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The convergence of three architectural waves is gathering momentum to significantly change the software application landscape, but if organisations are to reap the benefit of this change, it is the traditional disciplines of management, measurement, and governance that will be essential.
TECHwatch Articles - published 03/07/2008 - Tim Jennings
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Although it has taken almost eight years to mature, Microsoft’s SharePoint range of portal, document management, and collaboration solutions has now reached the sort of critical mass that gives the ecosystem surrounding the product a life of its own. With question marks over the additional value of migrating to Windows Vista, and a sense that the basic Office tools will come increasingly under threat from a commoditised market, it is SharePoint that has been the standout performer in Microsoft’s client s…
TECHwatch Articles - published 06/06/2008 - Tim Jennings
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Recent update briefings from Oracle have indicated that the company’s diverse portfolio of applications and middleware, the result of three years of almost non-stop acquisition, is now being translated into a more stable and effective set of solutions for its customers. Oracle’s efforts to make the transition from technology provider to strategic supplier are paying off now that it has a credible pitch spanning database, middleware, and applications. This pitch is backed by deliverables that establish Fu…
TECHwatch Articles - published 12/05/2008 - Angela Eager, Rob Hailstone, Tim Jennings
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Considerable attention is quite rightly being paid to the topic of data quality in the Business Intelligence (BI) field, since the adage of garbage in garbage out is considerably amplified when data from multiple sources is integrated, aggregated, and processed to create higher level analysis and business insight. There is now a much better appreciation of the need to improve and then maintain data quality in underlying systems, if consistent and trusted reporting, querying, and analytics are to be key m…
TECHwatch Articles - published 08/04/2008 - Tim Jennings
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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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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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With the consumer Web driving so many enterprise business application developments it makes sense to review what happened at the flagship event of the year, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which took place in Las Vegas last week.
TECHwatch Articles - published 06/02/2008 - Angela Eager
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XBRL, or Extensible Business Reporting Language, might seem like a finance-only play, but the data exchange standard is flexible enough to support the reporting requirements of a range of different business processes and activities outside the office of finance. In particular, XBRL’s ability to quickly extract and aggregate and populate consistent definitions and attributes of financial and other types of business data into analytic models and reports, makes it especially useful for business intelligence…
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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Whilst an economic recession (at least, a serious one) is still rated as a relatively low probability, the mere possibility is causing many organisations to exercise caution in their spending plans, and will mean that many CIOs will be forced to review their project budgets over the coming months.
TECHwatch Articles - published 06/02/2008 - Tim Jennings
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Users of the Oracle E-Business Suite are quicker to move to newer versions of the package than users of PeopleSoft and JD Edwards suites, a trend that appears to reflect the more templated approach embodied in the native Oracle product.
TECHwatch Articles - published 08/01/2008 - Tim Jennings
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After four years of work, version 2 of the Ruby on Rails framework has officially debuted. Besides a number of features that simplify use, streamline the framework, or step up security is one headliner: support of REST. Announcement of the 2.0 version was made by David Heinemeier Hansson of consulting firm 37signals, the creator of the Rails framework, in a recent blog.
TECHwatch Articles - published 08/01/2008 - Tim Jennings
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Business Process Management (BPM) software maker, Pegasystems has released a new framework technology that lets companies configure, customise, and quickly roll-out products to market.
TECHwatch Articles - published 08/01/2008 - Tim Jennings
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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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CEOs may have to take personal responsibility for protecting customer data if the UK government changes existing data laws. Under new proposals based on the recommendation of information commissioner Richard Thomas, careless treatment of personal data could become a criminal offence. Companies would also be required to report security breaches to the information commissioner.
TECHwatch Articles - published 08/01/2008 - Tim Jennings
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Responding to SAP’s xApps, Oracle is introducing its own architecture for generating composite applications. The new framework, called Oracle Application Integration Architecture, which is based on Oracle’s Fusion Middleware SOA Suite, provides enterprise business objects and services that can be used to piece together processes exposed from Oracle applications.
TECHwatch Articles - published 04/12/2007 - Tim Jennings
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Undeterred by a limited set of real-world-use cases, Information Builders has joined rivals Cognos and Business Objects in adding mobile capabilities to their Business Intelligence (BI) platforms.
TECHwatch Articles - published 04/12/2007 - Tim Jennings
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The server virtualisation software maker VMware has announced a beta of its upcoming VMware Server 2 hypervisor, which is expected to be launched in 2008. Like the first release of VMware Server, which is the hypervisor that used to be known as GSX Server that put the company into the data centre for the first time five years ago, the second release of the product is expected to be freely distributed. It will not be an open source product, however.
TECHwatch Articles - published 04/12/2007 - Tim Jennings
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UK companies are failing to exploit the business opportunities of Web 2.0 and social networking because senior managers don’t know their Facebook from their PowerBook. Instead of seeing the potential for recruitment or communication, human resources managers are more likely to discipline staff for time-wasting as they visit YouTube, MySpace, and Bebo in work hours. The response of 65% of UK firms to the social networking explosion was simply to ban access outright, according to a survey of 300 UK HR deci…
TECHwatch Articles - published 04/12/2007 - Tim Jennings
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The Council of Professors and Heads of Computing (CPHC) represents and promotes the teaching of computing science and ICT at university level in the UK. Earlier this year, it released a briefing note on the diminishing pipeline of UK graduates in these areas and the consequences for UK industry, which highlights what I believe to be a deeply worrying picture. Firstly, between 2001 and 2006 there was a 42% decrease in students beginning ICT courses, despite the fact that the number of ICT job vacancies in…
TECHwatch Articles - published 04/12/2007 - Tim Jennings
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Further consolidation seems inevitable within the Business Intelligence (BI) sector, following SAP’s US$6.8 billion acquisition of Business Objects, which I believe will herald the start of a new phase in the BI market. I think that this has been a shrewd, long-term move on SAP’s part, despite the view of some that it was born more of short-term expediency in response to Oracle’s takeover of Hyperion. For some time now, Butler Group has been highlighting the trend towards the embedding of BI capabilities…
TECHwatch Articles - published 07/11/2007 - Tim Jennings
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Microsoft has announced a new roadmap for the development of composite applications that envisions its recently unveiled Workflow Foundation models becoming directly executable within the next major release of BizTalk.
TECHwatch Articles - published 07/11/2007 - Datamonitor Analysts
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Microsoft is to let small pieces of its Office suite loose on the Web in the form of Microsoft Office Live Workspace, a service to provide space to store, share, and comment on documents. However, unlike competing services from the likes of Google and Adobe, anyone wanting to create or edit a document with Microsoft will still have to use their installed Office applications.
TECHwatch Articles - published 07/11/2007 - Datamonitor Analysts
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Infor has acquired the bulk it needed to become a contender in the enterprise business applications ring, and it is now showing off its technology development muscles with its Open SOA strategy.
TECHwatch Articles - published 07/11/2007 - Datamonitor Analysts
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Vendors are touting enterprise search as the next big thing in Business Intelligence (BI). However, is the current level of integration between the two sets of technologies only skin deep?
TECHwatch Articles - published 02/10/2007 - Datamonitor Analysts
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