Jon Collins on IT-Analysis.com

Is IT offshoring ready for "Designed in India"?

Jon Collins, Freeform Dynamics — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 15:35:00 +0100

There's an interesting article in India's Business Standard newspaper this week, about the impending plans for the World's Largest Democracy(TM) to promote itself not just as a place... [Read More...]

Why I'm interested in Open Source

Jon Collins, Freeform Dynamics — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 10:00:32 +0100

Because it's having a distorting effect on the rest of the industry. I'm afraid I don't buy the argument (nor would I have to, but you get what I mean) that all software should be free, as... [Read More...]

IBM: SOA Far, SOA Good?

Jon Collins, Freeform Dynamics — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 11:10:30 +0100

It's been a couple of months since I jumped on a plane back from IBM's SOA Impact conference in Las Vegas. For those in the know, this conference is a re-named evolution of the... [Read More...]

Master Process Management? Now, there's a thought.

Jon Collins, Freeform Dynamics — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 13:27:14 +0100

One of the most fun debates I have had in recent times was with a couple of execs from IBM and Cognos, and with a senior analyst from IDC, at last week's Information On Demand event in The... [Read More...]

IP Address Management - a latent need, not a market bandwagon

Jon Collins, Freeform Dynamics — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 22:45:09 +0100

It always seems quite ironic to me when I read how industry analysts are accused of 'bigging up' vendor offerings, when I and my peers seem to spend so much of our time resetting the... [Read More...]

Microsoft Bloat, Green and the Vista opportunity

Jon Collins, Freeform Dynamics — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 10:35:38 +0100

Microsoft's always going to have a hard time presenting a convincing green story for desktop computing. Its not that the story itself is un-sound: power-saving features are useful as far as... [Read More...]

Can Power over Ethernet make networks greener?

Jon Collins, Freeform Dynamics — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 23:19:31 +0100

It is always dangerous to speculate, particularly in this industry, which sometimes seems to be more founded on speculation than practical reality. Consider, for example, Power over Ethernet (PoE) -... [Read More...]

On police paperwork and technology promise

Jon Collins, Freeform Dynamics — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 09:59:01 +0100

As I was driving to the National Motorcycle Museum to give a presentation on archiving this morning, I listened to a constable from a Welsh police force on Radio 4, backing up the... [Read More...]

Flock rocks - and Microsoft is not going to take over the world. Deal with it.

Jon Collins, Freeform Dynamics — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 21:36:59 +0100

It was Danny Bradbury that first mentioned Flock to me, a couple of weeks ago when I had one of my regular little tirades against Facebook (in general, I keep these out of my blogging because I might... [Read More...]

Bringing wireless networks into the management fold

Jon Collins, Freeform Dynamics — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 13:04:48 +0100

As part of the briefing cycle for Aruba's announced acquisition of Airwave Wireless, I had a very interesting conversation with Roger Hockaday, EMEA marketing director for Aruba. In part it was... [Read More...]

Why 2008 for enterprise identity management?

Jon Collins, Freeform Dynamics — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 15:49:11 +0100

Like many people I suspect, I have struggled to get my head round identity management. This is less to do, I suspect, with the nature of the thing itself� [Read More...]

Can software developers be protected from themselves?

Jon Collins, Freeform Dynamics — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 15:07:40 +0100

It's now six weeks since RSA Europe, when I made a diary note to take a deeper look at the SAFECode forum. SAFECode stands for the Software Assurance Forum for Excellence in Code - we can be... [Read More...]

Has it been a week with Ubuntu already?

Jon Collins, Freeform Dynamics — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 12:00:28 +0100

Its been an interesting experience so far - notably my reading and writing of blogs has suffered as I've been tinkering and tweaking, but I think I now have a stable environment, notably: -... [Read More...]

Why I've replaced Vista with Linux

Jon Collins, Freeform Dynamics — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 23:30:11 +0100

This decision was a long time coming but I think it is the right thing to do right now: I have reformatted the hard drive on my laptop and replaced Vista with the latest version of Ubuntu Linux as... [Read More...]

Oh My God! They Killed Music DRM!

Jon Collins, Freeform Dynamics — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 15:21:19 +0100

Digital Rights Management in music was, to be fair, always doomed. As long as there exist free mechanisms to transport music, it will always be impossible to protect it from unauthorised copying. The... [Read More...]

BT skates its way to transformation

Jon Collins, Freeform Dynamics — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 17:43:37 +0100

When I was a kid, once a year we used to go and watch an ice show. For adults perhaps, it might have been an excruciating panto rescued from the brink of despair by a few spangled costumes and... [Read More...]

The bigger picture of behavioral analysis - a conversation with Tier-3

Jon Collins, Freeform Dynamics — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 16:35:49 +0100

In a break with tradition, I�m going to write about a specific company in this one, or at least a specific series of conversations. I�ve been talking quite a lot to the guys at Tier-3, a... [Read More...]

Twitter�s just a big chat, right?

Jon Collins, Freeform Dynamics — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 20:44:59 +0100

S�funny. There I was thinking that Twitter was in some way different from, well, anything else. To the extent that it had taken the web publishing model and reduced it to the finest level of... [Read More...]

Sun vs NetApp - Good Hippies Don't Divorce, Do They?

Jon Collins, Freeform Dynamics — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 23:07:03 +0100

Funnily enough it was only today that I was recounting a tale to goodman David, about a formative experience I had a few years ago when two hippy friends of mine decided to divorce. It took me a... [Read More...]

Shoulder standing 101: being influenced by the influencees

Jon Collins, Freeform Dynamics — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 21:27:04 +0100

These are indeed interesting times to be an influencer of any form, not least as we see the democratisation of influence - interestingly, not a term that has yet been adopted... [Read More...]

What a way to start RSA - with a virus

Jon Collins, Freeform Dynamics — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 18:54:37 +0100

Well, well. The last thing I expected to see when I plugged in my SD card this morning, was a virus. I think I must have been picked it up earlier in the week. as I was transferring files between... [Read More...]

Day 2 at Storage Expo - Greening Up the Act

Jon Collins, Freeform Dynamics — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 20:11:43 +0100

Exhibitions are like travel - one spends a lot of time seemingly not doing much at all, and its completely shattering. In the case of Storage Expo, 'nothing at all' translates into... [Read More...]

HELLO! I'M ON THE PLANE!

Jon Collins, Freeform Dynamics — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 16:05:09 +0100

It was with initial trepidation that I read the news that mobile phones might be allowed on plane flights around Europe. After all, along with the metro/tube/subway, churches and... [Read More...]

Nostalgic? Try Mobile

Jon Collins, Freeform Dynamics — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 05:48:10 +0100

Anyone who thinks modem speeds are a thing of the past (hi Joe, not a criticism) can't spend much time working mobile, using GPRS... [Read More...]

Day 1 of Storage Expo

Jon Collins, Freeform Dynamics — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 22:19:15 +0100

Random thoughts - walking in was like the scene at the end of Trading Places, the noise, the hubbub. Lots of people! I remarked to Bob Plumridge... [Read More...]

Sleepwalking Towards the Last Post

Jon Collins, Freeform Dynamics — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 11:44:38 +0100

The one thing I didn't expect to be doing this morning was agreeing with Tory MP John Redwood on the plight of the postal workers in the currently still-ongoing postal dispute in the UK. For... [Read More...]

Silicon Agenda Setters - the results are out

Jon Collins, Freeform Dynamics — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 12:08:32 +0100

Sometimes, this job is, well, just a job and sometimes it's a damn good wheeze, such as when I was invited to come along to the Silicon.com agenda setters panel last month. My approach was... [Read More...]

Descending on Documation, Schmoozing at Storage Expo

Jon Collins, Freeform Dynamics — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 10:50:08 +0100

For anyone who's in London this week and wants to meet up, I shall be at Olympia Wednesday and Thursday for the jointly held conferences of Documation and Storage Expo. Indeed, I'll be... [Read More...]

Information Management - three sides or three mountains?

Jon Collins, Freeform Dynamics — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 21:41:20 +0100

Yesterday I had a rather interesting conversation with Dale about how perspectives on information management can vary according to the provenance of the people involved. At the highest, most... [Read More...]

Things I miss about UNIX

Jon Collins, Freeform Dynamics — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 18:57:34 +0100

A long, long, time ago, in a vertical far, far away, I once used to spend a lot of my time doing various things with UNIX - as an administrator or a developer. Somewhere along the route I appear to... [Read More...]