Allen Bernard

Spawned in the mainframe days of computing, grid today is being taken out of the realms of academia and research and being used by enterprises in an attempt to ease the process of homogenizing heterogeneous and siloed compute environments. Because grid computing puts a layer of virtualization, or abstraction, between applications and the operating systems […]

As the economy picks up and IT budgets begin to loosen, the pent-up demand for new equipment will lead to the disposal of more and more retired gear. The big question many CIOs will face in the coming year is what to do with it? Aside from the ethical and environmental implications of simply using […]

Last month’s Sobig.F worm attacks and MSblaster infestations, which spread through unsolicited emails, have added fuel to the fires already burning in corporate boardrooms over what to do about so much unwanted junk mail. Over the last six months, anti-virus and anti-spam vendors have noticed a marked increase in enterprise interest for their products. That’s […]

It used to be that ‘back in the day’ a CIO typically rose from the ranks of techies, going from T-shirts and jeans to join the suits around the boardroom table. Even today, some CIOs achieve their less-than-envious position of bending technology to suit the business needs of other c-level executives — many of whom […]

While Web services has been hailed as the next best thing since sliced bread, the reality is without security standards that allow companies to automatically share and authenticate each other’s security tokens, access privacy policies and resolve trust issues, the promise of Web services as a firewall-crossing business tool will remain elusive at best. The […]

Born in manufacturers’ engineering departments in the 1980’s, product data management (PDM) applications are morphing today into full-blown product lifecycle management (PLM) tools used by boardroom-level decision makers to increase profits and improve efficiencies across the extended enterprise. PLM systems are geared to give enterprises a 360-degree view of all phases of a product’s lifecycle […]

With the rollout of enterprise-class instant messaging by the likes of AOL, MSN and Yahoo! still in its infancy, video-IM has yet to even hit the radar of most corporations. In fact, at this point in the IM game, about 25% of the 12 million or so business users have simply added the free versions […]

As Web services become the de facto standard for building and integrating applications, IT managers looking to reap the benefits of eased integrations and more ROI are either implementing service-orientated architectures or, at the least, exploring the possibilities it provides. “An SOA says lets you move from data integration to process integration,” said Eric Austvold, […]

In an IT world top heavy with bad news, there is at least one, albeit little known, bright spot on the horizon: thin clients. Sales growth over the past three years has been double digit (at a time when PC sales are lucky to achieve low single digit growth if any) and, next Wednesday, Hewlett […]

To make the most of a $500,000 network expansion grant, California Lutheran University sidestepped hard wiring in favor of a wireless LAN that connects 12 buildings including the campus coffee shop (a la Starbucks) and the library for half the price. For just $40,000 CLU was able to install an 802.11b network running Cisco AP1200 […]