Recent Blog Posts

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.

This is a guest blog by Ben Calnan, head of the smart cities practice at people movement consultancy Movement Strategies Autonomous vehicles will soon be a reality – in fact, industry commentators ...

The long-term row between HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) and the Government Digital Service (GDS) over online identity assurance broke into the open this week. HMRC published a blog post that ...

It's nice in Nice, we already know that... But that's probably not the central reason why data analytics company Teradata has chosen this southern French city as the location for its EMEA user, ...

Mobile devices put access to IT right into the hands of people while they are out and about performing their work tasks. For many this is not just about 'being in touch' or getting access to useful ...

What should we expect from Microsoft Build or //build/ 2017 then? One thing you may notice is that rather than posting this on the Computer Weekly Developer Network (CWDN) column, we have subtly ...

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 ...