Recent Blog Posts

Less than a week after Cabinet Office minister Ben Gummer announced the new government transformation strategy, its central premise is already in question after HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) ...

Did you hear the one about the time Openreach CEO Clive Selley visited the countryside and was shocked, shocked I say, to discover that people in rural areas have difficulty accessing ...

Yahoo!'s Big ML (machine learning) team comprising of Lee Yang, Jun Shi, Bobbie Chern and Andy Feng have confirmed that they are offering TensorFlowOnSpark to the community. This is the latest open ...

It’s been a long time coming, but the document we’ve all been waiting for is finally here. The Government transformation strategy, billed as one which will, according to Cabinet Office minister Ben ...

The long wait for the new government digital strategy may have caused frustration in some places, but clearly within the Cabinet Office the extensive delays have brought expectations to a peak of ...

Automotive technical data provider Autodata has added a new 'motorcycle API' to its developer portal. Using TIBCO Mashery API management software, the Autodata API tool offers developers a range of ...

Progress has open sourced its Telerik UI for Universal Windows Platform (UWP) native UI controls for building Windows apps. As well as expanding its donations to the .NET ecosystem and foundation, ...

Load Balancing (LB), is now popping up on the corporate security agenda! LB is no longer just about managing traffic flows across enterprise routers and servers. In the age of the cloud and ...

Perhaps the most bombastic cliche of an imagined futuristic world is the flying car. So when better than this already cartoonishly terrifying now for the overlords at Uber to recruit a veteran Nasa ...

In this guest blog Gavin Mee, senior area vice president of enterprise UKI for Salesforce, discusses how artificial intelligence may be the next step in connecting with the modern shopper. Ever ...

There was a dodgy* old joke about a glass of beer that re-filled itself when you had drunk it. The unwritten premise was that that’s what everyone (well, men in the 1970s, I presume) would want if ...

The Computer Weekly Open Source Insider blog takes a closer look at Bloomberg -- as previously reported, Bloomberg L.P. produces technology for financial markets. The firm's software includes tools ...

Just who and what have you got connected to the network? If it was just a matter of regular IT products and employees, that would be hard enough. Now all manner of smart devices and itinerant ...

How does the UK fund a full fibre infrastructure if BT is unable and/or unwilling to pay the price?

If GDPR compliance is not near the top of IT leaders’ priorities for 2017, you have a problem. GDPR – the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation – was always going to be a major ...

Because apparently, 77% of Brits are more likely to dump their partner than their broadband provider. At least, this was the main finding of a survey of 2,000 UK consumers conducted by broadband ...

Microsoft continues to 'openly' (in all senses) tinker (Redmond would prefer we said refine, augment, extend and finesse) with the mechanics of .NET Core and ASP.NET tooling right now -- and it ...

Cloudera is an interesting company. Interesting in that it bills itself as a data management, analytics and machine learning specialist... three 'disciplines' that one might have expected to find ...

Open source database company MariaDB Corporation is on a politically charged mission to bring data analytics to the people, or so it says. Bourgeois analyst cognoscenti The firm has grandiosely ...

In this guest blog Amali de Alwis, CEO of Code First: Girls and winner of the Women in IT Awards -Skills Initiative of the Year award, explains why the technology industry needs to consider targets ...

In this guest blog Beverley Bryant, director of digital transformation at NHS Digital and winner of the Women in IT Awards Digital Leader of the Year award, discusses how tech careers can help ...

In this guest post Brynne Kennedy, CEO and founder of MOVE Guides and Women in IT Awards finalist, discusses how diverse tech cultures create the perfect breeding ground for innovation I recently ...

MI6 head Alex Younger spoke to more than 1000 business and tech specialists at the awards ceremony for the 2017 annual women in IT awards. Younger claimed the secret intelligence service is ...

Reducing traffic jams and pollution levels requires road infrastructures that optimise communications with smart cars in read-time

Software application development focused security and code quality firm Veracode has named its latest product offering Greenlight. The product aims to promote security higher up in the software ...

The mere existence of an industrial strategy for the UK – especially one that prioritises science, technology and innovation - is a hugely positive step for everyone in IT. But it’s nowhere near ...

How can you (a company, we mean) be an open source as-a-Service company? That's how Platform9 describes itself. In truth (and for some clarity) the firm is in fact a SaaS managed hybrid cloud firm ...

Amidst the proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) endpoints, the cybersecurity threat landscape has expanded to every mobile, smart and cloud-enabled device on the network. This threatens the ...

We need to take action against fraud and deception before the On-line Advertising market implodes

The mass market adoption of the Internet is now leading to 1930s protectionism not internationalisation

Something disconcerting happened when Downtime looked at its phone the other day. Vine had finally gone through with it. The six-second video sharing app’s green logo had given way to a gothic, ...

"Do you know Gartner? Well, yeah, we're not like them." This is the opening line oft used by James Governor in his capacity as co-founder and analyst at tech-focused analyst house Red Monk. Using ...

In this guest blog Ronnie Toerien, HCM strategy leader, Oracle Africa explains why giving all employees access to relevant training is the solution to the tech skills shortage. The past ten years ...

Fuzzy Logix (like fuzzy logic, but with an X, get it?) has announced availability of its analytics suite DB Lytix on the Cloudera Enterprise 5 data platform. So what is this? Essentially it's a ...

Almost three out of five CIOs we speak with today tell us that technology providers often seem to be pushing software defined networks (SDN) simply to sell hardware, writes Verizon's Peter Konings, ...

Hyper-converged infrastructure has been a rapidly rising star of the storage and datacentre scene in the past year or two. And it is predicted by Gartner that that rise will continue, with ...

Collaboration tools platform company Jive Software is staging JiveWorld17 in Las Vegas once again and the firm (as previously) is marking out its developer track as a dedicated conference block ...

Software supply chain automation company Sonatype is hanging out the flags to celebrate the fact that it has experienced a 300 percent growth in the use of its Nexus Repository over the past three ...

We should take some encouragement that this week’s gathering of the powerful, the rich and the even richer in Davos chose technology risks as one of its key agenda items for discussion. The World ...

Now we know that 2017 is the year when open source finally grows up... at least that's what some people are saying. The recent security issues regarding MongoDB (it was reported that 28,000 ...

Software AG used presentations staged in the Italian capital Rome this week to describe some of its more life-changing data analytics work with Octo Telematics. US, UK and continental Europe ...

Downtime’s thoughts today are with ex-Government Digital Service staffer Ivanka Majic’s Twitter mentions, after gaffe-prone president elect Donald Trump mistakenly copied her into a tweet hailing ...

D-Wave Systems has released an open source quantum computing chunk of software. Quantum computing, as we know, moves us on from the world of mere 1's and 0's in binary to the new level of ...

This is a guest blogpost by Larry Augustin, CEO, SugarCRM. It’s a perennial discussion: what’s going to be making headlines in the world of business technology in the coming twelve months? Usually, ...

Luxury Italian shoe retailer M.Gemi has designed its store to act as a showroom where customers can experience their product before making a purchase. There has been lots of talk over the last few ...

Wearables, smart homes, smart buildings, smart cities and autonomous vehicles are among the technological breakthroughs that are starting to gain traction. The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in ...

This is a guest post for the Computer Weekly Developer Network blog written by Anders Wallgren in his capacity as CTO at Electric Cloud. Much (and we mean much, a lot, really loads in fact) has ...

The festive season is behind us for another year, even for those giddy traditionalists who keep their trees up well into January instead of just getting over it. But maybe we can cling onto the ...

The United Arab Emirates has a Minister for Happiness, so why shouldn't we have software application developers focused on programming happiness related code structures to provide 'apps' that drive ...

HMRC plans to relocate 38,000 people to city centres instead of using on-line networking

Open source in-memory data grid (IMDG) company Hazelcast has integrated with Apache Spark, the open source data processing engine. What is an IMDG? But back to basics for a moment, what is an IMDG ...

Everywoman has announced the women who are finalists in the 2017 FDM Everywoman in Tech Awards. The Awards are held each year by Everywoman to showcase and celebrate the many women who are making a ...

In this contributed blog post Katie Gallagher, managing director at the North West’s digital trade association Manchester Digital, claims the Northern tech industry needs to start recognising its ...

A new year brings new challenges, but the CIO faces the same issue every year – to drive the business’s technology agenda while doing more with less overall budget. Computer Weekly’s annual IT ...

We're so done with DevOps. Today, it's a case of DevOps + DataOps, but what does this latter term mean? What is DataOps? DataOps describes the creation & curation of a central data hub, ...

The New Year’s Honours list released at the end of each year quite often features a number of talented techies, and the 2017 Honours list is no different. A number of great women in technology have ...

This is a guest post for the Computer Weekly Developer Network blog 'penned' by Jason Kent in his role as VP of web application security at Qualys. Yin Yang application options Application ...

Developments in both audio visual (AV) and information technology (IT) are leading to a ‘convergence’ of the two sectors. This is similar to what has already happened in other markets once open, ...

This is a guest blog post by Ravi Shankar, chief marketing officer, Denodo. For over two decades, the traditional data warehouse has been the tried-and-true, single source of truth in support of ...

In a guest blog, Neo Technology’s CEO Emil Eifrem says graph databases are being looked into by government to manage big data.  While classical business database software, RDBMS (relational ...

In these days when flash storage grabs so many headlines for the right reasons it’s quite a surprise that one of the pioneers in the space – Violin Memory – is about to hit bankruptcy hard, with an ...

Not 100% open source, but open source-ish due to Java-like proximity, the latest news from Compuware sees the mainframe application development company announce the availability of Topaz for Total ...

In this guest post Sarah Davies, head of higher education and student experience at Jisc, explains why a tech career does not have to be daunting To some people a 'tech career' could seem daunting, ...

Each year the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) runs its consumer technology trade show in Las Vegas known as CES. CES 2017 will mark 50 years of CTA running the show, and not only has the huge ...

Whilst combing through all the emails we over the Christmas holidays, Downtime came across a hair-raising little item; L'Oreal owned Kérastase is launching an internet of things (IoT)-enabled ...

In the wake of a handful of Linux projects pushing ever closer to consumer desktop adoption (think Ubuntu, Mint Cinnamon, Solus, Arch and Chrome OS)... members of the openSUSE Project have ...

You want people to access the content on your web sites. However, increasingly your visitors will not be people, but bots web scraping data with bad intent. Bot activity can be controlled and, when ...

Technologists in the 'Holy Land' were working away over the festive period and informed the Computer Weekly Developer Network blog of news emanating from Tel Aviv based Typemock. The firm is known ...

How Brexit turned onto Flexit as the negotiating position of the Commission was bypassed by reality

Online food delivery service Just Eat has a number of ideas for how food tech will influence the future of online food delivery, including technologies such as augmented reality (AR) artificial ...

Bloomberg has published a blog post detailing its top five open source contributions of 2016 from a real commit history perspective. Is that Bloomberg as in Bloomberg? Well yes, that's Bloomberg ...

This guest blog features two women in tech from the same firm - product manager Therese Stowell and senior software engineer Maria Ntalla - both explain their career paths and how they became women ...

In this contributed blog post Keith Tilley, EVP at Sungard Availability Services explains why there is a "me or the IT" attitude amongst employees and what firms can do about it  The “head down ...

In this contributed blog post, Damilola Erinle, area vice-president for UK & Ireland at Salesforce, discusses why businesses should see gender diversity as a way to increase productivity and ...

It's the shortest day of the year, the 'egg nog' is fermenting nicely (sounds disgusting), the tree is festooned with lights and children all across the land have that special 'Santa is really ...

Budget 40% Larger than UK Norm. Medium sized advertising firm (100-999 employees) typically has an IT & telecom budget of over £1.5m.  This is 40% greater than the value for all medium sized ...

There's support (in terms of platform and standards compliance) these days... and then there's 'first-class support', is this the way the industry is going? eeGeo thinks yes... and the firm has ...

Have an off-line Christmas and a thoughtful New Year

There may be much enthusiasm for the Internet of Things (IoT), but that does not mean organisations are prepared to invest lots in replacing legacy devices as they bring them online. To ensure ...

Big Data analytics are more likely to produce expensive slurry than strategic insights

Cloud data protection and information management firm Druva has unveiled its eponymously named Druva Cloud Platform. The technology is intended to solve the increasing data risks posed by the ...

A militant train working on the driverless Dockland Light Railway (DLR) in London is running an online campaign for equal rights for hard working robots. In a show of solidarity to striking rail ...

On 7th December 2016, Xerox held an Investor Conference to outline its business strategy and long-term financial model as a standalone company. It expects the separation of the two companies – ...

Research commissioned by Quocirca in July 2016, as background to its Reference Architecture for the IoE (Internet of Everything), shows that most businesses in the UK and Germany believe the ...

As we know, Microsoft now lists its platform interests in plural and points (along with Windows) to Office365, Azure cloud, .NET and onward to its newer approach to cognitive services. Running ...

With what amounts to literally hundreds of Linux distributions out there, Refracta version 8.0 and its suitability for the so-called "average user" might just be what makes it an above average ...

We must unpack meaningless slogan like digital single market or freedom of movement into what we want to keep and what we want to turn into reality.

Top Dozen Sectors Account for Half the Total Spend. Wholesalers top the spend on IT & Telecom by small enterprises (50-99 employees).  They account for 10% of the UK total whilst the top dozen ...

As 2016 draws to a close, Ahead in the Clouds looks at how enterprise attitudes to cloud have changed over the last 12 months. At the first Amazon Web Services (AWS) Re:Invent in 2012, the cloud ...

Computer Weekly’s UKtech50 list of the most influential people in UK IT provides a fascinating insight into the big issues affecting the tech community, as we watch how the leaders who make the ...

Contrary to popular belief, the Computer Weekly team are an awfully discerning bunch when deciding who to interview, with relatively few of the IT industry’s waifs and strays making the cut. One ...

This is a guest post for the Computer Weekly Developer Network blog 'penned' by Olivier Bonsignour in his role as executive vice president of product development at Cast -- - the company is ...

This is a guest post for the Computer Weekly Developer Network blog 'penned' by Dr. Andy Phillips in his role as director of technical operations at LMAX Exchange -- the company is a specialist in ...

The Tech Community needs to take politics seriously before it is too late

Driven by traffic congestion, pollution levels and rising infrastructure costs, the future of public transport is being technology-enhanced on many levels. Thus major initiatives include: ...

Google is making news this week in developer circles. The search giant has come forward with a software fuzzing tool designed to fuzz open source code. What is fuzz (testing)? Fuzz testing or ...

Application Software Up by 33%. Large food manufacturers are to increase their spend on application software by a third.  In 2016 the outlay is £155 per employee but this will increase to over £200 ...

Redgate is a Cambridge UK based software company known for developing tools for Microsoft's relational database management product SQL Server. Aren't there enough tools in the Microsoft SQL Server ...

Twice in the past week, the UK government has passed legislation despite overwhelming concerns from the technology community. The Digital Economy Bill – a mostly sensible attempt to update laws ...

Information management company Veritas Technologies is attempting to provide (even) greater control for data workloads that reside in cloud computing environments. The firm's NetBackup 8.0 is now ...