Apps Meet Ops

Office applications: Still your father's Oldsmobile

It's 2010. The Internet is pervasive and mobile. Business processes, supply chains, and financial markets are globally connected and electronically executed. There are no flying cars, but in many other ways, the future has arrived. Yet when we look at the tools and processes organizations use to create and update documents--the lifeblood for business processes--they're straight out of the 1990s playbook. The world's changed, but the office applications most in use today--our word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation programs--basically have the same priorities and follow the same strategies they did two decades ago.

Sure, today's office apps … Read more

Use the tools that make the job easier

Google recently published data showing that the character encoding used on the Web is dramatically shifting towards the Unicode standard. It also discussed its strategy of up-leveling data it finds in dozens of competing character encodings into the Unicode standard, then processing everything in Unicode. This is a great example of the philosophy:

Use tools that make the job easy.

When you narrow the field to data formats and structures, you can make the rule a bit more specific:

Use data formats that are easy to process.Convert to and from those formats, if and as necessary.

And for good … Read more

Oracle climbs up the food chain

A million gallons of ink and four gazillion pixels have been spilt detailing or pontificating on Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems.

My colleague Gordon Haff, for example, has nicely laid out Oracle's plans for Sun (as best as can be known this soon). So I'll be brief...

Oracle's interest in taking Sun's assets forward is at the very high end of expectations. In the almost-a-year since it became clear that Sun was shopping itself around, first to IBM then to Oracle, we've heard the direst of predictions. "Oracle only wants Sun to kill … Read more

IT players in motion

One of the most amazing things about the IT industry over the past two years is how aggressively the vendors have expanded their spheres of operations. Everyone's in motion as the industry rapidly consolidates. Who aims to sell what, to whom, is in enormous flux. Traditional boundaries on what companies will or won't do have gone completely by the wayside.

For example, Cisco doesn't just sell networking; it also sells servers and collaboration tools. Oracle will be a server and storage company, in addition to applications and middleware. EMC has been transforming into a management and security … Read more

Why we can't have nice security

I know this is TLDR fodder of the highest order, but I'd like to read to you from a press release--for a security product, even. Here it goes:

The entire line of Spyrus Hydra PC USB encryption drives are invulnerable to such attacks because no password authentication values or keys are ever stored on Hydra PC devices after logoff or removal. Unlike any competing USB encryption drive, the Hydra PC reconstitutes a Master Key Encryption Key at logon using a FIPS-approved Key Derivation Function which utilizes, at a minimum, an Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) public/private key pair … Read more

2010 will be a wild ride for IT

This year is going to be amazingly full of change in IT. "Ennnh, IT sees a lot of change every year," you say? Yes, fine and true. But not like this one. Not at this magnitude. Consider:

Virtualization is being taken up at such a pace that it's hard to find a metaphor to describe it. "Exploding" has a pieces-coming-apart-at-high-speed vibe, when in fact virtualization's pieces are all coming together. "Imploding" doesn't work either. We've had maybe five years of fast growth, but now it's mainstream and ready for … Read more

Apps and ops don't meet--but they will

My CNET column is called Apps Meet Ops for a reason. It's about the time and place where the creative, development side of IT meets the disciplined, operational side of IT.

This isn't to say that there isn't discipline in development, or that there's no creativity in operations. But the gestalt of the apps world is about creating new functionality; writing software that embodies new or updated business logic; making things. The gestalt of the ops side is about building and running infrastructure; managing logistics; keeping things up and running smoothly; operating things. The two zones … Read more

Defining the 'shared-services model' ideal

We hear a lot of talk about enterprises moving IT toward a shared-services model. That raises the question: Where do they think they're going?

Roughly speaking, moving to a shared-services model means adopting a centralized, standardized, streamlined approach to IT. Like all idealizations, real enterprises can only imperfectly implement it. Nonetheless, it serves as a useful goal and measuring stick. Common elements and aspirations include:

Service-oriented: IT is thought of as a provider of services to a business--or, in some cases, multiple businesses. Every IT process, asset, and outcome is understood, operated, and judged in terms of services that … Read more

Character limitations in passwords considered harmful

For about the 4,000th time in the last five years, I tried to sign up for a new Web service, but it wouldn't accept my proposed password. Apparently, the site operators decided that passwords should contain only letters and numbers. Aarrrrgh! This isn't the first time I've seen this idiocy, and it won't be the last. But it should be.

Guidelines on how to construct a strong password almost uniformly recommend using a mixture of upper and lower case letters, numbers, and symbols. Tools for generating passwords (for example, strongpasswordgenerator.com) encourage the use of … Read more