enterprise

Jive Software is getting cozier with Twitter and Google in an effort to grab the lead in so-called social business.

In a series of deals (statement, Techmeme), Jive said it is putting its software on the Google App Marketplace. in addition, Jive is licensing the Twitter Firehouse and integrating it with its core suite. The general theme: Provide access to 65 million Tweets a day via its social business software.

Add it up and Jive's effort is to be more like a Facebook for the enterprise and integrate real-time data into business apps. Sound familiar? It is. Multiple companies--namely … Read more

VMware will standardize its virtual appliance-based products on Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Server, a move intended to help ward off a growing threat from Microsoft.

Under the partnership, announced this week, customers buying certain vSphere licenses will be eligible to receive a subscription to Suse Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) patches and updates for SLES instances deployed in vSphere virtual machines. The companies are also working to make it easier to port SLES-based virtual machines across clouds.

VMware offers virtual appliances--self-contained virtual machines preconfigured with an OS and the application--as a way of making them easier to deploy and maintain. … Read more

Vivek Kundra, the federal government's first CIO, said recently that he likes cloud computing because it provides "access to powerful technology resources faster and at lower costs."

That's a great reason and perhaps it will be the key underlying drive behind cloud computing's increased popularity as an IT delivery mechanism. But should it be the reason? That is, are there other, better reasons to move to the cloud?

Yes, there are. Among them, as Dan Woods points out, is the increased control that end users, and not just IT, gains over critical IT infrastructure. While … Read more

Image editors are a dime a dozen these days, and a lot of them just aren't worth messing with. Image Editor and Converter Pro, however, is. It's not going to replace Photoshop, but it's a well-designed program that puts the most common photo-editing functions at your fingertips.

The program's interface is clearly modeled after Office 2007, which makes it extremely easy to navigate. Users simply open the image they want to edit and access the program's various tools through a set of well-organized tabs. The Edit tab contains basics, such as rotation, flipping, cropping, and … Read more

McAfee announced Tuesday the release of its new Firewall Enterprise 8 appliance, touting it as the next generation in firewall devices. The company is targeting the new firewall at security administrators trying to protect their networks from the growing threats of malware and hackers.

IT administrators will be able to set up and enforce policies to filter out thousands of different applications that can sometimes sneak past traditional firewalls, according to McAfee. By tapping into McAfee's cloud-based services and networks, users of the new Firewall Enterprise hardware should be able to keep up with newly developed malware and other … Read more

Looking at this decidedly non-vegetarian Enterprise model, you might think, "Well, gee whiz, how hard can it be to make a replica of Captain Kirk's starship?"

It's not as easy as it looks. Trust me. This one looks much sturdier than the one my friend and I tried to make for a gingerbread house contest back in high school. Pro tip: Gingerbread does not, in fact, support the weight of the peppermint stick warp nacelles.

Nor does making a gingerbread Enterprise make the ladies flock to you.

(Via Gizmodo)

Companies are not only aware of the number of enterprise architecture designs but will soon embrace their diversity, according to a new report from analyst firm Gartner.

Gartner analysts predict that 95 percent of companies will support multiple approaches to enterprise architecture (EA) by 2015 and that the majority of clients will need to support a mixture of more than one of these approaches based on their business needs.

The important thing to note is the realization that enterprises will have no choice but to blend these architecture types into one larger strategy. Gone are days of attempting to strictly … Read more

Despite Gartner projecting a 5.3 percent increase in IT spending in 2010 over 2009, and IT vendors reporting rosy earnings, venture capitalists have been moving away from investing as much in enterprise IT in the past several years. As The Wall Street Journal reports, IT represented 53 percent of VC deals in 2001 but it has plummeted to 33 percent in 2009.

It's not as if those VCs are holding their money. They're actively investing in health care, green tech, and other sectors...

...like mobile.

The irony with mobile is that while it's siphoning away VC … Read more

The debate over private clouds will likely continue in the foreseeable future as public-cloud usage becomes more acceptable in the enterprise, and private-cloud vendors offer more solutions-oriented approaches to create cloud-like infrastructure.

And it's only getting more confusing as the cloud term has effectively lost any specific meaning and is thrown around in relation to everything from Internet-based storage to grid computing.

To the extent that cloud offerings can be categorized for ease of discussion, I like RedMonk analyst Michael Cote's explanation. (He also uses a burger metaphor in describing these layers.)

Most vendors focused on private clouds are targeting the IaaS layer, which for ease of discussion is similar to Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2. And while EC2 sets the tone for how most people think about clouds, it lacks (and maybe doesn't require?) the same kind of tooling enterprises need to manage their complete infrastructure.

Tooling and management is arguably the most important aspect for enterprise private clouds to be successful but may also be the most difficult to get right.

But tools may also be where the money is. And considering the cloud has yet to rain down the cash we all hope for, it seems like it's time to reset thinking a bit and focus more on enabling applications and infrastructure to make it appear more cloud-like rather than focusing on specifically making clouds. (Note: see my blog colleague James Urquhart's excellent series on DevOps to learn more about what happens after you have a cloud deployment.)

In terms of private-cloud software, its becoming less clear that enterprises want to run their own version of EC2, but perhaps that they want to make their existing infrastructure behave the same way--that is, allow for APIs and such to turn up VMs with a variety of images that are relevant to their organization.

And, perhaps more interestingly, I've recently heard from several enterprises that they are interested in programming-language and/or application-specific private clouds for Java application or other infrastructure like internal content management tools that require variability in their scaling. … Read more