James Maguire

As Broadcom CIO Ken Venner tells it, several years back his company urgently needed an enterprise-wide security solution. The company, a global leader in semiconductors, had suffered some serious data leaks – from its own employees. Trusted staffers had taken key intellectual property with them when they left the company. It’s every CIO’s worst nightmare: […]

After a flurry of heavy voting, our readers have selected their picks for this year’s DatamationProduct of the Year Awards. The winners represent the essential building blocks of IT infrastructure: Anti-Spam Software, Enterprise Servers, Network Management, and more. In some categories, top honors were scored by the accepted industry heavyweight. The winners in, for instance, […]

[Note: see IT salary chart at the bottom of this page.] The Dicesalary survey completed in January 2008, based on 19,000 tech professionals, offers some good news and some not-so-good news. On the cheery side: • IT wage growth in major metropolitan areas like Atlanta and Boston, and especially Silicon Valley, keeps chugging along. (Here’s […]

If you want to see the future of the portable PC, forget about the MacBook Air. While the fashion-model thin unit (retailing for a flabby $1,799) earns a few admiring glances, it won’t prompt a mass movement. Forget, too, about deluxe supertanker laptops like the HP Pavilion HDX, which fetches $1,999. You can play Warcraft […]

A conversation with Robert Dewar is enough to make you wonder about the future of the American software engineer. Dewar, a professor emeritus of computer science at New York University, believes that U.S. colleges are turning out programmers who are – there’s no nice way to say this – essentially incompetent. To support his claim, […]

The idea that every company needs its own IT department is dying, opines Nicholas Carr. Instead of maintaining in-house data centers, companies will tap into the processing power of remote mega-computing facilities, much as they now tap into electricity from centralized utility plants. As he theorizes in his new book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the […]

                I know the idea makes you nervous. I understand that. You would never – never – want to end your relationship with Microsoft Word. With good reason. You’ve been joined at the hip with Word for years. You’ve written hundreds (thousands?) of documents with it. You’ve spent […]

There is, to be sure, no lack of “top software” lists in the open source world (or in software in general). The Internet is drowning in such lists. You’ll see lists like The 7 Most Influential GNU/Linux Distributions, Top 35 Firefox Add-ons for Fun, and 49 Open Source Projects in the Spotlight. The variety of […]

In 2008, forces in the IT industry that were once seen as disruptions will be embraced as the new status quo; yesterday’s rebels will be next year’s leaders. So says research firm IDC in its forecast of the mega-trends that will shape the tech market in 2008. These great forces of change, which IDC calls […]

John Miano You might call John Miano the “Lou Dobbs of the tech industry.” Miano, a onetime programmer who’s now a lawyer, is a fierce advocate for American software developers against what he sees as the encroaching tide of low-cost foreign software developers. The H-1B visa program, which allows skilled foreign workers to work in […]