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.
Sun wasted no time in responding to IBM's announcement (yesterday) that it had formalized a Solaris-to-Linux migration program and that it would be providing migration assessments at no charge. The move by IBM isn't just a shot at Sun.
Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, San Francisco, CA - Beyond their similar roles as open source poster children, MySQL and JBoss have two other things in common. First, neither company wants to be acquired (both would prefer to go public).
Gartner Symposium/ITxpo - San Francisco, CA - The main attraction on Day 2 of Gartner's semi-annual confab was what Gartner calls a Mastermind Panel. These sessions are where one or more of Gartner's rock star researchers go on the big stage to put vendor executives on the hot seat in front of all of the conference attendees.
Researchers at the University of London Institute of Psychiatry have found that the interruptions brought on by instant messaging, cell phones, and e-mail can actually make you--technical term coming up--stupid. The constant task-switching will (temporarily) impair your intelligence to the tune of 10 IQ points.
San Francisco - Gartner Symposium/ITxpo — Between the existing ranks of mobile workers who now need the ability to access/update records in real time, and the new ranks of workers who can now leave the office by virtue of the latest mobile enablers, one of the biggest challenges to enterprises looking to to keep all of them in touch with back office systems in real time is building the end-to-end application.
Apparently not satisfied with the 12,000 Linux customers it claims to have under its belt, IBM is ramping up yet another major Linux initiative and this time, it has put Sun's Solaris squarely into its crosshairs. Big Blue has formalized a formulaic Solaris-to-Linux migration assessment program and, starting today, it is making that program available at no charge to Solaris shops that are seriously considering the move.
A recent story in Baseline Magazine discusses what CIOs at various companies are doing to retain institutional knowledge in the face of retiring IT workers. One example, FirstEnergy Corp: As its first baby boomers turn 60 next year, FirstEnergy Corp.
San Francisco - Gartner Symposium/ITxpo — When most people hear the name Nokia, the first things that come to mind are cell phones. Indeed, Nokia is one of the world's largest manufacturers of cell phones.
The most important and alarming point Gartner Fellow Richard Hunter repeated throughout his talk was that, on average, CIOs spend less than 1 percent of their budgets on managing risks related to the flexibility and agility of the IT organizations. That is, they do not work hard enough on the essential core competencies of IT--project, program, and process management.
Gartner is recommending that CIOs develop plans by mid-2006 for offloading IT infrastructure operations to external providers. "It’s becoming increasingly more difficult to prove how retaining in-house infrastructure has an advantage over the outside," said Gartner Fellow Ken McGee.