Recent Blog Posts

In some respects, it may have. But before there are panicked responses (or flaming torches and pitchforks) from many across the video vendor sector, let’s look at why this might not be an entirely ...

Managers used to "manage a business", those days are gone. Now we build strategies for "deterministic outcomes" though collaboration tools and social graph big data analytics. Gulp, pardon? Yes, ...

Jive Software is an enterprise collaboration specialist with a focus on what it calls 'powering human connection' through the use of its software platform. Is it really a platform? It's always ...

So the Digital Economy Bill, setting new standards for broadband and mobile provision, data-sharing and more, is law, waved through along with a whole bunch of other stuff the government would ...

Application Packages Spend. R&D firms, with 100-999 employees, are each typically spending £140k on application packaged software during 2017.  In terms of individual company expenditure they ...

Enterprise collaboration company Jive Software is about to kick off its annual Las Vegas located customer, partner, user/practitioner and, crucially, developer convention. Jive recently entered the ...

The Linux Foundation has used its news chain to unveil the OpenChain Specification 1.1 and an accompanying Online Self-Certification service. The technology is positioned as a means for ...

Social media management firm Hootsuite has hooted and tooted this month about its eponymously named Hootsuite Integration Fund. Lots of loot The fund is a US$5 million initiative established to to ...

Elon Musk’s recent penchant for an Instagram selfie has sent some of tech’s more skittish observers twitching in their seats. The business magnate has his fingers in more pies than Little Jack ...

Is this the phone loyal BlackBerry fans have been longing for? Inspect-a-Gadget goes hands-on with the BlackBerry KEYone, a super-secure Android smartphone with a trademark physical keyboard.

An online training initiative promises to make information security accessible and understandable to journalists, confidential sources and whistleblowers.

In Singapore, where labour is scarce and expensive, automating work processes to improve our productivity and free up time for higher-value work seems like a no-brainer. Yet, it is only in recent ...

With its openly stated operational remit of 'aggressive acquisitions' (albeit positively aggressive), Oracle is (very) arguably a firm known for buying, swallowing, acquiring those companies it ...

In the run-up to the last UK general election in 2015, the Labour Party’s then shadow employment minister Stephen Timms pointed out that the target completion date for the Universal Credit welfare ...

A new study from information management firm Veritas Technologies has suggested that 86 percent of organisations worldwide are concerned that a failure to adhere to the upcoming General Data ...

In this guest post Frances Burton, security services group manager at education technology solutions charity, Jisc, explains what it's like to be a "woman in technology" and why we should be ...

Knowledge-sharing platform for software application developers Stack Overflow has opened up its Q1 Developer Ecosystem report. The analysis features a ranking of what are estimated to be the UK and ...

Developer needs platforms, developers need (programming) languages, developers need DevOps, developers need automation with workflow controls… and of course developers need beer, soda and pizza. ...

Sir David Attenborough is to be digitised as part of an interactive virtual reality experience promising hands-on access to some of the rarest items from London’s Natural History Museum. But after ...

Like it or not, necessary or not, we have another General Election, and while nobody will decide their vote based on a party’s digital policies, the imminent poll will raise important questions ...

In this guest post, Kevin Cooke, product director at desktop virtualisation software provider Liquidware Labs, explains how CIOs and IT departments can avoid playing the blame game when working out ...

A guest blog by Matt Jones, Analytics Strategist at Tessella  Big tech vendors have been piling into analytics and now AI. IBM’s Watson has been charming the media with disease diagnosis and ...

Burger King faced a backlash when its latest advert gaily invaded US living rooms by triggering Google Home devices to recite Wikipedia’s description of the Whopper burger. You find that ...

The recent announcement by Cisco of 32Gbps capability in its MDS 9700 Director switch and UCS C-series server products means the two major storage networking hardware makers are now able to offer ...

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 ...