This blog appears in the Prism Micorsystem EventTracker newsletter. That posting does not include the footnoted hotlinks that are included here. The beginning of a new year marks a time of reflection on the past and anticipation of the future. The result for analysts, pundits and authors is a near irresistible urge to identify [...]
It doesn’t take a genius to know that business applications have to perform well, particularly if those applications service a company’s customers. This is why most IT staffs understand the importance of application performance management (APM) for protecting and enabling their business’ reputation and success. But selecting APM solutions can be a very confusing experience [...]
Earlier in my career, I spent several years managing a PC application development team. One thing that I learned from this experience was exactly how dedicated programmers were to their tools. I remember one programmer who had spent 20 years working with COBOL. He felt it was his mission to prove COBOL was superior to [...]
Unrelenting change and escalating complexity appear consistently as the top challenges facing enterprise executives fighting for success in today’s global market. In fact, IBM’s most recent global survey of executives found that ‘80% of CEO’s anticipate turbulent change and bold moves’ lie ahead, as they define and implement strategies and plans to deal with these challenges. [...]
Companies that pay attention to emerging trends and adapt quickly are most likely to succeed, while laggards suffer the consequences of latecomers and miss business opportunities. The DevOps movement is one of these emerging trends that companies should be taking seriously despite numerous failures by vendors to jump start this area in the past. However, [...]
Our recent conversations with both executives (IT and business) and developers have convinced us that an evolution is well underway in enterprises of all shapes and sizes. All the ink spilled on articles and presentations to convince IT staffs that they need to expand their historic focus on keeping the infrastructure up and running has [...]
During IBM’s Pulse conference, we attended a session where presenters from Isbank described how they accomplished an integration project to solve issues within its IT department, specifically to integrate and streamline processes between development and operations (DevOps). At first glance, their DevOps integration project seemed like a nuts-and-bolts kind of project – involving IT [...]
I found some interesting outtakes from a recent IBM briefing on the effort and technology behind IBM’s Watson (which is a computer-based Jeopardy “contestant” that will compete against two of the Jeopardy game show’s all-time champions.) As expected, the technology and effort behind this project are very impressive: ninety clustered, commercially-available IBM POWER 750/755 systems with [...]
At an IBM analyst event earlier this week, Steve Mills, IBM Senior VP & Group Executive, Software and Systems, made some interesting observations about how the microprocessor industry makes no distinction between design and fabrication anymore. He noted that it is simply impossible to produce new high density, high performance microprocessors without tightly integrating fabrication [...]
One would think that a near complete Rational-based, mainframe application Development/Test environment able to support some 10 developers running on an x86 server would capture some attention in the IT market, if not from the pundits. Whatever the reason for the lack of attention, this needed a deeper look. Here’s what IBM is offering.