Stories by Heather Havenstein

IBM launching site to boost collaborative coding

IBM's Rational Software unit is planning to launch a new open source project in June which officials say is designed to help IT organizations improve collaboration among globally distributed software development teams.

Con-way exec details SOA success

Con-way, a freight transportation and logistics company based in California, began developing its service-oriented architecture (SOA) in 1998. Since then, it has evolved into an event-driven architecture, where computer systems can subscribe to and publish "events" -- like an order being received -- and process events according to pre-defined rules. Maja Tibbling, lead enterprise architect at Con-way, sat down with Computerworld yesterday at The Open Group's Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in San Diego to talk about the company's SOA history.

Move to SOA can be rewarding for companies, users say

For many companies, the move to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) can yield substantial rewards, including reduced operating costs and better customer service. But those benefits only show up after companies work through thorny problems like obtaining executive buy-in, shifting the way development groups operate and hammering out sometimes contentious new business rules, according to users at The Open Group's Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in San Diego.

Borland to unveil new ALM scheme, testing tool

Borland Software plans to unveil a new approach to its application life-cycle management business, called Open ALM, and to roll out a new product designed to provide real-time visibility and software quality metrics for each phase of the application development process. Tod Nielsen, president and CEO of Borland, and Marc Brown, the company's vice president of product marketing, discussed the announcements in an interview with Computerworld last week.

MicroStrategy to roll out 'dynamic' dashboards

MicroStrategy Tuesday plans to unveil performance management dashboards that combine data visualization and animation to make it possible for more users in an organization to track business performance easily, the company said.

HP forms BI, information management unit

Hewlett-Packard announced Wednesday the formation of a new business unit in its software division to go after the business intelligence and information management markets.

Cognos adds link to IBM-Yahoo search engine

Cognos added a link between its BI search engine and a new joint IBM-Yahoo search tool that it says will let users gather structured and unstructured data simultaneously. IT executives say that such combined searches can help users more quickly gather the key data needed to make business decisions.

Borland exec explains tools division reversal

In an about-face, Borland Software announced that it would spin off its developer tools division into a wholly owned subsidiary called CodeGear rather than sell off the group, as it had announced it would in February. Rick Jackson, chief marketing officer at Borland, spoke to Computerworld today about the rationale behind the decision to keep the tools division.

Business Objects updates tool set

Business Objects SA Monday unveiled an update to its current tool set at its user conference in San Francisco and provided a glimpse of its take on the role of BI in the burgeoning world of Web 2.0.

Eclipse gaining ground at five-year mark

Five years ago this week, the Eclipse consortium was unveiled by IBM and others with an eye toward offering tools based on the Eclipse open-source integrated software development environment.

IBM, university develop courses in Web 2.0

IBM and the University of Arizona announced Thursday new curriculum to help prepare students for corporate IT work using Web 2.0 technologies like blogs, forums, and wikis. The course, one of the first to focus on skills related to Web 2.0 technologies, will teach Management Information Systems (MIS) and marketing students how to plan, launch and populate online communities through the use of these technologies to help businesses attract clients, generate revenue and support customers.

Electric grid operator consolidates BI tools

The company that coordinates the buying and selling of wholesale electricity for 80 percent of California is standardizing on new business intelligence (BI) tools as part of a major corporate technology upgrade.

Small SOA projects can show immediate ROI

Many companies that have achieved early success with service-oriented architectures (SOA) focused first on small, incremental projects that show immediate returns to the business.

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