Recent Blog Posts

Microsoft UK has conducted research which suggests that the "vast majority" (86%) of those software application developers building services and apps today believe the skills required are ...

Happier customers pay their bills faster. This is the high level win from a whole series of incremental improvements that can be made to the order to cash process.

It's not often that an institute decides that its mission has been accomplished, declares success and steps down. But that's what the Jericho Forum has done after a decade of evangelising the ...

SAP kicked off its biggest developer, user and partner event this year in what tech chief Dr Vishal Sikka has called: "a time of reflection and transformation"

Will the result prove to be a more effective means of promoting self-regulation than the powerless pontifications of politicians?Or is the fear of reprisals from "the darker users of the Internet", ...

HCL has given its CIO customers a platform to share experiences.I recently met up with HCL and I was told about a digital magazine the Indian IT services supplier publishes. Going by the name CIO ...

Today at the Nokia World event in Abu Dhabi, Nokia announced its new range of products, including three new members of the Asha family, two new Lumia "phablets" and a Windows tablet. Although the ...

Microsoft, Lloyds Banking Group and Deloitte have funded a 30-minute documentary aiming to encourage more young people into the IT sector.

Those smart techies are at it again. Computer Science academics at City University London are working on pervasive computing and have already got a few products up and running. There are rings that ...

Of course each player will claim to offer convergence, alias try to eat each others lunch (as with BT offering content and Sky offering broadband) so the outsome is by no means certain. It does, ...

Powerful generalist system management tools like HP OpenView, and packaged Microsoft applications such as SCOM, represent 'simplification through complication' - the belief that by creating a ...

Will this be made available to fund services to the final 2% (over a million indviduals) who will still be unable to get fixed or mobile broadband?

IT doesn't so much go round in circles as overlapping rings - think the Olympic sign. That's to say, it does repeat itself but with additions and a slightly changed working environment each ...

Today Logitech has introduced the Logitech Mobile Speakerphone P710e, a portable speakerphone that allows hands-free access to calls. The device is suitable for individual use, or for a small group ...

Mobile computing, social media, cloud and big data, are top of CIOs priorities says Software AG COO.

Hypocrisy regarding the debate over e-crime and cyber-security is not confined to the postions taken by the (formerly Manchester) Guardian and the civil liberties lobbyists of the West. Global ...

It has been a while since my last post. Today I spent the last few hours updating Windows 8 and I thought I'd share my experiences.Window 8.1 is the free update to Windows 8, which supposedly fixes ...

For the past several years, tech's titans have battled for control of an enterprise's virtual environment in the so-called "hypervisor wars." For one vendor to win the battle, an IT department ...

The speed of the apparent success of the voucher approach does, however, indicate that there may be some case for a continued role for BDUK, as opposed to winding it up as part of the renewed ...

Large personal services firms spend 2.4% of their turnover on IT products, services and staff. This is similar to the all UK value. For smaller sized organisations the ratio is consistently higher ...

I've just read an interesting report of future 2020 scenarios on cyber security put together by an esoteric institute called the International Cyber Security Protection Alliance (ICSPA). I don't ...

SAP TechEd 2013 is here. The party faithful are gathering and there are a few shockwaves and revelations... plus a few logical predictions to be made here and there.

Donn Parker just copied me in on his critique of Harry de Maio's new book. For those of you who might be more Gen Y than Baby boomer I should explain that Donn and Harry were old-school, cyber ...

I'll be contributing to a Webinar on APT Protection via Data-Centric Security next Thursday. Given the progressive erosion of corporate perimeter security it's about time we switched our attention ...

The call for papers for 2014's IAPP Europe Data Protection Intensive comes to a close this Wednesday. If you're a privacy professional then this will be the most important event in London next ...

Should we not be more concerned about the waste of scarce talent (not just money) on tracking down spies, terrorists and disidents, instead of helping identify and deter those responsible for ...

When in the early 1990s a bunch of waggish Sun employees created a tee-shirt (one of hundreds over the years), which proclaimed "the network is the network, the computer is the computer, Sun ...

The oldest, longest running story in Computer Weekly is the IT skills shortage. No matter what the time period, the latest technologies, or the state of the economy, the UK IT sector has never yet ...

Free GOTO for NoSQL developers

An area the size of Wales is filled with junk every year because tech PRs insist on sending, usually useless, free gifts and other crap to tech journalists on a daily basis.PR Junk black holes are ...

The UK government, led by the Cabinet Office, is zealous in its desire to overhaul government IT.Out go mega-outsourcing deals with the big "oligopoly" of IT suppliers, in come lots of SMEs, ...

Competition makes any company up its game. Consumer facing businesses in today's digital world can't afford to give poor customer service. People find out quickly. This is a story about how mobile ...

Huddle and Tibbr have announced a strategic partnership to connect customers with each company's innovative cloud and social solutions. This partnership will allow Huddle users to use Tibbr's ...

Large telecom firms each spend on average £15m on system software. This is by far the highest investment made among large information & communication companies. Information services ...

nthony Freed has now published the final article in his series on the true background of BS7799 on his Tripwire blog. There are real lessons to be learned from these postings. I hope that students ...

This is the title of an article from yesterday's Australian Financial Review, the leading Australian business newspaper. It was written by Chris Joye, a leading economist, fund manager and policy ...

Mozilla continues its (positive) onslaught upon the developer tools space this month with the launch of the Firefox OS App Manager.

The Office of Fair Trading has launched a study looking at government IT procurement practices. These things are ten a penny and they all make the same conclusion and nothing is done about it.There ...

Here at VMworld Europe in Barcelona the term ecosystem is being thrown around with gay abandon. It's a lovely-sounding word. It evokes life, the planet, lush green rainforests, myriad plants and ...

Being a CEO and delivering tech keynotes is difficult. First of all you have to welcome everyone, thank your sponsors and then crack a few jokes about not drinking too much at the after party etc. ...

Is the writing is on the wall? There have been some interesting stories lately about how UK firms are struggling to get the right IT staff and are looking overseas for them. There seems to be a ...

In case you didn't know, today (15th October) marks Ada Lovelace Day. The annual event aims to raise the profile of women in science, technology, engineering and maths by encouraging people around ...

They also face some very difficult choices. One of the most profound is whether to support the planned internationalisation of the commercial cartel which currently runs the Internet (from search ...

What are the actions that HMG should take to help undo the damage? Perhaps the first is to repeal IR35 and make it very much easier (as well as cheaper) to for both public and private sectors to ...

Ada Lovelace, is widely regarded as the world's first computer programmer. Her notes, written in the 1840's on Charles Babbage's "Analytical Engine" an early form of computer, contained an encoded ...

Iron Man in Iron Man: Armored Adventures. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)Anyone with at least half a brain loves the Iron Man movies and Robert Downey Junior's portrayal of the vain yet loveable ...

Today, Katrina Collier, Speaker, Trainer & Writer on Social Media in Recruitment, speaks with Victoria Bell Director & Co-Founder of Bell IT Solutions, continuing our video interview ...

This is a guest blog by Clare McDonald.The iPhone 5S and its golden Bond-style finesse has us all thinking about technology upgrades. The 5S is fancy, and 5C may be colourful, but if you're going ...

Medium sized office & other business support companies employing 100-999 staff invest over £600 per employee on external application software. This is twice that spent by other firms in the ...

My new ISACA book on Advanced Persistent Threats has now been published. It's an excellent guide for any Business, IT, Security or Audit Manager responsible for safeguarding critical, sensitive or ...

Anthony Freed has been publishing further historical information on the true background of BS7799 on his Tripwire blog. There are some important learning points from these postings. It's ...

My apologies for radio silence on this blog. It's been due to an exceptionally busy workload coupled with an extended holiday I'm now back with lots of views about what's going on and what's going ...

Highly ranked on the sourceforge open source code repository attractions this month is the download for Celestia -- an application for real-time 3D visualisation of space

Progress has launched a new open community forum for programmers with the intention of enabling developers to access and share timely relevant technical and business content. The Community will ...

So we added another paragraph to the eternal tale of government IT woes this week, with the news that the Home office e-Borders programme to secure Britain's borders, doesn't actually secure ...

TIBCO has this week announced the latest version of its Spotfire data discovery and visualisation platform.

The Department for Work and Pensions has refused to answer allegations that it is attempting to scrap the core computer systems underpinning Britain's welfare state.It was due to conclude a ...

There is nowhere to hide from cyber attacks - not even the privy is safe anymore, according to security firm Kaspersky Labs.The firm has just added toilets to the increasingly long list of hackable ...

Banking & finance institutions with 100-999 employees typically spend £1.2m each on IT & telecom staff. This is a little ahead of life insurance and auxiliary financial & insurance ...

As part of its corporate academic programme, Micro Focus has staged a COBOL code contest for student and community developers around the world.

News that a manufacturer is developing ways to use Google Glass in the operating theatre should be kept out of sight and earshot of any Tory Minister.IT suppliers are putting together a ...

I was with a former EDS executive last week and he was telling me about the problems he is having sorting out the student loan for his son, who has just started university. He says the new online ...

I cannot keep count of the amount of times in the past few weeks I have had the same conversation with friends, colleagues and even my partner. Person I am familiar with: What is the phone you have ...

Given that Internet usage as whole appears to have plateaued, except for looking at photos (now up to 70% of users) and videos (now up to 50% of users), we can expect an infrastructure ...

Progress wagers on new disruptive cloud application construct at Progress Exchange 2013 #PRGS13

Research & development companies spend on IT & telecom as a ratio of turnover is twice that for the UK as a whole. Large R&D organisations devote lower proportions of their turnover on ...

Regardless of what the company's future might be, the rise and fall of BlackBerry is set to be a business school case study for many years. It's a classic example of the innovator's dilemma - a ...

The IT services sector is seeing a burst in acquisition activity as the companies that emerge from years of recession strong begin to consolidate the sector. Getronics has acquired NEC Enterprise ...

TIBCO API Exchange integrates with TIBCO Spotfire analytics server to provide a full range of out-of-the-box analytics and reporting capabilities.

Designed to support the teaching of computing in schools the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is now live.

This guest post looks at the risks associated with outsourcing to multiple suppliers without the right level of management in place to make sure it does as it should.It comes from Paul Cash. He is ...

Last week I attended the European Women in Games Conference, at the Millennium Gloucester Hotel in Kensington.

Companies providing accommodation services have an outlay of £230 per employee on telecom services. For all UK organisations the figure is some £600. The smallest accommodation firms spend the most ...

If you could build a datacentre - and more importantly its contents - from scratch chances are it wouldn't look much like many of them do now. Technologies have come along, have served their ...

So another six weeks have gone by friends and I must admit I was hoping to have a lot more to tell you about my mission to publish the post code data on where the BDUK project will be rolling out ...

UK open standards policy was going to revolutionise computing - it was even going to revolutionise society. It has instead been subverted itself, by an irony of heroic proportions.Open standards - ...

News that an airline is equipping its pilots with tablet devices will send shivers down the spines of nervous flyers the world over. If you think it dangerous when a White Van Man holds court with ...

This image was selected as a picture of the week on the Malay Wikipedia for the 51st week, 2010. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)Thunderbolts and lightning may be very, very frightening indeed, but it ...

There are software application developers, then there are web application developers, specialist mobile developers and a multiplicity of other sub-genres pertaining to the application developer ...

I was with a contact of mine the other day who was telling me about his visit to the Government ICT 2.0 event recently. He works for Unisys.Unisys had a stand at the conference and were handing out ...

The open source Open Structures Project has created an open design for a massive industrial toaster.

For our series looking at the diverse roles women play in the IT industry, Katrina Collier, speaker, trainer & writer on social media in recruitment, speaks with Natalie Harris-Brigg, head of ...

In recent months the fuss about surveillance revelations has distracted attention from some good work in the European Commission to try to align and push forward a harmonised electronic identity ...

It may be tempting to delegate cyber security strategy to IT, but to do so is to delegate responsibility.

I have written extensively about the large amount of contract renegotiations going on at the moment. Keeping suppliers and customers happy at the same time is difficult. Particularly when the ...

It was disappointing to see that according to the Female FTSE Board Report 2013, progress in increasing the representation of women on UK boards has stalled. Although the number of women in ...

Computer Weekly Developer Network caught up with Richard Huddy, European gaming enablement manager at Intel.

Creative, arts & entertainment companies are forecast to grow their software spend by 7% in 2014. Development tools will be the fastest growing component at 11%. Slowest advancement will be ...

Last week I was invited to a women in tech event by Jacqueline de Rojas, vice president and general manager of CA UK and Ireland.

Many in the women in tech world will have heard of Sue Black. If you haven't she is a senior research associate in the software systems engineering group in the department of computer science at ...

GCSE results, then A-levels, then back to school and now off the university. This is the time of year when academic achievement is most in the headlines, and academia itself comes under a ...

Saudi Aramco, GE and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) have announced the first all-female services centre for business processes in Saudi Arabia.

A new website has emerged that encourages kids to start think about computer programming techniques.

Outgoing Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is well known for his dad dancing - but at his farewell company meeting in Seattle he revealed a previously unknown love of dirty dancing.As reported by The ...

If Labour is elected at the next election and follows through with an idea to change procurement rules to force businesses to create an apprentice for every job done by a migrant worker it could ...

Oracle customers were a little upset when CEO Larry Ellison decided the Americas Cup was more important than his customers last week. The flamboyant CEO missed a keynote he was giving in favour of ...

Automated network control company Infoblox this month proffers forth Tapestry, a free and open-source software tool for measuring network complexity.

The secret to Linux is hardware, really?

As one of the industries most affected by the digital revolution, there is a lot that other sectors can learn from retailers. We've seen cold, hard evidence of what happens when established ...

How many different ways have your contorted your fingers over the years, to find the best way to hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete - that perfect encapsulation of how to make computers much harder to use than ...