VMware, now owned by EMC, created its ESX Server virtualization product for businesses that need truly enterprise-class virtualization. ESX Server 2.1.1 implements the consolidation, dynamic provisioning, resource pooling, and all-bases-covered availability assurance of expensive system and storage hardware. But ESX Server does it with ordinary servers, modular SANs, and vanilla operating systems.
In the field of wireless technology, the United States still lags in third place behind Europe and Asia. So, it's no surprise that Nokia revealed its aggressive new enterprise mobile strategy in Amsterdam instead of San Francisco. Nokia's Enterprise Summit 2004 gave the phone maker and its software partners a chance to show off the present and future of enterprise wireless mobility. I left the summit convinced that enterprise mobility is going to play out ahead of my predicted schedule. Real, stable, flexible connectedness between workers; large-scale messaging; and back-end applications are already here -- except by "here" I don't mean in the United States. But it's all on the way. Nokia and its partners have already loaded the steamer.
You just gotta love a Cinderella story. Advanced Micro Devices is the hardscrabble kid who came to Silicon Valley with a dollar and a pack of Luckies and ended up in a building with its name on top. AMD's rapid rise from startup to US$5 billion semiconductor powerhouse is, as Humphrey Bogart's English teacher once said, the stuff of which dreams are made.
In terms of stability and functionality, Microsoft's Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 is a marked improvement over the preview released in May. I found that Beta 1 resolved most of the interactive operational glitches I experienced in my earlier look at the product.
Practical IT science tends to evolve most rapidly from projects that have business objectives in mind rather than scientific ones.
As a Xeon, Nocona is a honey of a power boost: fat cache; fast clock speed; smaller, denser die; and faster front-side bus. Intel's engineers busted hump to make Nocona Intel's best Xeon CPU. It's a shame that this laudable effort will be overshadowed by the last-minute inclusion of EM64T, Intel's 64-bit extended memory architecture. The Nocona EM64T-equipped server CPU, and its desktop counterpart Prescott, are precisely the "64-bit instructions strapped to 32-bit CPUs" that Intel warned against when Pentium 4 Xeon was launched.
Unix servers are making strides even if they aren't making a whole lot of noise. But those of us who are listening closely and willing to take calculated risks can beat the rush.
Let's settle this up front. Microsoft has let its developers down. During the past few years, the company has left a trail of broken promises: a .Net-centered operating system; a broad stack of managed, .Net-based server applications; effortless targeting of everything from servers to cell phones; an egalitarian approach to programming languages; and a new, revolutionarily productive, framework-aware IDE.
Microsoft isn't about to tell you that the upcoming release of the Tablet PC OS is the next generation of the Tablet architecture -- that would be admitting that there was something wrong with the first one. Nevertheless, Microsoft and a handful of OEMs are taking another run at the touchy-feely notebook. And it isn't just a fresh marketing push. It's a genuine reworking that creates new reasons for looking at the platform again.
I recently had a talk with Apple Computer's Tom Goguen, director of server and storage software, about Xsan, the software-based SAN solution that Apple's putting out in the fall for US$999 per server. I went into the discussion knowing what a SAN is, but after about five minutes I felt like I was in short pants and learning my ABCs.
I am rooting around in the windows XP service Pack 2 Beta and delighting in all of the things it won't let clueless users do. Microsoft Corp.'s Secure By Default must become the default configuration of desktop PCs. Bank on installing XP SP2 on every machine running Windows XP. For now at least, you must specify an Athlon 64, Opteron, or mobile Athlon 64 CPU for new PCs. Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) is first to market (Intel will follow this year) with CPU hardware that proves the adage, "Good things come in small packages."
I like to take fuzzy-buzzy terms such as business intelligence and nail them down. BI is not just a smarter, faster way to extract statistics from databases and warehouses. It's a grab for that brass ring of business computing: solutions that don't just tell you what your data is, but also what it means. To take this beyond marketing speak, we must establish what "means" means.
Lately I've been glued watching the Sept. 11 commission's hearings, and I found the testimony given on April 14 riveting. Witnesses from both the FBI and the new Terrorist Threat Information Center (TTIC) echoed the complaints I've heard time and time again from corporate IT and business management.
Microsoft Corp.'s BizTalk server introduced the concepts of business process automation, management, and orchestration to many IT organizations. With the release of BizTalk Server 2004, Microsoft delivers the benefits of leading-edge business process design, development, management, and monitoring technology, while remaining true to smart corporate practices that are timeless.
The IT economy is marginalizing and will permanently shed those who don't bring creativity, curiosity, and invention to their jobs.