Network Management Breaking News

Your apps need a scratch pad
Developers working with three tiered software architectures -- divided into presentation, business logic and data tiers -- cannot efficiently handle temporary application data that must be sharable between servers to provide high application availability and seamless scalability. But technologies, many of them open source, have emerged that deliver an important piece of infrastructure to manage this work-in-progress data. More..

Blockbuster withdraws offer for Circuit City
Blockbuster has pulled its offer to buy Circuit City after finally getting the chance to look at the retailer's books. More..

Alliance to promote Windows-managed Macs in enterprise
A group of five vendors has formed an alliance to help push Macintosh desktops into managed Windows environments on corporate networks.  More..

Report: Tech giants forming 'patent troll' alliance
Patent trolls beware: some of the tech industry's biggest names are banding together to run you out of court. More..

Survey: CIOs need to prioritize personal development
CIOs are not paying enough attention to their own training needs, a survey of the CIO Connect membership has revealed. CIO Connect, a membership organization of 250 U.K. based CIOs, found that providing training and development for their department was good, but many forgot to include themselves in development plans. More..

Sun sheds light on telework savings
Sun is an old hand when it comes to telework. The technology company has been expanding its telecommuting ranks through its Open Work program for a decade, and today nearly 19,000 employees (56% of Sun's population) work from home or in a flexible office. More..

SEC XBRL mandate: What you don't know will hurt you
There are few areas where the CIO-CFO partnership can pay off as effectively as with the implementation of the Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) in reporting, risk management and compliance processes. CIOs can potentially realize enhanced process efficiencies and effectiveness, while CFOs can potentially realize speed, streamlining and flexibility of reporting functions. More..

It's time to invest in market innovation
Current economic volatility may trigger further business process transformation in the financial services (FS) sector, according to a financial services industry research paper released recently by business advisory firm EquaTerra. What's Next for Service Delivery in Financial Services? Is a compilation of findings from two recent studies offering management insights gleaned by canvassing industry leaders on a variety of business topics. More..

Survey: One quarter of SLAs fail to be met
Nearly three quarters of organizations fail to meet the requirements of service-level agreements (SLA), according to new research by Forrester Consulting. More..

5 Ways to Make Your Company Gen Y-Friendly
Facing a potential onslaught of baby boomer retirements and a smaller pool of Generation X employees to replace them, IT managers who want to create or sustain a Best Place to Work environment will need the additional help of another group of professionals: Generation Y. Also known as Millennials, this group consists of nearly 80 million individuals born roughly between 1979 and 1999. They are the workforce of the future. More..

Embotics adds granular policy control to virtual management
Start-up Embotics introduces the second generation of its virtual machine lifecycle management software at Gartner's Infrastructure, Operations and Management Summit in Orlando. More..

Is the fire-fighting IT chief becoming extinct
At least some CIOs are optimistic that their fire-fighting days are going to be reduced. A survey by Coleman-Parkes Research, conducted on behalf of Avanade, found that IT bosses expect to spend 14 percent of their time on crisis management in three years' time compared to 26 percent three years ago. More..

Fostering effective project management
What's the most important factor in creating a strategic IT department, one that partners successfully with and is respected by the business? For Phil Bertolini, CIO of Oakland County, Mich., it's effective project management. More..

Coaching style matters in managing millennials
Forget any assumption that great pay will result in superior performance. In an April 2007 New York Times article it was revealed that today's MBA students aren't listing compensation as their top job priority. As important as work/life concerns are to them, that topic isn't even top of the list. What matters most now: "Challenging Responsibilities," weighing in at 64 percent, is a full 16 percent more important than compensation (48 percent) and 19 percent more important than work/life balance (45 percent). And though they all might claim greening the planet as a shared value, all other attributes, such as contribution to society, ethics, travel and collegial interaction, rated no higher than mid-20s. More..

Stop buying more technology, start maximizing current investments: Gartner
Gartner Fellow Andy Kyte calls upon attendees at Gartner's Infrastructure, Operations and Management Summit to kick off IT transformation within their organizations.  More..

Why do women, men leave IT
Kathleen Melymuka's Q&A with researcher Sylvia Ann Hewlett created quite a stir. Titled "Why Women Quit Technology Careers," the interview, posted on our Web site last week, has elicited well over 250 reader comments, many of them faulting Hewlett's statistics and conclusions. More..

Service-level agreements not working properly
Many IT departments are failing to meet their own service level agreements, according to a recent survey from Forrester. More..

Is tech M&A frenzy good for business?
Another day, another Oracle acquisition. Oracle seems to buy up companies based on if there is a 'Y' in the day although informed sources that it always checks the weather first. If there is weather on the day, it goes ahead and purchases. More..

Does playing golf actually help your career?
Conventional business wisdom has long held that to succeed in the corporate world, to win friends in the ranks of senior management and to show you can interact with co-workers and customers alike, you should take up the game of golf. More..

What your team can learn about innovation from The Simpsons
Probably the only technical qualification to put Joel Cohen, a writer and associate producer of The Simpsons, in front of the keynote crowd at the Red Hat Summit in June was that Red Hat Enterprise 5 was used to render some of the animation in The Simpsons movie. But Cohen had surprisingly deep-and quite entertaining-advice about innovation and the creative process to offer the conference attendees. More..

Use virtualization to bring testing out of the lab
Although virtualization is still used primarily as a means to consolidate servers, the technology's next big win could be in testing. More..

HP chief Hurd fields questions about EDS buy
HP Chairman and CEO Mark Hurd made a brief cameo during HP Technology Forum & Expo keynote address to re-assure some 7,000 attendees on the quality of the deal. And he later talked in more detail at Software Universe about the deal that could double HP's IT services revenue. More..

CiRBA to optimize virtual environments
CiRBA announces Data Center Intelligence 5.0, which now provides automatic updates to analysis to help IT improve performance and utilization across virtual environments. More..

Master data management: forgiveness for all past sins?
Newly released research and analysis from Aberdeen Group has uncovered one main reason why many enterprises' interest in master data management (MDM) initiatives is growing: IT leaders believe MDM can help fix the data management mistakes they've committed over the years. More..

Hiring great IT staff: the Spiegel Brands interview process
Great IT staff is hard to find, says Elvis Cernjul, senior director of technical services at Spiegel Brands. But one key to finding-and hiring-great IT staff is the knowing how to interview really well. More..