Recent Blog Posts

Last week I used the appeals for support for the forthcoming demonstration in support of the CWU Campaign to halt the closure of the SE27 Sorting Office to illustrate how Royal Mail appears to be ...

The domain name system (DNS) is fundamental to providing reliable Internet access. Despite this, many organisations neglect DNS, relying with over-complex infrastructure with poor insight, ...

It used to be the Hadoop Summit, but the strategic focus at Hortonworks the enterprise-ready open source Apache Hadoop provider, has evolved. So, this year it was renamed DataWorks Summit. The ...

DevOps is, obviously, a coming together of Developers and Operations teams. All well and good, but what about security? Ah that's okay, we have (well, the industry has) thought of that as well i.e. ...

Yes yes okay we get it. Hybrid cloud is better than public cloud (with its openness and multi-tenant-ness) & better than private cloud alone (with its expandability that doesn't ever match the ...

In this contributed blog post Paul Reed, regional product manager for Zebra Technologies discusses the technologies retailers should be choosing to increase warehouse productivity. In recent years, ...

The GitHub Developer Program (programme, if we're using Her Majesty's English) has been around for around three years now. Essentially, this initiative exists to encourage developers to test out ...

Royal Mail must reconcile the need for larger sorting offices to handle goods ordered over the Internet with that for local collection offices for those out when delivery was attempted.

What does Bluetooth 5 mean for IoT and the smart home? Inspect-a-Gadget speaks to Steve Hegenderfer from body behind the Bluetooth specification.

This is a guest post for the Computer Weekly Developer Network written by Yasmeen Ahmad in her role as practice partner for analytic business consulting at database and data services ...

Microsoft has released to open source ReactXP -- a library for building cross-platform apps (with a heavy emphasis on User Interfaces) based on the React JavaScript library and framework. Microsoft ...

This is a guest post for the Computer Weekly Developer Network written by Didier Durand in his capacity as VP of product management at LzLabs -- the firm's so-called 'software defined mainframe' ...

In the science fiction drama series Humans, Laura feels displaced by Anita, a humanoid robot known as a synth that was bought by her husband to help with the household chores. Imbued with ...

Given the fact that there's an 'app for everything', one would have thought that the software application developer community would, by now, have spent more time working on anti-RSI (Repetitive ...

With over 50 governments since World War II, it would be hard to describe the Italian public administration track record as anything but erratic. But perhaps a new era has dawned... and with it ...

Last week’s highly critical National Audit Office (NAO) report highlighted the need for change at the Government Digital Service (GDS). The NAO “found widespread views across government that GDS ...

Bad-bots are being used by cybercriminals to automate many time-consuming activities to perpetrate their crimes. Payment card fraud is an area of particular concern as large data bases of stolen ...

This is a guest post for the Computer Weekly Developer Network blog written by Ayman Gabarin is his capacity as senior vice president for EMEA at cloud infrastructure control software company ...

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One man’s damning review of an internet-enabled garage door device has seen its capricious creator weigh in and block him from using it. Garadget founder Denis Grisak, who responded to the irate ...

It’s been a long time coming, but it seems like the tide is finally changing among government departments. For years, critics have been complaining to no avail about the siloed nature of the civil ...

Use of the IoT could really help in the efficiency and effectiveness of the overall arable food process chain. However, poor levels of understanding are hampering adoption. What can be done to ...

There are lots of scale-out, parallel file systems about, from those of the big six array makers such as NetApp’s clustered Ontap and EMC’s Isilon OneFS to the open source and distributions thereof ...

Teradata CTO Stephen Brobst spoke at the firm's day #2 keynote to add more colour to the data and services firm's stance on how we should be working with analytics and all aspects of the data ...

Teradata has used its 2017 EMEA user, partner, customer, developer (and other-related practitioner) conference this week to explain how it now positions itself as a firm with a suite of data ...

We should build our Post-Brexit industrial strategy round making good use of the digital talent of the other half of the population.

We need to train our own, not rely on imported talent, in a post Brexit world

As all tech experts know, it is only a matter of time before artificial intelligence (AI) takes over the world, eliminates all our jobs, creates Skynet and the terminator, and enslaves us all in ...

In this guest post, Gary Bloom, CEO of database software supplier MarkLogic, explains why adopting a cloud-neutral strategy is essential for enterprises to avoid lock-in. Not so long ago, choosing ...

Prior to this week’s publication of the latest National Audit Office (NAO) report on the Government Digital Service (GDS), rumour had it the Whitehall watchdog had pulled back from serious ...

The CWDN law of headlines states that any firm who acquires, merges with or forms a working partnership alongside the now TIBCO-owned API management division Mashery must also wilfully accept the ...

Google has produced a new 'umbrella' website to coalesce all the search and data giant's open source projects under one virtual roof. The logically named opensource.google.com will serve as a ...

Let’s start with the disclosure. I voted for the UK to remain in the European Union (EU). My reasoning at the time was that the EU is an over-bureaucratic, dysfunctional organisation that ought to ...

Managed cloud company Rackspace gathered the great and the good from the London media-focused tech scene once more this month to congregate, postulate and ruminate over the future for so-called ...

German storage supplier Zstor has uprated the JBOD (Just a bunch of disks) for the NVMe flash era and produced the JBOF. The NV24P allows for up to 24 2.5” NVMe-mounted flash drives of up to 8TB ...

2017 Spend to Grow 7%. Large retailers spend £2,000 per employee on IT & telecom products and services.  This is dramatically less than the corresponding outlay by all UK large organisations ...

The Hyperledger Project is an open source consortium focused on development issues for blockchain, the distributed database of 'permanent' time-stamped records. Led by the Linux Foundation, ...

With the UK’s formal Brexit notification due on 29 March, heralding two years of uncertainty, the tech sector’s lobbying for consideration in negotiations with the EU is likely to intensify. Two ...

This is a guest blogpost by Stuart Wells, Chief Technology Officer, FICO. Recent research by Industry Week found that 73% of manufacturing companies recognise the potential benefits of successful ...

Analyst house IDC predicts that by 2018, as many as 70 percent of siloed digital transformation initiatives will ultimately fail because of insufficient collaboration, integration, sourcing or ...

An application that is difficult to use may not be used - individuals will find workarounds. An application that provides greater value than the effort of using it will be firmly embraced. Make ...

In a age when developers became mobile developers, who then became Internet of Things (IoT) developers... we must also embrace the reality of the machine learning specialist developer. Arise, ...

Beijing’s Temple of Heaven park toilets are clamping down on local loo roll kleptomaniacs by rolling out face-scanning dispensers. But there’s a problem with this, isn’t there? Very rarely does ...

Automation specialist Chef Software is, unsurprisingly perhaps, a champion of the so-called 'continuous enterprise' i.e. one in which software application development can be executed on a ...

In a world of big data and cloud, software application development professionals are becoming data developers and the terms 'data scientist' and 'data engineer' are becoming very real (and ...

The share prices of Google and Facebook have held up but recent on-line advertising cancellations will force fundamental change.

Let’s think about the UK in 2027 for a moment. By then, just 10 years from now, we will have been out of the EU for eight years. We might not even be the UK any more, but if we are, the population ...

Application delivery platform company Nginx (Engine-X, get it?) has announced the availability of its Plus release 12 (R12). The latest software improves the high-performance load balancer, content ...

Healthcare systems host valuable data and are consequently a target for cyber-crime. The problem of bad-bots (automate threats), which help hackers gain entry to systems, can be mitigated.

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is in a bad need of an overhaul. The increasing use of metadata as seen in certain Enterprise Information Management (EIM) systems is the way forward.

This is a guest blog post by Bhavin Turakhia, Founder and CEO of Flock Today, collaboration is a key to a company’s success. It is therefore critical to understand that collaboration itself can be ...

Amazon has announced a new programme designed to allow Alexa developers to build and host most Alexa skills using Amazon Web Services (AWS). Alexa is an 'intelligent' personal assistant developed ...

Software development and verification tools company AdaCore has pushed out four product releases in line with the Embedded World Conference in Nuremberg this month. Vehemently verifying ...

This is a guest blogpost by Gal Horvitz, CEO, PNMsoft Artificial Intelligence (AI) refers to a wide variety of algorithms and methodologies that enable software to improve its performance over time ...

If you believe the hype, the IoT is already rampaging across businesses around the world. However, talking to end users gives a totally different picture - there is a massive chasm between those ...

Donald Trump's counselor and strategist Kellyanne Conway caused uproar online this week when she implied that former president Barack Obama may have used a microwave oven to spy on her boss. Conway ...

This is a contributed post which is wholly attributed to the team at GitHub, 'the home of developers' as they would like to be known. Widening open source Software developers love open source ...

Most organisations are looking for ways to foster collaboration and grow team productivity. How this is achieved is less obvious. For a while it has been assumed that if you throw sufficient ...

Security researchers say they have discovered an open source code vulnerability (CVE-2017-5638) in Apache Struts 2 – (report). Apache Struts is a free and open-source MVC framework for creating ...

The otherwise obscure topic of taxation for the self-employed hit the headlines this week after chancellor of the exchequer Philip Hammond announced in his latest Budget a rise in national ...

Regular readers will know the deep commitment to quality journalism that Downtime embodies. As the cutting-edge blog of the Computer Weekly stable, within the office tales are legion of the lengths ...

Should software application development professionals be tasked with finding out where, when, how, why and on what cloud form factor their applications should exist upon at any one single given ...

This is a guest post for the Computer Weekly Developer Network blog written by Simon Poulton of CA Technologies — Poulton is ebulliently vocal about his passions for virtualisation, cloud, mobility ...

Identity cloud provider company Okta has snuggled up with identity management company Stormpath. Who brings what to the party? This new union is designed to bring forward Okta Identity Cloud as ...

Brexit means Brexit and BlackBerry means enterprise-level application of the secure communications and mobile productivity platform technologies now that the company's once oh-so-consumer level ...

Old-style enterprise content management is no longer fit for purpose. Organisations need to be able to manage far more than a subset of their information assets, and need to reach far beyond the ...

MongoDB is an open source NoSQL cross-platform document-oriented database company favouring dynamic schemas. The firm has this month announced a new free developer-focused tier for its ...

GitHub is launching a new offering (pitched at businesses of varying size and scale) with extra advanced features, which is intended to change the way software is developed (and, crucially, scaled) ...

The Amazon cloud storage outage provides a neat reminder about the role humans continue to play in the delivery of online services, but - when things go wrong - end-user sympathy for the plight of ...

High performance computing (HPC) has not historically been seen as a good candidate for colocation. However, things change - now may be the right time to consider such a move.

Small form factor smartphones combined with high-speed wireless networks are changing the way emerging economies operate. It is time for commercial, government and NGO entities to change the ways ...

This is a guest post for the Computer Weekly Developer Network blog written by Simon Poulton of CA Technologies -- Poulton is ebulliently vocal about his passions for virtualisation, cloud, ...

This is a guest blogpost by Kirk Krappe, author, CEO and chairman of Apttus The thing about technology evolution that the movies don’t quite tell you is that it desperately relies on adoption. The ...

The very best thing about the government digital strategy is that it exists. The areas covered by the strategy are vitally important for the UK’s economic future – not only for our digital economy ...

The question of build vs buy was the fundamental question posed, framed and postulated by Jeff Lawson in his role as CEO of Twilio during a keynote address delivered at this year's Mobile World ...

If you haven’t met Handle yet, Handle’s the latest robot to be delivered by the benign storks at Boston Dynamics, an intensely creepy subsidiary of not-so-proud parent Google. How does one describe ...

There were plenty of amazing products launched and on display at ISE2017 in Amsterdam in early February. But in the background buzz there was a common theme of an industry in transition. While many ...

Digital rights management (DRM) capabilities are often embedded in third party software products via partnerships agreements. One DRM supplier, Seclore, has made such OEM relationships its main ...

Dutch semiconductor specialist continues its drive at Mobile World Congress in the Catalan capital of Barcelona this week with a series of announcements no doubt saved up specially for the ...

Inspect-a-Gadget reflects on how the heady days of smartphone innovation and excitement are long gone from Mobile World Congress 2017

NXP Semiconductor works across a number of indusrty verticals, but the Dutch headquartered firm specialises in automotive semiconductors and automotive cybersecurity. The firm has previous ...

This is a guest post for the Computer Weekly Developer Network written by Patrick McFadin, chief evangelist at DataStax -- the company develops and provides support for a commercial edition of the ...

Here we are, it’s 2017, on-demand and pay-as-you-go software is all the rage, cloud is the rising and soon-to-be dominant IT architecture, and yet we’re still talking about software suppliers ...

A lemur face recognition tool has been developed by a team of computer scientists to identify between and keep track of individual members of the species and boost conservation efforts. For too ...

A new survey has found Brits are now less bored today than they were 20 years ago, because they have a smartphone. Greg Tatton-Brown, spokesman for online gaming site Casumo.com, who commissioned ...

This is a guest post for the Computer Weekly Developer Network blog written by Chetan Manjarekar in his roles as senior VP and head of Syntel’s Digital One practice. Manjarekar writes as follows... ...

Consumerisation of mobile technology has had many benefits. It has driven down the prices of devices, improved the user experience to the benefit of non-technical users. Plus, awareness and ...

This is a guest post for the Computer Weekly Developer Network written by Burke Holland in his capacity as director of developer relations at Progress -- the firm is a specialist in backend ...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) could help the DevOps profession, massively.  Think about it, all that control and ability to connect and coordinate things, elements, code streams and workflows ...

Report finds Android VPN apps on the official Google Play store fail to deliver basic privacy and security, with some injecting malware and malvertising

The top five in storage continue to see declining revenues, but for IBM storage seems to have been worse than for its competitors. This week Storage Newsletter published an aggregation of financial ...

This is a guest post for the Computer Weekly Open Source Insider blog by Arianna Aondio in her role as field engineer at Varnish Software -- Varnish is a content delivery specialist and its HTTP ...

Open source in-memory data grid (IMDG) company Hazelcast has hit its 3.8 release iteration. What is an IMDG? This is a data structure that resides entirely in RAM and is distributed among multiple ...

In all the recent talk about whether HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) is truly committed to the Cabinet Office’s Gov.uk Verify service, there’s been less said about the commitment of the external ...

In this guest post, Mollie Luckhurst, global head of Customer Success at cloud-based collaboration firm, Huddle, outlines the seven employee types that could make or break an organisation's shift ...

This is a guest post written for the Computer Weekly Open Source Insider blog by Daniel Jones in his capacity as CTO of EngineerBetter -- the organisation is a member of the Cloud Foundry ...

Google and Facebook need to lead the way towards auditable algorithms before loss of trust destroys their advertising funded business models

News of the Nokia 3310’s imminent relaunch has brought Downtime over all nostalgic. Take our hand, and come with us to the cloudless summer of 2001. It’s safer there. The sun shines brightly, the ...

Go back 10 or 20 years and direct-attached disk was the norm. IE, just disk in a server. It all became a bit unfashionable as the virtualisation revolution hit datacentres. Having siloed disk in ...

The move to intelligent cities runs the risk of creating problems as seen during the industrial revolution. An intelligent planet needs more thought.