When I post a job opening for a Senior Java Developer, people send me resumes, and their titles match my post title. But the meaning of the word “senior” varies depending on the geography. Here in the USA a 22-24y.o. person graduates from college and starts as an intern or a junior programmer working his [...]
The Apple App Store has reached 25 billion downloads, and many of us have bought and enjoy some of them. Really, the apps for iPad, iPhone and Android astonish us many times. The bad part comes when we go back to our desktop computer to use the enterprise software and feel as if we travel in the time some years back. It would be nice, very nice, to be able to use our mobile device to access to our enterprise software. The question is: are native mobile applications ready for enterprise software?
The Justice Department is fixing to sue Apple, Macmillan and maybe Penguin for antitrust maybe as soon as Wednesday by all reports. The iPad-centered charges are supposed to be collusion and fixing the price of that newfangled invention, e-books. The DOJ essentially destroyed Microsoft at the height of its powers a generation ago with its antitrust suit. Ironically Apple hit an all-time high Tuesday and for one bright shining moment had a market cap worth $600 billion. The DOJ’s got a burr under its saddle because Apple and Macmillan won’t settle – or even talk anymore about settlement.
Has the world changed more between now (2012) and 1962 that is the last 50 years or the 50 years prior to that (1962-1912)? Wait a minute! What does this have to do with “Consumerization of IT”? Believe me, there is a connection – just hold your skepticism – humor me – and read on! What we had in 1962 that we did not have in 1912? I am sure you will dispute this list and add / subtract items from them. However, I am fairly certain that after some consideration you will agree that there has been more technological breakthrough between 1912 and 1962 then in last 50 years.
Here is #5. Five points the Mobile Information Worker expects from their Mobile Enterprise Data. 1. Always available and on-demand access to information (off-line and on-line). 2. New ways to interact and display data. 3. Reduce data re-entry error, by synchronising data. 4. Capture new forms of data not available before. 5. Custom and or on demand reporting, for example Mobile Analytics.
Taking a stance of 'Build it and they will come' has never worked in IT and especially now with the Consumerisation of Mobility and the Prosumers (Professional + Consumer) in your Enterprise, whom are expecting or even demanding the same experience as Mobile Apps on the App Stores/Markets. These employees have been covertly educated to expect the best mobility experience and are now turning their thoughts to solutions in their daily tasks, on the go! Just look at the best ranking mobile apps within the App Stores/Markets and the Apps that are being acquired for large sums of money… they would have all done their homework to ensure maximum effect and this is now the target where Enterprise Mobility is expected to shoot for! In-House Mobile Application Development is the key going forward for the Enterprise and many companies nowadays have a Chief Mobility Office (CMoO). It is the CMoO's top responsibility to Co-ordinate Mobility Trends and Directions, reducing any wasted time and effort and ultimately empowering the Enterprise with the benefits of mobility that I have mentioned in previous articles, such as streamlining business processes, rapid response, ultimately gaining a competitive advantage.
Here is #2. Five points on how Enterprise Mobile Developers can improve the Relationships with their End Users. 1. Live several days in the life of your user observing work locations and patterns. 2. Have end users in on the design panel as well as the usability and testing. 3. Get buy in from key stakeholders that are part of the end user team. 4. Learn from consumer applications that are popular with users. 5. Listen... The End User has the business expertise.
Okay, so an admission before I go one step further – the supermodel in this headline is something of a misnomer or misapplication of the term designed (I shamefacedly admit) to draw the reader in. Forget supermodels if you will and jump straight to megatrends for analyst house Gartner’s latest buzz-phrase to describe the impact that new cloud computing models are having on the way we develop, use and integrate with software applications at all levels. Fundamentally, Gartner is suggesting that users’ use of “personal clouds” (and the various devices they use to access them) effectively signals the end of the PC era in terms of our trusted desktop and laptop devices being the sole (or at least primary) corporate access vehicle.
OpenStack is becoming the most popular open source platform for building private and public clouds. The number of code commits and the engineering velocity of this project is matched by no other technology adoption in history. While OpenStack is merely two years old, there have been six production releases of it. Those who opted to deploy an OpenStack-based cloud a year ago are now likely running production workloads on a version of OpenStack that is three releases behind what they initially deployed. Just as the evolution of software development methodologies and high-level programming languages has empowered organizations to adopt continuous deployment practices at the application level, increased engineering velocity and innovation in the infrastructure space are now forcing companies to consider the same at the lower levels of the stack. In the modern age of distributed and ever-evolving infrastructure, traditional rip and replace methods of upgrading are no longer optimal. The problem becomes particularly acute when dealing with open source products such as OpenStack that do not offer a clear vendor-dictated upgrade path, tooling, and supporting services.
In a previous article we introduced the JBoss JMX monitoring capabilities and the Monitis JMX agent. Since most JEE web applications store data in relational databases accessed through JDBC, and the database is the most frequently cited source of performance bottlenecks, let’s take a closer look at how Monitis can help you.
Apple is having a heady time on Wall Street. Its stock pushed past $630 for a while Tuesday morning after its ax Gene Muster, the respected Piper Jaffray analyst recognized as having the most clout in the stock, pushed his 12-month price target from $718 to $910 a share. His call, which said Apple could go to a thousand bucks or better in 2014 and make Apple the first trillion dollar stock in history, came a day after Brian White, a “who’s he ?” analyst with Topeka Securities, thinking Apple TV and China, said Apple’s good for $1,001.
Cloud computing has found its way into many organizations as business leaders and IT departments look to capitalize on the many benefits that cloud offers. As your company considers moving all or part of its IT operation to the cloud, a key decision is whether to rely on public cloud, private cloud, or a combination. Finalizing a cloud strategy must start with understanding your objectives and how they best align with the value each offering can provide. The public cloud can be characterized by IT resources delivered via the Internet using a standardized, self-service, pay-per-use methodology. Public clouds are designed to provide compute resources virtually at will – similar to that of a utility. Public clouds are highly standardized, allow limited customization, and their respective resources can be oversubscribed and massively shared. Workloads requiring inexpensive storage or compute cycles where known response time to the user community is not critical can be a fit with the public cloud.
I was sitting in a meeting sometime ago with a company that was embracing Scrum like a ten year old being offered a warm plate of chocolate chip cookies. They were grabbing at it as fast as they're little hands could reach out and grab the goodies. Watching this made me wonder what is was about Scrum that made them embrace it so emphatically. They had claimed to be an Agile shop for years, but were still failing to deliver quality software on time with in budget. Over the past years they refused every single proposed process improvement recommendation made by dozens of consultants. They literally went from zero process (using the name Agile to execute no process at all) to zealot Scrumbots overnight. After spending some time pondering this and interviewing a few people I found the answers I was looking for. Scrum was allowing them to preform the magic trick of perceived success better than they had ever been able to before just using the generic fake Agile process. A scary realization. This of course was not the fault of the Scrum process. It was the team's refusal to truly change anything except a few timelines, titles of individuals, and a few names like iteration to sprint.
As almost any causal bystander could have predicted, Oracle and Google couldn’t come to terms after a Pollyanna magistrate judge ordered them to try to settle their differences over Java and Android one more time last week ahead of a jury trial starting April 16. It’s just a good thing there have been no reports of Oracle co-president Safra Katz picking her teeth with the bones of Android chief Andy Rubin, both of whom were told to show up for the negotiations and presumably did. The judge sent out word Monday that “Despite their diligent efforts and those of their able counsel, the parties have reached an irreconcilable impasse in their settlement discussions” and that “no further conferences shall be convened.”
You are a software service provider. You develop software for you clients. Majority of your clients are from a different city or even a different country. You are in a discussion with your client where you are exploring the option of adopting Agile Development Methodology for your next project. Does the above paragraph describe you? Are you concerned about how the whole thing will work out? If the above paragraph describes you, then I can assure you that you are not in minority. Many of us have been in a similar situation. The biggest challenge of adopting agile for an outsourced project is that there aren’t any clearly defined best practices available which you can adopt. The whole field is still evolving and the best practices are yet to emerge.
Apple’s new iPad was named the best tablet computer in a ranking by Consumer Reports, two weeks after the magazine said the device runs “significantly hotter” than previous models. The new iPad’s high-resolution screen provides the best detail and color accuracy of all tablets Consumer Reports has seen, the publication said today on its website.
If you are planning to do build a career as a software developer, you have to be prepared to get trained and re-trained every couple of years. But how? If you’re lucky, your employer will send you to classes, otherwise you have to spend substantial amount of time self-studying. Back in the nineties I was hungry for the courseware. Going through these thick manuals on hot technologies was the shortest way to master them. Beside software developers, university professors and contract instructors are also looking for the courseware that would help them to teach the class without major surprises and failures in front of the students. No matter who you are, I’d like to offer you some extra materials that’ll help you in learning or teaching programming in Java and Java EE.
Smartphones are trending up, they now account for almost 50 percent of mobile phones in the United States. And, not surprisingly, feature phones are trending down – four out of five new mobile phone purchases are for smartphones. The clear winner is Google, about 48 percent of smartphones are Android devices. iPhone is second with [...]
The Fair Labor Association (FLA), which Apple hired to look into working conditions at Foxconn plants in China a few months ago, said late Thursday that it had interviewed 35,000 workers and found no instances of child labor or forced labor. What it did find was people working an unsafe 60 hours or more a week in violation of even China’s labor laws (49 hours) to make “quick money.” Foxconn has reportedly pledged to reduce overtime and hire and house tens of thousands more people by July of 2013, which the FLA called “an unprecedented commitment.” Workers weren’t always paid fairly for the overtime and 64% of the workers said the basic wage of a few hundred dollars a month was insufficient although more than the Chinese minimum wage.
As many IT organizations continue to expand to the cloud outside of the Software as a Service space, they are faced with a significant security challenge – how do you meet your security requirements in the cloud provider's environment with its increased complexity and functionality that lies much closer to the hardware layer? In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Garth Whitacre, a senior solutions architect within SHI’s Professional Service Organization, will focus on identifying a cloud provider's security controls and how to supplement them to meet your organization's specific needs.
Hmm, that’s curious. Fortune noticed that Vertica, the analytic database management software that HP bought early last year for ~$350 million, has been quietly shifted out from under Autonomy and its boss Mike Lynch, who was given information management to run when HP closed on the $10.2 billion Autonomy acquisition in October. In November HP announced its Next Generation Information Platform, a Big Data analytics platform based on Autonomy’s unstructured data analytics engine, IDOL 10, and Vertica’s analytics database. The platform combines structured and unstructured data into a unified workflow. Vertica is now under ex-Microsoftie Bill Veghte, who’s running HP’s software unit. Wonder what that says for Mike Lynch.
Australia’s Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) filed a legal complaint against Apple Wednesday charging it with misleading consumers in promoting its new iPad. It said Apple suggests the iPad with Wifi+4G can connect to an Australian 4G mobile network with a SIM card when it can’t. The regulator wanted financial penalties, corrective advertising, refunds for the consumers affected and possibly an injunction. The one 4G network in the country is reportedly part of the spectrum the iPad can’t reach but Apple is pushing to retain its 4G branding.
If you are clear about what governance means then you can skip the next section. However, if you have heard the term – Corporate Governance, SOA Governance, IT Governance – but you are not exactly sure about what it really means, then here is an explanation. Suppose you are interested that an entity works in a way you want it to work. If you are managing the entity then you have the necessity authority to ensure it. However, you don’t manage the entity directly then what do you do? To do anything you need to have some authority or influence over the entity. You can discuss with the management team of the entity and come to an agreement on what needs to be done. Then you also come to an agreement on how to ensure that what you have agreed is followed. In other words, you lay down a governance framework. Let us look at an example.
Apple’s contract manufacturer Foxconn and its Taiwanese avatar the Hon Hai Group are buying 9.9% of struggling Osaka-based electronics conglomerate Sharp. They’ll get $1.6 billion worth of new Sharp shares. It’s the biggest investment a Taiwan company has ever made in a Japanese company and Hon Hai will be Sharp’s largest stockholder. It’s a big comeuppance for Japanese industry. Sharp expects to lose $3.49 billion this fiscal year, which ends March 31. Hon Hai will also take half of Sharp’s 92.96% position in its losing LCD panel unit. At least until September Sony owns the rest but won’t put any more money in it. The failure of the four-year-old Sharp-Sony alliance is said to be the reason Sharp turned to Hon Hai, whose LCD operation is also losing money. Sharp’s IGZO screen technologies and production facility are leading-edge.
Ahead of a May 31 trial, HP and Oracle Monday separately asked the court for a summary judgment in its favor to resolve their bruising fight over whether Oracle can legally stop supporting servers based on Intel’s Itanium chip. HP, the biggest of the few Itanium users, claims Oracle is contractually obliged to continue supporting its Itanium boxes. Oracle claims it isn’t and stopped porting its software to the architecture last year claiming the chip was secretly at end of life. Oracle’s decision caused HP sales to tank. The litigation caps the dogfight HP sparked by hiring Léo Apotheker, the former CEO of Oracle’s hereditary enemy SAP, as its CEO and bringing in one-time Oracle president and now Oracle antagonist Ray Lane as non-executive chairman.