Cloud computing is fundamentally changing the IT ecosystem in many ways, forcing related changes in business models. Other than customers (who are always “king” and make buying decisions), the IT ecosystem players being affected by cloud includes technology providers, independent softw...

On the surface, everything seems fine. If you do a search, you’ll see lots of people offering support for cloud-centric application frameworks. But, when I speak with companies actually moving Java applications into the Cloud or trying to create new Cloud services based on Java, I get ...

Cloud facilitates a new generation of technology and related impacts that have never been seen before. With utility computing and on demand capabilities, many organizations want to jump on the bandwagon as soon as possible. As the Chief Executive, there are some tough decisions to be m...

Talk of so-called “sea change developments” and “paradigm shifts” has long been rife among the IT media and the web’s wider technology commentary channels. Right now we’re all talking about cloud, mobile empowerment (let’s not forget the Bring Your Own Device tagline here) and virtual...

About once every five years or so, the technology industry blazes a new path of innovation. The PC, the Internet, smart mobility and social networking have emerged over the past 20 plus years, delivering new technologies and business ecosystems that have fundamentally changed the world...

IT exists to support the business - and in best-of-class IT departments, this truism is embedded deeply into the departmental culture. Yet in so many cases, this self-evident truth gets lost in the mayhem of building, maintaining and supporting the myriad of complicated and brittle le...

Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest particle accelerator that is being used to find the elusive "God particle" generates about 40Terabytes (1 TB=103GB) of data per day from its four main detectors. Assuming an average size of 1GB for a movie, that amounts to a data stream ...

A Chief Technology Officer for a Midwest banking holding company made a very interesting observation. In commenting about the needed increase in fraud fighting resources, he warned about the perils of overemphasizing technology while ignoring training staff in using manual fraud-detect...

I talk to a lot of CIOs. I met with one recently who oversees the IT operation of a $6 Billion yearly entertainment-related company with about 7,000 employees. This top-notch exec was all about transforming a huge investment in existing IT infrastructure into a new dynamic, extensible...

One of the most challenging things about being an advocate for a broad horizontally applicable technology is that it does not solve a particular business problem. Instead, it solves about 100,000 business problems. That means that everyone is impacted by it, yet nobody is particularly...

I occasionally get questions from clients who are using Agile and Scrum frameworks for software development. Techniques and tools aside, it is often questions about the fundamentals of collaboration that seem to be getting in the team’s way. Unlike most of the rest of the universe, ...

The application release lifecycle is unnecessarily complex, manual and time-consuming and its cumbersome nature is putting businesses in a position of weakness. This one very critical process determines how fast a business can deliver products to market and yet is complex, error-prone ...

The business must specify its requirements in a fundamentally different way. Instead of thinking about what it wants the software to do, the business should specify how agile it expects the software to be. In other words, don’t ask for software that does A, B, C or whatever. Instead, t...

Every cloud computing platform that is being sold today will be obsolete prematurely unless they can retrofit them with a single-source timing device. If cloud computing is going to be as pervasive tomorrow as some sales executives have hyped them, the need for a more sophisticated pla...

Modularity plays an important role in software architecture. It fills a gap that has existed since we began developing enterprise software systems in Java. This chapter discusses that gap and explores how modularity is an important intermediary technology that fills that gap. There a...

With all the hype around “the cloud,” it’s difficult not to be skeptical about its value. While cloud computing seems complex, it is possible to understand the building blocks that help make the cloud more tangible for businesses of all sizes. In fact, understanding the innovation the ...

There are fundamental differences between data centers and the Internet of Things, which means that fundamental Cloud architecture principles must also transform to support this new reality. This transformation promises to be truly disruptive — a true paradigm shift as we figure out wh...

In his book The Art of Action (2011), Stephen Bungay identifies three gaps that frustrate the ability of organizations to translate plans into actions that lead to desired outcomes. He calls them the knowledge, alignment and effects gaps. Here, I wish to reflect on Bungay’s perspective...

Businesses can be transformed, sometimes through new leadership, sometimes through new market realities or business relationships. But perhaps the easiest way, for IT at least, to transform the business is by enabling the business to evolve from a data silo’d organization to a data-cen...

Enterprise monitoring gets a great deal more air time these days than it ever did in the past. Perhaps it's because our technology dependent lives have become some so reliant on the availability of systems and infrastructural services. Have things improved? How would you know? In real...

If you search for a standard definition of "Agile Methodology" you will not find it. Though all of us seem to understand what Agile means - there isn't any standard definition. Here is a collection of definitions from different sources - they are very different from each other. "Agile...

Sustaining applications in the most cost-effective and efficient fashion is the foundation to maximizing a return on data. But it is only the foundation. Organizations have to move beyond sustaining applications to driving innovation, and the first step in that progression is learning ...

Today's buyer is information overloaded, bandwidth constrained and fiercely independent. A recent survey by the Corporate Executive Board reported that 57% of the new B2B sales cycle is DONE before the buyer's first formal contact to the selected vendor. Understanding that simple fact...

Application owners / senior-level IT allocate a certain percentage of their budget to sustaining, enhancing, and transforming their applications. In most organizations, the largest percentage of the IT spend is on sustaining the applications or basically “keep the lights on” type of ac...

Your reaction to the title is probably one of the following: Why should it be a challenge? Co-existence would be impossible. There will be difficulties but it can be done. Why should this be a challenge? After all, EA is agnostic to software development methodologies. After all, EA is ...

Vertica - an advanced database that is very simple to install and administer, thanks to the its modern design and purpose built architecture. Vertica is high-performing, advanced RDBMS that is very simple to install and administer, thanks to the its modern design and purpose built ar...

These past few weeks, I published several blogs pointing out problems with static rule based correlation, their current limitations, their high TCO, etc. Because these solutions have been sold for many years as the end all be all to security problems, it has created false expectations...

You remember that "False Sense of Security," the feeling that you are secure, but in fact you're not...? Attackers know that an attack is a process, it is not an event. And they use this - and they use time - to their advantage. They use time scales that static rule-based correlation ...

If you consider the CNN Money survey it is IBM which has beaten Microsoft by a whisker. They did not consider Facebook as it is not publically traded. If you listen to Eric Schmidt, it is off course Facebook. Off course anybody from Google will consider Facebook in the list because La...

In the second article of the Oracle Fusion Applications installation series we are looking at Repository Creation Utility which populates transaction database with OFA schemas. The Oracle Fusion Applications Repository Creation Utility (Applications RCU) creates applications-specific...

"DIY", "homegrown" or "hand-coded" is the most commonly used method of data and application integration. It's also almost always a terrible idea. I remember back in the mid/late 1980's talking to IT departments about the concept of a relational database, and why having one on their VA...

It is time to invest in the advanced technology that provides the foundation and tools for the people and processes to meet their true potential. This means investing in the organizational construct known as a business technology Center of Excellence (CoE). The general concept of a bu...

Business design is set to undergo a dramatic transformation. The convergence of ecosystem automation and autonomics, architecture for continuously evolving business, together with the merger of consumer and business IT will have a profound impact on conventional business models, which ...

WebSphere eXtreme Scale can be used in different ways. It can be used as a very powerful cache or as a form of an in-memory database processing space to manage application state or as a platform for building powerful Extreme Transaction Processing (XTP) applications.

As IT systems form the backbone of business operations, their performance plays a key role in business growth. Understanding this fact, organizations work toward obtaining best performance from the software systems to maximize ROI on IT. Now an application’s performance can be improved...

Everyone seems to want to be an enterprise architect or an IT architect right now. It's that label to have on your business card. What we're trying to do is separate the true architects from one of these, and certification is a key part of that. Learn how EA is becoming more business-...

Cloud Expo, Inc. announced on Thursday that Cloud Expo 2011 New York, the 8th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, will take place June 6-9, 2011, at the Javits Center in New York City. The International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo series is the world’s leading Cloud-...

The management of people, capital, relationships, assets, and information is one of the most critical functions of business AND information technology. However, the resource planning and management of IT across the enterprise is typically either an undisciplined practice or an underi...

Cloud Computing Journal recently caught up with Pete Malcolm, CEO of cloud management innovators Abiquo - a major new player in the fast-emerging Cloud ecosystem and Platinum Plus Sponsor of 6th Cloud Expo being held in Prague, the Czech Republic, 21-22 June 2010. Malcolm is keynoti...

Discussing the core challenges that face every organization, such as SSO, Access Controls, Identity Provisioning, and Federation, we’ll take a deeper look into the components of a comprehensive IAM system. Specifically addressing the extension of IAM to the Cloud and identity integrati...