Recent Blog Posts

With all the current hype about the IoT, mobility and interconnected everything, something important risks being missed. It is not simply about the connection, but the purpose - that is the message.

Linus Torvalds has detailed the launch of the Linux 4.3 kernel, a new release with significant security enhancements.

Devices are being connected to the so-called Internet of Things (IoT) at an increasingly rapid rate -- this we already know to be true.

Next time you look at DevOps news, look for functions like quantifiable tasks metrics, call stack analysis technology or binary artifact repository control... the rest of it might be trying to spin ...

...the first thing all mobile apps need to do is sell themselves, otherwise all that development effort runs the risk of being abandoned very quickly

Constantly on red alert since work began in 2012, the government's high-risk reform of the courts has come up against mistrust.

On Monday 2nd November, HP as we know it ceases to exist. The IT supplier that once was too big to fail, becomes two companies that, if recent history is anything to go by, will be individually ...

Downtime regulars may already know that in future, we won't own or buy stuff anymore, we'll all share with everyone else in a big, cuddly, let's-all-have-a-spliff-around-the-campfire, tree-hugging ...

Veeam Software describes itself as the company that delivers 'availability for the always-on enterprise' -- so much so, it has even trademarked the phrase.

Much of the talk on this blog recently has involved the world of acquisitions. And so it goes on. A recent meeting with Phil and Jim from the UK and US arms of Netscout respectively focused ...

..user experience is significant as it impacts directly on the ability of an individual to do their job as effectively and efficiently as possible

IBM VP for industry analytics solutions held a breakout session at the firm's recent Insight 2015 conference and exhibition to talk about the real world implications, possibilities and applications ...

IBM builds Apache Spark into its core analytics engine

The increasing need for software development and web-based digital skills is a hot topic these days, and it's hard to go more than a week without hearing about how in-demand the tech savvy are. But ...

The British government has been trying to persuade companies to ditch their home-grown ID systems for one it helped design under an international collaboration driven from Silicon Valley and the ...

Applicants now have until November to nominate women for the FDM everywoman in technology awards. The deadline for applications for the annual FDM everywoman in Technology Awards has been extended ...

By 2020 we are likely to have hundreds of thousands whose lives depend on the reliable functioning of systems remotely monitoring chronic medical conditions while they live semi-independently at ...

Senior VP for IBM Analytics Bob Picciano talks about the 'insight economy' as another kind of catchline that tries to express where his firm is channeling its software application development ...

Dell made some announcements at its recent DellWorld event - but could not go into any great detail on its proposed acquisition of EMC. What can be read into what was announced?

IBM renamed its old Information on Demand conference to IBM Insight just before the whole big data analytics (which leads to 'insight', obviously) thing really started to take a hold

As you may have already noticed, the state of the application is now an always-on and always connected thing -- this is the new normal. Surely then, we need to approach software application ...

On 1st October I spoke (*) to one of the Institute of Directors' largest branches on the need for a pro-active approach, including to put at least 10% of their security budgets into active ...

Paul Donnellonwww.voodoodog.com

IT people always talk about aligning IT with the business. So if you head up IT for Arsenal, Man U or whoever, what's the priority from an IT perspective? Options are:Put Wi-FI in the stadiumFigure ...

Magnet Systems recently launched Magnet MAX, a modular suite of tools that are supposed to help developers maintain user experiences.

Michael Dell pulls off another miracle with his acquisition of EMC

In this guest post, J. Tyler Rohrer, co-founder of Liquidware Labs, explains how the use of cloud apps can help user solve end user computing scalability issues. We are about to enter the golden ...

We often hear local government talked about as if it were a single entity. It's particularly common in digital circles - "We need a digital transformation of local government!" being a typical ...

Where you like to call it data visualisation or data visualizations, data vizable-ness company Tableau has had a busy week.

Tableau has used its keynote sessions at the company's annual user conference to to announce Vizable, a mobile application designed to help understand data with an iPad.

Thomson Reuters raises stakes in financial desktop software

With highly connected businesses and their supply chains increasingly becoming digital, messages are sent automatically as instructions and alerts, which have important consequences if not ...

Quocirca believes that the future for VMware will be a high growth one. Dell's future is somewhat less apparent.

This blog is written live at the 8th annual Tableau Conference -- the firm is known for its 'mission' to reinvent the spreadsheet for the tablet age.

Google recently played the role of the small boy in that fairy tale by making the announcement of Accelerated Mobile Pages.

Until BT expands its own infrastructure investment programmes to match those of its competitors, local authorities looking to provide world class broadband access, fixed or mobile, to their local ...

This is a guest blog post by Laurie Miles, head of analytics, SAS UK & Ireland If I were to believe the feedback I get, statisticians are among the most difficult people to work with. What's ...

The IT world has gone acquisition bonkers. Dell is paying as much for EMC as any football club would do to secure the combined services of Messi and Ronaldo. Well almost... Meantime, a couple of ...

The 8th annual Tableau Conference is staged next week in (fabulous) Las Vegas -- so what should we expect?

Those who wish to see better broadband for the communities they serve (or live or do business in) should work together to provide better information on the choices available to MPs planning local ...

The proposed Dell-EMC merger was always going to be a major talking point at VMworld in Barcelona, given news of the deal was confirmed on the eve of this year's show. What was unclear, as ...

The government is failing to get enough help from the private sector to make its next generation identity scheme work at full speed.

There are many good reasons for referring BT to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission but expecting a demerged Openreach to "make a difference" is not one of them.

This is a guest post by Jennifer Kyriakakis, Founder and VP Marketing, MATRIXX Software When people ask me what I do, I tell them my company develops software for communications providers, and the ...

Pentaho has had a busy week -- the firm has had its first week out in full public scrutiny as the new Pentaho, a Hitachi Data Systems company and staged its second annual customer, partner, user ...

2014 2015It seems the big brains creating the robots that will take over the mundane tasks that humans have to do, otherwise known as a 'fair day's work for a fair day's pay,' want robots to have ...

Forrester analyst Mike Gaultieri always gives one of the most colourful presentations at the PentahoWorld conference and exhibition every year. Last year's George Costanza story is linked here. ...

How is Pentaho doing under its new uber-parent Hitachi Data Systems (HDS)?

Gee whiz, if Apigee ain't as busy as a gee'd up API specialist this month. (Ed - enough cowboy talk, what's the scoop?) Apigee (pron: Apa-gee) is the firm behind Apigee Insights, an API-based ...

pauldonnellon.com

VMware's vision of the near future of IT revolves heavily around the hybrid cloud in which customers run both on-premise and off-premises cloud. Listening to VMware execs at VMworld Europe this ...

The ONOS community and The Linux Foundation have now partnered in an attempt to impact on the future of networking.

This is a guest post by Doris Mattingly, Director of Engineering, LantronixThe statistics don't lie; there is still a clear gender gap within the IT industry. Despite an ever-growing need for an ...

How the digital team at Sainsbury's uses creative thinking and agile methodologies to build software that solves consumer problems. In September 2015 the Sainsbury's digital lab ran a hackathon, ...

On the eve of VMworld Europe it's like witnessing the IT/storage world's equivalent of the Big Splash. Yes, I'm talking about Dell's proposed $67 billion purchase of storage giant EMC. The ...

In this guest post, Rafi Azim-Khan, head of data privacy in Europe at legal firm Pillsbury Law, explains how the cloud provider community can side-step the European Court of Justice's Safe Harbour ...

Is capacity planning just a nice to have tool, or is now something that is an imperative in dealing with the dynamic nature of modern workloads and distributed platforms? Quocirca took part in a ...

Former Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude once described DVLA as having the worst outsourcing contract in government - and that's quite an accolade, given the number of terrible deals in the ...

Helix GitSwarm is available free of charge as part of Perforce Helix.

Pentaho is an open source data integration and analytics company with a special penchant for data warehouse refinery and data streamlining

Microsoft developer division chief S. Somasegar (call me 'Soma') is to leave his post after 27 happy years of serving the firm.

● "The rise of unstructured data presents a significant opportunity for innovation. As a result, companies are demanding database solutions that are operationally easy and specifically optimized to ...

Couchbase Server 4.0 is designed to give software application development pros a route to building more apps on Couchbase.

Cloud-based financials and ERP company NetSuite held its Cloud Tour Europe 2015 this week in London. Working to push forward its omnichannel software suite strategy, the firm announced the opening ...

Deep inside a PDF white paper written by KPMG, the firm has justified its reasons for using, adopting, developing and subsequently releasing open source software.

Compuware thinks Mainframe DevOps (ManDops, perhaps?) does exist and has spun the use of this term out to coincide with the release of this year's fourth major release of its Topaz software.

A couple of months ago loo roll maker, Charmin developed an app that helps people find the nearest public lavatory.The Sit or Squat app identifies nearby bathrooms (along with ratings) for those ...

Microsoft would be happy with me right now - I just upgraded to Windows 10. It was free, as a consumer, of course, so that helped. But frankly, the only reason I did so was because my seven-year ...

Mendix is one of those companies that says things like -- we drive digital innovation by empowering customers to bring new digital products to market.

Boosting the take-up of cloud services across Europe has been the mission statement of both public sector and commercial organisations for several years now. From the latter point of view, HP has ...

There's way too much PR spin in DevOps, it's a basic fact of life.

Every cloud provider should have it's own exhibition, symposium, pow-wow and convention with the name of its product bolted onto or into the shortened "con" for conference, right?

Conferences come and go, but Apache: Big Data Europe and its sister event ApacheCon Core Europe 2015 is kind of special as it's a pure and thoroughbred user conference.

I sympathise with those in the Sector Skills Councils who have been tasked to get employers views on how to try to implement this botched proposal and apologise to them for not making time earlier ...

Apparently, 41% of Brits claim their busy professional and personal lives mean they would invest in some sort of help which means they don't have to do housework, if they could afford it. So now ...

Amidst a rapidly evolving threat landscape, where malware and exploits continue to proliferate, endpoint security often fails to adequately protect networked printer and multifunction printer (MFP) ...

MapR Technologies is a firm that provides a distribution of Apache Hadoop that integrates storage and database functions.

Key features of Teneo 4 include software that covers every aspect of natural language application development in 35 languages running on any operating system or device.

This is a guest post by Geoff Smith, managing director of Experis Europe.Technology is flourishing across Britain - not just in the Silicon roundabout. Tech City UK's Tech Nation report recently ...

At this year's Sapphire, I was part of a group of journalists from outside the US who interviewed Bill McDermott, chief executive officer of SAP.At the end of the interview he gave each of us a ...

Spiceworks is a company that provides a professional vertical network for IT users.

File hosting service Dropbox, Inc has released its Zulip chat application under an open source Apache Foundation licence.

Perhaps Ofcom should review the UK communications market every year - because its current one certainly seems to be causing waves at BT.The regulator put the future of BT's Openreach network ...

In this guest post, Frank Denneman, chief technologist of storage management software vendor PernixData, sets out why datacentre management could soon emerge as the main use case for big data ...

Trust in high quality software

Congratulations to mobile operator O2, which may finally have found a way to put an end to the most tedious and embarrassing aspect of the consumer digital revolution.With Apple releasing the ...

What to expect from Apache: Big Data Budapest & ApacheCon Core Europe 2015

Retailers are struggling with the online and physical divide, but retailer The Dandy Lab has implemented a store to combine retail and technology in the physical space. Spitalfields used to be a ...

This guest post from Steve Gandy, CEO of MeetingZone, describes how businesses were hit by loss of working hours during the tube strikes due to lack of flexibility. Anyone of London's 4 million ...

DataStax is a company that supplies a commercially supported version/offering of Apache Cassandra. For those that would enjoy a recap, Apache Cassandra is an open source distributed database for ...

Studer is in town with the rest of the NetSuite glitterati for the firm's annual London cloud summit this October 2015.

it would be great to see more vendors thinking along radical lines every once in a while

Universal Credit was doing fine and right on time as the Department for Work and Pensions began rolling out its IT system in April 2012, according to a project schedule released under Freedom of ...

Platfora brings together traditionally separate tools: data prep, in-memory acceleration, BI, analytics and visualisation -- to streamline big data analytics and simplify data discovery

Information security consultancy MWR InfoSecurity is hosting a DevSecCon workshop.

Actually, the title of this piece should read -- it's conference season: so please don't mention the Pope, Uber, Amazon, Ali Baba, Facebook and if you can possibly manage not to to use the ...

The immediate objective is to identify no more than three or four pilot constituencies to test the concept. The current shortlist, based on volunteers to date, includes Kingston and Surbiton, ...

Like him (or his social network) or not, Mark 'Zuck' Zuckerberg has come up with one worthy comment it appears.

Intergalactic Software Freedom Day is September 19

In this guest post, Mike Weston, CEO of data science consultancy Profusion, discusses how Amazon's cloud-based push to democratise machine learning sets to benefit the enterprise.Machine learning ...