WebSphere Today

So, who could argue that we need a smarter planet. I certainly couldn’t. I am at an IBM software analyst meeting. I have been attending this meeting for many years. The focus, as you might imagine is on the software strategy. But  there was something this time that I think is worth talking about.  Rather […]

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What a difference a year makes. The past year was filled with a lot of interesting innovations and market shifts. For example, Software as a Service went from being something for small companies or departments within large ones to a mainstream option.  Real customers are beginning to solve real business problems with service oriented architecture.  […]

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I have been researching and thinking about the problem of the packaged application for many years now.  Over the years I have had conversations with many CIOs who are planning to implement large complex ERP systems as part of their initiative to streamline their operations.  There is an assumption that implementing one of these systems […]

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If you are not in the software industry and not conversant in the jargon, you probably think I have lost my mind. What do you mean WOA? It stands for Web Oriented Architecture (WOA).  So, from what I can see the positioning is that SOA is about back end services and protocols like SOAP, etc. […]

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I participated in a SaaS event this week that was sponsored by IBM.  It was sort of a funny feeling to be at a very good, positive event that focused on SaaS as a platform right in the midst of an economic meltdown.  In some ways, I had one of those out of body experiences. […]

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I had an opportunity to have a chat with Ambuj Goyal, General Manager of IBM’s Information Management division about the idea of an information agenda –  an initiative that IBM recently announced. The company intends to make a major investment in methodologies, best practices, and technologies over the coming years as way to help its […]

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Back in January of this year I signed up for a Twitter account. I have to admit I was skeptical. Why does anyone need to know what I am doing right now? I wrote a blog about how silly I thought it was. Then after playing around with Twitter for about five months I wrote […]

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I attended Citrix’s industry analyst event a couple of weeks ago. I meant to write about Citrix right after the event but you know how things go. I got busy.  But I am glad that I took a little time because it has allowed me the luxury of thinking about Citrix as a company and […]

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HP has been a player in the virtualization market for quite a while.  It has offered many hardware products including its server blades have given it a respectable position in the market. In addition, HP has done a great job being an important partner to key virtualization software players including VMWare, Red Hat, and Citrix. […]

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I am going to introduce you to the idea of anticipation management. I hope that by the end of this you will agree with me that at the end of the day, this is what the value of information is all about.  Alright, you might ask, what is anticipation management? I define anticipation management as […]

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I have seen some research recently that suggested the CIOs are not seriously thinking about Cloud Computing. Is this a leading indicator on this emerging market or is it looking in the rearview mirror? I vote for the rear view mirror theory. Here is why. If you are the typical CIO, you are […]

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I have been spending a lot of time over the past several months looking at issues around desktop virtualization. While a lot of the focus in the market has been around server based virtualization, I’d put my money behind desktop virtualization. I will even go out on a limb and predict that within […]

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For three years in a row I have attended Microsoft’s server and tools analyst briefing. This is the vision of Microsoft that focuses on the server side of the company. A few years ago I predicted that this part of the company would get my vote in terms of growth and potential. I stand by […]

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After meeting Steve Pugh, CEO of CODA Financials, Inc., I wanted to understand why this mid-market financial applications vendor decided to build its next generation infrastructure on Salesforce.com’s infrastructure. I found the decision making to be quite interesting. First, for some background, CODA decided that it was time to move. […]

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I have been following Salesforce.com since its founding in the mid-1990s. Initially the company started by creating a contact management system which evolved into the sales force platform it offers today. Last month I attended a small dinner meeting in Boston hosted by Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO of SalesForce.com, for some partners […]

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It is ironic that I was at the first Tivoli user conference called Planet Tivoli back in the early 1990s. Now, I am sitting at Tivoli’s first full blown user conference called Pulse. Pulse is very much like Tivoli itself, it is a combination of the Netcool, Maximo, and Tivoli user conferences. Over […]

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I had a very interesting conversation with Jeff Barr, the senior web services evangelist at Amazon. I have known Jeff for almost 15 years. In those days Jeff was one of the architects at a company called Visix, an early graphical development environment that was ahead of its time. Visix’s software development environment […]

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I was minding my own business and twittering (I think that is how you say it) when I noticed a breaking news story from the Wall Street Journal: HP would be acquiring EDS. This is quite a significant. Now, at this time it isn’t official — no conference call yet on my calendar but it […]

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A few months ago I wrote a blog entry criticizing Twitter . I was not sure I got the relevance of this micro-blogging site. So, I decided that it made sense to spend time getting deeply involved in a Twitter community to test it and see if my opinion would change.
Here are my […]

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I spent part of last week at CA’s (Computer Associates in the old days) industry analyst meeting. My overall impression is very positive. CA is a complicated company with a complicated history. Often when a company has a near death experience, it either dies or changes. I have seen many companies that […]

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I have been thinking a lot about the evolution of virtualization lately and so I was intrigued when a company I had never heard of called Desktone asked to come in for a briefing. When I heard that the company specialized on desktop virtualization I was intrigued. I was even more interested when […]

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I was busily working away when I got a call from a hedge fund manager. Now, I don’t really know that many hedge fund managers so I thought this could be a good education. This fund manager — no I don’t remember his name — had a request. Could I spend an hour […]

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Last week I attending IBM’s Impact conference which Sandy Carter, VP of SOA for IBM contends is the largest SOA conference in the world. With more than 6,000 attendees all focused on SOA, I think she might be right. So, it is interesting to listen to see what the key messages and issues. […]

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Every year for the past 20 years I have attended HP’s annual analyst meeting. The first one I attended was quite small with a couple dozen analysts with all the focus on hardware. Having spent so much time with HP over these years I am in a unique position to give a point […]

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This is the beginning of another season of analyst meetings. Today I am at IBM’s Linux and Open Source meeting. Next week I will be with HP at their industry analyst meeting (hardware, software, services — no printers), that will be followed by IBM’s Impact (SOA conference), CA’s analyst meeting, and finally I will […]

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