Enterprise

Google is developing a system status reporting dashboard for its Apps Premier product line. This decision provides further evidence Google is serious about becoming an enterprise software vendor. CNET’s Dave Rosenberg posted the announcement email, describing the dashboard’s incident reporting features: A description of the problem, with emphasis on user impact…. A continuously updated estimated time-to-resolution…. For most minor incidents, that should provide sufficient information to users regarding problem status and expected recovery times. For more serious…

Online storage service MediaMax, also called The Linkup, went out of business following a system administration error that deleted active customer data. The defunct company leaves behind unhappy users and raises questions about the reliability of cloud computing. According to Nirvanix, which along with MediaMax was spun out of a company called Streamload, a faulty script caused the problem: Streamload offered unlimited and then 25 GB of free storage for quite some time. This resulted in a tremendous amount of data stored in a few million free, non-active accounts for [nine years]. Streamload…

A computer problem at the Federal Aviation Administration center in Atlanta has created air traffic problems across the country. From WSB Radio in Atlanta: FAA Computer Problems: Failure in the system that processes flight plans in the eastern U.S. FAA says no danger is involved. System that processes the information for the east coast is based in Atlanta. It has been moved to a facility in Utah which usually processes only west coast flights. Flights across the country are backing up. Here’s a screen capture from the FAA, showing delayed flights: Information on the outage is still…

The “IT system used to identify terrorist threats that has been crippled by technical flaws,” according to a memo from the House of Representatives Committee on Science and Technology. The failed system is part of a “central US government repository of data on international terrorist identities…described by Vice Admiral (Ret.) John Scott Redd as ‘the mother of all databases.’” This enormous database, called the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE), is operated by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) to support the…

Cultural issues are among the key drivers causing acute IT problems. Project failure rates remain high in large part because these drivers are difficult to identify and diagnose. Many organizations accept information silos as a cost of doing business, despite the clear negative impact of these boundaries in communicating project status, problems, and potential points of failure. In extreme cases, projects fail and management claims complete ignorance of any problems whatsoever. Yes indeed, these are Dilbert moments. The importance of conversation becomes magnified when we recognize the term…

From that day in 1976 forward, I became relentless in negotiating as much money as possible on every new job I accepted. Once you’ve had your first job in your chosen field, it’s a lot easier to negotiate a new salary. After all, changing jobs is both stressful and risky. No one expects you to switch without getting more money. How much more is part of the negotiation, but 10-15 percent is a good rule of thumb. This also means that you have to tell your future employer what you’re currently making before you can start negotiating.

The SaaS model continues to turn the on-premise software model on its head. In a previous post, I discussed the SaaS model’s impact on software marketing, and sales. In this post I’d like to discuss the model’s impact on services. I’d like to consider this topic from two perspectives: The type of services that are being delivered around on-demand software. The way these services are delivered. On-premise software, regardless of its complexity, has always been delivered through extensive professional services engagements. A typical professional services engagement would start by…

When the next big thing from Apple or Microsoft is introduced, it doesn’t arrive quietly. On the contrary, these products are vigilantly tracked through the R&D life cycle by analysts, the press, The Street, and deliberately timed press releases. The launches are a big deal – even the ads are celebrated.

It is a well kept secret that some of the leading companies arrived at the top without taking early venture capital funding. Today’s market may call on companies to be more prudent in how they apply capital to generate returns.

Buying has changed. It’s no secret. Most companies selling in business-to-business markets face commoditization of products and services. Forces in the marketplace make it increasingly difficult to create sustainable competitive differentiation.

Much has been written about the promise of mashups to become serious business tools — as well as the obstacles and challenges they must overcome along the way. It’s only now, more than six years since the notion of mashups first came to the fore (they acquired the name a little later), that SaaS vendors and integrators are beginning to realize the full potential of the mashup for enterprise applications. As this first wave of commercial enterprise mashups comes to maturity, it is making clear once and for all the mashup’s seminal role as the disruptive motor at the heart of the…

We live in an era when any of us with an Internet connection can converse and do business instantly with strangers on the opposite side of the planet. Yet when any of us experiences a problem with one of the largest providers of that very technology, we might as well live on the Moon. Yes, hey, Google, I’m talking about you. We’re here, on the outside, knocking on your door. Is there anyone at home? IDG reports today (via PC World) that an unspecified number of Google Apps users were locked out of their accounts by a Gmail problem for around 15 hours yesterday and today. Google…

SaaS providers are still learning the hard way that If you trade in dependency, you have to earn trust: “[Clients of] on-demand application providers … depend on them for everyday functions and operations, and therefore trust is paramount.” Yesterday, in When Google Owns You, Chris Brogan posted about a colleague who came back from lunch on Monday to find he was locked out of all his Google resources because the provider had disabled his account. With no clue how to resolve the problem and no opportunity to call a live person at Google for help, it took him a day and a half…

When Elastra launched in March, my ZDNet blogging colleague Dana Gardner wrote that the company “aims to become a de facto standard for accessing cloud resources.” But if it wanted to become a neutral broker of cloud computing, why did it accept lead funding from Amazon in its $12 million B round, as Dana reports today? “Amazon is the leader in this area,” Elastra’s CEO Kirill Sheynkman told me when I put this question to him yesterday. “They agreed with us on our vision and believed in our technology. The plusses [of Amazon funding] far outweigh the…

Google has teamed up with SaaS vendor SuccessFactors to bring its cloud-based collaboration suite into the human capital management (HCM) arena. In a low-key announcement today, SuccessFactors launched five separate Google integrations that customers can choose to activate in its talent management software, including integrations with Google Docs, Google Calendar and Google Talk. Also linked are Google Maps and Google Book Search. Earlier this year, Google teamed up with Salesforce.com, the leading SaaS CRM vendor, for the launch of Google Apps for Salesforce. Although the integration to…

For the last few years SAP and Oracle have provided a series of entertaining "who is more black" episodes. And while they mock each other, SaaS vendors have continued to flourish, and newer categories of social media and vertical vendors...

Cisco is acquiring PostPath - a Linux based messaging product. PostPath claims a 1:5 cost advantage against MS Exchange. But to me it should be going after hosted mail or outsourced Exchange.Especially if it can support 1 GB mailboxes for...

Tom Friedman in a New York Times column"I couldn’t help but reflect on how China and America have spent the last seven years: China has been preparing for the Olympics; we’ve been preparing for Al Qaeda. They’ve been building better...

So says Harry Debes, CEO of Lawson.Part of me is not surprised. Over his career, Harry has been a solid operational guy at many software companies including GEAC, J.D. Edwards and now Lawson. Numbers are important to the man and...

Your neighboring passengers may give you dirty looks, but Andy Abramson has figured out how to make VoIP calls when you are flying on an Aircell equipped plane. Most airlines rolling out Wi Fly plan to block VoIP calling.

Always on the ball, unless I'm trying to get money out of him, Pillar's Chris Drago was nice enough to volunteer their "storage efficiency" calculator. I must admit, it looks great…..and it doesn't appear to automatically take you to the "if you don't buy Pillar you are an idiot" page –at least not directly. http://www.pillardata.com/green/storage-eq.shtm

So you are feeling a bit guilty about that entire carbon footprint you create aren't you? Me too. And probably like me you try to do little things to help out here and there, yet you find it furiously frustrating to do the right thing. So instead you do what I do, you give it your best shot and go to bed feeling like it's really someone else who is screwing things up. For example, at home I recycle. I take a painstaking (almost militaristic, if you were to ask the family) amount of time and effort to make sure all things cardboard or paper end up in the proper recycling bin, as I do…

I love the Olympics. I love them because there is always some sport being played that I've never seen nor heard of, but I find myself riveted too. This year it's "Women's Team Handball", which is not a good name as it really is more like lacrosse without sticks and pads. Ladies basically get a ball, pass it to each other, dribble it occasionally (no idea if there is a rule on this or not) and push towards the other teams goal (there is a goalie) where they try to get a clean shot while the defenders smash, maul, and attempt to annihilate them. They throw the ball…

Three weeks ago I got on the phone with the new team at Agami – a well funded startup in the NAS space with big name VC's ready to for a "do over". The past regime spent a lot of dough I guess but built a product with no market – it was too late and too limited on the high-end and too expensive and complicated on the low-end. I had heard that Wendell Wilson had gone there as VP of Marketing and Mike McGuire (STK/Sun) as VP of Sales. ESG Strategic Consultant Tim Lieto, who ran Sun Americas for a few years, spoke highly of Mike, and I knew Wendell from Pillar, so I wanted to…

Cuil is Cool. A batch of ex-Googlers started their own search engine predicated on things I like – finding relevant results instead of endless amounts of crap, helping me find things by not assuming I have any idea of what I'm looking for, and suggesting ways to move ahead. Best of all they are being transparent about what they know about me and what they do with that knowledge. Specifically, here's Cuil's privacy policy: "Effective Date: July 27, 2008 Privacy is a hot topic these days, and we want you to feel totally comfortable using our service, so our privacy policy…

"Toilets are necessary but not sufficient for success in the telecommunication industry" Succinctly delivered by Kjell Nordström of Funky Business fame. Water, electricity, and toilets are necessary for any organisation. As are accounting programs, CRM, ERP systems and (with time) any state-of-the-art enterprise software application. Those are the resources that any business can have, necessary but not sufficient. To quote his co-author Jonas Ridderstråle: "It's the ability to combine and recombine things that will make the difference, because most of the technologies, most of the raw…

A week ago Thomas Otter, George, Richard and Geoffrey set out on their bikes from Genova on a most gruelling but spectacular path ending up in my tourist infested area. Here's more from Thomas. And note that the ride reaches beyond the pedalling, sweating and ooh and ahhs over the nature - it's for a good cause as well - so pop by here to support the cause! Underway Isabel joined them from Germany for the last three legs. But George, the strong one (he was preparing for the UCI MTB masters world championships) must be the unluckiest of all cyclists this summer: In a inexplicable…

What happens when you organise tasks? First a look at our own personal time when process is rather natural: You receive mails, calls and you have ideas on the bus in the morning. For most of us such ad-hoc tasks end up in lists or inboxes - then postponement commences. OK, even the worst of us do some tasks straight off the bat, but things that requires some work or involves a unpleasant phone call have a tendency to be postponed - procrastination, a very human trait. It messes up with our work, it messes up for others and it gives us bad conscience - not good when the pending task list…

Sometimes when I hear the term "competitiveness" it hits me as ever so slightly aggressive. Fists flying, brats vying for a position in the front row, a tad macho the whole thing. But it's not, it's about success, delivering great value, being liked, being loved, being human, using a minimum of resources to deliver a maximum of value. Basically it's all good. It's about doing your very best, accepting that the ones not doing their best will be weeded out. That's life. Business talks the competitiveness game. But I am a sceptic as I often see that the term is…

Or how to "Dashboarderize" my usual software tools onto one interface and call it a "Management System". A couple of examples from two very popular (millions of users) services, randomly picked (so do not take it personal if you're a fan of these two in particular, all the others are basically variations of the same): Some "Project Management Software" - note the nifty use of a file browser, a calendar, a to-do list, a forum and some other knickknacks. All mashed up into a "Dashboard" with direct links to each "Application" via tabs on…

The recent service outages experienced by Amazon and Google have raised additional concerns about the reliability of these services in particular, and the concept of 'cloud computing' and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) in general.In my last blog entry, I suggested that the term 'cloud computing' may be gaining widespread acceptance but could also be preventing many mainstream business decision-makers from getting their heads around the idea of utilizing web-based services to meet their corporate needs.The faceless personas of Amazon and Google's cloud computing services doesn't help the…

My views in a recent blog post about how cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) relate to one another generated some interesting feedback. So, I've decided to delve in the cloud computing topic again to see if it can produce a similar response.A few years ago, as the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market began to pick up steam, a debate emerged about whether the SaaS term was the right label for this new movement. Many industry insiders became concerned that SaaS was too techie a term, and proposed an assortment of alternatives they thought would appeal more to mainstream IT and…

In May, I blogged about "Silicon Valley's first phone company" which was creating a new market opportunity for Software-as-a-Service (Saas) in the voice communications sector.Today, BT announced its intention to acquire that "Telco 2.0" platform company, Ribbit, for $105 million in cash. Not bad for a company which just closed a "small" B round of funding, according to the company executives I chatted with this afternoon.This acquisition clearly demonstrates how far SaaS has come.SaaS is no longer viewed as just a cheaper and easier alternative to traditional, on-premise applications.

Last week Appirio announced that it had secured Series B financing of $5.6 million led by Sequoia Capital, the investment firm which has become notorious for also backing Google, Yahoo!, LinkedIn, and PayPal. Sequoia also funded one of my previous employers, International Network Services (INS), one of the high-flyers of the 1990s.Appirio's latest round of funding comes on the heals of a Series A investment of $1.1 million which it captured earlier this year from salesforce.com and angel investors. Although there is lots of VC money chasing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and cloud computing…

I received an email message from a frustrated Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company executive yesterday asking if I could publish a commentary clarifying the difference between cloud computing and SaaS.His plea was prompted by a trade publication article which basically referred to cloud computing and SaaS as one and the same.Anyone who has been intimately involved in the evolution of the SaaS or cloud computing worlds has a right to be frustrated by the blurring of the lines between the two concepts.In my case, I view cloud computing as a broad array of web-based services aimed at allowing…

I was in Bangkok last week to visit Kuhn Taveesak Saenthong and his team for the Hitachi Data Systems Thailand User Conference. There were over 400 people in attendance with around 300 signed up for the Enterprise track. The hot topics were storage virtualization, Services Oriented Storage, and Active Archive. Some of the highlights were presentations by Kuhn Satit Viddayakorn, VP of Bangkok hospital who talked about “Delivering Value Beyond Storage in Healthcare” and Kuhn Stephen Lehman, IT Director, International School Bangkok, who talked about “Delivering Value Beyond Storage in…

The EPA issued a letter on August 8, 2008 to Computer Server Manufactures or Other Interested Stakeholder, asking for a review of draft 2 of the ENERGY STAR® specification for computer servers. The response is due by September 19, 2008.  The purpose of this specification is two-fold: “(1) to identify the top performers currently available in the marketplace based on key energy efficiency metrics and (2) to provide end users with more detailed product and performance information so they can make informed purchasing decisions based on consistent manufacturer reporting.”  The EPA intends…

The move to network unification recently took a step forward with an FCoE Test Drive Event in June 2008. FCoE can send FC protocols over an Ethernet network and makes it possible to have a common Ethernet network support FC storage and Ethernet message traffic. This would greatly reduce connectivity costs, especially for servers. Today servers require redundant connections for storage, LAN traffic, and clustering connectivity. A redundant pair of FC host Bus Adapters alone could cost as much as the server itself. When one thinks of Storage and Ethernet, there is a concern about guaranteed…

Congratulations to SNIA on their 10th Anniversary and to Vincent Franceschini of HDS and Larry Krantz of EMC who have just been chosen to join SNIA’s Hall of Fame Contributors. Larry is a past Chairman of the Board for SNIA, and Vincent is the current Chairman of the Board. Both of them made major contributions towards the success of SNIA through their leadership during important growth periods in the storage networking industry. They join other Hall of Fame Contributors, Mike Dutch, Paul Massiglia, Roger Reich, John Tyrrell, and John Wilkes.  Above and beyond their day jobs, they…

Rick Villars of IDC believes that the predominant storage system in the future will be modular, two controller, storage systems. While modular storage will continue to be the storage of choice for the midrange market, it will have an expanding presence in the enterprise market as “role based” storage systems. This is storage that meets a particular role, such as NAS, VTL, Archive, or as a back end tier to a storage virtualization controller. While modular storage systems do not have the high availability of large enterprise storage systems that have 32 to 128 controllers clustered around…

A Wall Street Journal article (subscription required) points out an interesting side benefit of the latest e-discovery tools: reduction of low-value work for law firms. That is, not a benefit to the law firms, but to their clients. First, some background. E-Discovery refers to the production of electronic documents during the discovery phase of litigation. As more and more corporate records are

Spectator readers have been reporting more layoffs at Epicor: Five in early August from Epicor's CRS Retail Systems unit in Newburgh N.Y.An unknown number of Epicor employees in the firm's Montreal officeIn mid-July, 40 employees including "quite a few" management and consultants from the Vantage side I've not yet gotten a response from Epicor's analyst relations office for verification. If other

A ruling by a federal appeals court yesterday in a copyright case (Jacobsen v. Katzer) sets an important precedent for the enforceability of open source licenses. The Wall Street Journal reports: The case centers around free software used in model trains that Robert Jacobsen, a model-train enthusiast, made available online. Mr. Jacobsen alleged that Matthew Katzer, and Mr. Katzer's company, used

i2's quest for a buyer has ended, with the announcement of an acquisition by competitor JDA. In 2005, JDA acquired one of the other major supply chain management vendors, Manugistics. Now with it's pick up of i2, it is poised to be the dominant best-of-breed developers of supply chain management (SCM) systems worldwide, with revenues exceeding $600 million and over 6,000 customers. Even with

Oracle apparently is making progress in its Fusion program, to develop best-of-breed applications based on its myriad acquisitions, but it is publicly disclosing very few details of its efforts or its plans for Fusion. Bill Kutik in HR Executive Online writes: ...there is the continued secrecy around Fusion, the long-awaited next generation of applications built on a single architecture, with

Click to Play Most organizations have done a pretty decent job of managing all of the "data."  But they have done an awful job managing all of the other electronic "stuff" -- things like application files and images and web information and so on and so on.The "digital landfill" in most organizations represents the last great untouched frontier of information management.  There is more information surrounding our business and organizational processes than ever before.  Increasing percentages of this information are business critical. This information is being created…

Thanks to everyone who has viewed our "What's in your digital landfill?" presentation.  We're now over 10,000 views. If you haven't yet viewed the presentation, GO HERE.  Or click on the embedded link below. What's in your digital landfill?view presentation (tags: technology bpm ecm happens)

On the way to moving number two son from dorm to house had the  misfortune to stop at a KFC/Long John Silver's combo and watch the  patrons stare in sheer befuddlement at the menu. Unfortunately not unlike the experience I've seen a number of times in  end users as they consider ECM solutions.

We have partial season tickets to the Nationals.  Most teams have mascots or a scoreboard race or those shell games where the "shells" (usually something local) move terrifically fast and you need to keep track of where the baseball is. The Nationals Presidents Race is an example of marketing that simply takes off.  A couple of years ago they started these races.  George Washington is #1, Thomas Jefferson is #3, Lincoln is #16 and Teddy is #26 (get it?).  This event has taken on a life of its own -- the "race" begins every game somewhere over by the…

From the most recent Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) investor update, a datapoint worth noting... Year over year overall quarterly income growth = 15%SharePoint growth > 30% Hmmmmm. As we've noted before, there's something going on out there.  (See my previous post on the Elephant in the Room.) We've done a lot in the magazine and on the web over the past 12 months about SharePoint.  We thought it might be useful to collect some of it in one place.  You can find the information collected at THIS LINK. As you think about your schedule for the fall, you should definitely get one one…

So weird: A plane was forced to land when a passenger had an extreme allergic reaction to a leaking jar of mushroom soup, it was revealed today. The soup fell on the man from an overhead locker on a Ryanair flight to Dublin from Budapest. He reportedly suffered allergic swelling in his neck and struggled to breathe, forcing staff to seek emergency medical treatment.

Premier Election Solutions, formerly called Diebold Election Systems, has finally admitted that a ten-year-old error has caused votes to be dropped. It's unclear if this error is random or systematic. If it's random -- a small percentage of all votes are dropped -- then it is highly unlikely that this affected the outcome of any election. If it's systematic -- a small percentage of votes for a particular candidate are dropped -- then it is much more problematic. Ohio is trying to sue: Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner is seeking to recover millions of dollars her state spent on the…

Laptops aboard the International Space Station have been infected with the W32.Gammima.AG worm. And it's not the first time this sort of thing has happened.

It's all about the captions: ...doctored photographs are the least of our worries. If you want to trick someone with a photograph, there are lots of easy ways to do it. You don't need Photoshop. You don't need sophisticated digital photo-manipulation. You don't need a computer. All you need to do is change the caption. The photographs presented by Colin Powell at the United Nations in 2003 provide several examples. Photographs that were used to justify a war. And yet, the actual photographs are low-res, muddy aerial surveillance photographs of buildings and vehicles on the ground in Iraq. I'm…

In eerily similar cases in the Netherlands and the United States, courts have recently grappled with the computer-security norm of "full disclosure," asking whether researchers should be permitted to disclose details of a fare-card vulnerability that allows people to ride the subway for free. The "Oyster card" used on the London Tube was at issue in the Dutch case, and a similar fare card used on the Boston "T" was the center of the U.S. case. The Dutch court got it right, and the American court, in Boston, got it wrong from the start -- despite facing an open-and-shut case of First Amendment…

News Corp. Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch made a statement during the company’s annual meeting last year where he said:“We’re only at the beginning of two of the most profound social and economic trends of our age–globalization and digitalization,” rattling off a few of the company’s milestones of the past year. Besides Fox Interactive and all [...]

Bill Ives provides a nice overview of the EMC release of Documentum Enterprise Content Management (ECM) 6.5. The big new thing in the release is apparently that it tries to make use of Web 2.0 concepts and technologies: They are providing a bridge between traditional web content management and tools and Web 2.0 to allow their clients to take advantage of the new opportunities that many inside the enterprise have seen on the consumer web. This inc...

I have been wondering what the big content management vendors were going to do to respond to enterprise 2.0 so I was pleased to have this opportunity to speak with Documentum and want to share this cross post from the...

ROI for Social ComputingMy blogging manifestoThe Reality Club: ON "IS GOOGLE MAKING US STUPID" By Nicholas CarrThe Atlantic Online | July/August 2008 | Is Google Making Us Stupid? | Nicholas CarrWhy Abundance is Good: A Reply to Nick CarrWhy Skepticism is Good: My Reply to Clay ShirkyWhy Abundance Should Breed Optimism: A Second Reply to Nick CarrChallenging the TechnophilesThe New Techno-Historical Determinism: A Rep...

Your company has a perfectly good wiki but your (otherwise intelligent) co-workers insist on emailing you Microsoft Word documents to review. Your gentle guidance has been ignored. Your snarky comments have been equally ineffective. What do you do? I suggest the following method. Try it (at your own risk) and let me know hot it works. A co-worker has sent you and four or five other colleagues a MS Word document that summarizes some research ...

It's true... I come across things on our EMC employee community almost daily that surprise me. EMC'ers across the globe are connecting, collaborating and innovating around the clock on EMC ONE. What's more, the sense of community that ONE is helping drive throughout the company is astounding. I came across an interesting bit this morning that I wanted to share... It's a slideshow of photos taken from EMC'ers - and was syndicated on EMC ONE. Sit back for a minute or two and enjoy the show... There's some fantastic stuff in here. It's nice to watch this community of like minded folks come…

EMC VP of Employment Brand and Strategy Polly Pearson is onto something cool... She's started a virtual talk show for EMC'ers called Culture Talk. During the 45 - 60 minute program, she interviews one or two folks from across EMC to get perspective around who they are and what makes them tick. I was honored to be a guest during yesterdays show, along with VP of Global CMA Marketing, Whitney Tidmarsh. To make the event even more interesting, Polly brought in celebrity co-host Storagezilla. Judging by the rate of incoming questions, a sizable and passionate audience had tuned in to the event.

I came across a rather interesting report from Universal McCann. The Wave 3 report is the third in a series that dives deep into measurement for trending, usage, sentiment and geo adoption of Social Media. If you're evangelizing Social Media in the enterprise - and making a case for investment - you may want to leverage the data in this report. Some interesting notes - - The vast majority of users surveyed are now producing content - Asian markets are leading the way - creating more content than any other geo - China has the largest blogging community - with over 42M bloggers - Video is the…

Yesterday EMC announced Documetum ECM 6.5... Despite the 6.5 label, this is much more than a point release. From my POV, it represents a fundamental shift in the ECM space. While there's no shortage of cool new tools under the hood of 6.5, it's the marriage of Web 2.0 with the more traditional ECM capabilities that I believe to be most exciting. As noted in a previous post, my world consists of two very different landscapes... There's the world of structured data - object models, content policies, versioning, etc;. In this world, things are easy to find - Everything is organized and…

As a general rule, I don't deep dive into new EMC products. There are others better equipped for down and detailed product chat. However, today EMC launched a product that I'm personally quite excited about - Documentum ECM 6.5. To be candid - I've been a fan of Documentum for some time. Long before the acquisition of Documentum in 2003, we selected the Documentum product family to meet our ECM needs after months and months of extensive research. Today, Documentum manages hundreds of thousands of assets - in over 52 locales - across our web properties. But, the point of this post isn't to…

Computers of today are too limited. In only being able to count by one even the simplest of equations involving large numbers is cumbersome. Storage of those numbers is inefficient and translation of bases from 2 to n a requirement. If we want to take computers to the next level we need to break out of the bipolar mode. The ideas for doing it have been around for as long as I have been alive (and

For those of you who have been following my new reaility of giving up e-mail at work, this is *the* blog post. The one that contains the one and only extensive recording of an event I participated in a couple of months back and which will detail what I have been pursuing all along and still going strong: "See the Light - Thinking Outside the Inbox"

From SDN: With such a growing interest in RIA and related technologies SDN and SAP ventured out to see how large an interest was present in the SDN community, the result together with Adobe was a sold out event in 3 SAP TechEd locations in 2007. For 2008 we've doubled the capacity and increased the presentations and sought

Here are some quick highlights on the ASP.Net MVC framework that .Net developers should be aware of.

This week's weekly poll asks the ERP community their thoughts on how long ERP projects usually take. The poll has been posted on our site for just two days now, but the initial results are already beginning to tell an interesting (but not surprising) story: most ERP projects take longer than expected. In fact, at the time of this blog,

Couple of things first before we get to the next post in the Hansei series.  First, Jon Robinson was thinking about reputation damage and stock price and wrote a very lucid and smart post on the subject: Companies think they own their reputation, but in reality they don’t. A reputation is the aggregate of the popular opinion about you. Opinions, or thoughts, belong to an individual, true or not, and a company doesn’t own a person’s thoughts, therefore a company doesn’t own its reputation. QED. Yes.  Absolutely.  In fact, there are already changes in the works to the FAIR model that…

Picking up from yesterday, Today I’d like to talk about: HANSEI - WHAT IS “RELENTLESS REFLECTION?” - And why we’re talking about it in the context of Risk Analysis. Recall from yesterday’s post about how I got to thinking about the concept of Hansei-Kaizen, “relentless reflection” and “continuous improvement” and how we might apply that to risk management.  It’s a concept born of Toyota and is, in some way, the foundation for “Lean” production. Call me biased, but I think that Hansei - the act of ‘relentless…

You might consider this a follow on to the Deming in Risk Management series I did this spring. Recently, Thinking Problem Management wrote on the concept of Hansei-Kaizen.  That started me thinking about Information Risk Management, Information Security, the role of the security group and the analytical function. The following isn’t necessarily a revelation, but as I’ve a friend interviewing for a CISO-type job at a Fortune 20 this week and they are focused on a not dissimilar business management philosophy, I thought I’d write a little about the subject. Hansei-Kaizen is…

Reputation damage can be one of the most difficult concepts to build measurements around.  In fact, it can be difficult to develop the actual metrics for the measurements, as well.  Damage to things like “corporate reputation” and “goodwill” and “brand equity” can be difficult to wrap even reasonable dollar estimates around (When I use FAIR, I really only care to use one metric when describing loss magnitudes - the almighty currency). Complicating factors is the impact (or lack thereof) of incidents on stock price.  Many researchers who identify…

So our server was upgraded by our hosting provider.  Unfortunately, in the upgrade, a comment from Christian was lost amidst the shuffle. Sorry Christian! Please take a second and verify your RSS feeds and all that.  Thanks! Alex

I haven’t tested this one out yet, but if what Gizmodo is writing is true, there’s a huge security flaw in the iPhone on the 2.0.2 firmware. Basically if you take a locked iPhone and tap the emergency call button, you can then double-tap the home button to get you to your favorites. This is really a problem because from there you can open up a lot of different information on your iPhone, including email and other contact information. It opens up the potential of looking at all your email, your SMS history and opening Safari. Not a good thing. I’m sure this will be fixed with…

While Rich is off on a well deserved vacation with his wife, I’m joined by Mike Rothman, analyst, consultant, blogger, podcaster and friend. Mike and I recorded Monday night since I should be in a hotel somewhere in Southern California when this goes live. Show Notes: Mike Rothman Security Incite Blog, The Pragmatic CSO Book and the Pragmatic CSO Podcast Road Tolls Hacked - Nate Lawson takes on FasTrak Summary of PCI-DSS 1.2 changes: You might want the actual summary. Google Streets: Google’s going down private roads in my own back yard. Tonight’s Music: Jim Armstrong with…

Amrit Williams has a snarky little piece called “The 11 Worst Ideas in Security“. I haven’t read Ranum’s article yet, but I can guess at the content given some of Ranum’s previous writings. Amrit’s comment on WEP is worth reading the article by itself. I’d actually forgotten about Microsoft Central Point Anti-virus, or I’d never really paid attention at the time. The former is more likely. I probably would have moved security analysts up the chart, but Amrit was once an analysts and still has a soft spot for them in his heart.

After some of what happened at Defcon and just to combat my general laziness when it comes to passwords, I purchased 1Password for my Mac Book Pro and iPhone several weeks ago. Actually, the OS X version is $34.95 while the iPhone version is currently free. The main feature that finalized my decision to purchase it was the ability to sync between the iPhone and the Mac Book Pro. I’m the only one in the house with a Mac, otherwise I would have purchased a 5-seat license for the house, which I think is only $20 more. I’ve been using 1Password on both the iPhone and the MBP for…

I’ve had this article flagged on Lifehacker for over 4 months, waiting for the right time to use it. When a friend brought over his computer for repair, I took one look at the running system and realized it needs to be rebuilt from scratch. His hardware’s good, but the OS is infected beyond trusting. I’m hoping I can save a few pictures for him, but that’s about it. In the mean time, I decided his computer would make a good guinea pig for playing with a few LiveCD’s and the Fedora 9 Live USB Creator. I have a 2 gig USB thumb drive I picked up at RSA this year…

Neal Ford and Rebecca Parsons will be working with me again on a DSL tutorial at JAOO and QCon San Francisco. The two biggest event I have coming up are two more conferences run by JAOO. The first is the mother-ship conference in Århus, which has become my favorite conference of the last few years. Later I'll be at QCon San Francisco. At both conferences I'll be giving a tutorial on Domain Specific Languages with Neal Ford and Rebecca. In addition I'm giving a shorter talk in the regular JAOO session on the patterns for internal DSLs, working directly on the topics that I've recently got…

I've hit a significant, if purely internal, milestone in the DSL book recently. I also find that people regularly ask me what the status is of the book is. So it seems like a good moment to post a note about where I am with the book and where I see things going.The most common question I get is "when will the book be out?" The way things look at the moment, I'd estimate it appearing some time in 2010. That's an estimate, with all the usual hedges that apply to such things.To help see how the current state meshes in with that estimate, I'll describe the general progress of how books work, at…

What is the connection between ModelDrivenSoftwareDevelopment (MDSD) and DomainSpecificLanguages (DSLs)? It's pretty common to see the term "DSL" crop up in the context of MDSD. Indeed some MDSD people seem to think that DSLs only exist within the MDSD world. I've been writing a lot on DSLs recently for my book, but so far I haven't really touched on the MDSD angle much Instead I've concentrated on DSLs role in more conventional programming. DSLs exist in both the textual language and MDSD worlds and play pretty much the same role for both.In an MDSD context DSLs are again a language targeted…

Model Driven Software Development (MDSD) is a style of software development that considers itself as an alternative to the traditional style of programming. The approach centers itself on building models of a software system. These models are typically made manifest through diagrammatic design notations - the UML is one option. The idea is that you use these diagrams, to specify your system to a modeling tool and then you generate code in a conventional programming language.The MDSD vision evolved from the development of graphical design notations and CASE tools. Proponents of these…

Like any profession, software development has it's share of oft-forgotten activities that are usually ignored but have a habit of biting back at just the wrong moment. One of these is data migration.Most new software projects involve data that's lived somewhere else and now needs to be moved into the new system once it's live. A system replacement might have to move all the old data, new functionality may lead to data being loaded from some other system.It's common to not take this task very seriously. After all, it's just reading some data, munging it a bit, and loading into the new system.

Today Salesforce announced that its 2nd quarter '09 earnings call will take place on Wednesday, August 20th at 5:00pm EST. You can listen on the web at: http://www.salesforce.com/investor or dial in at 866-901-SFDC. Salesforce's official press release is here.

At today's Tour de Force event in Santa Clara, Salesforce and Google will be announcing the new Google Data API Toolkit for Salesforce. From the Salesforce developer wiki: The new Force.com Toolkit for Google Data APIs makes it easy to...

This is just a friendly reminder that Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff will be keynoting the Tour de Force event taking place Monday the 23rd in Santa Clara. For a full agenda or to register, visit Salesforce's Tour de Force site....

Scott Hemmeter's early morning tweet alerted to me to the fact that Scoble posted Tuesday's interview with Marc Beinoff on the FastCompany.tv site. The interview is titled, "Salesforce.com to Become Platform Juggernaut, Says CEO". Scoble twittered about the interview saying:...

Earlier this week, Adam Gross, Salesforce.com's VP of Platform and Developer Marketing, gave a keynote at eBay's Developer Conference on "the importance of platform-as-a-service to the ecommerce industry." In an interview with AuctionBytes after the keynote, Gross commented on eBay's...

This story at MSNBC about people who choose not to vaccinate their kids hits a nerve with me.. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26269069/ I've had the conversations with those wild-eyed fanatics (yes, I feel that strongly about it) who believe chiropra...

I'm a political junkie so naturally I'm watching the party conventions, looking for some inspiration, some good speeches then hitting MSNBC, CNN - everywhere looking at commentary. I thought it was my project that had a problem but I think it's more of a global "people" issue and it's only getting worse. No one closes their mouth long enough to hear what someone else is saying or they are so

Why, in today's modern world, does a major laptop vendor not include a simple list of components in the system?  I want to be able to find- at a re-install or new OS - the latest drivers. Seems fairly simple, eh.  Should just come in the p...

I love the various Forbes list.  Recently, they did their 10 best cities for earning a living. How much do such list factor into your thoughts of moving - if at all?  If you live in one of those cities, what do you love/hate about it? ...

How to build a focused and simplified sales and marketing message.

I'm heading out for a trip for the first time in several months. I'm going to be one of the keynotes at the CRM Association Return2Customer National Conference in Atlanta this week. I suggest, if you... The award winning, edgiest CRM blog on the planet. The industry, the concepts, the news from CRM at the Speed of Light author Paul Greenberg

I'm proud to say that CRM Magazine, the Institutional Investor of the CRM industry, gave me one of their 2008 CRM Influencers awards yesterday. As I stood on the podium around the pool at the Water... The award winning, edgiest CRM blog on the planet. The industry, the concepts, the news from CRM at the Speed of Light author Paul Greenberg

Each year in August, the Singaporean government has a National Rally Day - and most of them amaze me. When they dazzle, they unfold an initiative that is so imaginative and so well adopted and funded... The award winning, edgiest CRM blog on the planet. The industry, the concepts, the news from CRM at the Speed of Light author Paul Greenberg

I can't say that I've ever been completely convinced of the ultimate value of any analyst firms' geometric ranking systems, such as Gartner's Magic Quadrants or of Forrester's Waves or any of the... The award winning, edgiest CRM blog on the planet. The industry, the concepts, the news from CRM at the Speed of Light author Paul Greenberg

Before I get into the newest excerpt of the book (partially because it minimizes how much I have to write. My hands still hurt pretty badly), I want to thank everyone who have written encouraging... The award winning, edgiest CRM blog on the planet. The industry, the concepts, the news from CRM at the Speed of Light author Paul Greenberg

There's certain times when you have that gut feeling about something. That time when you just know there's better ways to do things but you can't seem to decipher the right approach to get there. One shift in today's business landscape that doesn't make it any easier is enterprise 2.0, big brother of its more publicized and consumer-oriented Web 2.0.While few of the digerati would ever debate enterprise 2.0's worth, a lot of businesses still struggle with where to start or how to build a team of technical communicators and media creators.And if you're a buyer, you're acutely aware of all the…

The Trouble with Twitter Sounds like change is on horizon for Twitter's biz model. And conversational search is now a must when tracking activity about your brand. (tags: twitter microblogging microsharing web+2.0 socialnetworking)

Online Community Platform Report | Patricia Seybold GroupWorked with Matthew Lees on this report on enterprise social software..Telligent was one of the 10 companies featured. Reach out if you have questions or need info -- gdearing at Telligent dot com Can IBM save Lotus from the Microsoft onslaught? | Computerworld Blogs"It's going to have to beef up SharePoint's social networking capabilities, for a start." (That's where our Evolution product comes in..we're releasing mid September and looking for some beta customers.) Technorati Tags: online+communities,telligent,social…

I'm two weeks into the new gig at Telligent Systems, and I couldn't be more excited. If you don't know about Telligent, chances are you've encountered Community Server, its flagship product. It's the underlying platform for some of the world's largest communities and biggest brands. Dell, Microsoft, and Intel are just a few of our customers. I'm looking forward to sharing our experiences as we plan, build and deploy all sorts online communities and social software applications. It's gonna be a good ride. And I'm ready. Technorati Tags:…

Twitter For The Enterprise We're doing this now..If you'd like to be a test client, email me at gdearing at telligent dot com. (tags: microblogging twitter enterprise+microsharing telligent)

To help myself organize the different pieces of realXtend documentation, I’ve added a realXtend resources tab to my blog header. This page lists all the resources I use. If you know of others, please add a comment.

In Mark Kingdon’s first blog post after taking over the helm at Linden Lab, he said of his first first staff meeting that “It was a remarkable first meeting with the team and I can tell you I have never attended another staff meeting like this anywhere. It was visually arresting and very engaging. Second Life’s communication tools (text chat [...]

  Microsoft’s amazing Photosynth™ technology went live on Thursday of this week. It’s intended to create a pseudo-3D viewing experience from large numbers of overlapping photographs of a scene, both distant and close-up. I thought it would be fun to try it out with a completely synthetic scene - our recruiting center in Second Life (click [...]

Two days ago I did something really stupid to my realXtend world. Without looking too closely at a script I pasted it into an new cube prim in my virtual office and the object disappeared. Confused, I created another cube object of a different color and pasted the script. It also disappeared. I went outside the [...]

There’s a strong push in the IT industry to enable employees to work from home if it makes sense for both the employees and the employer. The pros and cons have been discussed in many places, so I won’t go over them here. Suffice it to say, EMC has embraced the concept for a while [...]

I’m keen to see startups in the accounting for small business space. Part of that is because I spent more years than I care to remember in finance roles, part is in the belief that accounting systems that reflect a 600 year old methodology are well past their sell by date. There has to be a better way. GoBootstrap.com makes a valiant effort in that direction and while I like their general approach, they have a long way to go. First the good stuff. Offering just four tabs from which to choose keeps things really simple. These are income, expenses, taxes and reports. Each is self…

It’s rare for me to pick out individuals but Mike McDerment CEO of FreshBooks deserves attention by anyone in the startup game and especially those trying to develop business applications. I first came across Mike some two years ago when FreshBooks had about 70,000 registrants. That number is now over 400,000. That’s some growth. Running a startup isn’t easy, there’s often a lot of incumbent competition and as for word of mouth/viral growth - ferget it. At least right now. For as much as we talk about the consumerization of business applications, it takes a LOT of…

Much has already been said about Tweetrush, the service that allows you to get statistics on your personal Twitter usage. I particularly liked Bernie Goldbach’s commentary where, among other things, he says: Tweetrush is Sweet Infoporn. I like stats. I like comparing like to like. And that means I like the infoporn hit that I get when clicking through Tweetstats. Tweetrush is powered by a real analytics engine using PHP and the Zend engine. It’s displaying only the tip of an iceberg of live data. That got me thinking. Using Tweetrush, I can look at pretty much anyone’s…

The spat between WidgetLaboratory and Ning highlights one of the running sores in the current rush to all things 2.0: no-one and I mean no-one has given enough thought to how Terms of Service (ToS) are going to operate in the real world once cloud based services start to scale and third parties tangle with each other. On this occasion, I agree with Mike Arrington that the WidgetLaboratory folk have behaved in an asinine manner. Regardless of the rights or wrongs, behaving like school children in email is guaranteed to get anyone’s back up. But then in the testosterone driven world of…

Through my keen observations, deep procrastination and occasional drunken ramblings, there are three things which annoy me about a service or product before I even use them. These three things, from a consumer’s point of view, are the following: having a product with a stupid name; a blatant disregard to standard English and not capitalising the first letter of their product or company name - a noun; having a company which uses a ccTLD which magically incorporates the product name: del.icio.us and last.fm, par exemple. When I first saw iterasi, it hit two accounts of which trigger my…

Well, quite a bit of confirming feedback (17 comments) from other people in their LinkedIn frustrations... and LinkedIn has actually improved the usability of group subscribing/unsubscribing since my previous post - Failures of Process (and Thinking) in Social Networking. If you expand the screenshot above, you can see that they've added a counter to the number of groups you are subscribed to (recall that I'd been told I was subscribed to 154 groups, and needed to get that down to 50... or they'd do it for me) - a simple counter is a wondrous thing. See, usability doesn't have to be painful!

Oy vey - this is going to be a long post, as the more I dove into it, the more insanity I found... I've been on LinkedIn essentially forever. It's my favorite professional networking site, and I have easily spent hundreds to thousands of hours on LinkedIn finding interesting people to connect to, or responding to inbound requests. I've slowly built up to around 1500 connections on LinkedIn, and have had some great success with the help of the LinkedIn platform. All that said, they are by far the slowest moving/innovating platform for social networking, and to make matters worse, the time they…

Should you outsource your e-mail archive?view presentation (tags: cloud computing saas outsourcing e-mail management) Wrapped up an AIIM Wednesday Webinar earlier today, this one on Should You Outsource Your E-mail Archive? Will post a link (when it's available - next 24 hours or so) to the actual replay of the audio and slides, but here are the raw slides for my portion of the presentation. Funny enough - e-mail/messaging and security where the original topics I first covered when I accidentally stumbled out of my IT-oriented cube and became an analyst. Much of this was a blast from the past…

Is Six Sigma Enough? Is it Too Little? Does it even matter outside of manufacturing circles? Despite decades of theories and methodologies from BPR to Six Sigma, many organizations still find that processes are unowned, unmanaged, and out of control – in short, many organizations are "process ignorant." Is your organization process ignorant or process smart?  More importantly how do you rank against your competitors? Take the AIIM Market IQ Survey on Business Process Management What’s in it for you? You will gain actionable intelligence from the collective experiences and…

Influential Marketing Blog: How to Avoid Social Media Espionage Talking in our Enterprise 2.0 class today about the dangers of "remembering in public" - via social bookmarking, twitter, etc.. Transparency can be a bad thing - depending on which side you sit. (tags: privacy security social socialmedia socialsoftware twitter social_bookmarking espionage rohit_bhargava) Top analyst twitterers / analyst twitter index « Technobabble 2.0 Made it to position #14 (up from #15) in the latest update to the "top analyst twitters" by Jonny at TechnoBabble 2.0. Thanks for the updates Jonny - nice…

The global economy has been hit with some rough weather lately, but when looking at a 12 percent growth of...

Microsoft has recently announced that it is loosening its licensing policy to make it easier for businesses to utilize virtualization...

We're taking a short break from the "Securing the Line" series to cover the recent residential VoIP news, specifically AT&T CallVantage. AT&T recently stopped selling the CallVantage service to new customers within the last month, sparking concern from current subscribers that the entire service may be shutting down soon. Interestingly enough, AT&T has showed a marked change in reference to their marketing and sales channels, decreasing or eliminating marketing for the service in the last quarter. Read more

3com 4500G or the new 4800 series...cheap,solid from the company that's been doing networking since day 1.

how will they see if the cameras are facing the wrong way ? :(

Really, all this discussion about WAN this and that is so boring. Sure there's all sorts of new toys for the geeks among us but the practical business reality still hasn't emerged. If executives were to simply examine HOW their IT resources are used and to what extent they contribute to the "bottom line" they'd soon realize all the bandwidth they'd need is a 56K line. Web video, surfing, chat, emailing vacation photos and the like burn countless business cycles and contribute nothing to the business. Users are driving bandwidth consumption because stakeholders and IT are clueless and the…

Robert X. Cringely - the famous Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) weekly columnist whose Web site describes him as a sex symbol, airplane enthusiast and intrepid adventurer (the nerdiest of them all?), has authored a very provocative column regarding CCIEs and how their numbers and geographic locations could become key indicators to help economists predict which countries in the future hold the most promise for becoming technology leaders. In his column, Leading Men: Cisco engineering units are the emerging measure of global power, Cringely credits his friend and dual CCIE George Morton, as…

An interview with Barry is up on EDN where he's talking about FLASH Drives and he didn't even leak anything about Symmetrix on a Chip. Yes. An entire Symmetrix on-one-chip!*Awhhh crap...I'm going to be pulling this post as well aren't I? ;)*I'm joking, laugh.

V 1.0 of the EMC Centera SDK for XAM is now available, making EMC the first hardware vendor in the SNIA XAM initiative to deliver a XAM SDK. HP and Sun are expected to deliver their SDKs soon.Centera access options now include, the Centera API, HTTP, FTP, CIFS/NFS and now XAM.XAM offers ISVs and their customers the ability to leverage CAS functionality in a location independent and vendor independent fashion. Going forward, that's good news for all of us.

It took a while, but the nice folks over at NetApp have attempted to describe what exactly Tape Smart Sizing does. I could be wrong, but I think they agree with me. I guess since I agreed with them that using single parity RAID on a VTL with 1 TB drives is dangerous (yes their Near Store VTL does exactly that...) they decided to return the favor? Perhaps... In any event, Absolute Architect decided to pen a response which was completely complementary to my analysis. To the best of my understanding, she agrees that Tape Smart Sizing is a "confusing ... technology that won't remotely impact your…

I couldn't sleep the other night. I woke thinking of missed opportunity ... EMC's 20th anniversary listing on the NYSE.  We went up on the NYSE in 1988, I was fairly certain. First thing the next morning I walked into the Boardroom area where the listing certificate hangs on the wall. Bingo! 1988.  So what I wanted to know ... is EMC possibly the most appreciated tech stock during that 20 year period?  I went over to my old home inside of Investor Relations and asked the crew if they'd mind looking into it.  Here is a preliminary finding ...   EMC is up over…

In the US, every car sold has a standardized EPA rating on fuel economy.  Using a quaint measurement system of "miles per gallon", it's not precise, but it does gives buyers a rough measure of comparative fuel efficiency.  And, of course, has given rise to the frequent disclaimer that "your mileage may vary". Storage