Will Sun and SOA become a natural act?

Yesterday, I spent almost the entire day on the phone talking about Service Oriented Architecture…and then I got a headache…that is not a condemnation of SOA, it is just that too much of a good thing can make you sick (I guess). Anyway, one of the interesting meetings I had was with Sun Microsystems. [...]

Trolling through SOA land — not a straight line

In our family we often talk about straight lines in the context of getting to an outcome. So, when you are looking at a teenager, it is natural to hope that he or she becomes a responsible citizen with a good job and a nice family. But it doesn’t happen over night. In some [...]

What’s the value of autonomic computing?

Ok, here is a test for you. What is the value of autonomic computing in the real world? Autonomic computing has always sounded a little like science fiction. The system sits there and anticipates when something is going to go wrong and rushes in, and fixes the problem – before any [...]

Visualization of Value or is what you see what you get?

I look at more enterprise computing platforms that anyone should and still stay sane. But, I get really frustrated by the type of marketing hype that talks about how the next generation of some sort of platform is designed to bridge the gap between business and IT. Bla bla bla. While it is [...]

Why are Web 2.0 vendors dreaming about PowerSoft?

Recently I have been having dejá vu back to the days of PowerSoft. If you are old enough to remember, PowerSoft was the leader in making graphical development practical for the masses—rather than the object oriented gurus. Back in the early 1990s when PowerSoft’s product—called PowerBuilder—was in its heyday, it had been able to achieve [...]

How Amazon.com made my day

Amazon.com is on my mind today. I ordered a book the other day; now that may not sound revolutionary but it was important to me. My father was a clinical psychologist who died 25 years ago. In the 1960s he wrote a book called “Opening Doors for Troubled People.” I have a [...]

Dumb Spending Surveys!

On Friday I got a call from a journalist who had a copy of someone’s IT spending survey. He had noticed that SOA spending was number 11 on the list so his question to me was; “Does this mean that SOA is fading as a requirement for IT organizations?” When I asked him [...]