Richard Davies wrote: The UK has a good crop of technology pioneers in cloud computing - for example ElasticHosts, FlexiScale, Flexiant, OnApp - and also some strong government initiatives such as G-Cloud.
We will have to see whether this kind of technical leadership converts into swift mass-market adoption or not.
Jan. 8, 2012 11:38 AM EST
In many cases, the end of the year gives you time to step back and take stock of the last 12 months. This is when many of us take a hard look at what worked and what did not, complete performance reviews, and formulate plans for the coming year. For me, it is all of those things plus a...
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One of my favorite sayings is, "If you don't know where you're going, any direction will do." While in many cases people take that as license to do whatever they feel like, what it really means is that before you embark on a journey, you should plan your destination. You know, get out ...
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SOA in many ways reminds me of relational database technology. At it’s first inception, the concept of an RDBMS must have had a hard sell. Sure it made perfect sense to arrange the data and ensure that the relationships between the data were enforced but what was the business case tha...
I remember (vaguely) when I was in kindergarten, playing with my classmates, learning to make things out of clay and paper, and generally enjoying that sneaky introduction to education. Little did I know that my teacher (I forget her name, it was a long time ago) was grading my perform...
There's a biblical story about a walled city called Jericho. In the story, the walled city was under siege, and the folks who wanted in blew their horns for seven days and then the walls all fell down. The Open Group has an initiative based on this story, called Jericho Security, which...
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It seems like not a day goes by lately in which some new story of malfeasance in office doesn't come out - whether it's lying under oath, using the services of a call girl, or spying on other officials in the government in order to further a personal agenda. Clearly, our elected offici...
I had the opportunity recently to speak at a Microsoft event on Web 2.0. It was an interesting evening, with speakers from several organizations discussing various issues and strategies that could be used to move the bar forward on the Web. Now if you're a faithful reader, you've seen ...
As a student of physics, Albert Einstein is one of my personal heroes. Aside from being one of the most brilliant minds to ever contemplate the universe, Albert had a way with words. One of his quotes strikes me as particularly apropos for this month's issue - 'Any intelligent fool can...
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At the end of the year, it's always interesting to take a moment and try to imagine what's next. In this case, I'm not thinking about whether the Patriots will win the Super Bowl, I'm wondering what comes after service-oriented architecture. Although SOA has been dramatically hyped as ...
Recently I had a chance to do some training in France. I participated in a week of coursework with classmates from all over the world. Some were from France, Spain, Holland, Sweden, and England; others were from even further - the United States and even India. To say the least, it was ...
I have no children myself, but I've watched my nieces and nephew grow from newborns to walking, talking, independent individuals over the years. To me, one of the most fascinating parts of watching a child grow is seeing them go from their first tentative, hesitant steps to toddling ar...
SOA - which provides capabilities for loosely coupling these duplicate systems, federating the data between them and managing the concept of systems of record - is an enabler that eases the pain of bringing two entities together. Much like a catalyst that enables a reaction, SOA simpli...
When Web services first burst onto the scene, which in my mind was the beginning of the SOA movement, one of the biggest challenges faced by early implementers was the perceived lack of security. Fear and uncertainty abounded, and it was years before the majority of IT organizations be...
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Many recent science fiction novels deal with the concept of nanites - tiny bits of computers than can aggregate themselves to form new larger composites to assist their host. These concepts typically relate to making human cells self-healing, but they also have their sinister aspects, ...
We all do it from time to time - forget something, get it out of sequence - and experience that annoying feeling that we've just done something incredibly stupid. I usually arrive at the dry cleaners to pick up my clothes, only to realize I'd left the next batch behind. Fortunately, it...
Sometimes it seems like it takes forever for new technology to be adopted, and even when a technology goes mainstream, it seems as if people cling to the old ways long after a better way has been shown. Heck, I drive a car but still have a couple of horses - sometimes you just want the...
You know, I love an election year. The drama, the emotion, the positioning, it all makes me think about running for office myself - or at least going through the motions to generate a large war chest that I can dip into (I AM from New Jersey, it's a time-honored tradition). Oh, wait a ...
This month I thought I'd put on my sales hat for a moment and talk about what it takes to actually sell someone on the concept of using service-oriented architecture as the underlying paradigm for an organization's information technology implementation and direction. In part this is be...
One of the most interesting aspects of being a consultant is that I get exposed to any number of different facets of system design in the course of an assignment. While I tend to focus more on application and integration work, I find it fascinating to deal with the concepts of services...
In some ways, an industry is like a country. It has its citizens, the corporations, its own particular nuances that serve to make one industry just that much different from another (think insurance and financial services) as to be distinct, and it has a language.
There's a guy I know who's incredibly gifted when it comes to building things. I've watched him repair a barn, build a new shed, put up a roof - you name it; if it can be done with wood and tools, this is the guy to do it. And I've never seen him use a plan - he just knows what to do.
If I were a lot more paranoid than I am (well, perhaps at least a little more than I am), I might suspect that the various free e-mail programs were a social engineering attempt by the big software coalition (yes, I know, it doesn't exist) to ultimately change the way we use our comput...
Nothing is more enlightening for a technologist than to observe development in progress. We're faced constantly with a bewildering array of choices and tools. We see specifications on paper that then become something completely different when we actually get to see them implemented in ...
As editor, I review a great many proposals for articles. A good portion of them deal with SOA, which is to be expected. When I review them, I'm reminded that there are two very different views of SOA, which in my opinion are both equally true. I call this the SOA Dichotomy, because the...
Imagine trying to solve a puzzle without being certain what the end result should look like, much less how the pieces fit together. Now imagine trying to build the puzzle pieces themselves. Bit of a challenge? To say the least! But this is exactly the situation facing many business and...
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Recently I happened upon a blog site that had a discussion of one of my previous articles, one in which I proposed a need for a new 'browser.' The discussion was very interesting, but it was obvious to me I had not been clear about what I was asking for. Some of the folks on the board ...
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If you're old enough, you probably remember the whole episode with Al Haig in the White House, saying 'I'm in charge here' during the period when Reagan was shot. He wasn't really, but it's a good illustration of the concept of confusion, and how different people react to situations. H...
