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After much debate and probably a significant amount of internal company angst, Secure Computing has bitten the bullet and decided to streamline the branding of its core product set. This has no doubt been done in order to overcome current and future confusion, and to help to raise corporate awareness. It is something that the company had obviously struggled with whilst its product set consisted of Webwasher; IronMail; SafeWord; and of course the Sidewinder firewall. All of these are strong product offeri…
OpinionWire Articles - published 20/03/2008 - Andy Kellett
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It is nearly a year since ITIL® V3.0 was launched and the Configuration Management Database (CMDB) disappeared from ITIL®’s lexicon, but eight months on and people still talk about CMDB, and not the Configuration Management System (CMS) that replaced it.
OpinionWire Articles - published 20/03/2008 - Roy Illsley
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Two recent announcements in the still-consolidating Identity and Access Management (I&AM) market may cause concern for customers of two of the largest vendors.
Firstly, IBM announced its acquisition of Encentuate (see also Maxine Holt’s OpinionWire ‘IBM Acquires Encentuate’), whose main offering is a Single Sign-On (SSO) solution. Secondly, HP is to discontinue sales of its I&AM offering, SelectAccess, to new customers.
OpinionWire Articles - published 20/03/2008 - Alan Rodger
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Last week IBM announced the acquisition of Encentuate, a privately-held Identity and Access Management (I&AM) provider. IBM plans to integrate the technology into its Tivoli division, and the announcement included the formation of the IBM Security Software Laboratory in Singapore, which will utilise the expertise of Encentuate’s Singapore development team.
OpinionWire Articles - published 20/03/2008 - Maxine Holt
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When speaking with vendors, the most widely cited risk that can cause a project to fail is a failure to clearly state the objectives. In many cases the project will be the implementation of a new application or system, where a poor implementation that results in a system that is not optimised, can leave the organisation in a worse position than if it had not put in the new system at all. Whilst there are other reasons for the failure of a project, such as reluctance on the part of end-users to use the sy…
OpinionWire Articles - published 11/03/2008 - Sue Clarke
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Software as a Service (SaaS) is gaining significant momentum as a model for delivering application functionality, but there are significant differences in the architectures that are being used as the foundation for these services, which will have an impact on customers’ choice of provider. These include multi-tenant, where multiple customers work from a single instance of the software, based on a common single database, single-tenant, where each customer has its own database instance, and isolated-tenant…
TECHwatch Articles - published 11/03/2008 - Tim Jennings
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Despite recent public sector data loss scandals, Government Connect, a network for English Local Authorities (LAs) to share information securely between themselves and with central government, is struggling to gain traction.
OpinionWire Articles - published 11/03/2008 - Sarah Burnett
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In the beginning, businesses were monolithic. Not only were they structured monolithically, but also they sought to own as much of the supply chain as was possible. This was not only to increase the profit potential, but to reduce reliance on third parties, or indeed any factors beyond their immediate control. Henry Ford recognised that it was ludicrous for an automobile manufacturer to own and run its own rubber plantations for the production of tyre rubber, and at the same time, he recognised that a workforce consisting of employees that could be turned to any of the...
Butler Group Review Articles - published 05/03/2008 - Rob Hailstone
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While India has grown to be synonymous with commoditised application development and maintenance, it would be interesting to speculate on whether the collective knowledge acquired through ten years of IT services can lead to an ecosystem of innovative product companies.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 05/03/2008 - Somak Roy
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HP announced its Q1 results on 20 February 2008, which showed a headline of 13% year-on-year growth giving a US$2.1 billion net profit for the quarter, arising from US$25.8 billion of revenues.
OpinionWire Articles - published 29/02/2008 - Roy Illsley
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The campaign to win the hearts and minds of customers entered another round of ‘my dad is bigger than your dad’ style of marketing, as both HP and Dell announced their most recent figures on recycling in the battle to be seen as the most environmentally responsible IT organisation.
OpinionWire Articles - published 21/02/2008 - Roy Illsley
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The National Association of Software and Services Companies, NASSCOM (the public body that represents outsourcing organisations based in India) last week issued a press release on its Strategic Review 2008. The India Leadership Forum, run by NASSCOM, took place on 13-15 February in Mumbai, and the Strategic Review 2008 was formally released at that event.
OpinionWire Articles - published 21/02/2008 - Maxine Holt
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Diligenta, the UK-based Financial Services Authority (FSA)-regulated subsidiary of IT services Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), recently announced the award of its second deal, just two years after it was newly established in order to take over closed-book business and IT operations at Life and Pensions (L&P) insurance company Pearl Group.
OpinionWire Articles - published 18/02/2008 - Alan Rodger
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Microsoft’s unsolicited (and somewhat generous) bid of US$44.6 billion last week for Yahoo! has stirred-up a hornet’s nest of protest from Google. The company’s senior lawyer and apparent spokesperson, David Drummond, is reported to have said that Microsoft’s “hostile bid” is an attack on “the underlying principles of the Internet”, and that the company would seek to block any deal between Microsoft and Yahoo! on antitrust grounds.
OpinionWire Articles - published 11/02/2008 - Richard Edwards
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UK companies are failing to use IT to reduce and to improve their environmental sustainability, even though they believe that technology is key to tackling the problem.
TECHwatch Articles - published 06/02/2008 - Datamonitor Analysts
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A Masters-level program backed by universities and employers has been set up to fast-track the careers of IT professionals in the UK.
TECHwatch Articles - published 06/02/2008 - Datamonitor Analysts
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Athene, from Metron, is a reporting, analysis, and prediction tool set that uses historical infrastructure performance data to enable capacity planning, and can incorporate a business demand context. Failure to ensure that applications and systems are capable of providing availability and satisfactory levels of performance constitutes organisational risk, and IT managers need efficient means to assess the infrastructural capacity across boundaries of heterogeneous technology types. Athene allows business…
Technology Audits - published 04/02/2008 - Alan Rodger
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In some ways, passing from one year into another is almost indiscernible when it comes to the general capabilities within the outsourcing market place. Unlike the world of software, there are no major new releases of products marking the calendar gone by, or ahead, and no ‘leaps forward’ in architecture to prompt debate about the relative merits of change.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 29/01/2008 - Alan Rodger
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2008 will be a pivotal year in the infrastructure management space. Butler Group predicts that five key capabilities will, in different degrees, influence the approach to how organisations transform their infrastructure strategies so as to become more agile and responsive, but this will have to be achieved with the cost of IT remaining static, or even decreasing in real terms.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 29/01/2008 - Roy Illsley
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assyst, from Axios Systems, is a highly mature solution for IT Service Management (ITSM), which comprehensively addresses ITIL processes for Service Delivery and Service Support. Many organisations grapple with escalating costs of improving and integrating support for increasingly demanding end users.
Technology Audits - published 17/01/2008 - Alan Rodger
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Considerable momentum is building up behind the Software as a Service (SaaS) market, as both large software companies and smaller Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) get to grips with the potential transition from software being installed on their customers’ own servers, to the delivery of that functionality as a service, irrespective of the physical location of the infrastructure. Allied to this is a combination of changes in the management responsibility for the deployment, and the commercial basis on …
TECHwatch Articles - published 08/01/2008 - Tim Jennings
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Reviewing the numerous outsourcing deals announced over the year’s last quarter, one particularly stands out in terms of market significance – that between The Nielsen Company (one of the leading providers globally of consumer and media information services), and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS).
OpinionWire Articles - published 20/12/2007 - Alan Rodger
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GlassHouse Technologies provides a number of services that help organisations to manage their IT infrastructures, addressing issues such as a lack of reporting tools or an ability to analyse or interpret the results, a lack of skills or coverage, lack of service levels, and the management of policies and processes. Many organisations do not have the resources either in terms of skills or people to adequately manage their IT infrastructures. An advantage of the GlassHouse approach is that its tools are ha…
Technology Audits - published 18/12/2007 - Sue Clarke
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Microsoft recently announced details of how virtualisation fits into its range of major product launches in 2008. With the general benefits of virtualisation shifting vast numbers of units of the leading technologies, and changing entire market landscapes, the success of Microsoft’s approach is critical to whether it will have the reins aboard this particular bandwagon.
OpinionWire Articles - published 06/12/2007 - Alan Rodger
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“It’s an education project, not a laptop project.” These are the words of Nicholas Negroponte, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and co-founder of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Foundation – an organisation whose stated goal is: “To provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment, and express themselves.” However, as production of the ultra low-cost XO laptop finally begins to ramp-up, some reports suggest that politicians are stifling the pro…
OpinionWire Articles - published 03/12/2007 - Richard Edwards
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