Eric Knorr

For the past year everyone's been talking about cloud computing, but for many it's still nebulous. However, it's not so fuzzy when you view the value proposition from the perspective of IT professionals

Given the strength of Microsoft's developer base, and the recent announcement of Google App Engine as a cloud-based development platform, Microsoft has every incentive to launch a hosted platform for developing Web applications as soon as possible

Like the mainframe, enterprise resource planning software soldiers on, though companies complain about its inflexibility. Oracle just took a significant step toward softening that rigidity with its new Application Integration Architecture (AIA), announced by Oracle president Chuck Phillips at the company

As general manager of information management in the IBM Software Group, Dr. Ambuj Goyal ensures the success of IBM

In a real-time world, batch processing has all the sex appeal of an old grey filing cabinet, but as Gur Steif, a product marketing vice-president for BMC, said,

Reconciling and normalizing all that data is hard, tedious work. There's no magic bullet, but "master data" solutions of the type IBM formally introduced this week can go a long way toward enabling enterprises to create a single version of the truth without driving IT insane.

SOA presents a paradox: turning applications into platform-agnostic services is a great way to reduce redundancy and accelerate integration, but where can you turn for architectural guidance that avoids the vendor lock-in that SOA is supposed to prevent in the first place?

Remember a few years ago when the wireless mobile enterprise was the next big thing?