Red Hat CEO undaunted by Oracle, Microsoft

On Thursday, Red Hat Thursday reported fourth-quarter sales of $111.1 million in sales, up 41 percent from sales of $78.7 million during the same period one year ago. The sharp rise in sales came despite stepped up competition, including Oracle's introduction last October of lower-cost version of Red Hat's subscription service for businesses using open source software. In this Interview, Red Hat chairmain and CEO Matthew Szulik discusses the company's prospects in the face of new competitive challenges.

Identity management and virtual worlds

By Sean McGrath

Virtual worlds are on the rise all over the world. The "new" thing called the Web has met its first serious challenger in the form of immersive, 3D environments that underlay Second Life, There, Habbo Hotel, World of Warcraft etc. Use some of these for a while and the Web can seem rather flat - physically and metaphorically - by comparison.

Read the full article here.

Management Mashups

By James Gaskin, ITworld.com

Web 2.0 applications may be making the most noise about application mashups, but "old-fashioned" products can play that game as well. For some reason, people have been asking me about alternatives to Microsoft's Project Manager software recently. Now the company behind FastTrack Schedule 9.1, AEC Software (http://www.aecsoftware.com/), has juiced their own product with an interesting mashup: brainstorming software MindManager (from Mindjet.com).

Read the full article here.

Subscribe to Enterprise Networking - Strategies for designing, implementing and securing enterprise-level networks.

XML and the document format mind bender

By Sean McGrath

XML has been around now, in its final fully fledged form, for more years than I care to remember. Having played a small part in its original creation, thinking back that far makes me feel old.

Explaining the whys and wherefores of XML to non-technologists and technologists alike has always been an interesting challenge. One could be forgiven for thinking that the value proposition has at this stage been fully trashed out. Either you believe in the value proposition or you do not. Either you are applying XML sensibly in your business or you are not. Surely such matters would be well and truly baked at this point?

Read the full article here.

Subscribe to E-business in the Enterprise - Observations about business, the Internet, and cool technologies.

Do we really need another search engine?

By Dan Blacharski, ITworld.com

Apparently, Jimmy Wales thinks so. Naturally, he wants to do it with volunteer labor. The Wikia home page's "Get Involved" section asks, "Do you want to contribute your knowledge?" "Can you help out with translations?" and "Can you help with one of the tasks on the volunteer portal?" Towards what end? What's in it for me, Jimmy? Apparently, according to the Wikia site, you get a gold star, which you are then entitled to place on your user page to show how much you've volunteered.

Read the full article here.

What No One Ever Tells You About Blogging and Podcasting

If you think a blog might provide value to your business, but you haven't blogged before, Ted Demopoulos, author of What No One Ever Tells You About Blogging and Podcasting recommends starting a "throw-away" blog. Blogging about a hobby, for instance, is good practice for the real thing. After that, he recommends that you keep your writing personal, conversational, and link out to other blogs and sites as often as you can.

Read the full article here.

You Can Hear Me Now

Nicholas P. Sullivan, author of You Can Hear Me Now: How Micro Loans and Cell Phones are Connecting the World's Poor to the Global Economy discusses the partnership between Grameen Bank, the micro lender that won the Nobel Peace Prize along with Muhammad Yunus, and Norwegian telecom company, Telenora. The results include 10.5 million subscribers, about a 63% market share in Bangladesh, and 300,000 village phones, that are out in very rural areas and provide income opportunities to the poorest. Following is an edited transcript of that conversation.

Read the full article here.

Why would Google make a phone?

By Dan Nystedt

Rumors abound that Google Inc. plans to launch a mobile phone, reportedly code-named "Switch," with the look and feel of a BlackBerry but with better Internet capabilities. But in all the commentary from news agencies, blogs, gadget sites, analysts, investors, and the like, there haven't been many compelling reasons given as to why Google would enter the mobile phone market.

Read the full article here.

Management maps

By James Gaskin

Why do executives look so disappointed when they visit the operations center? Because the TV program 24 shows us a NOC with network maps linked to satellites able to drill down and watch Jack Bauer run around town. You've got log files, and if you're lucky, a reproduction of a router face plate with blinking LEDs.

Time to spiff up your presentation for executive eye candy as well as provide better management. Take a look at the new FireScope (.com) Dashboard now integrated with Google Maps and drill down to street level. You won't see Bauer running around, but you will see your remote locations in physical context with their environment.

Read the full article here.

IBM's Handy on managing Linux

As vice president for Linux and open source, Scott Handy is one of the main public faces articulating IBM's open-source strategy. In this interview, Handy talks about how the industry giant manages to support a vast product portfolio for Linux and open-source initiatives.

Read the full article here.

Flickr co-founder talks about growth, plans

In this interview, Stewart Butterfield, co-founder and general manager of the lauded photo management and sharing site Flickr, talks about Flickr's growth in size and quality, its status as a Yahoo Inc. company, and near and long-term plans, as well as peanut butter.

Read the full interview here.

Is Google Book Search fair to authors?

By Dan Blacharski

The Google Book Search has been controversial from the start, and there are a lot of misconceptions out there on both sides of the fence. A common one is that you can download any book in print, in full. I admit, when I first heard about it, I was afraid that Google was simply digitizing entire libraries and putting the results online -- a practice that would be disastrous for the publishing industry, blatantly unfair to authors, and outright illegal. Fortunately, they are not doing that.

Read the full article here.

SAP chief developer heads for the 'clouds'

In search of new markets and customers, SAP AG is developing a new breed of hosted, on-demand products and looking at ways to make its complex business software easier to use. In this interview, Vishal Sikka, SAP's chief software architect, discusses one of the company's first on-demand offerings, its software-as-a-service philosophy, search functionalities in enterprise software, Web service standards and more.

Read the full interview here.

Shred your data to stay ahead of the pack

By Sumner Lemon

Jeff Jonas, the chief scientist and distinguished engineer at IBM Corp.'s entity analytic solutions group, has developed a means of sharing corporate data without revealing what that data contains.

This technology, called anonymization, effectively "shreds" information, making it possible for companies to share information about their customers with governments or other companies without giving away any personal data. Over time, Jonas believes companies will increasingly use anonymization to defend their data, and corporate well-being, from competitors and identity thieves.

In this interview, Jonas discusses anonymization and how protecting customer privacy will make companies more competitive.

Read the full interview here.

Wikipedia's Great Fraud

By Dan Blacharksi, ITworld.com

Wikipedia's basic premise is built on a pseudo-intellectual concept of collective contributions, on the mistaken belief that since there are lots of people constantly contributing and reviewing entries, they will somehow come out accurate. Chairman Mao would have been proud. Wikipedia cheerleaders believe that the old traditions of mainstream media (fact-checking and professional editing) lack merit, and that an entry that is written by an anonymous contributor, and subsequently reviewed and edited by many other anonymous contributors, will be inherently superior. It's rather like getting a hundred monkeys in a room together and expecting them to produce Hamlet.

Until last week, one of the most prolific contributors was one such anonymous person named "Essjay," who claimed to be a scholar with multiple degrees. There’s been a large degree of scandal since Essjay has been shown to be nothing of the sort, but what’s even more amazing is that he felt justified in lying and that Wikipedia supporters (and Jimbo Wales himself) justified his actions. Essjay was pretending to be something he's not -- but that's not too surprising. Wikipedia itself, from the very beginning, pretends to be something it's not, and its very existence is an affront to real writers and editors everywhere.

Read the full column here.

11 Truths About Computing

By Sean McGrath, ITworld.com

This week, for a complete change of pace, I have gathered together some of the cynical/rueful thoughts that I accumulate on my travels around the IT business. One such thought: 'For every problem, there is an apparent solution that is simple, elegant and wrong. Unfortunately, these tend to get implemented before they are known to be wrong.'

Read the full article here

Subscribe to E-business in the Enterprise - Observations about business, the Internet, and cool technologies.

Book Review: MySQL Cookbook, 2nd Edition by Paul DuBois

By Sandra Henry-Stocker

MySQL is one of the most popular open source databases. With an estimated 10 million active installations and more then 50,000 downloads every day, it runs on nearly every Unix platform and Windows as well. Along with this popularity, however, comes a host of questions from users on how to best accomplish any of a myriad of tasks. That's where MySQL Cookbook comes in. Whether you're new to MySQL or a long-time user, you will find numerous "tricks" that you can put to immediate use.

Read the full article here.

Mancini to boost eBay's innovation

EBay Inc. has big plans to provide more programming tools, like new SDKs and APIs, to its community of about 45,000 third-party developers. The goal is to help external developers increase the volume and variety of applications they create for the company's marketplace, and in particular to increase applications for eBay buyers. In this interview, Max Mancini, the recently appointed senior director of platform and innovation at eBay, discusses these developer plans as well as another group he heads called the Disruptive Innovation team, started last year.

Read the full article here

It's not what you know, but who you know

By Sean McGrath

There is a lot of talk about the all-engulfing knowledge economy these days. Workers of the near future in (relatively speaking) high wage economies will either work with their heads in the field of knowledge or with their hands in the field of services. All other activities that can move, chasing the cheapest economic environment, will do so. So the story goes.

Read the full article here

SpikeSource's Polese faces the heat

SpikeSource Inc. CEO Kim Polese is an industry veteran who was head of the Java team at Sun Microsystems Inc. in the 1990s and also founded "push" software company Marimba, which was eventually bought by business software company BMC Software Inc. SpikeSource helps companies put together open source software stacks by testing and configuring open-source components. It is increasingly feeling competitive heat from big companies like Oracle Inc. and IBM Corp., which are offering Linux services and support, as well as from smaller companies specializing in open-source applications and components.

In this interview, Polese discusses how SpikeSource competes with big companies, how it cooperates with other open-source players, and whether or not SpikeSource is looking to be acquired or go public.