SOFTWARE

RESET

BIG DATA - Agile Development of High Performance Computing

Saturday, Sep 22, 2012

ARTICLE: The Met Office’s supercomputers produce over 20 terabytes of data every day –and all this data needs to be available to meteorologists on demand. In the last few years, a solution to the ever-increasing need for available data-handling capacity became urgent.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Medical Device Software: Challenging Aspects of Compliance

Thursday, Sep 27, 2012

ARTICLE: The use of software for medical applications began in the 1950s, and was pioneered by Robert Steven Ledley, an American physicist. At that time, the primary application was in health informatics.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Toward Achieving Full Technology Gamification

Friday, Sep 28, 2012

ARTICLE: Over 30 years ago, technology in the workplace was perceived as exciting and futuristic. Employees considered themselves fortunate when they had access to computers that helped them do tedious and difficult tasks in a more efficient way. Times have changed and technology has spread to all aspects of our lives. The use of computers is no longer perceived as a privilege. Employees of large corporations can easily develop a negative attitude toward computer systems because they can be perceived as overly complex for what they want to use them for and are sometimes unreliable.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Cloud Computing Standardization Panel at CLOUD 2012

Monday, Oct 1, 2012

ARTICLE: Distinguished panelists examine the complex landscape of cloud computing standards efforts, including international organizations, governments, consortia, and the overlapping needs and concerns of all in the field. The insights here are from the very people leading many of those activities, and include practical as well as insider views on where things are headed with regard to interoperability in cloud computing.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Pioneering Innovative Technologies in User Documentation

Friday, Oct 12, 2012

ARTICLE: To be sustainable in this highly competitive world, organizations from all fields must strive to reach the global market and cater to a global audience. Software is developed, enhanced, and marketed with cohesive collaboration that spreads across cities, countries, and continents. Similarly, software documentation is a highly collaborative effort of teams spread across various locations. But it has the added challenge of needing to reach customers and interact with teams who speak multiple languages.

BIG DATA - Q2 2012 Technology Purchase Index (TPI) Update

Monday, Oct 29, 2012

ARTICLE: The TPI for overall technology purchases increased 1.9% between Q42011 and Q22012 reflecting slow but steady growth in the planned IT purchase intentions for business, education and institutions in the United States and Canada.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Reducing Uncertainty in the Financial Evaluation of Technology Projects

Tuesday, Oct 23, 2012

ARTICLE: The standard return on investment (ROI) or cost-benefit analysis has proven to be less relevant for evaluating disruptive technology or strategic projects. However, these techniques remain the primary tool for all capital budgeting due to the lack of alternatives. These financial decision-making tools both rely on economic worth. This requires all components be quantified in terms of dollars, and discounted to current value.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Intelligent Distributed Systems

Wednesday, Oct 24, 2012

ARTICLE: The lightweight Internet-based communication for autonomic services (Licas) system started as a research platform for testing dynamic linking possibilities, to optimize a network for query processes. It was innovative in that respect, but the architecture design is now quite standard. As such, it can also be used to describe these standard features that a distributed and intelligent system would typically require.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Computing Conversations: Bertrand Meyer - Eiffel Programming Language

Thursday, Oct 18, 2012

VIDEO: Computer magazine's multimedia editor Charles Severance interviews Bertrand and Annie Meyer about the Eiffel programming language, software engineering, and object-oriented approaches.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Challenges and Future Research Directions of Services Computing

Wednesday, Oct 31, 2012

VIDEO: Ephraim Feig, the chair and founding member of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Services Computing (TC-SVC) discusses the challenges of working with the US Social Security Administration to migrate legacy systems to the cloud. His insights are instructive to any enterprise with a large installed base, as well as more nimble start-ups. He identifies challenges from foundation to technologies and user expectations relating to services computing. After this talk, he joined a panel discussion on the topic at the Cloud 2012 conference in Honolulu, Hawaii.

BIG DATA - Green Computing: A Dual Technology for Cloud Computing and HPC

Tuesday, Nov 13, 2012

ARTICLE: Climate change and global warming are viewed by many as the two most challenging problems facing the Earth. Green IT and in particular, green computing, are two ways the information and communications technology community is working to address those problems.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Computing Trends Lead to New Programming Languages

Tuesday, Nov 13, 2012

ARTICLE: New programming languages are emerging to meet the demands of recent computing and communications developments, such as multicore CPUs, high-performance and cloud computing, distributed systems, and mobile technology. According to an expert, is the best approach to software development because it enables parsimony - using the simplest technique that solves the problem.

INSIGHTS - Patent Reform: New Tools for Challenging Patent Validity as of September 2012

Friday, Nov 16, 2012

ARTICLE: In the ninth in a series of articles providing basic information on legal issues facing people and businesses, Computing and the Law contributors Brian M. Gaff, Brian P. Murphy, Ralph A. Loren, Christine A. Dudzik, and Lisa Swiszcz examine strategic considerations in seeking and defending against new post-grant review procedures under the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act.

BIG DATA - It's Complicated

Monday, Nov 19, 2012

ARTICLE: Authors David Alan Grier and Erin Dian Dumbacher provide an audio recording of their Forward Slash column, in which they discuss how computer science seems to be moving rapidly into the social sciences, not to build machines that simulate our actions but to hold up a mirror to our lives.

INSIGHTS - Starting a Business: Which Entity Structure Is Best for You?

Tuesday, Nov 20, 2012

ARTICLE: In the tenth in a series of articles providing basic information on legal issues facing people and businesses that operate in computing-related markets, the authors discuss the different types of corporate entities.

BIG DATA - Eric Baldeschwieler on Big Data, Big Analytics, and Big Insights

Wednesday, Nov 21, 2012

ARTICLE: Eric Baldeschwieler is cofounder and CTO of Hortonworks. In this talk at the Cloud 2012 conference, he presented research on increasing data variety and complexity as well as the challenges, issues, and constraints in the evolving space before participating in the ""Big Data, Big Analytics, Big Insights"" panel discussion in Honolulu, Hawaii.

INSIGHTS - A Brief Overview of the America Invents Act

Tuesday, Nov 27, 2012

ARTICLE: A series of articles in Computer magazine provides basic information on legal issues facing people and businesses that operate in computing-related markets; in this installment, the authors discuss the America Invents Act.

INSIGHTS - Accruing Technical Debt: Practical Decision-Making and Its Business Relevance

Wednesday, Nov 28, 2012

ARTICLE: Christof Ebert discusses technical debt including a Netscape vs. IE case study and provides a framework with practices for managing technical debt.

INSIGHTS - Woven on the Loom of Sorrow

Thursday, Nov 29, 2012

ARTICLE: Author Grady Booch provides an audio recording of his On Computing column, in which he discusses how conflict has shaped computing and computing has changed the nature of warfare.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Computing Conversations: Rasmus Lerdorf Interview on Creating PHP

Wednesday, Dec 5, 2012

ARTICLE: Computer magazine's multimedia editor Charles Severance interviews Rasmus Lerdorf about the creation of PHP.

INSIGHTS - Computing and the Law: The America Invents Act

Monday, Dec 10, 2012

ARTICLE: The twelfth in a series of articles in Computer magazine provides basic information on legal issues facing people and businesses that operate in computing-related markets discusses employment law issues faced by new companies.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Big Iron Moves Toward Exascale Computing

Thursday, Dec 13, 2012

ARTICLE: Developers and researchers face many challenges in trying to produce exascale supercomputers, which would perform a thousand times faster than today's most powerful systems.

BIG DATA - SCADA Systems: Challenges for Forensics Investigators

Tuesday, Dec 11, 2012

ARTICLE: Gary Kessler interviews Irfan Ahmed about SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) systems.

BIG DATA - Computing Conversations: Vint Cerf on the History of Packets

Wednesday, Dec 12, 2012

ARTICLE: Computer magazine's multimedia editor Charles Severance interviews Vint Cerf about how TCP/IP evolved from ARPANET, an earlier small-scale research network.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - A Brief History of Packets - Vint Cerf

Friday, Dec 14, 2012

ARTICLE: Charles Severance provides an audio recording of his Computing Conversations column from the latest issue of Computer magazine, in which he discusses his interview with Vint Cerf about the history of packets.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Using In-Memory Analytics to Quickly Crunch Big Data

Friday, Jan 4, 2013

ARTICLE: In-memory analytics - which probes data stored in RAM rather than on disk, as is traditionally the case - is becoming popular because it speeds up the analysis process, even as data volumes explode.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - From Stone Knives and Bearskins to Mobile and Cloud Computing

Tuesday, Dec 18, 2012

ARTICLE: The advances made in computers, communications, and the Internet in the past 50 years are some of the most exciting and significant technological changes in history. The author examines where we've been and how far we've come.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Lean Software Development: A Tutorial

Thursday, Dec 27, 2012

ARTICLE: “Lean Software Development” has become a popular term over the last few years. This tutorial describes where it comes from, what it means, how it relates to well-known agile development practices, and how it will evolve in the future.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Arvind: 2012 IEEE Computer Society Harry H. Goode Memorial Award Winner

Monday, Dec 31, 2012

ARTICLE: This video showcases Dr. Arvind and his influential work in the field. For more on the IEEE Computer Society's awards program.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - October-December 2012 Transactions on Haptics Podcast

Tuesday, Jan 8, 2013

ARTICLE: This podcast gives an overview of the articles in the October-December 2012 issue of Transactions on Haptics.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Adaptive Mixed Reality Rehabilitation

Friday, Jan 18, 2013

ARTICLE: Students at Arizona State University's School of Arts, Media, and Engineering discuss adaptive mixed reality rehabilitation research and extending interactive stroke rehabilitation from the clinic to the home.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Innovation Reconsidered

Wednesday, Jan 23, 2013

ARTICLE: "Innovation" and "innovative architecture" are topics of broad popularity in software engineering. Yet, the two terms appear to mean different things to different people—with interpretations of both driven more by personal interests than by their true meanings. It's therefore essential for architects to have a clear understanding of what "innovation" means in the context of their projects if they are to make the right design decisions and communicate the intended messages to project stakeholders.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - The Importance of Being Declarative

Thursday, Jan 24, 2013

ARTICLE: Author Diomidis Spinellis provides an audio recording of his Tools of the Trade column, in which he discusses why well-written declarative code is easier to understand, modify, and maintain.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Computing and the Law: Protecting Bioinformatics as Intellectual Property

Tuesday, Jan 29, 2013

ARTICLE: Although trade secrets and copyright provide some protection to bioinformatics tools, a carefully drafted patent can provide the broadest available protection in an increasingly competitive market.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Philippe Kruchten: The Games Software Architects and Requirements Managers Play

Tuesday, Feb 19, 2013

VIDEO: IEEE Software editor-in-chief Forrest Shull interviews Philippe Kruchten about how software engineers can be misled by their own cognitive biases, fallacious reasoning and the games architects and requirements managers play.

BIG DATA - New Directions in Computer Science

Friday, Feb 22, 2013

VIDEO: Computer science is undergoing a fundamental change. Over the last 40 years the field was concerned with making computers useful. Focus was on programming languages, compilers, operating systems, data structures and algorithms. These are still important topics but with the merging of computing and communication, the emergence of social networks, and the large amount of information in digital form, focus is shifting to applications such as the structure of networks and extracting information from large data sets. This talk will give a brief vision of the future and then an introduction to the science base that is forming to support these new directions in computer science.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Video: A Principled Way to Use Frameworks in Architecture Design

Monday, Feb 25, 2013

VIDEO: Author Humberto Cervantes from Autonomous Metropolitan University interviews Josué Martínez Buenrrostro, a Software Architect at Quarksoft in Mexico City about the design process discussed in the article "A Principled Way to Use Frameworks in Architecture Design."

BIG DATA - Video: Promising New Breakthrough in Speech Translation Technology

Tuesday, Feb 26, 2013

VIDEO: In the late 1970s a group of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University made a significant breakthrough in speech recognition using a technique called hidden Markov modeling which allowed them to use training data from many speakers to build statistical speech models that were much more robust. As a result, over the last 30 years speech systems have gotten better and better. In the last 10 years the combination of better methods, faster computers and the ability to process dramatically more data has led to many practical uses.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - A Technology that Comes Highly Recommended

Monday, Apr 8, 2013

ARTICLE: Today's recommendation systems use new approaches that let companies more effectively suggest products and services to potential customers.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Video: Bill Buxton at TechFest 2013: Designing for Ubiquitous Computing

Wednesday, Apr 3, 2013

VIDEO: Bill Buxton, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, shares his perspectives on the premise that in this emerging world of ubiquitous computing, it is vital that devices, applications, and services are designed, from the start, by taking the other members of the ecosystem into account. Individually, they must offer great value, experience, and satisfaction, and combined, great design must derive value from all the other devices, applications, and services in the ecosystem, while continually reducing overall complexity.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Video: Enabling Real-Time Business-Metadata Extraction

Tuesday, Apr 9, 2013

VIDEO: Real-time business information, such as current occupancy level and music loudness, can be invaluable to mobile users planning an outing. Crowdsourcing, via real-user check-ins, can gather such information to be displayed in search or to be indexed to provide more detailed real-time business metadata.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Mobile Game Changers

Thursday, Apr 11, 2013

VIDEO: The history of video games is built on a shifting foundation of constant evolution and revolution. Author Jason Pace describes how the changes in the industry have been both dramatic — as with the meteoric rise of PC power and Internet connectivity in the 1990s — and subtle, like the emergence of always-connected Internet devices giving rise to game experiences served in byte-sized increments. As major platforms continue to expand and diversify, one thing remains certain: we're likely to continue seeing the revolution-evolution cycle unfold in the years to come.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Reducing Uncertainty in the Financial Evaluation of Technology Projects

Tuesday, Apr 23, 2013

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Tools of the Trade: System Software

Friday, Apr 26, 2013

ARTICLE: Author Diomidis Spinellis provides an audio recording of his Tools of the Trade column, in which he discusses how with mean and lean code, paranoid testing, and comprehensive logging, programmers can write the systems software that their applications deserve.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Emerging Computing Technologies for Resilient & Robust Intelligent Infrastructure

Monday, Apr 29, 2013

ARTICLE: A word from the Guest Editors Sandeep K. Shukla and Arpan Pal seeking original manuscripts for the Special Section on Emerging Computing Technologies for Resilient & Robust Intelligent Infrastructure for the new Open Access Journal IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing (TETC).

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Lessons Learned from Leading Workshops about Geographically Distributed Agile Teams

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

ARTICLE: We've all read a lot about agile software development—the various flavors and methods sprouting up to tackle new issues in requirements, architecture, design, coding, and testing. But it's rare to hear real, tangible, objective lessons based on the experiences of those who have tried some form of agile development and failed. Get ready to take notes!

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Using Speculation to Enhance JavaScript Performance in Web Applications

Thursday, May 2, 2013

ARTICLE: JavaScript lets developers provide client-side interactivity in Web applications, but because it is sequential, it can't take advantage of multicore processors. Thread-level speculation (TLS) addresses this issue by enabling the speculation of JavaScript function calls and thus exploits the parallel performance potential multicore processors provide. The authors implemented TLS in the Squirrelfish JavaScript engine, which is part of the WebKit browser environment. They evaluate their approach using 15 popular Web applications on an eight-core computer, and show significant speed-ups without any modifications to the JavaScript source code.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Cutting-Edge Research in Visualization

Thursday, Jun 6, 2013

PODCAST: Computer magazine guest editors Theresa-Marie Rhyne and Min Chen discuss how visualization has become a formidable intellectual powerhouse that is delivering solutions to the problem of managing the data deluge. IFrame

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Challenges for a Technical Communicator in the Global World

Tuesday, Jun 4, 2013

ARTICLE: Globalization is important to most organizations. Most companies want their products — whether hardware or software — to hit the global market and cater to a global audience.

INSIGHTS - Computing Conversations: Gordon Bell on the Building Blocks of Computing

Monday, Jun 17, 2013

VIDEO: Computer magazine's multimedia editor Charles Severance interviews Gordon Bell about how the minicomputer served as a building block for computing-enabled innovation and the eventual evolution of computing applications.

Global Software Engineering

Friday, Aug 31, 2012

BLOGPOST: Companies in IT and software business will fail if they don’t master global software engineering. Prestigious journal Harvard Business Manager recently wrote that outsourcing with global IT services and software development ranks as one of the top business ideas of the past 100 years.

The New Breed of Servers: Platforms for Server Virtualization

Friday, Sep 14, 2012

BLOGPOST: Much has been written about virtualization over the last few years. Hypervisor software is revolutionizing the datacenter bymaking applications mobile, providing superior disaster recovery, and allowing IT administrators to allocate computing resources more efficiently. Virtualization has been deployed so broadly that the role of the computer server has evolved from directly hosting operating systems and ...

The Network of Content

Friday, Sep 14, 2012

BLOGPOST: There are a lot of cool new technologies surrounding networking today, from the impending changeover to IPv6 to the rise of software defined networking and technologies like OpenFlow. However, while these changes are significant, they are essentially just upgrades to the existing engine of networks and the overall Internet. But one new idea for the Internet and networks is ...

The Case for Virtualizing Your SharePoint Deployment

Friday, Sep 14, 2012

BLOGPOST: Much has been written about the benefits of virtualization over the last few years. Hypervisor software promises to revolutionize the datacenter by making applications mobile, providing superior disaster recovery capabilities, and allowing IT administrators to allocate computing resources more efficiently. In May 2012, Aberdeen surveyed 137 enterprises to see what applications have been deployed on ...

TechOpinionator: AppSung 2.0 and Innovation vs. Imitation

Friday, Sep 14, 2012

BLOGPOST: The recent court ruling upholding Apple’s claim against Samsung (“AppSung“) for violation of patent protection for certain design and software patents has unleashed the expected storm of fear, uncertainty, and doubt among journalists and analysts alike. You’ve heard it before: “Beware the Apple luxury tax”, “The end of innovation…”, etc.

Uncovering Mobile Video Collaboration’s Business Value

Friday, Sep 14, 2012

BLOGPOST: Although the use of mobile video conferencing for business collaboration is a relatively recent practice, the July 2012 Aberdeen Group Sector Insight “Maximizing the Business Value of Mobile Video Collaboration“ was able to compare the performance of 27 organizations that were already using mobile video with 81 that were using video conferencing without mobile capability.

BYOD: Hidden Costs, Unseen Value

Friday, Sep 14, 2012

BLOGPOST: The Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) phenomenon in the workplace has become an unstoppable global trend.The July 2012 Aberdeen Sector Insight “Enterprise Mobility Management 2012: the Global Perspective” tracked the emergence of BYOD, concurrent with the evolution of Enterprise Mobility itself. It identified three fundamental...

IT Security and the Butterfly Effect

Tuesday, Sep 18, 2012

BLOGPOST: Did a butterfly in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas? This is one expression of The Butterfly Effect, the term coined by mathematician and meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz to explain how small changes in conditions can sometimes have large effects in far-distant parts of large, complex systems.

Are We Human?

Tuesday, Sep 18, 2012

BLOGPOST: Some have mentioned that my titular references could be more, um, current … hence this one from the song “Human” by The Killers, released in 2008. As always, I aim to please. But from a security perspective, knowing whether your online application is dealing with an actual human end-user – or in fact another computer ...

Token Security

Tuesday, Sep 18, 2012

BLOGPOST: Surely one of our many challenges in high-tech is our (ab)use of language – e.g., too many acronyms, or too many meanings for the same word.The word “token” is an example of the latter – in the context of IT Security, it may have one of several meanings...

Cloud Storage Gateways – Large Enterprises are Learning what SMBs Already Know

Tuesday, Sep 25, 2012

BLOGPOST: Cloud Storage Gateways – Large Enterprises are Learning what SMBs Already Know In June, 2012 Aberdeen Group conducted a survey of end user technologies designed to support long term data storage. This survey included topics such as email archiving, Cloud storage and data archiving. One technology that has begun to emerge widely in the IT industry is the use of Cloud Storage Gateways, devices that make it easier for organizations to connect their private, on-premise storage to the Public Cloud.

SECURITY - Email Archiving: EMEA Focused on Functionality, North America on Litigation

Monday, Oct 8, 2012

BLOGPOST: In June 2012 Aberdeen Group conducted a global survey of nearly 180 enterprises and their deployments of technologies designed to support data storage, including e-discovery, Cloud storage, and data archiving. Aberdeen’s analysis of 87 companies with an email archiving initiative found a distinct difference between the email archiving programs in North America (NA) and those in Europe, Middle East & Africa (EMEA): the primary objective in North American email archiving programs is to prepare for litigation, while the primary objective in EMEA is to reduce IT operating costs.

Better Estimation Means Better Projects

Friday, Oct 12, 2012

BLOGPOST: Estimating size or resources is one of the most important topics in software engineering and IT. You will not deliver according to expectations, if you don’t plan. And, you cannot plan if you don’t know the underlying dependencies and estimates.

SECURITY - Splitting Secrets — “Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead”

Monday, Oct 15, 2012

BLOGPOST: “Three may keep a secret,” observed Benjamin Franklin, in his Poor Richard’s Almanack, “If two of them are dead.”Instead of sharing the same secret among multiple parties, what if there was a way to divide a secret among multiple parties without ever disclosing the secret itself? This is the basic idea, announced this week at RSA Conference Europe 2012, behind RSA Distributed Credential Protection, which is designed to eliminate a single point of compromise by scrambling, randomizing, and splitting sensitive data across multiple locations.

INSIGHTS - Star West 2012

Tuesday, Oct 23, 2012

BLOGPOST: Star West 2012, located at the Disneyland Hotel, just wrapped up, and after five days full of information on the cutting edge of software quality engineering, it’s pretty evident that this conference is here to stay. 2012’s content-offerings were varied and interesting, but I’m here to talk about the expo floor.

CAREERS - Disaster Recovery in the Wake of Hurricane Sandy: A Personal Account

Monday, Nov 19, 2012

BLOGPOST: First, let me set the record straight: I have not suffered (much) as a result of Hurricane Sandy. My story is about minor inconveniences and life disrupted in subtle ways – nothing as compared to the many folks who have truly suffered: loss of homes, health, livelihood, and even loved ones. To them all I wish a speedy return to safe shelter, dry clothes, hot food, and a warm bed. It is a brief and inconsequential personal account and observation on a) the lack of preparedness in modern life for the breakdown of modern life as we know it, and b) the brilliant performance during the disaster and its aftermath of that little portable SoMoClo™ endpoint, the smartphone.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Why Lean?

Friday, Aug 31, 2012

BLOGPOST: With more or less regular intervals we see new software engineering fads like maturity models, RUP, XP, and scrum. This is nothing new, and many other disciplines experience the same things.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Git

Tuesday, Oct 2, 2012

BLOGPOST: Traditional version control systems derive their requirements from software configuration management practices. The focus of these practices is to identify, control, and disseminate the software’s configuration and changes. A system, like CVS or Subversion, that can retrieve the files corresponding to a specific software version, list the changes that led to it, and keep developers from trampling on each others’ feet satisfies these requirements and can be a boon over exchanging files through a shared folder or email. However, configuration management mainly prevents bad things from happening during software development; it provides (valuable) control, but few tools that genuinely aid a developer’s everyday life.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Don't Install Software by Hand

Tuesday, Sep 25, 2012

BLOGPOST: An IT system’s setup and configuration is a serious affair. It increasingly affects us developers mainly due to the proliferation and complexity of internet-facing systems. Fortunately, we can control and conquer this complexity by adopting IT-system configuration management tools.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - How to Calculate an Operation's Memory Consumption

Tuesday, Sep 25, 2012

BLOGPOST: How can you determine how much memory is consumed by a specific operation of a Unix program? Valgrind's Massif subsystem could help you in this regard, but it can be difficult to isolate a specific operation from Massif's output. Here is another, simpler way.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - iPads, Consumption and Creation, and the Future of Enterprise Software

Tuesday, Nov 20, 2012

BLOGPOST: Several months into my experiment with Windows 8 on a Samsung Slate tablet, I now have answers to three important questions about the past, present and future of tablet computing, the so-called post-PC era.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - MandA The HP Way – Why the Autonomy deal was doomed, and what can't be done to save HP

Wednesday, Nov 28, 2012

BLOGPOST: The latest debacle at Hewlett-Packard involving the allegations of accounting wrong-doing at Autonomy make for a particularly sticky wicket for CEO Meg Whitman. While there have been some attempts to blame her predecessor, Léo Apotheker, for the decision to buy Autonomy, it’s impossible for Whitman to avoid taking ultimate responsibility for the deal. And when the dust finally settles on this latest in a series of miss-steps at HP, the question of what can be done to save this storied Silicon Valley icon from itself will be harder and harder to answer. Part of the problem is that even if Autonomy had knocked it out of the park, instead of fouling out, it never would have turned HP around. Not even close. The fact that it’s now another big HP deal gone bad just adds to the sense that all we can do is watch a Greek tragedy unfolding on stage before our eyes.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Dreams of My Data: GE Software and the Industrial Internet

Monday, Dec 17, 2012

BLOGPOST: Jeff Immelt of GE has the biggest calling card I’ve ever seen, and he wasn’t adverse to flaunting it on stage late last month at GE Software’s coming out party. Flanked by a 12 foot tall GEnx jet aircraft engine, Immelt took to the stage to make clear that GE’s next big bet would be on the what I’ve called the sensor revolution, what others call the internet of things, and what GE calls the industrial internet. The risk that this bet will fail to make an impact on GE and its customers is largely zero –the company’s smart devices are everywhere, from GEnx engines loaded with sensors measuring temperature, airflow, and turbine spin rates to massive locomotive engines collecting accelerometer and location data to hospital equipment sending out patient and equipment status updates to consumer appliances providing energy consumption data. These sensors are everywhere – numbering literally in the billions. Which is why this sensor data revolution is, in my opinion, orders of magnitude more valuable than the click-stream and location data that is currently being mined from consumer devices and web-based customer interactions and hyped as the primary source of the so-called big data revolution.

INSIGHTS - A Bad Penny

Monday, Dec 10, 2012

BLOGPOST: More than 500 years ago (or April of 2010, whichever seems more likely), I started this blog with the big, bold, brilliant idea of keeping it limited to 300 words or less about (and I quote): "The Glamorous and Exciting World of Publishing." Yeah, I talk like that.

When Will You Pay Back Your Technical Debt?

Friday, Nov 23, 2012

BLOGPOST: Debt is bad. We hear this simple rule from parents when they educate their children on the proper use of money, from politicians when they try to control economy, and of course from our managers when we try to sell a proposal which needs investment. Expenses should be done from our earned money. On the other hand, success often stems from borrowed money. Apple was started in 1976 with borrowed money from an Intel executive. Later Steve Jobs borrowed millions from Bill Gates to turn around the loss-making Apple. There seems to be good and bad debt.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Open Source: The Unseen Pillar in IT

Monday, Jan 14, 2013

BLOGPOST: Nobody talks about it, everyone’s got it, but who is using it best? Open Source software is hardly ever mentioned when people talk about their business’ core IT foundation. It seems like everyone has some form of Open Source software supporting their business, but the stigma appears to be that Open Source is looked upon as the redheaded step-child no one wants to admit they have. Commercial and proprietary software certainly rules a large portion of enterprise solutions, but there’s still a goodly amount of tools enterprises stand upon that fall into the Open Source bucket.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Getting Back to Performance Management’s Testing Roots

Tuesday, Jan 15, 2013

BLOGPOST: I vividly remember my first foray into application performance testing. While working as a reviewer at PC Week Labs, I needed a tool that I could use to test the performance capabilities of the then emerging web and application server market. Back then I used a simple web load simulation tool that ran on an SGI Indy system.

NETWORKING - Best-in-Class Companies Choose Thin Client Desktops

Tuesday, Jan 22, 2013

BLOGPOST: Aberdeen's extensive research into virtualization adoption has found that server virtualization has been widely accepted by companies of all sizes. While most organizations have deployed hypervisor software on their servers (See "Is the Hypervisor Market Expanding or Contracting?" September 2012), fewer companies have deployed desktop virtualization.

Bridging the Twin Peaks - Winning with Requirements and Architecture

Monday, Jan 21, 2013

BLOGPOST: Requirements and architecture of any system thus are highly interdependent. Projects without early architecture evaluation will overlook critical requirements. They will fail in prioritizing requirements. They face budget overruns and rework due to inappropriate and late design changes. This blog looks how to bridge the twin peaks of requirements and architecture.

CLOUD - Computing Technologies for Best-in-Class CRM Deployments

Monday, Jan 28, 2013

BLOGPOST: No matter the shape or size of an organization, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are the backbone for managing a company's interactions with customers, clients, and sales prospects.

CLOUD - SaaS Data Loss: The Problem You Didn't Know You Had

Friday, Feb 8, 2013

BLOGPOST: In January 2013, Aberdeen surveyed 123 organizations to learn how they use the Public Cloud as part of their IT infrastructure. This Blog will focus on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) as a platform for enterprise applications and the surprisingly high percentage of survey respondents that reported losing data from their SaaS applications. This report is a warning to all that have mission critical data in Public Cloud SaaS deployments — you may not be as well protected as you believe.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Infor the Innovator: Is There Room for Another Horse in the Race?

Friday, Feb 22, 2013

BLOGPOST: There’s never enough solid competition in the enterprise software market, and it’s been tempting to see the top tier of the market as a three-horse race, with SAP and Oracle the dominant players, and Microsoft, in the form of Dynamics AX, moving fast to catch up, particularly in the large enterprise. It’s looking like that’s about to change.

CLOUD - The Growing Importance of SaaS as an Application Deployment Model

Tuesday, Mar 12, 2013

BLOGPOST: In January 2013, Aberdeen surveyed 123 organizations to learn how they use the Public Cloud as part of their IT infrastructure as well as the use of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). With SaaS as a platform for enterprise applications and its growing importance as an application deployment method, companies now have an alternative to purchasing a software license when they decide to use a commercially available application. Findings from the recent Aberdeen research report "The Growing Importance of SaaS as an Application Deployment Platform", shows wide use of Cloud-based SaaS applications in many different parts of today's enterprises.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Mastering Functional Safety

Friday, Mar 8, 2013

BLOGPOST: We increasingly rely on complex electronic functions to ensure functional safety. These functions are realized by systems of sensors, actuators and interconnected electronic control units. To mitigate product liability risks associated with such systems as well as to ensure the high level of quality under varying operational conditions, significant improvements to engineering processes are necessary. This blog shows how to master functional safety.

NETWORKING - M2M – The Rise of the Machines

Wednesday, Mar 13, 2013

BLOGPOST: An emerging trend – dubbed “the Internet of Things” — is the growing prevelance of interconnected devices in our lives. These connected devices range from “smart” refrigerators to intelligent production machines in factories and warehouses. Each of these devices is collecting and sending data back to a central collection point specific to their business role —whether it is the system running the manufacturing plant, or the “smart” home core computer. As more data is collected, data analytics processes can be applied, resulting in the refrigerator compiling a grocery list from items previously consumed, or the automatic delivery of a replacement part to the manufacturing plant for the one pending expiration.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Microsoft’s Lync 2013 Flunks the Unified Communications Opportunity

Thursday, Mar 14, 2013

BLOGPOST: Some things are just too good to be true, and Microsoft’s vision for Lync 2013 – its desktop unified communications product – is a good case in point. It’s almost a shame, because rationalizing the many different channels of communication that business users have access to – email, chat, social, video conference, voice – under a single application has enormous potential for optimizing how people collaborate. And Microsoft’s vision for Lync, as spelled out at its sold-out first-ever Lync conference last month, was a singularly beautiful vision of instant-on, real-time communications enabling amazing feats of collaboration never before possible. Too bad trying to make this vision happen with the current product set is just a dream – or actually, if my example is any indication – a bloody nightmare.

CLOUD - How Private Clouds can Transform IT in Midsize Companies

Tuesday, Mar 19, 2013

BLOGPOST: Aberdeen has been following the adoption of Cloud computing for many years. In May 2012, Aberdeen surveyed 123 organizations to learn how they use Cloud computing as part of their IT infrastructure. The adoption of Cloud computing technologies by midsize organizations — companies with between 100 and 1,000 employees — has allowed them to become more flexible, increase end-user involvement in managing their own infrastructure, and reduce the overall cost of IT services. However, according to the Aberdeen research report "How Private Clouds can Transform IT in Midsize Companies" midsize organizations have not taken this technology as far as it can go to fully transform the way their IT organization supports the lines of business.

HIGH PERFORMANCE - Big Data in Customer Management: Moving from Hype to Success Requires Focus on Use of Data, not Volume (Part 1 of 3)

Thursday, Mar 21, 2013

BLOGPOST: We've witnessed the rapid emergence of the term "big data" as a key technology trend in 2012. There is no shortage of insights and conversations that focus on the importance of big data and best practices to leverage big data as a key business differentiator.

SECURITY - Evernote, 50M Passwords, and the Law of Demos

Monday, Mar 25, 2013

BLOGPOST: When visiting my mom, who does not live close by, I try to play Geek Squad and help her with any open technology issues. Most recently, we set up a new Wi-Fi service for her new Windows 8 laptop (that's right, my mom has newer capabilities than I do).

CLOUD - On Premise or in the Cloud: How Best-in-Class Deploy their Business Intelligence Applications

Thursday, Mar 28, 2013

BLOGPOST: There is a continuing revolution in how IT deploys enterprise applications; today there are many platform options on which to deploy applications, including physical servers, virtualized servers and multiple versions of the Cloud.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Microsoft and the enterprise/consumer opportunity. Time to go “all in” again?

Tuesday, Mar 26, 2013

BLOGPOST: Microsoft Dynamics has many ambitions, many of them warranted, to become a force for innovation and change in the broad enterprise software market. And Dynamics has a problem, or really a set of problems, that in essence originate from a single source: the rest of Microsoft. As Dynamics performs yeoman’s service defining, or at least trying to define, the enterprise value of its parents company’s increasingly broad innovation portfolio, the rest of Microsoft is having trouble following suit, or a times even playing in the same card game. Windows 8 and Windows 8 phone were both launched largely devoid of any mention of the enterprise, and the Yammer acquisition was jammered into the Office division, where the desperately needed business context for making social collaboration relevant is missing in action (unless you think collaborating over a PowerPoint preso is the raison d’etre of social collaboration). Lync 2013 was launched in a similar way – despite a lot of sloganing and some nifty demos, there was no link to real business processes (or to anything but Lync, apparently).

NETWORKING - We're Not in Post-PC Times, But It Is a Nouveau Mobile World

Tuesday, Apr 2, 2013

BLOGPOST: With the rising importance and ubiquity of devices such as tablets and smartphones, it's becoming trendy for technology pundits to say that we are moving to post PC times, that not only will the importance of the PC dwindle, but that we will soon cease to use them completely.

SECURITY - Endpoint Security and the DSD Top 4: One Size Does Not Fit All

Friday, Apr 12, 2013

BLOGPOST: Have you been hearing lately, as I have, about the "DSD Top 4"? This refers to the Australian Government Department of Defence's Defence Signals Directorate (DSD), and its recently updated publication called "Strategies to Mitigate Targeted Cyber Intrusions".

HIGH PERFORMANCE - Predicting Faster Predictive Analytics Modeling

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

BLOGPOST: Predictive analytics is moving mainstream — big data is making it so. Aberdeen’s big data research ("Go Big or Go Home? Maximizing the Value of Analytics and Big Data") indicates that 90% of organizations working with big data were also using predictive analytics. This is a natural fit — as data sets get bigger and more complicated then the human eyeball is going to find it much harder to find patterns in data. Time for smart software in the form of predictive analytics and data mining technology to step in and help.

SECURITY - Two-Factor Authentication: What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been

Thursday, May 16, 2013

BLOGPOST: If you're not old enough to relate to the musical reference in the title, you may also not be old enough to know that two-factor authentication didn't just become fashionable in the last couple of months – as you might otherwise surmise based on announcements (both actual, and rumored) by Twitter, Microsoft, WordPress, Apple, Dropbox, Facebook, Google and others. In ge

BIG DATA - Early insights from the agile analytics survey, part 1

Monday, May 20, 2013

BLOGPOST: Michael Lock, Peter Ostrow, Trip Kucera and I have been speaking at many IBM Business Analytics Summits recently. One of our big talking points has been this: Where business users are able to use analytics self-sufficiently, with very little (if any) assistance from skilled IT staff, analytics is used more pervasively throughout the organization. In other words, analytics gets into the hands of a greater percentage of employees.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Microsoft Needs an Enterprise Reboot Now

Thursday, May 30, 2013

BLOGPOST: I don’t usually like to admit I was wrong, but my love affair with Microsoft’s Windows 8 strategy is over. While I still think the basic strategy is a sound one for the enterprise – a single code base for building touch-enabled apps that can live on phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, and anything else Windows 8 will run on – I’m a little tired of the lack of execution on key parts of the strategy.

CLOUD - On-Premise or in the Cloud — How Best-in-Class Deploy their Manufacturing Applications

Friday, May 31, 2013

BLOGPOST: There is a continuing revolution in how IT deploys enterprise applications. A number of years ago, physical servers were the only choice. Today, on-premise physical servers are joined by virtualized servers and multiple versions of the Cloud. With this range of options, it benefits business leaders to make the best choice for their particular needs. To that end, in January 2013, Aberdeen surveyed the IT community to learn how they deploy their enterprise applications. This Blog examines a subset of those results — how the Best-in-Class deploy their manufacturing applications. The full report can be found at "On-Premise or in the Cloud &38212; How Best-in-Class Deploy their Manufacturing Applications".

SECURITY - Here, FIDO! If We Build Stronger Authentication, Will Consumers Come?

Friday, Jun 7, 2013

BLOGPOST: As a follow-up to my recent blog on Two-Factor Authentication: What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been (6 May 2013), about the flurry of activity around two-factor authentication in consumer scenarios, I want to call your attention to FIDO.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - Solving the Unique Computing Challenges of Small and Mid-sized Businesses

Wednesday, Jun 12, 2013

BLOGPOST: n May 2012, Aberdeen surveyed 137 enterprises to learn about their server environments.This report focuses on the role virtualization plays in SMB IT departments and the importance servers play in maximizing IT investments. The full report can be found at "Solving the Unique Computing Challenges of Small and Mid-sized Businesses."