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The article reports on the 2006 summer release of Salesforce.com's customer relationship management (CRM) service. The company's CRM service includes partner relationship management, interactive call scripting, improved service call management and a new connector for SAP R/3. Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff said that an emerging ecosystem of interconnected software as a service applications he dubs the Business Web will eclipse conventional software. With the release, customers of Salesforce can push customized Web pages out to their distributors, resellers, brokers and so on.

This article reports on the move of Software AG and Fujitsu to jointly develop and market release the new UDDI c3.0-compliant versions of CentraSite, a registry/repository that is tuned for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) metadata management. This move by Software AG and Fujitsu was a result of failure of SOA players BEA, IBM and Oracle to pay attention to registry issues, as they are better known for their application servers, development tools and enterprise service bus. The indifference of these mayor SOA players opened a market for small vendors such as Flashline, Infravio, SOA Software and Systinet.

The article reports on the latest beta version of Office 2007 from Microsoft Corp. as of July 2006. The launching of the browser-based test drive of Office 2007 will allow users to experience the next version of Office online through Internet Explorer, without having to download beta software. It was learned that the new beta is a remote session connection, via Citrix, to Microsoft servers running the Office beta. According to Microsoft, the launch is an effort to avoid conflicts with Office documents already saved on a system.

The article reports that International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) introduced WebSphere software and services in the U.S. in April 2006 that are aimed to overcome barriers to the success of services-oriented architecture (SOA). According to IBM senior vice president and software group executive Steve Mills, such WebSphere releases will refocus the company for a world that is more process-led than technology-led. IBM unveiled eleven new products, twenty product enhancements, and eight service enhancements that are all focused on SOA process integration.

The article reports that Cisco Systems Inc. unveiled its Application Control Engine (ACE) technology and an update to its Fine-Ground Application Velocity System in the U.S. in April 2006. ACE uses logical partitioning to create virtual instances of the company's server load balancing, application delivery, and application firewall features. The ACE module is expected to attract existing content switching module customers who need to upgrade. However, it also expects to attract large enterprises that need fast, high-performance application acceleration technology.

The article reports on the Office Live initiative introduced by Microsoft Corp. in the U.S. in February 2006. Dean Nicolls, senior product manager of information workers services at Microsoft, said that Office Live is aimed at U.S. business enterprises with less than ten employees. Office Live is providing such businesses with an all-in-one solution to create an online presence. Such presence ranges from creating a Web site to having company-branded electronic mail and Web site statistics, to having their own shared sites and online business applications in order to keep all their information in one place.

The article reports on the launch of the Siebel Component Assembly product by Siebel Systems for deployment on BEA WebLogic Server 9.0. The move by Siebel was prompted by the 2005 Analyst Summit held by SAP, where SAP described an initiative to componentize its applications as services running on the NetWeaver application server. Oracle and its Project Fusion, also headed in the same direction, want to become a common middleware infrastructure for its Oracle eBusiness, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards offerings.

This article reports on the initiatives of Microsoft Corp. at the Supercomputing conference in Seattle, Washington, as of November 2005. The main thrust of Microsoft's efforts at the conference was for Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, which is still in beta. Show attendees could grab a free time-bomb demo copy of Windows Compute Cluster Server Beta 2. Aside from that, the booth consisted of other vendors showing off various products loosely tied to clustering, running on some Windows variant. Microsoft's Compute Cluster Server is aimed at those who feel they need the raw horsepower of clustering but want to stay on the Windows platform. Historically Windows has been a very tough sell in the high-performance computing market, so it is safe to say that the established high-performance computing software vendors do not have too much to worry about from Microsoft--yet.

This article reports on the guidelines issued by Liberty Alliance Project, an industry consortium working on standards for federated identity systems, as of October 2005. Companies must concur on what types of information will be shared--and adopt a standardized set of security and privacy measures--to achieve what the liberty Alliance calls a circle of trust among the organizations involved. The 15-page document was created through Liberty Alliance's Public Policy Expert Group (PPEG), which includes members from the Business Industry Political Action Committee, the U.S. General Services Administration, plus Oracle and Sun Microsystems.

This article reports on various product announcements made by Microsoft during its Professional Developers Conference in September 2005. Microsoft announced Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF), a Windows technology that will enable developers to stitch together Microsoft Office applications and custom-built software into composite, enterprise-class workflow applications. With WWF, Microsoft will be able to offer the first workflow-enabled operating system. Microsoft also introduced the first public beta versions of Vista and Office 12. Microsoft presents its new Atlas Web toolkit for building Asynchronous JavaScript and XML applications, plus a lighter, more portable version of Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) dubbed XAML/E. These introductions follow after Microsoft's surprise distribution of its Windows File System beta.

This article reports on the launching of the Apache Synapse open source Web service from Apache in August 2005. Synapse is intended to produce a lightweight, scalable, distributed services broker based on Web services standards. The kernel will be X-broker, donated by software vendor Infravio, which will participate in the project along with middleware players Blue Titan, Iona and Sonic Software. Synapse will produce a ubiquitous and standard run-time environment for Web services. The Synapse project differs from Java-based open source enterprise service buses from Iona, Sun and others because it promises a pure Web services implementation.

This article takes a look at whether the mobile broadband technology has lived up to its hype as of February 28, 2005. In 2001, the U.S. mobile telecommunications claimed that wireless broadband delivered over 3G networks was just around the corner. As it turned out, the industry had little stomach for the huge costs of deploying 3G. Instead, using infrastructure upgrades they needed for voice traffic anyway, the carriers trotted out an alphabet soup of so-called 2.5G solutions. But the resulting speeds were closer to dial-up than true broadband--even though Sprint and Qualcomm liked to call their technology the first phase of 3G. Thankfully, the mobile broadband train is finally arriving in the station. Verizon has already deployed its EvDO (evolution, data optimized) service--with downstream data rates of 300 kilobits per second (Kbps) to 500Kbps--to six major U.S. metropolitan areas, and it plans to cover the nation by the end of the year. Sprint will be next, although it lags behind Verizon in EvDO deployment. Meanwhile, Cingular has inherited UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) technology from its AT&T Wireless acquisition, which is slightly slower than EvDO but also available in six major cities.

This article presents an interview of two executives from hosted applications or on-demand software service providers. Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce.corn, elucidated his expectations for the hosted-application paradigm. Benioff thinks that the resurgence of interest in the hosted model was driven by exciting feature of the on-demand model. He added that the hosted model offers a whole breadth of opportunity for the customer to be more successful than ever before, using a whole new model at very low costs and very easy to use. Yet, chief information officers must not be worried because their job is going to be more strategic and more about finding what right thing to do for the business, and less about managing databases. Meanwhile, Grand Central Communications CEO Halsey Minor extolled the virtues of sharing. Minor said that enterprises need to change the way they consume applications. Consider spending $100 million on an enterprise software and get nothing back. Sifting to the hosted or on-demand application reduces this risk and the costs. As for the services of Grand Central, Minor said that there is no upfront on the cost of its platforms. He pointed out that theirs is the only platform that lets clients share their Internet protocol.

Provides information on the launch of the forthcoming Longhorn version of Windows at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in October 2003. Features of Longhorn; Technology pillars of Longhorn; Applications of Longhorn.

The author explains how the importance of page views as a useful metric of online success is diminished by the presence of Web 2.0 technology. He notes that Asynchronous Java Script and XML (AJAX) and Flash make Web pages more like desktop applications, enabling users to interact without loading pages. He recommends Web sites to log AJAX and Flash events. He asserts that the problem for Web sites and their advisers is that there is no standard method for logging events.

The article reports on the launch of Cape Clear's enterprise service bus (ESB) 7.0. According to the author, this software makes service-oriented architecture (SOA) easier by offering middleware functionality on-demand so that companies can abstract services and coordinate them into composite applications without deploying an ESB internally. Annrai O'Toole, chief executive officer of Cape Clear, believes in software as a service (SaaS) model, and is confident that SOA will be much more aligned with the SaaS world.

The article reviews the voice over Internet protocol software Communications Enabled Business Processes from Avaya.

The article reports on the plan of Software AG to double its revenue through acquisition and an aggressive push into service oriented architecture (SOA) software and services. According to chief executive officer Karl Heinz Streibich, growth requires change and innovation. The company offers a suite of SOA-related products and a Java-oriented Web services development and deployment environment. It sees its future in helping businesses migrate their information technology systems to more SOA-oriented infrastructures.

The article looks at how Merrill Lynch implemented Service-Oriented Legacy Architecture, a Web services initiative that reduced their information technology overhead since 2000. The objective of the project, which was headed by the company's vice president Jim Crew, was to build applications that leveraged not just the data but also the applications on the mainframe. Thus, Crew and his team used X4ML and made it part of Merrill Lynch's service-oriented architecture. Since then, the team has helped create Web services using a collection of Internet technologies like XML and SOAP to make operations available to programmers. The programmers then can create new applications in modern environments including Java from Sun Microsystems.

This article reports on acquisitions between SOA registry vendors. Flashline has been acquired by BEA. A few weeks later, Infravio has been acquired by webMethods. Under the agreement, webMethods will obtain Infravio's X-Registry Platform, which has the capability of helping information technology systems govern the development and runtime interaction of services. Systinet was acquired by Mercury. According to Miko Matsumura, vice president of technology standards at Infravio, this consolidation trend among SOA software providers is not yet over.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue including the information technology challenges facing the financial services, retail, telecommunications and health care industries.

The article reports that IBM has acquired business process and enterprise content management specialist FileNet Corp. for $1.6 billion. The technology of FileNet will be integrated into the existing service-oriented architecture systems for BPM and information lifecycle management. Upon the completion of the deal, IBM plans to integrate FileNet's activities into its own enterprise content management business which is part of its Information Management Unit. Also, IBM plans to integrate its BPM technologies with FileNet's software.

This article explains the reason for the decision of Hewlett-Packard to acquire Mercury Interactive for $4.5 billion. Adaptive and Enterprise have been the long-standing Hewlett-Packard initiatives. The company aims to link IT assets directly to business value. Without acquiring Mercury Interactive the company will not be able to link its IT assets with business value. Thomas Hogan, senior vice president of software at Hewlett-Packard, said that Mercury's software portfolio and project management wares fill an important gap in Hewlett-Packard's product line.

This article reports on the line of servers launched by Sun Microsystems. Upon his return to Sun Microsystems, Andy Bechtolsheim, who is co-founder of the company, introduce a new line of Opteron-based Galaxy servers. The Galaxy servers earned praises from the computer software industry. The company's next big production are the Sun Fire X4500 and X4600 servers and blade servers. The company's objective with the new line of servers is maximum price performance using industry-standard technology. The Windows and Linux versions of the X4600 and blade servers will come out July and the X4500 in August 2006.

The article features Suzanne Peck, chief technology officer (CTO) for District of Columbia. In Summer 1998, she signed as CTO for Washington, D.C. when the city had obsolete systems and no Y2K program in place. She held IT leadership in various Fortune 500 companies. It was learned that Peck rebuilt the IT of D.C., hiring sharp people with corporate experience, outsourcing at a strategic level, lighting up a dark fiber optic network with Voice over Internet Protocol, and replacing eight awful IT facilities with two mirrored IBM z-class mainframe datacenters.

The article features Amichai Shulman, chief technology officer (CTO) and founder of Imperva. He heads the company's Application Defense Center (ADC), a research arm of the company devoted to building the most advanced, security knowledge base in the world. He was former CTO at Edvice, an application-and-database security consultancy. According to Shulman, there are many good public research organizations for Web servers and Web security, but fewer for database security. He notes that critical vulnerabilities exist in commercial database servers.

The article features Andrew Nash, chief technology officer at Reactivity. He developed identity and access management technologies, wrote a book on Public Key Infrastructure, and co-authored several security standards. He decided to focus on fresh security challenges better suited to an emerging Web services world. While making the rounds of RSA Security's customers, he discovered XML security startup Reactivity, where he encountered technologists who were working on a plug-and-play appliance that would provide secure access to Web services. He joined the Reactivity team in 2004 to lead the evolution of the current Gateway line, which adds XML routing and acceleration.

The article features Scott Metzger, chief technology officer at TrueCredit. He established a rational development process and dived into TrueCredit's business agenda. It was said that agility turned out to be job one, so a broad array of consumer credit products and services could be launched quickly. A home-grown Java-based SOA deployed in 2001 was his technology answer. The said technology enabled the delivery of new products every 30 to 60 days and respond rapidly to new compliance demands. Metzger said that the secret to IT success lies in real comprehension of business goals.

The article features Russell Daniels, chief technology officer and vice president of HP Software at Hewlett-Packard. He has a service-oriented perspective associated with applications, his flagship OpenView product. According to Daniels, the enterprise management category was viewed as network and systems monitoring. He argues that the enterprise management category should be viewed as a way to manage IT assets and services and measure their effectiveness in furthering an organization's business goals. The company's Adaptive Enterprise initiative was co-lead by Daniels. The said initiative combines virtualization with various datacenter automation technologies to form a malleable foundation for service-oriented IT.

The article reports on application development tools for mainframes announced by IBM as of May 2006. The company is planning for the mainframe versions of its most popular enterprise software. Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive of the company's Software Group, mainframes are finding a second career as a hub for service-oriented architecture and other services. IBM unveiled new Rational development tools that generate Cobol code and yet cater to the style of Java and Visual Basic programmers.

The article focuses on the acquisition of Web services company Blue Titan by SOA Software. Blue Titan decided to sell because of market evolution. Frank Martinez, executive vice president at SOA, said there is an increase in demand for a broader set of capabilities for service-oriented infrastructure. SOA Software, with Blue Titan, can now offer service-oriented architecture security, governance, management, and the mediation provided by Blue Titan Network Director. SOA Software intends to partner with enterprise service bus or messaging infrastructure providers, delivering solutions big companies lack.

This article focuses on the objection to the software as a service (SaaS) strategy. The main core of this objection is that reliability and availability are in the service provider's hands. One sample is the service disruptions experienced by Salesforce.com customers in December 2005 and January 2006. In line with this outages, the company launched a running accounts and history of system status at trust.salesforce.com. Nonetheless, some customers cancelled their subscription, not only because of the outage but also because of the so-called repeated system slowdowns.

The article reports on the acquisition of Fuego, a vendor of business process management (BPM) software, by BEA Systems as of March 2006. According to BEA CEO Alfred Chuang, the acquisition of Fuego will enable BEA's Aqua Logic line to offer a unified service oriented architecture-based platform via the graphical process modeling of Fuego's software. However, independent industry analyst Bruce Silver doubts that unification will happen. Yet, Silver acknowledges that the acquisition provides instant credibility to BEA in the BPM market.

The article reports on the release of the iWay Service Manager enterprise service bus (ESB) from iWay Software. iWay produces application adapters, those pieces of software that hook enterprise applications to middleware from the likes of BEA, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Sonic, and Sun. Jake Freivald, vice president of product marketing for iWay, says that the catch-all ESB moniker has changed to mean middleware that offers transformations, intelligent message routing, distributed architecture, message transport, and support for standards.

This article presents an update on the development of Microsoft's Vista operating system as of January 2006. The company has announced the availability of the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation for download on Microsoft Developer Network, for programmers who want to build Vista-class applications on their current XP and Server 2003 systems. WCF codifies a stack of Web services protocols, laying the groundwork for developers to build services that can work in tandem.

The article reports on the decision of SOA Software to purchase technology from Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. in the form of Service-Oriented Legacy Architecture (SOLA). SOLA is an interface to CICS applications that runs on IBM mainframes and provides access to legacy data and business logic via standard Web services protocols. The company purchase the software because it recognized that Merrill had a robust, battle-based solution. Merrill chief technology architect Andrew Brown oversaw the development of SOLA which is known internally as X4ML. The SOLA will be available in January 2005.

This article features the WebSphere Product Center, Customer Center Version 6, and Integration Center information service solution-set from IBM. According to Dan Druker, director of enterprise master data solutions at IBM, a number of key drivers point toward the master-data approach. The first is simply cost savings through elimination of redundancy--what he calls the once and done method of updating. Next in line is compliance because it is hard for companies to meet regulatory demands if there are multiple versions of the truth running around. Accurate, up-to-date credit and collections information is another motivation, as is the new wave of merger and acquisition activity, which has resulted in huge data consolidation problems.

Presents letters to the editor referencing articles and topics discussed in previous issues. "10 Steps to SOA," which featured service-oriented architecture; "Microsoft Poised to Take on TiVo," which discussed the possible venture of Microsoft into digital video recording.

This article reports on the partnership between Google and Sun Microsystems announced at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California in October 2005. When word circulated that Google and Sun Microsystems were poised to make a joint announcement, speculation abounded that Sun's StarOffice had been transformed into a G-mail. In this regard, Sun has agreed to bundle Google's browser toolbar with Sun's Java Runtime Environment, which, according to Sun, is downloaded 20 million times per month.

Introduces a series of articles on computer systems.

This article focuses on the launch by Microsoft Corp. of its WinFS beta in the U.S. in September 2005. WinFS was one of the three pillars of the company's next-generation version of Windows announced two years ago, then code-named Longhorn and now morphed and downsized into Vista. Microsoft developers were happy to discover that WinFS beta really does install on Windows XP and includes an array of supporting development tools. The beta release of WinFS is a small milestone in a grand experiment on the part of Microsoft, which is to detach desktop data from its rigid hierarchy and enable users to create new, more intuitive information relationships. Now that the code has arrived, developers can start prototyping applications for themselves and get a feel for what the new era will bring.

The article focuses on the package flow initiative system of UPS Worldwide Logistics Inc. Beginning in 2007 when the new system will be fully deployed, increases in operational efficiency are expected to save UPS that $600 million each year, according to Cathy Callagee, operations portfolio manager at UPS. The improved end-to-end flow, which will ultimately be used by more than 100,000 employees, begins when the customer generates a smart label using a Web application that transmits customer and package information to UPS and preprocesses it before the driver arrives for pickup. That information then passes to UPS' Dispatch Planning System which charts UPS truck pickup and delivery routes. 93 percent of UPS packages have smart labels. At the package center, the smart label information is validated, at which point the system spits out another label, dubbed the preload assist label or PAL, to help human loaders route the package to the correct conveyor belt and place it an optimal position on the delivery truck. The package flow software was developed in-house using COM+ components written in C, C++ and Visual Basic running on Windows 2000 Server. SQL Server maintains the planning, real-time sort and post-sort reporting databases.

BEA announced its BEA Project Sierra named, Liquid Computing, at the company's 2004 eWorld conference. An amalgam of current and future BEA technologies centering on Web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA), Liquid Computing is basically the company's answer to the On Demand initiative of IBM. In other words, Liquid Computing, a vision of an SOA-based enterprise application infrastructure that will dynamically adapt to shifting business demand, is primarily a marketing concept. Not that technology-driven BEA has any shortage of interesting stuff to back up its vision. One week before eWorld, the company unveiled its Beehive Project, an open source implementation of the run-time container underlying WebLogic Workshop. The eWorld show also saw the formal announcement of Alchemy, a collection of technologies for mobile application development and deployment, and Quicksilver, a Web services-based enterprise services bus. Last but not least, a new Process Edition of WebLogic Server will draw on the platform's integration capabilities to enable composite application development. The problem for BEA is threefold. First, Liquid Computing's exaltation of SOA may be right but with IBM and Microsoft in the game, their technology sounds imitative. Second, with the exception of WebLogic Server Process Edition, none of the technologies announced at eWorld has a definite ship date. More difficult is that slumping licenses and stock value have put BEA under pressure and raised expectations that eWorld could not meet.

The article discusses the attempt by Sun Microsystems and Microsoft Corp. to work together on interoperability after their clash over standards. Former Sun Microsystems' executive George Paolini dismissed the notion that there will be any real compatibility between Java and .Net at the application layer. Past agreements between Sun and Microsoft on XML and Web services specifications have been fleeting at best. Iona chief technology officer Eric Newcomer believes that interoperability between Microsoft and Java platforms has to be viewed entirely in the context of Web services. Fundamentally different views of standards must be reconciled. The bone of contention is that Microsoft reserves the right to license specifications. Sun's big opportunity is to compete with Microsoft's server offerings as the backbone to manage Windows desktops, according to Greg DeMichillie, senior analyst at Directions on Microsoft Corp. Sun doubtlessly has loftier plans. DeMichillie sees Sun in the midst of a painful transition into a software company, using a cash infusion from Microsoft to help make it happen. The $2 billion handshake might be viewed as a sellout or as a sad inevitability for Sun.

This article features several developers of middleware for the mainframe in the U.S. The rule-processing engine behind Attachmate's myEXTRA tools allows developers to create Web-based presentations that restructure the user interfaces of legacy applications. The company also offers managed terminal emulation software, as well as a range of data, screen, and transaction adapters that include bi-directional exchange of events with the mainframe. The Attunity Connect data access software exposes legacy data as a virtual database, allowing Structured Query Language access even to non-relational data via industry-standard developer application program interfaces. MQSeries was the first middleware to run on mainframes. Dubbed as WebSphere MQ, this line of software includes a wide range of workflow tools as well as business process management and development software. In addition to a line of high-performance drivers for the major relational databases, DataDirect offers SequeLink for zOS, an end-to-end middleware interface for the larger version of IBM DB2. Often used in conjunction with BizTalk Server, Microsoft's Host Integration Server 2000 connects with IBM mainframes and other legacy systems.

Focuses on the use of Web portals by storage provider Network Appliance. Information on business problem that emerged during the application of the first B2E portal; Comment from Scot Klime, CIO at NetApp, on the company's shift of corporate solution; Details of a plan to consolidate the separate portals of the company.

This article offers a look at proposed technologies that might transform the future of information technology (IT). The dream of superconducting computing persists in the form of the Hybrid Technology Multi-Thread program, which takes advantage of superconducting rapid single-flux quantum logic and should eventually scale to approximately 100 gigahertz. Obstacles to the integration of solid-state storage devices into IT are volatility and cost. However, developments in flash technology have reduced the negative aspects of solid-state devices. International Business Machines' autonomic computing initiative in 2001 has four pillars including self-configuration, self-optimization, self-protection and self-healing. But virtualization has stolen much of the initiative's value-prop claims.

This section features the chief technology officers (CTO) in the U.S. included in the Top 25 CTO Awards of Infoworld as of April 2005. As the holder of more patents--305--than any other IBM employee, anyone would think Ravi Arimilli would rest on his laurels. Instead, the youngest-ever IBM fellow is pushing ahead as chief scientist on the 500-person Power7 eServer development team. Back in 1996, CEO Lou Gerstner asked Arimilli to lead the Power4 server project, with the goal of taking IBM from No. 4 to No. 1 in Unix server market share. With new caching designs, virtualization, and simultaneous multithreading, Arimilli helped achieve that goal with Power4 and Power5. While other security vendors were devoting resources to vulnerability assessment and management, Carl Banzhof, vice president of technology and co-founder of Citadel Security, risked three years developing the first comprehensive, automated vulnerability remediation solution, with a library of hundreds of remediation signatures. Brian Behlendorf believes in developers working together. As one of the founders of Apache, he's seen how teams of geographically dispersed developers turned an upstart open source project into the world's most popular Web server software.

This article discusses a decision by IBM to add support for open document format (ODF) in its Workplace Managed Client 2.6 software, as of December 2005. The product will join other ODF-supporting software from OpenOffice.org and Sun Microsystems. Microsoft Office may be the undisputed leader in productivity software, but that balance is threatening to shift. Countries with emerging economies have welcomed open formats for documents and software. ODF supporters, including IBM and Sun, have started mobilizing a global effort to push ODF as a global standard format for documents.

The article highlights the working of information technological companies to help fight the ongoing coronavirus, covid-19 pandemic. It mentions the efforts of Twilio's offering three months of free use of Twilio Video Boost for customers in healthcare, education, and in the nonprofit sector; and Nuance Communications, offering of conversational AI, speech recognition and transcription services.