Articles by Dana Gardner

In an effort to shine more light on the traditional "dark art" of software development, Borland Software on Monday announced Borland Management Solutions (BMS). The three-pronged product leverages Borland's Open Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) framework, and is designed to enable users to better orchestrate, measure, predict and improve software delivery...

Not all trains run on time, but the Eclipse Foundation has kept to its schedule with its annual release train, this year named "Ganymede." For the third year in a row, the Eclipse community has delivered, on the same day as in previous years, numerous software updates across a wide range of projects....

Call it a Route 128 SOA date. Progress Software is buying Iona Technologies for a little more than US$100 million in actual value, broadening Progress' service-oriented architecture (SOA) portfolio significantly and catapulting Progress into the open source software infrastructure arena Progress said Wednesday it is offering $4.05 per share in cash...

HP opened the second day of its Software Universe event Wednesday in Las Vegas with "product day," but the presentations seemed more about process -- the processes that usher application definitions and development into real world use I've heard of applications lifecycle, sure, but the last few days I've heard more about data center lifecycle. So h...

HP's now officially pending EDS buy for just shy of US$14 billion positions the combined companies to organize and manage the hosted/on-premises mix to maximum efficiency and lowest total cost of ownership. It's a great goal to shoot for because all they have to do is beat IBM With this merger, the IT/business transformation second-source in the gl...

Mike Meehan at SearchSOA.com has done some homework on the use of Web Oriented Architecture (WOA), and the IT folks in the field are fed up. Enough with the labels, they seem to be saying And they raise excellent points. I for one am by no means wed to the "WOA" nomenclature. Several other industry analysts recently told me as much -- "WOA is not t...

On-demand applications and cloud computing often mean different things to different people. For developers, Software as a Service (SaaS) is quickly evolving not only as a means to deliver applications -- but as the means to develop them, too Taking the notion of "development as a service" to its full potential is the logic behind Platform as a Serv...

Tony Baer has a great rundown of Monday's EclipseCon OSGi-based runtime Equinox news. Extending the Eclipse community's unity to runtimes makes a ton of sense, given that developers can focus on the applications and business logic and become far less concerned with complex deployment issues. Write once, run anywhere? Eclipse's component development...

What a nut I was. Back when Sun Microsystems and Microsoft announced they would be joining forces on interoperability between Sun, nee Java, and .NET (remember Steve Ballmer [of "Ballmer and Butthead" fame] and Scott McNealy sitting side by side), I thought they meant it I pushed the envelope, just for giggles, calling for binary compatibility betw...

Gaining more insights early and often into what vast arrays of servers, routers and software stacks are actually doing has long been on the top of the IT wish list. Traditional IT management approaches force the trade-off between depth and comprehensive reach, meaning you can't get the full, integrated picture across mixed systems with sufficient clarity...

In the world of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), the battle for hearts and minds -- not to mention eyeballs and desktops -- heated up this week when Adobe Systems took the wraps off the beta version of its Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) and slotted it for public release Adobe AIR, according to the buzz on the street, "blurs" the lines between the...

Promising hefty productivity increases and a lower TCO (total cost of ownership), Tibco Software this week announced its beefed-up ActiveMatrix 2.0, which aims to simplify building and managing service-oriented architectures (SOAs) This latest release adds BusinessWorks, which is available either in standalone mode or as a container hosted in the A...

WSO2, an open source SOA provider, has combined JavaScript programming and Web services with the launch of its Mashup Server 1.0 This open source offering, which can be downloaded without subscription fees, will allow enterprises to consume, aggregate and publish information in a variety of forms and from a variety of sources....

MuleSource, a provider of open source service-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure software, has jumped into the SOA governance pool with the community release this week ofMule Galaxy 1.0 Galaxy, an open source platform with integrated registry and repository, allows users to store and manage an increasing number of SOA artifacts, and can be ...

Ever notice that Microsoft -- with cash to burn, apparently -- waits for the obvious to become inevitable and then ends up paying huge premiums for companies in order to catch up to reality? We saw it with aQuantive, Softricity and Groove Networks It's happened again with Tuesday's US$1.2 billion bid by Microsoft for Norway's Fast Search and Transf...

MyEclipse integrated development environment (IDE) vendor Genuitec is stepping up to the general developer downloads plate to take a swing at the task of automated and managed updates, plug-ins and patches to such widespread tools as Eclipse, Android and ColdFusion The free Pulse service helps bring a "single throat to choke" benefit to downloads b...

Some recent Iona Technologies announcements point up the growing practice of multiple ESBs within enterprises, often associated in a federated manner, and sometimes using ESBs tasked with specific types of integration duties Iona is taking a "hybrid" approach to ESB offerings, with a coordinated open source and commercial strategy. [Disclosure: Ion...

Get ready for new "controlled circulation" models on the Web, ones that target you based not on your preferences for music or soft drinks -- but on what you consume in your occupation. Think of it as B2B social networking First, some set-up ... One of the great media inventions of the mid-20th century was the notion of affinity-based, controlled ci...

The hot (albeit not necessarily sexy) segment of IT operations -- the analysis and intelligence-gathering from logs and performance management data -- is showing increasing signs of an on-demand future First, Paglo came out last month (in beta) with a free and open source (GPL) crawler service that scours the reams of log files and other electronic...

As the world becomes "flatter" and globalization drives new opportunities for international commerce, how do small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) jump on the bandwagon? The Internet allows any business to gather orders and process them across borders very easily at low cost. For SMBs in the U.S., currency fluctuations are working in their favor ...