Recent Blog Posts
As every good software engineer knows, not all clouds are equal. Where some instances are optimised for compute processing, some are tuned for analytics, specific Input/Output (I/O) prowess, ...
Camera-envy used to be that ‘thing’ that long-lens-toting tourists would exhibit when parading around beauty spots, well-known tourist locations and perhaps even Disneyland. That time has passed. ...
Write side up - by Freeform Dynamics
Business performance management 14 years on: still chasing the real-time dream
Freeform Dynamics 14 Jan 2021As our contribution to the bit of fun that is Throwback Thursday, we're taking a regular stroll in the Freeform Dynamics archives. “Continuous innovation and real-time steering are needed in the ...
Cliff Saran's Enterprise blog
Treat the internet like a natural resource
Managing Editor 14 Jan 2021There are some things that require a permanent internet connection. One cannot listen to internet radio, watch YouTube or take part in a video conference, without a permanent, live, high-quality ...
As a rule of thumb, we wish only misery and ruin on Bitcoin investors for daring to make the phenomenon sound any more sophisticated than a Bet365 advert. But our maniacal propensity for ...
If you want Post-It Notes, go to 3M. If you want independent MongoDB software tools with incremental security and management layers, go to 3T. That’s the message from the Berlin-based softwarehaus, ...
Computer Weekly Editors Blog
Unravelling the new digital leadership plans in UK government
Editor in chief 13 Jan 2021In September 2019, the then civil service chief executive John Manzoni told Computer Weekly that the new digital leader he wanted to recruit for the UK government would “have to be very wise, very ...
Red Kubes is a provider of a turn-key out-of-the-box (Ed: enough hyphens already!) Kubernetes-based container platform product. The company has now open sourced the Otomi Container Platform ...
Let’s take a quick dip into Open Data Lakes Analytics. But before we do, we need to cross off some names and definitions. This story starts with Ahana, a self-styled ‘self-service’ analytics ...
Take a deep breath… Oracle’s eponymously named Oracle MySQL Database Service with integrated MySQL Analytics Engine is a mouthful. Why did the company use such extended language to name one of its ...
As everybody knows, there’s no hot dogs, pretzels or pork roast without mustard. Microservices, it has been suggested, also need a solid relish (and a bun backbone), without which they fail to be ...
Write side up - by Freeform Dynamics
Throwback Thursday: how have attitudes to risk and resilience changed?
Freeform Dynamics 07 Jan 2021As our contribution to the bit of fun that is Throwback Thursday, we're taking a weekly stroll in the Freeform Dynamics archives. The New Year is traditionally a time for reflections as well as ...
Mainframes need love too, it’s not all public cloud out there - plus, anyway, some mainframe resources are used to further deepen the density of many cloud services in the first place. Despite the ...
Brian Clough once said that if he was given a magic wand and wanted to improve the standard of UK life overnight, he would have Rupert Murdoch removed from this planet. For 12 hours on Tuesday 5 ...
First, we had WanOp, then we had “son of WanOp” AKA SD-WAN (and its much misunderstood – mainly by vendors – sibling, SDN) and then the cloud came along and, well, clouded the scenario somewhat. If ...
With the UK now in the third coronavirus lockdown, organisations are again leaning on IT departments to ensure remote working can continue. It has been nine months since the UK first went into ...
CW Developer Network
What’s up dev? Bugsnag hops into application stability management trends
06 Jan 2021Are we all feeling stable right now, in 2021? No need to answer that question, obviously. But, in fact, application stability management is now a defined parameter for software application ...
When IT Meets Politics
Another lockdown and scrapped exams help drive the post-COVID-19 Open Schools (R)evolution
Winsafe Ltd 05 Jan 2021COVID has exposed our failure to bring education into the 21st century. The Open School concept is an ideal way of facilitating best practice (both online and face to face) in blended learning. It ...
Data Matters
Why the 2020s will be dominated by graph technology
Business Applications Editor 05 Jan 2021This is a guest blogpost by Emil Eifrem, CEO, Neo4j. In his view, four major trends driving interest in graph technology are starting to surface. Let's look ahead to what could be in store for the ...
Open Source Insider
CloudLinux commits to 'commits' on (CentOS replacement) Project Lenix
05 Jan 2021CloudLinux OS is a Linux distribution intended for use by shared [web] hosting providers. But there is more to the story than just the arrival of this distro, developed by software company ...
Gadgets come and go. There's always something better on the horizon. But some things seems to last and last. They pass down generations but then they eventually break. A decade ago I wrote about a ...
Data Matters
Becoming the orchestrator of the digital ecosystem
Business Applications Editor 04 Jan 2021This is a guest blogpost by Anthony Finbow, CEO of Cambridge-based biotech firm Eagle Genomics. For data to become truly powerful, we need more collaboration and more data exploration technology, ...
SAP is many things. It is a database company, it is an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) company, it is a data analytics company, it is a User eXperience company, it is a financial software tools ...
The is a guest piece written for Computer Weekly Open Source Insider by Ruby Raley in her position as VP of healthcare at Axway, a company known for its ‘full lifecycle’ API management ...
When IT Meets Politics
Covid changes education, training and skills for ever
Winsafe Ltd 28 Dec 2020The Dissolution of the Monasteries expedited changes that had been gathering for around a century. The Internet has had an impact akin to that of the printing press in the way thought and ...
The Kyvol Cybovac S31 Robot Vacuum sucks - and we mean that. But here’s the thing, we mean it in a good way. One might argue that robot vacuums have been brought to market before their time i.e. ...
Data Matters
How to communicate amid a storm of data fatigue and misinformation
Business Applications Editor 24 Dec 2020This is a guest blog by Andy Cotgreave, technology evangelist, Tableau Charts: they're all over the news. The NHS chief executive mocked others’ charts in their briefings; the science committee ...
When IT Meets Politics
NPCC brings the Christmas present of partnership to UK Cyber Policing
Winsafe Ltd 24 Dec 2020The combination of the Cyber Resilience Centres, Police Cyber Alarm and The Cyber Helpline provides a major advance towards joining up the UK approach to policing the on-line world,
This is a guest post by Sujith Abraham, senior vice-president and general manager at Salesforce ASEAN No one could have predicted what 2020 would bring. Across every industry, we have learned the ...
Networks Generation
My Question Answered: Neteventing (not not eventing) In Cyberspace...
Broadband Testing 21 Dec 2020My fine friends at Netevents have continued to battle the global lockdown elements (and we now know in England that the words "lockdown" and "tier" mean the same thing - who would have guessed?) ...
GUEST BLOG: In this guest post, Amy Franz, software engineer at DirectlyApply, talks about her journey into software engineering, and that often touted alternative routes into tech are not as ...
Let us go back in time to 2019 – a time when we could actually attend IT events in a physical way. There I am, on the top level of a stand, having a coffee and scanning the hall, seeing “me too” ...
Google open sourced its flowery-named Fuschia Operating System (OS) for IoT and mobile applications some four years ago. Know as a capability-based operating system, the project is now open for ...
Write side up - by Freeform Dynamics
Throwback Thursday: A prophetic look back at Green IT
Freeform Dynamics 17 Dec 2020As our contribution to the bit of fun that is Throwback Thursday, we're taking a weekly stroll in the Freeform Dynamics archives. Back in the summer of 2008, we surveyed almost 1500 IT ...
Appian is a patient company. Despite the fact that the whole tech industry is falling over itself to tell us that it now offers low-code software automation advantages, the arguably more pure-play ...
Question: what’s better than project management? Answer: Invisible real-time data-driven project management, that’s what. Holy Land and US-based LinearB plays in this arena and the company insists ...
When IT Meets Politics
Bethlehem placed in Tier 3: Inns closed. Herodian enforcement
Winsafe Ltd 15 Dec 2020A new variant of Covid has been detected among infants in the Bethlehem area. After receiving intelligence from a committee of experts, King Herod has decreed that all hospitality facilities will ...
If not quite a future predictions analysis (we've all had far too many of those by now anyway) market intelligence lead at Exasol Helena Schwenk has spoken to the Computer Weekly Developer Network ...
Write side up - by Freeform Dynamics
Why I'm uneasy about the Salesforce Slack acquisition
Freeform Dynamics 14 Dec 2020When I first heard the news, my reaction wasn't as an industry analyst, but as a small business owner – and it wasn't positive.
Quocirca Insights
Confidence in print security drops and data breach costs rise
Quocirca 14 Dec 2020As cyberattacks continue to increase, capitalising on the new vulnerabilities of remote working, securing the print infrastructure – across the office and home environments – must be a strategic ...
CW Developer Network
Developers, get 'image conscious' for royalty-free image codec JPEG XL
11 Dec 2020This is a guest post for the Computer Weekly Developer Network written by Dr. Jon Sneyers in his capacity as senior image researcher, Cloudinary. Dr. Sneyers is the co-chair of JPEG XL adhoc ...
For Christmas, we got you the most thoughtful gift of a lifetime. A special surprise from October 2020. A hologram of Robert Kardashian. Here is the transcript in full: “Happy Christmas, reader. ...
Write side up - by Freeform Dynamics
Throwback Thursday: x86 Server virtualisation check point
Freeform Dynamics 10 Dec 2020As our contribution to the bit of fun that is Throwback Thursday, we're taking a weekly stroll in the Freeform Dynamics archives. To say that server – and indeed data centre – virtualisation has ...
Computer Weekly Editors Blog
Don't be the one who gets the blame - the Home Office's biggest lesson in UK borders IT
Editor in chief 09 Dec 2020“Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it,” or so the oft-repeated quote from philosopher George Santayana goes. Where the UK’s Home Office is concerned, a far more meta version is ...
I very recently spoke at a webinar for a long-time client emanating from the artist formerly known as helpdesk market - Sunrise Software - on the increasing importance of APIs - usable ones, not ...
GUEST BLOG: In this contributed blog post, Eleanor Bradley, MD of registry and public benefit at Nominet, explains how digital skills and competency must be the post-pandemic focus to ensure young ...
Data is, just in case you hadn’t heard, the new lifeblood of business. It is the new oil, the new commodity, the new key ‘good’ and it is (of course) the lifeblood that drives the applications we ...
CW Developer Network
Widening the Amazon: OutSystems partners to broaden its AWS functions
07 Dec 2020More than ‘just’ a low-code software company these days, Portugal-founded OutSystems will be 20-years old next year and the company now stands for an application platform designed to provide ...
The Inspect-a-Gadget lab elves had some slightly unusual moments testing out the Razer Kaira Pro headset designed for Xbox, in a good way. Where’s the dongle? We were sure there must have been a ...
If anyone were in any doubt, the future is cloud. Just to clarify, the future is cloud and the future of cloud is hybrid cloud. For the record, the future is cloud and the future of cloud is hybrid ...
As many will know, JavaScript is a programming language that became the standard for browser-based programming, but it has also expanded beyond the client space to become a dominant language on the ...
Write side up - by Freeform Dynamics
Throwback Thursday: Linux on the Desktop
Freeform Dynamics 03 Dec 2020As our contribution to the bit of fun that is Throwback Thursday, we're taking a weekly stroll in the Freeform Dynamics archives. The first thing that struck me when I re-read our 'Linux on the ...
Over the last few months Computer Weekly has asked readers about their early experiences of computing and their first computer. A number sent in stories of how they learned programming on the home ...
Networks Generation
Networking as a Service Beats Not Working as an Alternative...
Broadband Testing 03 Dec 2020So, we’ve had number of standalone elements emerge in recent years: cloud, SD-WAN, virtual anything and everything that- together – create what you could readily term a next generation network, as ...
Nobody needs to be reminded that 2020 taught us to be kinder, nicer and more caring to people. Many companies have decided to take the chance this year to explain just what they stand for over and ...
A senior lecturer in management at the University of Exeter has suggested a number of wise-cracking robots have the emotional intelligence required to make them suitable for leadership roles. ...
If Jamie Oliver (other celebrity chefs are available) launched a service named Tastiest Ever Chef, you might not think it that unusual… but it’s a brand naming convention that we don’t often find ...
As part of the 2020 Computer Weekly diversity and inclusion event, in partnership with Spinks, we ran a number of workshops in the leadup to the day covering a range of different topics relating to ...
Open Source Insider
Neural lingual cure-all: Unbabel open sources Machine Translation (MT) tool
01 Dec 2020Babel is a term long associated with language and many of us have read the Tower of Babel pages on Wikipedia and elsewhere. When doing this, if nothing else, you can get some bible study in and ...
Welcome to our last edition of Tech in APAC for the year. One of our key stories in November was a piece we did on Snowflake, which made its debut in September on Wall Street as the biggest ...
Deep in the Inspect-a-Gadget lab, our elves don’t always get out and see the light of day that much; they’re quiet reflective characters who sometimes prefer the dim light of the backlit keyboard ...
Open Source Insider
Scanuppa you face: Exadel open sources CompreFace facial recognition tool
30 Nov 2020Within appropriate boundaries governing personal security, identity protection, data governance and information sharing compliance, there’s a strong argument for making all facial recognition ...
Google wants to help the programming community work more confidently with open source software. The search-cloud-platform tech giant has developed a new scorecard system intended to allow software ...
When IT Meets Politics
Which suppliers cannot deliver rural broadband by 2025?
Winsafe Ltd 28 Nov 2020The decision to delay over £3 billion of spend is one that deserves "robust" scrutiny by the hundred or so MPs whose parliamentary majorities may depend on improve on-line access to education, ...
Cliff Saran's Enterprise blog
An IT business boost in spite of spending review forecast
Managing Editor 26 Nov 2020If there is something a CIO could do to enable the business to increase its earnings by 5%, everyone would be listening. McKinsey recently highlighted the difference in performance between those ...
Write side up - by Freeform Dynamics
Throwback Thursday: the authentication arms race continues
Freeform Dynamics 26 Nov 2020As our contribution to the bit of fun that is Throwback Thursday, we're taking a weekly stroll in the Freeform Dynamics archives. This week we are heading back to 2006, when we reported on that ...
Data Matters
Initial thoughts on prospective Salesforce acquisition of Slack
Business Applications Editor 26 Nov 2020The FT’s ever-excellent, San Francisco-based Richard Waters has reported on a prospective acquisition of Slack by Salesforce. Slack, notes Waters, has evolved from being a chat app to a broader ...
This is a guest post for the Computer Weekly Developer Network written by Rob Tribe, VP of systems engineering for EMEA region at Nutanix. Tribe contends that today, none of us can attend a ...
This dystopian shambles of a year has reached a new, personal low, after a PR email revealed that a robotics company based in Reading has completed its first successful trial of a VR-controlled ...
Open Source Insider
Open source a stream: Alibaba Cloud conjures up e-retail stream processing ‘magic’
25 Nov 2020The stuff of legends? The original Ali Baba for sure, but the tech firm Alibaba is also hoping to go down in the history books. TechTarget’s Aaron Tang has already detailed some of the firm’s most ...
Write side up - by Freeform Dynamics
We need to start prioritizing workforce health and wellbeing
Freeform Dynamics 25 Nov 2020This has been a shot in the arm for those who have long overlooked their health.
In this guest post, Tony Jacob, vice president of design and construction for Europe, Middle East and Africa at colocation giant Digital Realty predicts what the next decade holds for the ...
Computer Weekly Editors Blog
What next for digital identity in the UK? Industry welcomes latest DCMS plan
Editor in chief 24 Nov 2020After months – some would say years – of frustration and delay, tech suppliers have largely welcomed the latest government initiative to establish a digital identity ecosystem in the UK. The ...
Software intelligence company Dynatrace enjoys tracing, dynamically, obviously. As such then, the fourth generation of its distributed tracing and code-level analysis technology, PurePath captures, ...
Champion of continuous intelligence Sumo Logic spends its time looking inside the state of the modern application technology stack, including changing trends in cloud and application adoption and ...
All laptops are pretty much the same today, right? Open the packaging and you get your basic clamshell unit, a power cable and adapter, a little warranty leaflet that you leave in the back of the ...
Data Matters
CTRL, ALT, REPEAT – Why short-sighted digitisation strategies may see businesses revert to analogue
Business Applications Editor 20 Nov 2020This is a guest blogpost by Stuart Bernard, Iron Mountain’s VP of Digital Solutions. In it he writes about a new study suggesting Covid-driven digitisation of business processes could be ...
Open Source Insider
OpenUK joins Euro data infrastructure Gaia-X project as ‘UK lifeline’ amid Brexit maelstrom
20 Nov 2020OpenUK is the open technology advocate organisation for open data, open source hardware and open source software in the UK - so yeah, pretty open all round. The organisation has now joined the ...
With just a couple of weeks left of 2020, it is worth reflecting on what IT professionals can take away from this year. First and foremost, the hard work put in by IT staff, enabled many, many ...
To emerge stronger in 2021, print industry players must adopt a future forward mindset to address the rapidly evolving cloud and hybrid workplace era – or risk being left behind. The office print ...
Write side up - by Freeform Dynamics
Throwback Thursday: IT Support, now and then
Freeform Dynamics 19 Nov 2020As our contribution to the bit of fun that is Throwback Thursday, we're taking a weekly stroll in the Freeform Dynamics archives. This week I look at a report we produced back in August 2006, the ...
The Labour Party has called for emergency laws to prevent social media companies from playing host to anti-vaccine content. You’d’ve thought the ruling elite would have already got the memo to ...
As Tears For Fears would say: everybody wants to rule the world… … but as Equinix, Inc. would say: everybody wants to scale to the breadth of potentially web-scale operational scope and the best ...
CW Developer Network
Nutanix: hyper-converged-hybrid cloud needs ‘near-instant’ infrastructure
18 Nov 2020Whenever anyone tells you that technology needs an ever-increasing injection of agility, you would be forgiven for a) possibly starting to yawn - but also b) predominantly thinking about the ...
Question: how do you build a hybrid cloud strategy? To start with, it’s a good idea to think about having Kubernetes at the core, to enable the orchestration of container workloads around the ...
Open Source Insider
Pocket (machine identity) rocket: Jetstack donates cert-manager to CNCF
17 Nov 2020Jetstack wants to be seen as a ‘proper’ open source company i.e. not just a corporate beast with an ‘open technologies’ department that is guilty of open-washing its wares by popping the off bit of ...
Let’s go back to basics and step back in time. When you’ve had a pair of (now considered ‘retro’) Sennheiser headphones in your teens (example shown here) the experience tends to leave you with a ...
Shipa is a cloud native application management framework company. Ketch enables developers to deploy cloud native applications to Kubernetes without a single YAML file, so no Kubernetes expertise ...
Write side up - by Freeform Dynamics
The #WFH extended talent opportunity
Freeform Dynamics 16 Nov 2020The rise of the virtual workplace and its implications for inclusivity and Generation Z.
Data Matters
Software: to build or not to build? That is the question
Business Applications Editor 13 Nov 2020This is a guest blogpost by Kevin Hurd, Founder & CEO, Digital Hive. In 2015 Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella famously said: “every business will be a software business”. And it’s hard to argue ...
Computer Weekly Editors Blog
Why setting IT budgets for 2021 will be harder - and easier - than ever
Editor in chief 13 Nov 2020It’s the time of year when many IT leaders will be setting budgets for 2021 and trying to persuade their boardroom why they should have more money to invest in technology. After the year we’ve all ...
Version control is important. There now - we’ve said it, do you feel better now? Revision control or source code control are also important, mainly because they’re all the same thing i.e. the ...
Cliff Saran's Enterprise blog
Will we lose our treasured memories to cloud policies?
Managing Editor 12 Nov 2020People who use the free Google Drive service for personal use to store, share and collaborate on documents, will be aware that the company has been slowly shifting consumers to pay for cloud ...
GUEST BLOG: In this contributed post, Laurent Homeyer, retail and hospitality industry advisor in EMEA & APJ, Workday, explains how retailers can properly plan their strategies during the ...
In this edition of Tech in APAC, we cover the top news headlines in the region for the month of October. Early in the month, we published an interview piece with Joe Beda, one of the co-creators of ...
We’re not ashamed to admit we don’t understand how the graphic tweeted by Boris Johnson to congratulate president-elect Joe Biden came to faintly display “Trump” in the background. Downing Street’s ...
The Inspect-a-Gadget team elves are a confirmed bunch of gamers. Having started gaming life with TV Pong games back in the late 1970s and then graduating to the Atari 2600 in the 1980s, we’ve also ...
Nobody ever stops to ask why infrastructure configuration compliance and automation company Puppet, is called Puppet. But of course, it’s obvious, a ‘real world’ puppet’s core infrastructure is ...
Splunk derives its name from the American term for potholing or caving. Spelunking Spelunkers dive down into the depths of the earth to look for the lower substrate layers that make up our planet. ...
Write side up - by Freeform Dynamics
Social interaction in the digital workplace
Freeform Dynamics 09 Nov 2020As workplaces increasingly pivot to virtual presence and digital collaboration, how can we stay connected?