Recently in Business IT Category

There's an interview with the Windows Vista kernel team over on the MSDN network. It's well worth watching, just to see what's going on at the lower levels of Windows (in case you thought MS simply had a team of trained monkeys working down there). I've met the VP in charge of the team, Rob Short, who's featured in the video, and he certainly knows what he's talking about as many of the improvements that went into Windows 2003 Server show.

Two-thirds of British companies aren't getting the benefits they expected from outsourcing. Well, quelle surprise. When the outsourcing/managed services hype struck 1-2 years ago, everyone (journalists and analysts alike) warned that outsourcing wasn't a panacea and it needed to be managed very carefully for it to work. Who wants to bet that the majority of the aforementioned British companies didn't listen and simply signed a contract, hoping all their IT problems would just go away?

There's undoubtedly an element of incompetence on the part of the outsourcers as well. But as is usual in such matters, who wants to bet the pendulum is now going to swing to the other extreme (it's already on its way) and all these companies are going to take their IT functions back in-house again? If they do, who wants to bet they'll try to build up some degree of flexibility by using SOA development techniques – except without enough management to actually ensure it's done properly? Then in three to four years, they'll outsource again to relieve themselves of the IT management nightmares they've given themselves. And so the circle of IT life turns.

Still, the good news is that we all should expect a bit of an IT boom next year as companies begin to re-invest in their infrastructure again.

Technorati Tags: outsourcing, SOA

True, they won't be getting the full 1Gbps speeds promised for 4G, but by combining WiFi, 3G and GPRS, they will at least get the pervasive networking side of things covered.

Technorati Tags: Orange, WiFi, mobile phones

CIO.com is running a piece from some ZapThink analysts about how SOA is a great way to free up data from legacy apps.

It's curious they would regard this as “news”. With most service oriented architectures based around web services, it shouldn't be too odd that the same “legacy-saving” technology should still be able to save legacy applications from obsolescence or isolation. The article also has a curious “SOA is great and you should know exciting things about it” tone.

ZapThink? These guys are stuck in 2003.

Technorati Tags: analysts, ZapThink, SOA

Just in case you were planning on handing over any money to “StoresOnline International”, read this Australian report first. I'd never heard of this company until a few minutes ago (someone I know has just been to one of their seminars) and it didn't take more than a few seconds of explanation for me to learn they're extremely dodgy. Plus, for an Internet business company, you'd think they'd get a higher Google ranking for a search on their own name, wouldn't you?

Technorati Tags: rip-offs

Two stories on Microsoft's 'opening' of the Open Office XML standard: take your pick as to which one is better and understands the nuances of so-called open standards better.

Technorati Tags: Business IT, Open source, tech journalism

Who's the biggest fan of open source on the IT block? IBM, right? Apparently, though, it isn't completely in love: it has reservations. In fact, IBM's just fine and dandy with open source as long as it doesn't have to compete with it with its own products.

With MySQL on the rise, IBM has decided that it needs a way to boost DB2 and is considering creating a free, cut down version of DB2. This won't be open source, though. Anyone else guessing that perhaps IBM makes too much money from DB2 to want to give it away to the community? And that IBM's love of open source is limited to areas where it means they can give it away with their hardware, thus saving them licensing costs, or in areas where they don't make money from their own software and fancy a little help with the R&D?

Technorati Tags: databases, IBM, Open source

Adobe has a scheme designed to stop pirates. As well as a serial number, you need to activate your software with Adobe, over either the Internet or the phone. So far, so irritating, but just about acceptable.

Except their scheme is rubbish. Microsoft has a similar scheme, but it's based around the hardware that makes up your computer. If you reinstall Windows XP, the magic key it generates will be the same as before, because you haven't changed anything. Even if you have, there are a number of changes allowed before a new key gets produced and Microsoft classifies your installation as new.

Adobe's work on how many times you've installed it. I've had to replace the hard drive on my Power Book once. Creative Suite 2 thought it was a new install and I had to ring Adobe for a special activation code to get it to work. Now I've replaced the operating system on my iMac, guess what. Yes, Creative Suite thinks it's broken and I can't use it. I've tried to call Adobe for a new code, but guess what again. The automated scheme doesn't work (as per usual) and It's the weekend so there are no customer representatives available to take my call.

I hate Adobe. If you're going to be evil, at least be efficient at the same time.

Technorati Tags: Adobe, anti-piracy, software

Bruce Schneier has an excellent article on Wired about Sony and its infamous root kit. What he highlights is something that's been nagging at the back of my mind: why did no anti-virus or anti-spyware software pick up on the root kit? And why was there such a delay in the response by security companies to the root kit?

It feels like the infamous “Good AIDS, bad AIDS” sketch in Chris Morris' Brass Eye, where a chat show host is initially warm and sensitive to someone who has AIDS, thinking he contracted it from a blood transfusion. When it's revealed he caught the disease from his boyfriend, the host becomes hostile and says it's his own fault he has the disease: he has “bad AIDS” not “good AIDS”.

It seems that the security companies have a similar attitude: if you get a root kit installed by a big company like Sony, then no matter what it does to your computer and what it leaves you vulnerable to, it's a “good root kit”, should be left alone and the user shouldn't even be warned about its effects.

If, on the other hand, the root kit comes from somewhere other than a partner company or a company that could sue you for interfering with its technology, it's a “bad root kit” and should be destroyed instantly, preferably with a simultaneous launch of a dozen press releases that proclaim security company x protects you against the nasty people out there that would mess around with your PC.

I wonder if it's possible to sue the companies for selling a product that fails to live up to spec. There must surely be a maximum time allowed between discovery of a threat and the release of a suitable virus definition that the companies stipulate. Worth looking at anyway.

Technorati Tags: security

ZFS is a pretty nifty file system used by Solaris. Sun has just made it available as an open source product. It's of limited use anywhere except the server, so I wonder how much porting will be done on it. I imagine with Reiser and all those other FS ported to Linux, it won't be long before ZFS makes the leap.

Will Apple do anything with it? After all, wasn't its virtual file system support one of the great high-end features touted when OS X first leapt onto our computers? What have we got so far: FAT, FAT32, UFS, HFS+ (journaled), case-sensitive HFS+, plus a few CD file systems and a limited, community port of NTFS. Not very impressive so far. ZFS support could be the kind of thing that could make enterprises think really seriously about OS X Server.

Technorati Tags: Macs, Open source, servers, storage

Obviously fed up with MySQL grabbing marketshare at the bottom, Oracle has just put out a cut-down version of its 10g database called 10g Express Edition.

It's sure to help Oracle regain some mindshare, particularly among students who know exactly how much Oracle DBAs get paid and who currently find it hard to get hands-on experience with 10g proper. It will, however, have little effect on the hosting market, since it's not free for that group of users. That means the LAMP stack will continue to dominate that arena until any further changes of heart hit Oracle.

Excellent investigation by The Register reveals that Sun hasn't even one customer for its on-demand grid computing service.

This doesn't surprise me totally. You may remember HP's Utility Computing product died about a year ago and most analysts are predicting it will be a few years before utility and grid from third-parties will enter into vogue in organisations. There are still technological and management issues that need to be solved and I don't think anyone's yet been fooled into thinking otherwise.

Take a gander at this analysis of Citrix that IDC have done. Well, technically, it's just a summary of an analysis, and it's only an analysis of Citrix's acquisition of NetScaler.

Now look at the price.

Yes, it's $1,500 to buy a one-page analysis of one company's acquisition of a start-up. Since I can't afford to buy it to work out a word count, I can't tell you what that works out at per thousand, but I can tell you one thing: it's a lot higher than the page rates offered by Future, Highbury and the consumer press (£80 per page since you're asking). I'm so in the wrong profession to get rich...

Well, gosh. Someone's a little full of himself.

From time to time, I find myself lassoing a sacred cow in this Editorial space, dragging it over to the slaughterhouse of rhetoric, and ultimately barbecuing its falsehood over the stainless-steel, six-burner, propane-powered grill of real-world experience.

That's nice, dear. Far be it from me to put a mute in the end of your massively overblown trumpet, but you're about a year and a half too late with your biting editorial.

Just got back from Zaragoza in Spain, which was hosting Innovate!Europe 2005. This was the first in hopefully a long line of conferences - more hopefully, a short line of conferences - that will attempt to help Europe catch up with the US and Asia in creating new, profitable technology companies.

As a first stab, it was pretty good, although the number of attendees was far smaller than might have been hoped for at a pan-European event. And unfortunately, a number of the companies presenting there did have a touch of the "dot com" about them in terms of their business models.

But rather than be typically European and criticise, an unhelpful trait highlighted on the third day of the conference in an excellent keynote by the CEO of MySQL, I'll just say for now that the conference was a good way to break the ice in Europe and get VCs, entrepreneurs, et al thinking about the obstacles that need to be overcome. I'm sure that the 2006 conference will give everyone a chance to delve deeper into the mechanisms Europe needs to put in place to stimulate investment. Maybe some government types might even visit. Wouldn't that be surprising?