Wow that was some morning in Luigi Malone’s! I’d never been there before and the venue was just perfect. I arrived in to find a few of the guys along with Don the owner who stayed for the entire session. A huge thanks to Don for covering the cost of the refreshments today and for [...]

Posted in Business, Community, Enterprise, Investment, Jobs, OpenCoffee 13 Comments »

We recently discovered that Hu Yoshida, Vice President and CTO of Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) has a blog. This may not seem to be a big deal to many people but it is actually a very major change on several different levels by one of the top players in a traditionally secretive industry.
The storage industry [...]

Posted in Enterprise, Uncategorized 1 Comment »

There have been many blog postings over the past two weeks making technology predictions for 2006 and beyond. Bill Burnham has taken a look back at 2005 and sees that the software industry itself has been shrinking. Last year, the aggregate market capitalization of the software sector shank by almost 10%.
From this he makes some [...]

Posted in Argolon, Business, Enterprise 3 Comments »

Business Objects have announced that they are joining the Eclipse Foundation and are going to Open Source some of their tools. This is a very timely move for them as there appears to be a lot of energy building behind their Open Source competitors which must surely be hurting sales of Crystal at the low-end. [...]

Posted in Argolon, Business, Enterprise 2 Comments »

Jon William Toigo over at Byte & Switch has a great article on Aperi and the history of SRM in general. His analysis of industry reaction to the Aperi announcement by IBM is particularly incisive.
Whether IBM will succeed (with the help of the OpenSource community) or not is obviously the great unknown. In any other [...]

Posted in Argolon, Business, Enterprise, Software Development 3 Comments »

The Register has a pointed article on the BMC SORM (Service Oriented Resource Management) announcements. Further into the article they quote Gartner as saying, in its “Hype Cycle for IT Operations Management, 2005″ that CMDBs are at the “peak of inflated expectations” with the “plateau of productivity” some 10 years out.
Whilst it does appear [...]

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Chip Hazard on Jeff Bussgang’s Blog has a great riposte to the assertion that the Enterprise software business is dying. In particular, his first point about driving IT efficiency is very relevant to our business area.
We spend most of our time developing custom solutions for clients who have made large up-front investments in [...]

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There is an interview over on Steve Shu’s Blog with Mike McLaughlin, a Management Consultant from Deloitte. Whilst the bulk of the interview is targetted at MBA students, there is one very telling comment about executable strategies rather than credenza-ware. Surprisingly, there are still many large Consultancies out there with no delivery capability. They [...]

Posted in Argolon, Business, Enterprise 1 Comment »

CNET has a very good interview with Bernard Liautaud who is Chief Executive of Business Objects. His vision for Business Intelligence has enabled BO to grow at an impressive rate. Whilst we can criticise the technical support problems which have occurred in the Crystal product range since they acquired Crystal Decisions, we have been mightily [...]

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The whole issue of Software Patents has been a hot potato recently. We intend doing some postings on it in the near future but in the meantime, Dan Brinklin has a very thought-provoking article regarding patents, VisiCalc, Microsoft and the industry.

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We spend most days up to our necks in Crystal Reports. Our standard platform for many customers has been Windows 2000 Server, SQL Server 2000 and Crystal Reports (and Crystal Enterprise) 10. However we have been getting some push back from customers who are very anti-Microsoft. In general this is just manifested as a refusal [...]

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This is a good solid down-to-earth post from an EDS blog. Of course we can all make easy lazy cheap shots at EDS due to the various well-publicized problems they have had with their huge contracts. But in our dealings with them we have always found the people at a project level to be tough, [...]

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This is a very interesting announcement:
OPSWARE INTRODUCES NEW GLOBAL SHELL TECHNOLOGY FOR CENTRALIZED MANAGEMENT OF LINUX, UNIX, AND WINDOWS

You don’t see much in the way of innovation in command-line shells but this looks extremely powerful. Cross-platfform, remote automation, supports all the leading current shells. Definitely worth a read if the scripted management of large-scale [...]

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This Inquirer article about VMWare opening up it’s source code to partners is great reading. We are currently working on a server running ESX with 4 VMs and it really rocks.
We started playing with VMWare Workstation when it was still in Beta back in the Integral Design days. Even then, it was obvious that [...]

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