Stories about: Apache

Software enables us to use computer hardware as well as connect and communicate in ways that drastically change the way we work and play. For users of software in developing countries, the adoption of software solutions and Information and Communications Technologies as an enabler for social and economic development, is severely limited by financial constraints. CIOs today are divided in to two groups: the first one being the one that has the budget and capability to test and implement a new technology infrastructure; and the other being the group that is bound by financial constraints. There is, however plenty of software choice that brings good value for money for both these groups.

Implementing SOA can be an extremely expensive undertaking. You might need to purchase several products within the SOA stack like an enterprise service bus (ESB), a business process modeling (BPM) tool, a portal, a rules engine and a data services tool. But it doesn't stop there. There are additional tools for testing, SOA governance, security... and the list goes on and on. In addition to all the software, you need to budget for training, hardware, consulting and salaries.

Open source is changing the rules about how software is designed, created and distributed. But leadership isn't always nearly as innovative. Esther Schindler spoke with Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth and two of the dudes who run SourceForge, and discussed some of the lessons the open source community could bear to learn.

We know your company uses open-source applications. We also know many of you already have an open-source policy. Sort of. As CIO.com discovered when researching the adoption of open-source in enterprise IT, a quarter of respondents have a formal policy in place to control how such software is chosen, supported and deployed. Another 18 per cent expected to adopt such a policy in the next 12 months. But those who have some kind of policy aren't necessarily thrilled with it; just 45 per cent said their policies are very effective.

A good CRM package does you no good if employees aren't willing to use it. Case in point: IMA Financial Group, a medium-sized financial services company based in the US. IMA had installed a commercial customer relationship management system that "was flexible and configurable and attractive on the front end," says business processes manager Jennifer Hallam.

As part of an expanded outreach to university IT students, IBM is releasing a set of Web-based tools and resources to help them hone marketable skills in the fastest-growing IT job opportunities.

All over Beijing, Olympic countdown clocks tick off the seconds that China has awaited for seven years: the moments until Aug. 8, 2008, at 8:00 pm, when the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics begin.

Open-source solutions used to be adopted quietly by company boffins who snuck in an Apache Web server or an open-source development tool suite under the philosophy "It's easier to get forgiveness than permission" (not to mention "It's easier to do it with open-source tools than to get an IT budget").

Following the open source model for collaborative software development can cut costs while providing a basis to create other innovative networks to develop technology specific to your company. While few have tried to develop industry-specific or vertically oriented open-source solutions up to now, it could become the future of software development.

For an executive who had just had his company bought for a cool billion a few months ago and was on the eve of announcing a major update to his business' flagship database program, former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos, now Sun Microsystems' senior vice president for databases, didn't look comfortable. Mickos had come to the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit at the University of Texas Super Computing Center to explain that MySQL was not about to abandon Linux. His audience, the movers and shakers of Linux business and development circles, were not overly impressed.

When Air Canada spun off Aeroplan, its frequent flyer rewards program, as a separate entity in 2001, the new company faced some tough challenges. Not the least of them was building an IT infrastructure, including e-commerce capabilities, almost from scratch. Virtually from day one, though, the Aeroplan IT brains trust agreed that the best way to achieve their goals was by implementing a service oriented architecture (SOA).