Jeff Vance

While many CIOs like the idea of Linux in principle, most of those who have shifted have done so in limited ways. Committing to Linux on servers can be justified through cost and performance considerations, but when it comes to the desktop, most enterprises are still reluctant. With so many applications so tightly linked to […]

It’s a contentious time for the open-source community. Microsoft has partnered with Novell, Oracle is angling for Red Hat’s customer base, while Linux is promising to enlarge its influence in the burgeoning market for mobile phones and set-top boxes. In the past, any open-source discussion centered on Linux, but now that Linux is a mature, […]

“Collaboration” has been an enterprise buzzword for years. It helps employees work smarter, frees information from data silos, and facilitates better working relationships across department boundaries. That’s the hype, anyway. The reality has thus far been less than stellar. One reason for the lackluster performance is top-down implementation strategies, with the typical implementation cycle going […]

Are you confused by NAC? If so, you’re not alone. Even NAC (Network Access Control) vendors can’t agree on what exactly the concept means. They argue over whether to control access and identity at the network or application layer. They argue about pushing WLAN access protocols to the wired LAN. They argue about what to […]

On-demand software, software as a service (SaaS), hosted software — call it what you will, but it’s certainly changing the nature of IT. The initial draw of SaaS was that it gave small and mid-tier organizations access to the types of applications that were usually priced beyond their reach. Costs were spread among a broad […]

Currently, most enterprise grid implementations reside in large enterprises like Hartford Life, Bank of America, and Royal Dutch Shell. The typical model is that of taking a complex computing problem, dicing it up into smaller problems, and distributing it to loosely stitched networks of grid-enabled computers. Implementations of this type are what are termed ”compute […]

Until recently, grid computing was an academic tool, used as a cost-effective means for tackling computationally intensive problems. In disciplines like particle physics and meteorology, when problems involved computations that could run in parallel, grids provided what were essentially cheap supercomputers. Most enterprise applications, though, are designed for centralized processing, and couldn’t easily be diced […]

Unless you’re in a throwback profession, say working on a lobster boat or picking coffee beans on the side of a tropical mountain, your business performance is suffering because of a common 21st-century problem: spam. While experience and common sense tell us that spam is a nuisance, what is less obvious is that dealing with […]