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Jason Stamper's Blog: November 2006 Archives
Who has the fastest BPEL server (and should you care?)
November 22, 2006
In the SOA space generally and business process management (BPM) market specifically, there is little in the way of consistent, comparable benchmarks to help users make more informed purchasing decisions. On the other hand, speed is only one of the things requried of an ESB (as some of the commenters below have been pointing out).
So is it valuable, or misleading, to see transaction benchmark figures? One vendor, open source BPM player Intalio, has just published some benchmarks for BPEL transactions, albeit their own rather than an industry standard benchmark (because there is no such thing).
Should you spend more on IT?
Nicholas Carr made some salient points in his treatise IT Doesn't Matter, but once again there is some new evidence to suggest that if not wholly wrong, he was at least exaggerating the point.
The Hackett Group, a research-based business advisory company, has just completed its annual study on Information Technology. It found that the best performing companies, which Hackett defines as 'world-class companies', spend 7% more on IT than their peers.
Why on earth do people buy Macs?
November 21, 2006
It's obvious, isn't it? People buy Macs because they're hip, funky trendsetters for whom having a beige PC in the room is a definite interior design faux pas. Or they simply like the fact that by buying a Mac they join an elite minority, swimming against the PC tide.
That might be true for some Mac users, but a new survey has just found that for most of them their decision is made for far less fashionable reasons than simply what their computer looks like, or whether they prefer jeans and a T-shirt to a suit.
Are big tech firms better than small ones?
November 17, 2006
Is big necessarily better? Are a large vendor's products always superior to a small vendor's thanks to its ability to invest more in R&D? It's an interesting question, particularly in this age of rapid vendor consolidation.
Of course the simple answer is that it depends on which vendors you are talking about. But some research just out from management consulting firm Booz Allen helps to confirm this view, as it found no statistical relationship between R&D spending and sales growth, earnings, or shareholder returns.
HP Ditches OpenView Brand
November 09, 2006
Now that Hewlett-Packard has closed its $4.5bn acquisition of Mercury Interactive, as well as dropping the Mercury brand going forward I've learned that it will also ditch its well-known OpenView systems and network management brand.
"You are going to see the gradual phase-out of both the Mercury and OpenView brands," Tom Hogan, senior vice president of HP Software told me. "You'll see that OpenView will be phased out gradually over time."
Key Absentees From Eclipse ALF
November 07, 2006
The open source Eclipse-based Application Lifecycle Framework (ALF) project, which seeks to create a standard way for heterogeneous application development tools to interoperate, will deliver its first version at the end of the year despite several major names being noticeably absent from the list of those committed to support.
But official ALF evangelist and Serena Software VP of market development, Kevin Parker, told me yesterday that the project still has the necessary momentum to become a de facto standard for tools interoperability. That remains to be seen.
iPods should be banned from work: lawyers
November 01, 2006
A UK law firm is risking being labelled a bunch of Luddites by arguing that businesses should clamp down on iPod use in the workplace because it enables employees to slack off and shut out their colleagues. The tabloids are going to love this one -- I can see the headlines now: "IPOD ADVICE FALLS ON DEAF EARS." Or how about, "LAWYERS SAY TURNING ON, TUNING IN IS COP OUT".
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