The way humans understand the world, the way we think, and the way we put our thoughts into language require both vagueness and ambiguity. Without them, we lose important aspects of meaning. Furthermore, how we structure our language is culturally and linguistically relative. As a result, current semantic interoperability efforts will be able to address a certain class of problems, but in the grand scheme of things, that class of problems is a relatively small subset of the types of communication we would prefer to automate between systems.

read more

IT is an acronym crazed world. So crazy that sometimes – when running out of three letter ones – we simply recycle them or add sequence numbers. Remember MRP, which used to mean Material Requirements Planning, but then became Manufacturing Resource Planning (called MRP II to avoid confusion), to only a couple of years – and a few trillion of investments – later, resurface as ERP.
In that era the term BPR also became popular. BPR stood for Business Process Re-engineering (see for example Hammer, M. and Champy, J. A.: (1993) Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution), a movement that in my perspective*really gained steam from the realization that throwing new technology (ERP) at existing processes, only offered limited improvement potential. As Business Process Re-engineering often resulted in massive redundancies and layoffs, BPR got kind of a bad rap, especially among employees and unions (remember those?).

read more

You’ve got SIEM, you employ log management. You even have access and or identity management. Each performs a specific security function for your enterprise, but unless they are working across all your information silos and collaborating their collective capabilities, you still might have vulnerability gaps…like a thoroughbred running with blinders.
While trawling the blogs, feeds and news I came across an analyst’s article about best security practices in which he kept referring to “the stack.” And by this, he meant a multitude of various solutions that address certain security needs and capabilities; everything from email filtering, firewalling, authenticating, credentialing, logging and intrusion detection, etc…

And, if you read my blogs often enough, you know I am a big proponent of unified security. However, unified security is not a stack. It is easy to be confused as both look to utilize best of breed tools to prevent negative impact on IP assets. A stack references a number of technologies where each operates independently from one another. Single sign on by itself is a sufficient tool, but when operating alone in its own silo, important contextual information is lost.

read more

Over the last week, the cloud world has witnessed a few important announcements from a couple of major cloud players. There were some new feature releases from Amazon and Microsoft. In addition, Amazon has announced the SAP Business Suite certification on AWS. Also, there was a ‘must read’ post published by Microsoft. Plus, ActiveState has announced about its significant revenue growth from the past year.
Here’s a quick summary of cloud happenings over the last week.
Beginning with the IaaS leader, Amazon has introduced the integration of Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) with Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS). This service allows a user to set up notifications for any RDS instances by creating an Event subscription. Next, Amazon has announced that AWS has been certified to host the SAP Business Suite environment in full production mode. Thus, increases the agility of the business, shorten deployment times, reduces deployment cost and scales up and down as needed.

read more

The Financial Reporting Council (FRC), a British accounting regulator, said on its web site Monday that it’s launched an investigation into the financial reports Autonomy put out between January 1, 2009 and June 30, 2011 right before it was acquired for $11.1 billion by Hewlett-Packard.
HP charged the British company with cooking its books and duping it into overpaying when it wrote off $8.8 billion of its investment in November. It referred the case to the SEC, which called in the Justice Department, and the Serious Fraud Office in Britain.
Mike Lynch, the founder of Autonomy, has roundly denied HP’s allegations. Lynch, who made a reported $800 million off the deal, claimed to welcome the FRC’s investigation and said in a statement that “As a member of the FTSE 100 the accounts of Autonomy have previously been reviewed by the FRC, including during the period in question, and no actions or changes were recommended or required.”

read more

The Financial Reporting Council (FRC), a British accounting regulator, said on its web site Monday that it’s launched an investigation into the financial reports Autonomy put out between January 1, 2009 and June 30, 2011 right before it was acquired for $11.1 billion by Hewlett-Packard.
HP charged the British company with cooking its books and duping it into overpaying when it wrote off $8.8 billion of its investment in November. It referred the case to the SEC, which called in the Justice Department, and the Serious Fraud Office in Britain.
Mike Lynch, the founder of Autonomy, has roundly denied HP’s allegations. Lynch, who made a reported $800 million off the deal, claimed to welcome the FRC’s investigation and said in a statement that “As a member of the FTSE 100 the accounts of Autonomy have previously been reviewed by the FRC, including during the period in question, and no actions or changes were recommended or required.”

read more

Mellanox Technologies on Monday announced the availability of new RDMA InfiniBand and Ethernet long-haul interconnect solutions as part of the company’s MetroX product line. MetroX products enable long-reach, high-throughput RDMA connectivity within and between data centers across multiple geographically distributed sites. MetroX enables IT managers to effectively connect remote data centers together, and provide faster disaster recovery and better utilization of remote storage or compute infrastructures.
“The need for long-haul InfiniBand and Ethernet with RDMA connectivity continues to grow,” said Gilad Shainer, vice president of market development at Mellanox Technologies. “The MetroX series extends InfiniBand and Ethernet lossless RDMA beyond a single data center network location. Data center expansion or Disaster Recovery (DR) sites can now benefit from Mellanox’s fastest interconnect solutions with no performance degradation. Utilizing Mellanox high-throughput interconnect solutions, our customers are able to reduce their database recovery time from days to hours, and thus maintain their business continuity and gain a competitive edge.”

read more

SoftLayer Technologies on Monday announced that its Catalyst startup program will support member companies from Startup Texas, a branch of Startup America. These promising startups can take advantage of generous IT credits on the SoftLayer platform for one full year, and get executive mentorship and valuable insights into how to build and scale the next killer application or game.
“Catalyst is unique because as a former startup ourselves, we know what it takes to transform an idea or vision into a viable business,” commented Paul Ford, vice president of community development for SoftLayer. “Our entrepreneurial spirit runs through Catalyst, helping equip the next generation of web-savvy entrepreneurs with infrastructure and support that is critical for growth and success, especially in the early stages. That includes best-in-class hosted infrastructure, mentorship from SoftLayer’s Innovation Team and executives, and increased exposure through marketing initiatives.”

read more

In just three days’ time it will be exactly two years since the weirdest Valentine’s Day I have ever experienced, or hope to experience again.

February 14, 2011, in short, is etched into my diary and my brain as the day when I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

read more

The bursting of the dot-com bubble left a long and lingering scar on the IT industry for many years.

Some would argue, rather successfully, that the industry never fully recovered after the 2001 implosion of an industry that had been propped up by the mad dash to prevent Y2K from changing life as we had come to know it.

Once disaster had been averted and the frantic race to the finish line was over, companies that had been spending big and living large suddenly had little money coming back into the business to support its ridiculous expenses, and the layoffs began.

Today’s IT job market is not nearly as grim as what was being faced by the newly unemployed of 2001. However, with the overall job market in such a state, it’s a very bright sign indeed that the IT job market seems to be recovering at a …