SOA & Web Services

I was sat in the break area of a company a couple of weeks ago, minding my own business while waiting for a meeting, when I overheard a water-cooler style discussion at another table about cloud computing. The main topic of the discussion was the expectation for many companies and individuals that while many are using cloud computing systems, like Amazon's EC2, but that longer term people want to be able to mix and match their cloud computing environments.

Google Gears is the Internet driven email replication service that owes its heritage to, among others, Ray Ozzie and Lotus Notes

In a period of broad economic weakness including many tech companies, how does IBM continue to outperform the competition?

Over the festive break there were quite a few announcements related to Amazon's EC2 service.

SaaS is wonderful. SaaS is great. But software as a service is killing IT jobs.

TimeTrade Systems Inc., which puts out a nice Web-based appointment scheduler called TimeDriver, said its software engine is supporting Sprint's new ReadyNow customer service program.

In Wednesday's IT Blogwatch, Richi Jennings watches bloggers watch the newest Linux distro: Fedora 10. Not to mention cow tipping with a tail-dragger...

From the Professional Ruby Conference: An enterprise Rails host has a project in the works to simplify server management -- not only at their company. Plus, a cool project management tool that's free, and Web developers moving closer to internal end users.

If you believe Microsoft, an independent study by ClickStream Technologies found Microsoft Office, to be far more popular than OpenOffice.org, which in turn was far more popular than Google Docs. What Microsoft doesn't mention is that ClickStream is headed by Microsoft's former head of Microsoft Office research. Very independent, eh?

Here's how Chrome + Gmail + Google Docs could unhinge the IE/Outlook/Office hegemony.

In response to a comment - can the cloud ever provide you with enough security? I anticipate it will eventually have more security, and more in other capabilities, than any infrastructure you've built for yourself today.

A university degree in service management, not computer science, is the ticket to a successful career in IT, says Don Tennant in this week's editorial.

Computerworld Editorial's blog

I agree, the cloud is vague, but we're talking about a set of technologies that you need to understand. What's makes a cloud? It's a matter of what you're enabling a set of compute and storage services to do for some set of users.

Debian 5, Lenny, was due out at the end of the September. Whoops. There are still some last-minute details that need fixing and the Debian developers could use your help.

Ubuntu's always been popular with users, but not so much with server managers. Now, with Wikipedia moving from a hodge-podge of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS that may be changing.