Tolly on Technology

By Kevin Tolly

What will rate in 2008?

12/03/07

It’s time to look into the crystal ball to see what exciting products will be coming your way next year.

Bento: A personal database breakthrough?

11/20/07

Thinking back to the dawn of corporate personal computing in the early 1980s, its single most important aspect was that it broke the monopoly that corporate IT had on information and the manipulation thereof.

Apple’s Leopard backup breakthrough

11/06/07

A string of columns could be filled writing about the many interesting features of Apple's OS X 10.5. To my mind, its integrated, automatic backup — Time Machine — is by far the most significant.

Soft hardware: the joys of virtual appliances

10/24/07

For all of my 25+ years in IT, the “software vs. hardware” debate has raged on. During that time, their benefits were mutually exclusive. In many instances, software gave us total flexibility, but hardware gave us reliability and performance. As with most things in life, there were tradeoffs. Now, though, it appears that virtualization is coming to the rescue — again — with the concept of virtual appliances. Perhaps you can have it all, after all.

Is Apple more controlling than Microsoft?

10/10/07

While many users laud Apple for the freedom that it gives them, recent developments indicate that Apple might be even more of a “control freak” than Microsoft.

Symphony – fully orchestrated office suite

09/25/07

Alternative office suites are nothing new. For users requiring the trio of word processing, spreadsheets and presentations there have always been options. For some years, it has been possible to get OpenOffice for free and the commercial version, Sun's StarOffice, for $69. More recently, Google Apps has been enticing business users by adding collaboration as an integral part of its office alternative. So why should we even care about IBM Lotus Symphony?

Beware product award inflation

09/11/07

As buyers, every one of us takes note of awards given to products we are interested in purchasing. Recent research I've conducted, though, shows that at least some magazine awards are given without the rigorous product reviews that one would naturally expect. Many readers take awards at face value and fail to dig for details. Those that take this approach may be in for a surprise if they buy based heavily on the "award count."

Unified communications - battle royal

08/28/07

For me the recent VoiceCon show in San Francisco gave new meaning to the words "unified messaging." As I made my rounds to close to two dozen analyst meetings, almost every executive was focused on laying out their company's "Unified Communications" strategy and/or its upper-stack cousin, "Communications-enabled Business Processes." UC and CEBP were certainly the stars of the show but how we'll get there is not at all clear and a big battle is brewing.

Big Iron is back

08/14/07

Having come of age in the IT industry at the likely zenith of the mainframe at the start of the 1980s, I am always drawn to mainframe-oriented news. For the past 15 years, though, such stories have been of the kind in which the writer is somewhat amazed that the mainframe is "not dead yet.” After some two decades of having its market share eroded by migration to server-based applications, "big iron" is back. And, irony of ironies, the catalyst for the comeback is the need to deal with server farms that have grown out of control.

Communication breakdown: Rethinking wireless LAN packet loss

08/01/07

We all know that there are trade-offs when using wireless communications. We would never tolerate the quality of our cell phones on land lines and we know that our wired Ethernet connections have better raw throughput than wireless.

App Accel and Microsoft’s stack attack

07/17/07

“Niche killer” has been an oft-encountered modus operandi of Microsoft over the years. Whether it is disk defragmentation, disk compression, firewall or antispyware, Microsoft has eventually decided to play the game and, in the process, change the game. While in the past these forays were limited, Microsoft is now poised to potentially shake up a much bigger space -- the world of application acceleration.

Road Trip: Miami to New York with the Apple iPhone

07/02/07

Talk about dedication. Within 12 hours of the release of the iPhone, I conducted a road test (literally) of the iPhone. Before dawn the test vehicle was launched up I-95 and the test commenced.

Lo-Fi Wi-Fi: Taking it to the streets

06/20/07

Strange times in Portland, Oregon: The Unwired Portland project is aimed at delivering Wi-Fi access to every part of the city, but some people just don’t get it — the signal, that is.

Will Cisco suffer IBM’s fate?

05/31/07

A mere decade ago, IBM was king of the corporate networks. That was no surprise, given that IBM essentially invented the mainstream corporate network. The surprise was that before 1999 was out, IBM was out, too — out of the network business. The company had been dethroned and exiled, finally selling what was left of its network business to Cisco.

Application acceleration: Divide and conquer

05/08/07

More than perhaps any other area except virtualization, the term “application acceleration” can be defined and characterized in almost as many ways as there are products on the market. Still, if you take the right approach, it is relatively easy to build a taxonomy that will help you choose what is right for your needs.

Open source and secret sauce

04/11/07

 A few weeks back, one of The Tolly Group’s testing clients got a fair bit of press when it announced test results showing that its open source, Fast Ethernet router outperformed Cisco’s 2821 Integrated Services Router.

Taking (re)stock of Vista

03/27/07

Given the generally glowing press that Microsoft’s Windows Vista has received, the terse notice I saw posted at a service counter at a south Florida Circuit City came as a bit of a shock to me. I can’t recall the exact words, but in summary, it said: 1. Vista is a totally new operating system. 2. Circuit City isn’t responsible for any existing Windows XP applications not running on it. 3. If you bring your Vista computer back because of Item 2, you still will have to pay the 15% restocking fee.

Blogs, truth & the enterprise

03/14/07

The Internet, in general, and blogs, in particular, give enterprise architects a vast array of informational resources to blend into their buying decisions. But are all blogs what they appear to be? Is it honest discussion and useful facts that you are getting? Or is it the words of someone with a hidden agenda?

Vista — The calm in the eye of the PC storm

02/12/07

For all the attention the introduction of Vista has received in recent weeks, it has ironically been one of the calmest areas in the world of personal computing — the eye of a storm engulfing many of Microsoft’s partners.

Vista — The calm in the eye of the PC storm

02/12/07

For all the attention the introduction of Vista has received in recent weeks, it has ironically been one of the calmest areas in the world of personal computing — the eye of a storm engulfing many of Microsoft’s partners.

Cache or Carry: Minimizing the video monster on your network

01/30/07

Like so many things, corporate video-over-IP has been heralded as the “next big thing” for some time now. And, like so many technology breakthroughs before it, IP video is finally entering many companies through the “back door” – the employee.

Opinion: Apple iPhone: Another enterprise Trojan horse?

01/11/07

Some 25 years ago, Steve Jobs and Apple lost the war of corporate computing to IBM and Microsoft. I imagine, though, that Jobs probably considers it just a battle in his own “Thirty Years War” against Microsoft and its founder. While Apple’s recent iPhone announcement was completely focused on consumers, the iPhone might also serve to bolster Apple’s position in the enterprise.

Tolly: Security, SMB-tailored offerings and China all a big part of 2007

01/03/07

Because The Tolly Group’s primary focus is to help vendors show what their offerings can do, it’s a pretty good bet that what came through our labs in the latter part of 2006 could be showing up on your to-do list sometime in 2007.

Redmond vs. Red Hat: Divide and conquer

12/15/06

As we close out the year, it is instructive to ponder last month's pro-Linux announcement by Microsoft. It tells us a lot about how the company's thinking is evolving with respect to competition. And, more importantly, what that might mean to customers in the coming year.

Living in the post e-mail world

12/01/06

I give up. After almost two decades of e-mail being my quintessential business tool for managing people, projects and processes, I have to admit that it no longer is up to the job. It is time for me to deal with the fact that we are living in a post e-mail world.

More