Say semantic web to a lot of people and the shutters on their brains come down. They may have lived through the disappointments of the AI or expert systems eras. Or they may simply know how impossibly tedious it would be to retrofit their...

Just a quick note to say that I'm honoured to have been asked to provide a keynote presentation at the upcoming CloudSlam 10 virtual conference being held from March 23-25. My presentation is scheduled for 11am ET / 8am PT on March 23rd...

What is Social Media Management? As described in the column What is Social Networking, and Why Should You Care?, Internet-based social media make it easier for people to listen, interact, engage and collaborate with each other. But, as...

Any business likes to claim to be number one at something; the biggest pet-shop in town, the largest office productivity application provider globally, the only telco that provides both mobile and broadband in your area. To this end...

In the days of black screens and green type, the arrival of colour was somewhat puzzling. If computers had got us so far without colour, who'd want it? Everyone, it seems. Then came windows, icons, mice and pointers. Again, we were all...

I just got back from the SAS analyst event that was held in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. It was a great meeting. Here are some of the themes I heard over the few days I was there: SAS is a unique place to work. Consider the following:...

In a bold move to get traditional value-added resellers (VARs) off the SaaS fence, NetSuite announced its new Solution Provider (SP) 100 Program, which gives business application VARs 100% margin on the first year of license...

Quocirca has completed the second cycle of research and analysis for Oracle around enterprise performance management (EPM), and the headline results show a massive improvement across the six sub-indices and the overall EPM index. Surely,...

As if IT directors don't have enough on their plates, they're being sucked in to all sorts of new areas. Every enterprise is, or soon will be, an online publisher. Many will transition from a hierarchical mentality to a more collaborative...

Along with new releases from lots of data warehousing vendors, TDWI has also seen in the formal announcement of the DataFlux Data Management Platform which was previously known as the Unity project. As the codename suggests this sees the...

I will be presenting a session titled Five Steps to Effective SOA Governance in BrightTALK's online SOA Governance Summit on Thursday, February 25. The summit includes five webcasts on different aspects of industry best practices for SOA...

As usual at TDWI there are a series of announcements from major vendors. Not least of this year's releases has been the introduction of the Netezza TwinFin iClass, which follows on from last month's announcement of the Netezza Skimmer (a...

Releases come thick and fast during TDWI. One of the more interesting announcements this week is Aster Data nCluster version 4.5. Aster Data's mission is to support what it calls big data analytics. It initially addressed this need...

Vertica, along with various other companies, has made a major announcement at this week's TDWI, namely with respect to Vertica 4.0. This is a major release by any measure with the product being in beta today and general availability...

IBM Lotus recently announced the availability of the latest beta for Lotus Symphony and I have been trying it out for the last week. I have been very impressed by the new functions available. For those of you who are not aware, Lotus...

One of the themes we delve into in our free online framing a Cloud Computing strategy event is the emerging role of the Service Integrator. This is something I've been talking about for a while in discussions with clients but I thought I'd...

Mainframes are expensive, aren't they? Well, that's a piece of accepted wisdom I've never really bought into. I think that mainframes are a remarkably cheap platform, if they are properly managed, partly because getting 80% plus...

Last week I attended an Informatica analyst event. There was a lot to digest but here are some highlights. To begin with, the company talked about its acquisition of Siperian. I have already commented on this but one point that emerged...

A recent article in the Economist, titled Breaking up saturated mobile networks, underlined the problems mobile network operators (MNO) face as demand for data access surges. The article is empathetic with a recent Quocirca report...

Last April, I participated in Dells Managed Services launch for SMBs. At the event, Dell had a couple of customers on hand who were both very satisfied with the service. Later in the year, Dell asked my colleague, Sanjeev Aggarwal, and I...