From the analysts: What with the software industry's continued saga of consolidation, services are perhaps more interesting now than ever. Revenues are up and, more interesting, only 21 percent of that rise was garnered by the top 6 firms. But the real juice is that "for the first time since 2000 outsourcing services grew more slowly than project-based services and software support -- a possible sign that outsourcing is slowing," David Margulius reports in IT services keep hope alive.

Best of the blogs: Paul Venezia waves au revoir to FireFox. "I've found that FireFox is simply too much of a resource hog on my 1.67Ghz PowerBook G4 with 1.5GB RAM to be usable," he writes. "Although I never reboot the laptop, I have to quit and restart FireFox every day or so."

Q&A: Black Duck CEO Douglas Levin discusses issues pertaining to intellectual property and open source in this interview conducted by Paul Krill.

The Screening Room: Jon Udell, in episode #6, gets an education about XML for Analysis, an emerging standard for OLAP, and the potential intersection between business intelligence and Web 2.0. Think AJAX and XMLA.

Podcasts: NetApp's carefully planned entrance into the SMB storage realm came this week in the form of StoreVault S500. The company, it appears, kept a close eye on the feature sets rivals offer and, at about $5,000 for the 1TB entry level system, StoreVault should be competitive. Listen to Storage Sprawl.

Posted by Tom Sullivan on June 30, 2006 10:54 AM