May 08, 2008

Out in the cold: small businesses' ERP deficit

It took the United States just 45 months to defeat the combined forces of Germany, Japan, and Italy. It has taken SAP 48 months to get Business ByDesign, its SaaS (software as a service) play for the SMB market, off the ground. And it still isn't ready for prime time. Oracle, meanwhile, doesn't even pretend to care about smaller businesses; CEO Larry Ellison has repeatedly said that it costs too much to go after a relatively low-margin market. And Microsoft? It has a tentative SaaS offering, and just for CRM at that. So small businesses' on-demand ERP options are limited... more

TAGS: SAP, SMB, Salesforce.com, Software as a Service

May 01, 2008

Don't be a cheapskate, Steve: Keeping XP won't hurt Microsoft's bottom line

Virtue may be its own reward when you go to church. But, like it or not, virtue generally takes a backseat to profit in the corporate world. But isn't it nice when the two come together? Case in point: Windows XP, an operating system whose time has not yet passed. At least, we hope not. InfoWorld, of course, has been leading the charge to save XP, and I'm not going to repeat all the reasons that's a good idea. [ If saving XP is revenue-neutral for Microsoft, keeping XP could mean actual big savings for users, argues Galen Gruman. ]... more

TAGS: Microsoft, Save XP

April 24, 2008

Why enterprise mashups aren't as prominent as the hype

I still think "cloud computing" will win the coveted Snidley Buzzword of the Year award, but after checking out the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, it looks like "enterprise mashup" is running a close second. Don't get me wrong. There's an important trend here. But as John Musser, the founder of ProgrammableWeb.com put it in a well-received presentation at the Expo Wednesday, "Beware the hype, but don't ignore." [ Learn more about AJAX and other rich Web app dev tools often used in mashups in our Test Center guide. ] What is a mashup? In essence, it combines multiple... more

TAGS: Web 2.0, mashups

April 17, 2008

What to do when developers take code snippets with them

Every good carpenter has a box of tools he carries from job to job: a hammer of just the right weight, a selection of drill bits, and so on. As he gains experience, his toolbox gets heavier with new, and sometimes specialized, equipment. Similarly, programmers accumulate their own tools as they move from job to job, but these tools are digital and often include snippets of code written over the years. And that can create a problem, says Vishwanath Venugopalan, an enterprise software analyst with the 451 Group. These snippets are often reused unintentionally in a simple cut-and-paste operation without... more

TAGS: Open Source, governance, software development

April 10, 2008

Battle brewing in the cloud

Amazon, better known for peddling books and CDs than selling leading-edge technology, surprised much of the tech world by rolling out, and actually attracting customers to, its version of cloud computing. Sure, there's still plenty of reason to be skeptical -- indeed, cloud computing is one of those technologies that can sound more like a buzzword than a solution to real-world IT problems -- but other players are jumping into the game. And that's good news for business. Competition will force vendors to keep prices low, improve the technology, and, more importantly, prove once and for all whether cloud computing... more

TAGS: EMC, cloud computing

April 03, 2008

Open source databases: the 97-pound weakling

Linux, Apache, JBoss, and other open source technologies are kicking sand in the faces of the big boys on the operating system and middleware tiers, but when it comes to the database world, open source is still a 97-pound weakling. And despite some heady growth numbers, that's not likely to change anytime soon. One big reason: Tool vendors have yet to catch up. "We advise clients that unless they have very strong IT resources, they should wait at least two years to think about deploying an open source database for mission-critical applications," says Colleen Graham, Gartner's longtime database market analyst.... more

TAGS: Databases, EnterpriseDB, Ingres, MySQL, Open Source, Oracle, venture capital

March 27, 2008

Multi-core to leave developers in dust?

Multi-core chip rivals AMD and Intel have been beating their chests as of late, but to what end, I wonder, as developers labor to keep up. AMD, for one, has fixed the embarrassing flaw that delayed the quad-core Barcelona chip. As Terry Malloy put it in On the Waterfront, so what? Meanwhile, Intel and Microsoft pat themselves on the back because they've donated $20 million to UC Berkley and the University of Illinois to found the Universal Parallel Computing Research Centers. Well, it's about time. Why so negative? The dirty little secret (and it's not all that secret) is that... more

TAGS: AMD, ISVs, Intel, multi-core processing, software development

March 13, 2008

Cloud computing begins to emerge from the haze

I hate technology buzzwords. And when I hear one, my impulse is to bat it away like an annoying mosquito. But before you do the same about one of this year's hot buzzwords -- cloud computing -- give it a little more thought. Cloud computing, a concept that can be as airy as its name suggests, is piquing the interest of forward-looking IT execs and attracting sizable investments from players like IBM, Amazon, Akamai, Sun, EMC and Salesforce.com. Sure there's a big helping of hype and plenty of reasons to be skeptical, but a growing number of startups -- and... more

TAGS: cloud computing