Larry Dignan and other IT industry experts, blogging at the intersection of business and technology, deliver daily news and analysis on vital enterprise trends.
Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic.
Andrew Nusca is a writer-editor for ZDNet, contributor to CNET and the editor of SmartPlanet, ZDNet's sister site about innovation. In 2013, his coverage will focus on enterprise startups. He is based in New York.
Rachel King is a staff writer for ZDNet based in San Francisco.
This past May, I wrote about how Bruce Cleveland who heads up Siebel's ASP-delivered CRM offering (officially "CRM OnDemand") had emerged from his bunker, apparently ready to take on (with a vengeance) CRM ASP poster-child Marc Benioff and his outfit Salesforce.com (see Siebel's on-demand chief now available on demand).
Hewlett-Packard’s red-shirted Martin Fink, with a title that may give a hint of a cultural problem with HP--vice president and general manager of the NonStop Enterprise Division, Open Source & Linux Division—got off to a slow start with his presentation at LinuxWorld, adding little to the canon of useful information about Linux and open source. He gave a history of Linux, offered a rehash of press releases, videos and customer testimonials for Linux and HP.
Oracle President Charles Phillips restlessly paced back and forth across the stage at LinuxWorld going through the standard company slides on how Oracle blesses Linux and is 100-percent behind open source OS. He didn’t pace like caged animal—more like a man in a hurry to move through the presentation and get on with more important business.
A friend (a native speaker) helped me translate (a bit roughly) a Chinese document written (thanks to Ed Frauenheim of news.com for the pointer) by Kai Fu Lee, the former Microsoft executive who signed on with Google to head its research labs in China, and is now at the center of a legal dispute between the two giants (with roots in different eras) over his defection from Redmond.
Dana Gardner, formerly with the Yankee Group and the Aberdeen Group, recently launched Interarbor Solutions, a consultancy focusing on enterprise applications, software infrastructure, RSS and other topics. Dana has agreed to post some of his insights on Between the Lines.
I ran into Chris Hofmann, director of engineering for the Mozilla Foundation, at a Red Hat press conference (support in Red Hat's Certificate System for smart card detection in the September releases of Firefox and Thunderbird 1.0) and asked him about other projects that Mozilla could undertake, such as blogging and wiki projects.
One thing we know for sure is that technology mono/duo/polies (aka: technopolies) are really bad for end users. But, in an FCC ruling that could stifle competition in the business of internet service provision, I have mixed feelings.
By the time marriage of the word "Java" to the phrase "application server" became in-vogue -- giving rise to the acronym J2EE (now being deprecated in favor of Java EE or Java Enterprise Edition) -- BEA was practically a household name in enterprise IT, having seized the early lead in the Java-based app server market. But since the late 1990s, BEA's dominance of the J2EE market has been undermined by commercial and open source competitors such as IBM and JBOSS, respectively.
I used to think of VMware (a part of EMC) as a savvy technology company that figured out something others couldn't. Now the company has also become business and politically savvy in trying to establish VMware as a de facto standard (the default) for virtualization services by allowing partners to access its ESX Server source code and interfaces.
Dana Gardner, formerly a top analyst with the Yankee Group and prior to that the Aberdeen Group, recently started his own consultancy, Interarbor Solutions. He'll be focusing on enterprise applications, software infrastructure, RSS and other topics, and he has agreed to post some of his insights on Between the Lines.