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A survey on the topic of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) governance has just been released by Software AG. It can be downloaded at www.softwareag.com/soagovernancesurvey. Some of the survey results could have been predicted (such as the top four drivers behind SOA adoption being improving business agility, simplifying integration, supporting Business Process Management (BPM), and delivering cost savings through reuse). However, other results are not so intuitive and provide an interesting insight. In…
OpinionWire Articles - published 16/07/2008 - Rob Hailstone
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The spate of acquisitions in the enterprise search market is allowing less well known vendors to come to the fore. One such vendor, Sinequa, is currently enjoying rapid growth with a growth rate of 80% per year over the past two years. It has started to raise its profile through some large implementations. A French company, Sinequa is widening its reach by expanding into other geographical areas. It has opened an office in the UK and also has representation in the Americas, which is allowing it to gain m…
OpinionWire Articles - published 16/07/2008 - Sue Clarke
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Being strong on filial duty I use my Thursday luncheon break to take my ageing (in flesh but not in mind or spirit) mother to pick up her pension and do some local supermarket shopping. This Thursday was slightly different in that there was no pension available from the Post Office as the ‘systems were down’, and apparently there was no indication as to when they would be ‘back up again’ – is it just me or is everybody starting to sound like a SysAdmin? Fortunately, mother and son had enough money availa…
OpinionWire Articles - published 16/07/2008 - Mike Thompson
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www.MarketingGovernance.com, a site run by marketing vendors and practitioners to promote the concept of end-to-end marketing operations and management, cites growth levels for the marketing platform sector of 20% per year until 2013. That level of growth has proved a temptation to vendors and sure enough the Marketing Resource Management (MRM) sub-segment appears to be a hot market with the total number of players (which describe themselves as operating in this space) growing from 60 in 2006, to 80 in 2…
OpinionWire Articles - published 16/07/2008 - Angela Eager
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If trouble comes in threes then Google executives must be holding their collective breaths waiting for the final hammer blow. Hot on the heels of the Viacom court case that is due to force Google to release its log files for YouTube usage, is the news that its plans to introduce Street View in the UK is likely to be referred to the Information Commissioner as the photographs used within Street View also contain images of passers-by, and as Street View is a commercial proposition, the feeling is that this…
OpinionWire Articles - published 11/07/2008 - Mike Thompson
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Last week, the British Government made an unprecedented move by releasing a number of previously unavailable data sets together with Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for use in composite applications or mashups. The “Show us a Better Way” initiative by the Cabinet Office is to get input from the Web 2.0 savvy public on how Government services can be improved using mashups. This welcome but unusual public consultation includes a competition with a prize money of UK£20,000 for seed funding the bes…
OpinionWire Articles - published 11/07/2008 - Sarah Burnett
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The Information Security Forum (ISF) (www.securityforum.org) this week issued a press release about outsourcing and information risk, stating that many companies consider information risk as an afterthought when using third-party providers for IT services. All too often using outsourcing services is viewed as the remit of the IT department and perhaps the business user department, but unfortunately the risk involved is often not considered in enough detail before the decision to outsource has been made.
OpinionWire Articles - published 11/07/2008 - Maxine Holt
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The most recent figures from the Association of Payments and Clearing Society (APACS) show that UK card holders posses more than 71 million debit cards, and over 73 million credit and charge cards, generating a total of around UK£9.9 billion card purchases with a value in excess of UK£567 billion. Interestingly, even though card usage and transaction volumes continue to grow, card fraud losses against total turnover, at 0.118%, are still significantly less than the percentage figures reported prior to th…
OpinionWire Articles - published 11/07/2008 - Andy Kellett
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Citrix Systems and Akamai Technologies have teamed up to make it easier for customers and integration partners to combine each company’s Web application delivery offerings into an integrated solution. The companies will exploit Citrix’s premise-based NetScaler product line and Akamai’s cloud-based Web Application Accelerator service to enable end-to-end Web application delivery to both Internet and enterprise customers worldwide. Initially, the collaboration between Citrix and Akamai will consist of the …
OpinionWire Articles - published 03/07/2008 - Mark Blowers
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On 2 July 2008 the acquisition of Mediasurface by Alterian, a provider of enterprise management software, was completed. Mediasurface is a Web Content Management (WCM) vendor with three distinct offerings: Morello, its enterprise WCM platform; Immediacy for mid-market and departmental implementations; and Pepperio, designed as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering for smaller businesses which is sold through design agencies. The offer from Alterian for Mediasurface was made in the middle of May, and wa…
OpinionWire Articles - published 03/07/2008 - Sue Clarke
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The saga of vendor consolidation continues in the world of SOA infrastructure providers. The latest event in this story is the announcement on 24 June 2008 that Progress is to acquire IONA. Because IONA is an Irish company the acquisition was conducted under Irish law, and this means that there was less opportunity during the announcement call for executives to be drawn on the detail than in a comparable North American acquisition. However, this particular instance is unusual in a SOA context in that it …
OpinionWire Articles - published 03/07/2008 - Rob Hailstone
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In Butler Group’s recent SOA Governance Report (June 2008) we bemoan the fact that many organisations wait too long before implementing effective SOA governance, at least in part because the cost and complexity can be considerable. The most basic software assistance for SOA governance is a service registry, but often these products are expensive, over-endowed with features that are more appropriate for large-scale deployments, and consequently difficult to cost-justify for an early-stage SOA project. In …
OpinionWire Articles - published 03/07/2008 - Rob Hailstone
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The code generation community gathered for its second annual event in the UK last week, Code Generation 2008, at Cambridge University. This is a part of the application development world that has a somewhat disjointed aspect, with a spectrum of products and market positioning, some of which on the surface would not be recognised as part of the same movement. So rather than envisioning modelling as the next phase in computing abstraction to take over traditional programming, most likely there will co-exis…
OpinionWire Articles - published 03/07/2008 - Michael Azoff
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The manipulation of data in an attempt to look into the future is not a result of the information age – technology just makes it easier. However, the issue that should really be addressed is whether ‘easier’ can be directly translated to ‘more accurate’? There appears to be an almost implicit acceptance that by using computing power to manipulate data we are able to create correlations that would have been impossible in days gone by, and the greater the power or the easier the interface is to use then th…
OpinionWire Articles - published 27/06/2008 - Mike Thompson
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On Monday 23 June 2008, Oracle announced that it was to acquire Skywire Software’s application software business, with the deal expected to close in the second half of 2008. Until it does close, each company will continue to operate independently. Skywire Software provides insurance software and document management business applications, and it is intended that the acquisition will strengthen Oracle’s content management business. The insurance software helps insurers to manage the lifecycle of insurance …
OpinionWire Articles - published 27/06/2008 - Sue Clarke
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In his new book (The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google), Nicholas Carr examines the technological transformation that is currently underway as software applications that were once stored on the PC move to the Web, or to the ‘cloud’ as some now call it. For many, the title of Carr’s book will trigger thoughts of a time for turning, shifting, and changing; but if one were to follow Carr’s electrical utility analogy presented in his book to its ultimate conclusion, then perhaps we should…
OpinionWire Articles - published 27/06/2008 - Richard Edwards
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On 17 June 2008, version 3.0 of the Firefox browser was released, and was subsequently downloaded over 8 million times within 24 hours of its being available. Within a few more days, statistics from Mozilla (the organisation that makes the open source Firefox product available in the market) showed almost 18 million copies had been downloaded. According to one analysis of Web traffic to major business and e-commerce sites, Firefox will reach a nominal landmark when, at some time forecast to be in July, t…
OpinionWire Articles - published 27/06/2008 - Alan Rodger, Alan Rodger
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Last month the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) advised BT that it would not take action over an alleged breach of European Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR) following complaints of BT’s trial use of a third-party service in 2006, which monitored individual Internet users' browsing patterns in order to serve up targeted advertising, without the individuals’ consent. This month it emerged that the European Commission (EC) was thinking about taking the ICO to task over its deci…
OpinionWire Articles - published 19/06/2008 - Angela Eager
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Last month Butler Group ran its Managed Services Strategy Briefing in London. A number of key points arose throughout the presentations and customer stories that we heard, and these made me consider the evolving needs and requirements of customer organisations in terms of the use of third-party providers to deliver IT services.
OpinionWire Articles - published 19/06/2008 - Maxine Holt
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Dialcom recently announced the availability of its Spontania real-time collaboration platform in the UK. The solution provides a user-friendly interface and delivers enterprise grade, premise-based software that seamlessly and securely makes available Instant Messaging (IM), voice, video, and data in real-time to any user, over any device or network, regardless of geographic location.
OpinionWire Articles - published 19/06/2008 - Mark Blowers
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Last week HP made major announcements about the structure of its Labs and the focus of its research. The number of commercial organisations that still retain a pure research capability, as opposed to a development capability, is limited to a handful of the leading vendors. The challenge for these organisations is to ensure that pure research can be funded, especially in an era where the business focus is on value and a short-term view of return on investment.
OpinionWire Articles - published 19/06/2008 - Roy Illsley
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Cranberry is a UK company that specialises in software and hardware solutions for the server-based computing market, and so it knows all too well the frustrations and ‘gotchas’ that hinder desktop and application virtualisation projects. Spurred on by the fact that organisations are still looking for a device that bridges the gap between the thin client and the traditional desktop PC, Cranberry has decided to build its own device: the Cranberry SC20 Smart Client.
OpinionWire Articles - published 12/06/2008 - Richard Edwards
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Server virtualisation has made a huge mark on the IT industry in recent years – first, it was positioned successfully in order to solve resources shortages; subsequently, it became associated with the need to ensure that enterprise computing was as ‘green’ as possible. While both of these are important requirements, wise IT managers will have an eye towards the long-term effects of investment in server virtualisation, in terms of its bearing on infrastructure manageability and on the quality of service p…
OpinionWire Articles - published 12/06/2008 - Alan Rodger
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An issue faced by many organisations is how to protect data stored on local hard drives, particularly in remote offices where the technical skills of staff may be limited. Globalisation and a legacy of mergers and acquisitions have resulted in growing numbers of organisations operating over multiple sites. At the same time, many of these organisations are attempting to consolidate their data centres on a single, or at least fewer, sites. This has created a situation where there may be thousands of deskto…
OpinionWire Articles - published 12/06/2008 - Sue Clarke
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Up until now application development has not changed since the birth of computers – when an application is built the programmers quite naturally assume that it will run on a specific machine. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and beyond, such as cloud computing, change this assumption – no longer can the developer assume a single source for the usual background services offered by the OS. Rather, programmers must now consider a changing flux of application hosts, with implications on software reliabili…
OpinionWire Articles - published 12/06/2008 - Michael Azoff
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