal assistant, on employees’ iPhones. The company worries that the spoken queries might be stored somewhere.”

read more

Hyper-connectivity

---

We live in a Hyper-connected world. As usual there is no accepted definition of the term but you can look it up in Wikipedia, Wikispace, TechTarget or look at the http://hyperconnective.org However, I guess, you would know the meaning of the term even without a definition. Even in the absence of a clear definition one thing is very clear. Hyper-connectivity has altered our life. It has changed the way we do any and every activity in our life. It has made our ability to network as the most important skill even more than acquiring knowledge - Network over Knowledge. It has also given the collective intelligence our civilization a boost and is taking it to a new level - Collective knowledge of our civilization is much more than the sum of what we know But do you know who coined the term?

read more

Software Defined Networking – A Paradigm Shift

---

The networking industry has gone through different waves over last 30+ years. In the ’80s, the first wave was all about connecting and sharing; how to connect a computer to other peripheral devices and other computers. There were many players who developed technology and services to address that, e.g. Novell, 3Com, Sun, IBM, DEC, Nortel. Across the industry, small islands of various protocols were created with multiple gateways to bridge them. In 90’s and 00’s, Cisco dominated the industry and did a brilliant job of pushing the industry towards a common approach built on Ethernet. They built a hugely successful business and ecosystem and even created new markets like VoIP on the proposition that networking should be on a common highway. We also saw isolation of networks from the rest of the IT infrastructure, in the sense that software innovations continued in the server and storage environments independent of the network area. The focus also remained on different components of the infrastructure and not on the ‘service’ delivered by the combination of those infrastructure components, i.e., server, storage and network.

read more

The Social (Enterprise) Network

---

The world changed. A boy was born in White Plains, New York, in 1984 and 28 years later he would float his social networking company on the stock exchange at a point at which most people in the English-speaking world had at least heard of Facebook – if they were not in fact a personal member in their own right. Away from Mark Zuckerberg’s not inconsiderable headline-making ability, his vision for social interconnectivity has of course permeated the business world too. Today we see that “enterprise social platforms” are now an important element in the IT-driven business transformation journey that firms of all sizes currently find themselves traveling on.

read more

Advancing Cyber History at the Atlantic Council

---

On 16 May 2012 I attended, with Alex Olesker and defense contractor Robert Caruso the Atlantic Council/Cyber Conflict Studies Association’s event “Lessons From Our Cyber Past: The First Cyber Cops.” Jason Healey of ACUS/CCSA moderated a discussion between the ODNI’s Steven R. Chabinsky, Crowdstrike President Shawn Henry, the State Department’s Christopher Painter. Alex has already written a wonderful summary of the event itself, but I’d like to add a different angle. Cybersecurity is a field very much focused on the future. That’s unsurprising–the technology is improving by leaps and bounds, and the tech community as a whole makes a living by predicting and creating the future as we know it. I wouldn’t have it any other way. We should be focused on future threats and opportunities. But future-centrism has a cost. First, we can succumb to the problem of “presentism” by extrapolating the present to the future without consideration of the often disruptive breaks in history. Second, we can also have a “everything is new” attitude that blinds us to useful information and experiences from the past.

read more

Is IBM Following the Right Strategy?

---

Is IBM a globally integrated enterprise focused on worldwide collaboration or is it an organization which is rotten to the core? Do you think that Samuel Palmisano (IBM CEO who retired last year) built IBM into the world’s leading information technology company or has he destroyed almost every one of his predecessor’s real accomplishments?

read more

So.cl and Google+ Musings for a Monday

---

This morning I signed up and had a play with Microsoft Labs’ social media application, so.cl. This was quietly released over the weekend with little attention as it’s a piece of experiment work rather than a new social media platform. It’s early days to be commenting on whether so.cl will be useful; currently it appears to be targeted at students and search sharing. I wonder whether the intention is to use the output to help improve the quality of Microsoft’s search engine, Bing. Anyhow, the so.cl interface is reminiscent of Google+ (especially party invitations, that seem to be like Google+ Hangouts) and that got me thinking back over some Twitter conversations relating to G+ over the last few weeks. Those of you who use G+ on the iPhone will have noticed that absolutely awful recent upgrade, which somehow attempts to merge G+ information with the images people are posting. The result is a totally unusable interface. I have decided not to use G+ on the iPhone until a new release comes out. Whilst I’ve thought G+ could ultimately succeed Twitter and Facebook, I’ve had two reservations.

read more

Facebook Crashes at Open

---

Facebook opened below its $38 IPO Monday morning and kept on tanking, losing 10% within 10 minutes. It put up a defense at around $33, down around 13%, and moved to around $34, down around 11%, within 45 minutes but didn’t hold that bottom and was back below $33 when last seen. Some people paid as much as $45 a share on Friday when it closed at $38.23. The $45 price mirrors what Facebook was fetching on the secondary markets a few weeks ago before those trades were halted. Take your pick for its shabby showing: Nasdaq’s serious software problems Friday; the jacked-up IPO price; the inflated size of the float; the announcement during its road show that its revenues were dropping; GM saying it wasn’t going to advertise on the site anymore. The list goes on and on.

read more

HP Brings Server Management to Mobile Devices

---

For years, HP has been on the cutting edge when it comes to server management technology. HP’s OpenView was long a standard in even heterogeneous server environments, and they’ve only continue to offer stellar options since then. The latest release by HP takes server management to a whole new level, and will be a boon to system administrators everywhere. The company is releasing a smartphone and tablet application that will run on iOS and Android, allowing admins to control, configure, and monitor servers from just about anywhere. This kind of flexibility is just the thing that many server administrators are looking for. The idea that they can use an app to log in to various server management subsystems means not only quicker response time, but it also means fewer trips into work for admins. Mobile devices also offer connectivity at times and places where WiFi isn’t available, meaning that response can be almost instant.

read more

Best Buy Chairman to Step Down After Probe

---

Best Buy founder and its largest shareholder Richard Schulze, 71, will be stepping down as chairman June 21 after a board investigation found he didn’t disclose CEO Brian Dunn’s “extremely close personal relationship” with a 29-year-old female employee to the board’s audit committee. Instead, based on an informant’s written testimony and ignoring possible liabilities to the company, he confronted Dunn who denied it. Dunn and the woman maintained to investigators that their relationship wasn’t “romantic or otherwise improper” – although he called her 33 times, sent 149 text messages and 42 pictures or video messages during two trips abroad last year and she wasn’t discrete among co-workers about favors he did for her like soliciting a vendor for a ticket to a concert in Vegas and helping her pay for the trip.

read more

Threatened, BMC Adopts Poison Pill

---

BMC Software Monday adopted a defensive poison pill to ward off Elliott Associates and its sister firm Elliott International, which have acquired 5.5% of its stock and want BMC to form a special committee to chase a sale of the company. Elliott, you will remember, is the activist hedge fund that pushed Novell into the arms of Attachmate. BMC said Elliott’s proposal is not in the best interests of other shareholders. In a letter to the board Tuesday, Elliott Management said BMC’s future will be increasingly difficult as a standalone public company; it’s suffering from sluggish growth, underperformance on its business plan and substantial execution challenges – it’s changed its sales chief four times since 2010; it’s been written off as a “growth-impaired legacy asset” with a low stock price; it lacks revenue-scale compared to its major competitors, IBM, HP and even CA; it’s late to SaaS and the cloud; and it’s facing new rivals eager to carve up its territory

read more