Cloud computing needs “condensed connections”

As readers of this blog may already know, I give about as much credence to IT surveys as I generally reserve for the low life characters that turn up on trashy morning talk...
SAP’s Sybase: big data by the people, of the people, for the people

It's not much more than about a month since SAP's Sybase division launched its Sybase IQ 15.3 columnar Relational DataBase Management System (RDBMS) in an attempt to win over converts to its newly beefed up product.
Flaunting this product's Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) and...
Microsoft: cloud computing government demands “API democracy”

So cloud computing is really starting to show some weather patterns isn't it? A number of businesses are now taking steps to open up their APIs and put their data into the cloud, either as freely available source code or at a cost. For public sector organisations, this has been encouraged by...
The Evolution of IT 3.0

Here's a bit of a techie Friday fun video to end your week with.
Below is a video from ServiceNow detailing the evolution of IT Service Management and how it has changed businesses. The video gives a timeline of how businesses operated from the age of the mainframe all the way to today...
Troubling times (and dates)

The is a guest blog written for the Computer Weekly Developer Network by Michael Vessey, senior consultant with software testing provider SQS.
Some of the most common defects in software systems are in areas relating to dates and times. Often...
Apple Programmers Get Step Ladder To iCloud

Registered members of the Apple Developer Program can now get early access to the new Apple iCloud service. Early access in this case will mean that users can migrate their existing MobileMe accounts to the as yet...
Lies, damn lies and software development surveys

It was British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli who coined the phrase, "Lies, damn lies, and statistics..." and given the amount of PR fluff that the IT industry throws up in terms of "shocking new stats", the man was clearly before his time. Only yesterday we saw this story on the...
Do drag-and-drop tools bankrupt application developers?

Hot on my news pile this morning is comment from GenieMobile. The company's GenieBuilder app building platform is designed to enable "non-technical users" to build, publish and manage mobile and web apps for all major smartphones. Now I am always wary of these drag-and-drop non-technical options...
What will Windows 8 look like?

Microsoft has previewed working prototypes of its next operating system (OS) on the MSDN developer portal. The cleverly titled "Windows 8" OS is built with touch applications in mind and (unsurprisingly perhaps) looks ever such a little bit like Mac OS X Lion with its large screen icons, which are...
What does ‘drilling into the cloud application layer’ really mean?

Those of us with a ticket to ride (to the cloud) gathered in a central London location earlier this week to hear Rackspace talk about its new Critical Sites service.
It's always nice to press the flesh with the real CEOs behind the IT industry -- and I got a quick chance to meet...