Many system administrator tasks are a repetitive drudge. Senior IT managers do not want to be doing such tasks on a day-to-day basis and would prefer to delegate these to junior staff or contractors from 3rd parties. However, they need to be...

Well, I think that Configuration Management (rather than just Change Management) is what eases the pain of change - but there are various points of view on this. What is important is that people understand the various positions and their...

I’ve been a little slow in blogging about what I learned at IBM IMPACT (#ibmimpact) this year… apologies if you’ve been waiting for pearls of wisdom from me! ;-) I blame a big client workload. Damn those clients. So it’s a...

In-memory is becoming increasingly popular within the data warehousing community. The cynic in me expects that traditional caching technology will soon be re-branded by marketing as in-memory, which, of course, it is, but that's not what people are...

This is the last in a series of five articles about graph databases. I have previously described what they are, how they relate to NoSQL databases such as Hadoop, and what they are used for. I have specifically highlighted Neo4j and uRiKA, where the...

The end of April was a busy time for IT security analysts. April 24 to 26 was Infosecurity Europe (InfoSec) at Earl’s Court, the biggest such trade show in Europe, and the following week was the Eskenzi PR annual IT Security Analysts...

Last week I took part in #SWCHAT – a weekly tweetchat session focused on the social workplace, and run by David Christopher of Stop! Think Social. The topic of the session was “Building a collaborative culture”, the subject of my...

When you are developing or testing software that will exist within a service oriented architecture (SOA) you may have issues with the stability or availability of the services that you need to consume. This may be because these are under development...

This is the fourth of my series of articles about graph databases. Now I want to discuss uRiKA from YarcData, which is a spin-off from Cray (Yarc is Cray spelled backwards). As far as I know uRiKA is unique within the graph database space, primarily...

This is the third in my series of articles about graph databases and here I am going to highlight Neo4j from Neo Technologies but first a further discussion on the use of graph databases versus (other) NoSQL approaches. A graph database has a...

Intuit announced last week that it was acquiring Demandforce, which provides an integrated suite of Web-based social media and marketing tools for small businesses, for $423.5 million in cash. Demandforce automates many of the internet and social...

As the financial climate cooled, Quocirca came across more and more organisations that sang the same song – do more with less, and batten down the hatches of expenditure to ride out the crisis. Part of the response back from IT on this was to...

Computing have a good piece summarising the panel I ran at InfoSec 2012 My issue was around the jailbreaking of devices. If a user is motivated and capable of jailbreaking a device what else could they be doing to your network? The full article is...

Nigel Stanley, Practice Leader at Bloor Research, talks to Infosecurity Magazine's Drew Amorosi outside the keynote theatre at Infosecurity Europe 2012. Link to video here

I’m back to serve up the second edition of Tech Tidbits, with a new sampling of SMB solutions that you might not know about, but could provide just what you’re looking for. On the menu this time are PaySimple and BizSlate. If you use or...

Two acquisitions recently – Teradata buying eCircle and IBM snapping up Tealeaf – mark out digital marketing analytics as a focus and investment area for the data warehousing and analytic heavyweights. Although both acquisitions have...

Gabriel Goldenberg is an expert on search engine optimisation (SEO). He has kindly agreed to let me reproduce in Office Jotter some of his writings on the topic. This is the first of them. You can read about Gabriel’s services at his Web site,...

This is the second of five articles on graph databases and in this article I am going to talk more about graph databases in general and how they differ from other approaches. In particular, to date, most of the emphasis within the big data story has...

I will be appearing in the SC Magazine Virtual Summit on mobile security on 18th May 2012 at 17.00 - 17.45. The session is called What Does The Future Hold? Understand What Technology, Staff Trends And Threats Lurk Round The Corner and will address...

Over the years SAS has worked with many data warehousing vendors. In particular, in the recent past it has collaborated with a number of database vendors to support in-database analytics. However, as far as I am aware the recent announcement of the...