If you listen very carefully, you can hear the sound of large application software vendors damning Web services with faint praise. Just about every software vendor has announced support for Web services on some level, but most of that support comes in two distinct flavours.
Art Technology Group first made a name for itself as a provider of e-commerce platforms. But more recently, the company has been making inroads in the corporate portal space with more than 50 customer installations, including the U.S. Army. ATG CEO Paul Shorthose and Vice President of Product Management Ken Volpe explain why they think an applications approach to corporate portals is preferable to any other approach.
Collecting data is one thing, making sense of it is another. That's the task Spotfire, a company in the business intelligence space, has assigned itself.
Given half a chance these days, it seems that every major software vendor is willing to give any prospective customer a portal for free. The first thing the vendor thinks is "What can I appear to be giving away in order to get the account?" The first and most obvious answer they come up with is the portal.
Given half a chance these days, it seems that every major software vendor is willing to give any prospective customer a portal for free. The first thing the vendor thinks is "What can I appear to be giving away in order to get the account?" The first and most obvious answer they come up with is the portal.
Anand Das left BEA Systems Inc. to found a startup company called Commerce Events Inc. that delivers a supply-chain application that leverages the event-driven programming model built into J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) application servers. As the company's CEO, Das has landed a couple of key contracts from the U.S. military, and with the formal release of its applications this spring he is positioning the company to become a player in the drive toward creating real-time environments across supply chains. In an interview with InfoWorld Editor in Chief Michael Vizard, Das talks about the role he sees Commerce Events playing in the enterprise.
Barry Briggs is one of the better-known CTOs in the world, given his stints at a variety of software companies, including Lotus Development. Today Briggs is on the customer side of the fence as the CTO of Wheelhouse, a Burlington, Mass.-based company that specializes in implementing CRM software on behalf of corporate clients. In his new role as an advocate for IT organizations that are coping with CRM chaos, Briggs talks about the critical role that Web services will play in bringing order to CRM implementations.
The Department of Justice's Justice's antitrust suit against Microsoft Corp. stank the minute it was filed and it continues to reek today. It was a course of action that had little chance of reining in Microsoft for two reasons. First, the people filing the suit had little or no understanding of the basic business practices of the industry (and the people hearing the case had even less). Second, a major premise of the case was based on a theoretical assumption that because Windows software pricing did not fall, consumers were harmed by Microsoft's monopoly.
One of the persistent knocks against IT is that, depending on who you ask, as much as US$7 out of every $10 dollars spent on software goes into installing and integrating the software once it's purchased. This always leaves the people who buy the software feeling a little burned, and frankly, gives the industry a bad reputation among businesspeople who typically fund these projects.
A major paradigm shift that could ultimately redefine the current world order of the industry is slowly but surely working its way through the infrastructure of enterprise computing.
Linux is here now and forever. Anyone who takes even a cursory look around the IT departments at any large company will find some representation of the open-source operating system. In truth, the current debate is not over the validity of the Linux development model but the extent to which it will be deployed in the enterprise.
SAN MATEO (03/19/2001) - Everywhere you look these days, vendors are talking about Web services. The immediate problem we face, however, is not the lack of Web services but rather the lack of an infrastructure to link Web services into something where the whole is greater than the parts. A Web service today is little more than a database-driven Web site where many users come together and use the same application in a collaborative fashion. This is a lot more than simply hosting an application; it's all about providing the infrastructure around an application to create an environment.
As chairman, co-founder, and CTO of Xuma Inc., Jamie Lerner is building an infrastructure for deploying e-business applications. In an interview with InfoWorld Editor in Chief Michael Vizard, Lerner talks about the critical role that component architectures play in building scalable applications on the Internet.
With the arrival of the Internet and new forms of e-commerce, business intelligence
has become a critical requirement. And two of the most unlikely competitors -- IBM Corp. and Yahoo Inc. -- are now on a collision course to dominate the emerging area of BI services.
Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. is an industry leader that helped make firewalls standard-issue software for IT departments. Check Point plans to take its software beyond the firewall to help secure wireless applications and business-to-business e-commerce.