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.
The following transcript is from the keynote presentation, entitled "Conquering Complexity: Operational Excellence in IT," at the Gartner Symposium ITxpo in San Francisco on May 16:RAY:And you thought IT was complicated!Just remember thatwhen you open your car door.
San Francisco - Gartner Symposium/ITxpo — Come to think of it, why isn't there a manager of managers solution called superMOM? It seems like such a natural name for a product that horizontally cuts across all of an IT infrastructure's management technologies (SNMP, Windows event logs, security appliance APIs, etc.
San Francisco - Gartner Symposium/ITxpo -- Put another way, SupportSoft vice president of marketing Bruce Mowrey asks this question: "If computers are so smart, then why can't they fix themselves?" And therein lies the nirvana that Mowrey claims Supportsoft can get its customers closer to than any other solution on the market.
San Francisco - Gartner Symposium/ITxpo -- When most people think about distributed processing technologies that simultaneously make the applications they host run faster while also making them more tolerant of system failures, the terms "cluster" and "grid" come to mind.
San Francisco - Gartner Symposium/ITxpo -- In the old days, if you were an IT shop or an application developer, you had almost total control over the environment in which your application lived. You had some code and it may have accessed a database or some other sort of structured data but it all lived on one system that you had control of.
In response to my blog post asking whether handhelds with hard drives might start to give iPod (and other dedicated music players) a run for its money, one Talkbacker pointed out that iPod now includes a Calendar feature, showing that iPod can give as good as it gets and push back against incursion from handheld vendors.
In response to my argument about why anti-malware vendors should form a consortium that builds a centralized database of legitimate applications and why the database that Uniblue has come up with as a part of its WinTasksPro product would be a good starting point, not only did Zone Labs CEO Gregor Freund have something to say, but so too did the folks at an outfit called answersthatwork.com.
It has happened so many times before and now the question is whether it will happen again. In the past, when Microsoft has decided to provide the same utility around which a cottage industry has formed, the cottage industry subsequently vanished.
Many have expressed concern about the use of networking technology in automobiles. Radio frequency identification chips (aka RFID chips) are common in the keychain "fobs" millions around the world use to open their cars.
On the final day of Digital ID World 2005, John Shewchuk, CTO for distributed systems at Microsoft, and Kim Cameron, identity and access architect at Microsoft, outlined their company's plan for delivering a unifying identity metasystem, an abstraction layer, based on WS-* Web services technology. "The essential concept of the metasystem is you have a bunch of contexts and need to achieve separation or amalgamation across the [contexts]," said Cameron.