SOA

The decorations are going up and the office party is the talk of the canteen — yes, Christmas festivities are upon us. While kids everywhere are busy making lists of the toys and gear they want to see under the tree Christmas morning, we asked Australian CIOs what Santa could bring them to make their life easier in 2012.

With this white paper, Oracle SOA vs. IBM SOA, you'll get a healthy perspective on SOA and figure out which one is best for your organization.

Cats are wily, cunning, skeptical, hard to fool and able to manipulate humans to do their bidding. Dogs drool, shed, lack any shred of dignity and ARE REALLY EXCITED ABOUT EVERYTHING!!!!. Guess which is happier.

How's this for a challenge? The CEO dies suddenly and you're tabbed to take his place -- on the heels of your network infrastructure company entering into a major new strategic partnership and in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Oh, did I mention your competition includes some companies named Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard and Juniper Networks, among others? That's life for Chris Crowell, CEO of Enterasys Networks, who took over in 2009 shortly after predecessor Mike Fabiaschi's untimely death.

So many different computing functions have moved into the cloud that the cloud has begun to look like the computing industry, or a single data center, itself. The difference is all those pieces are spread out and owned by different people. At what point will it make more sense to start consolidating "the cloud" into something that looks much more like outsourcing?

The Internet is abuzz with talk of Amazon's rumored streaming service for books. This news is exciting for any business, professional, or student that relies on research from original sources.

Did you go big for self-service streaming apps, virtual machines and cloud accounts, but didn't upgrade asset management at the same time? You'll go big on end-of-year license costs, too.

One German state's ban of Facebook's "Like" button drew taunts about Teutonic humorlessness, but is anything but anomalous in an EU increasingly leery of loose U.S. rules on personal data.

If you listen to industry discussion of service-oriented architecture (SOA), you are likely to get the impression that SOA is best thought of as a technical approach for application integration. The reality is that SOA is much more.

Cloud computing is too flexible; if you can do anything, there is no guideline to doing it well. External guides are too generic, but these questions will help you build your own roadmap.

VMware, criticized by competitors and some customers for its high cost, takes aim at the bottom line with better cost reporting and analysis and making app dev costs vary with use.

Software vendor CloudSwitch supports all hypervisors and most clouds with an abstraction layer designed to keep your VMs from knowing they're running somewhere other than your data center.